Search Engine Land broke the story, Google themselves confirmed it:

“Today, we are extending our efforts to keep search secure by removing the query from the referrer on ad clicks originating from SSL searches on Google.com.”

Queries, Not Keywords

Marin Software’s CMO Matt Ackley — on the heels of the report — quickly made the distinction between search query data and keyword data noting:

“Keyword data and search query data are not the same thing. If Google stops passing the full set of referrer data on paid search clicks, this will impact search queries, not keywords. Platforms that rely on Keyword IDs, as Marin does, would not have their bidding capabilities disrupted.”

Google’s statement corroborated that, mentioning:

“For generating reports or automating keyword management with query data, we suggest using the AdWords API Search Query Performance report or the AdWords Scripts Report service.”

So if it’ll still be available via API — and we “will continue to have access to … the AdWords search terms report and the Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report” — what’s the problem?

Google Analytics Implications

Well, for one, we’ve probably seen the last of the Matched Search Query dimension in Google Analytics. If they’re indeed removing the query from the referrer, that’ll mean it won’t come across to GA as a part of AdWords auto-tagging.

Matched Search Query can be applied to numerous insightful GA reports, including GA’s powerful Multi-Channel Funnels suite — the only place where you can discover how a given paid query impacts performance of non-paid channels:

Tumbling CPCs

Google’s party line on this has been to bill it as “security enhancements for search users.”

But if they really cared about user security, this would’ve happened a lot sooner.

What’s actually going on then?

I’m convinced it is part of a broader effort by Google to shore up falling CPCs. They’ve been chipping away at this over the past few years.

In their most recent earnings report, they spelled it out for their shareholders:

“Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, decreased approximately 11% over the fourth quarter of 2012 and decreased approximately 2% over the third quarter of 2013.”

So they’re stopping the bleeding. How?

Look closely at what they’ve done of late:

• Introducing Enhanced Campaigns — Taking away Tablet bid granularity. They’re getting those clicks at Desktop rates now.
• Putting Emphasis on PLAs — Feed-driven performance without a clear 1:1 relationship between products and non-branded queries. Susceptible to repeated comparison-shopping clicks.

In both cases, Google has taken control and insight away from the advertiser, while bolstering click cost and volume through attractive (and unavoidable) ad products for consumers.

A (not provided) Tomorrow

How is the query data related to Enhanced Campaigns and PLAs? Well, it’s not — on the surface.

But query data in Google Analytics makes for much more intelligent advertisers. A query that does well in terms of CTR in AdWords might not do well in terms of engagement and sales on your site. Informed advertisers build negative keyword lists through this, which kills volume for Google, raises Quality Scores, and in turn, lowers CPCs for advertisers.

I think they’re testing the waters with how much information they can take away from advertisers without it negatively affecting our willingness to spend. Don’t be surprised if the query information is just phase one in Google obfuscating keyword information in the referrer.

The advertiser in me hopes I’m wrong, the conspiracy theorist in me fears I’m right.

Ultimately, Google answers to two people above all: searchers and shareholders. Advertisers will always come in a distant third.

The post (not provided) for Advertisers™ Beta appeared first on Portent.

Post #1: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Account Structure

Post #2: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Understanding your Campaign Settings

Post #3: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Keywords

Post #4: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Crafting Engaging AdsThere are several different types of ad extensions you can utilize in AdWords. Each one offers a unique way for you to provide potential customers with additional information such as phone numbers, directions, or services about your business, right from your ad.

Adding ad extensions is one of the quickest and easiest ways to give your click through rate a boost. They are simple to set up and do not cost you anything extra. Extensions are a great win-win that can help you build a successful PPC campaign.

Some of the different ad extensions include call extensions, location extensions, sitelink extensions, social extensions, product extensions, and more.

In this post, we will go over a few key ad extensions, the features they offer, and how to get them up and running in your campaigns today.

Sitelink Extensions

Sitelink extensions allow you to provide a list of additional links to pages on your website right from your ad.These extra links allow your ad to take up more real estate in the SERP, as well provide a customer with options so they can get straight to what they were looking for with less clicks.

To add sitelinks simply select a campaign, click the Ad Extensions tabs, and select Sitelink Extensions from the View drop-down menu.From here you can create new sitelinks by clicking the +New Sitelink button. You will need to craft link text (the title that will be displayed in your ad) and set a destination URL for each link you wish to create.

You can create two to six sitelinks for each campaign (you can create ad group level sitelinks as well with enhanced campaigns).  Try to stick with an even number of sitelinks to help ensure they format nicely and the way you intend.

Call Extensions

Call extensions allow your phone number to display directly in the ad. AdWords does not allow you to put phone numbers in your ad text, so if your business relies on customers to call in, this is a great resource. Call extensions can also be scheduled to show only at certain times of the day (so you can set them up to show only when someone will be there to answer the phone).

To set up call extensions, select Call Extensions from the View drop-down menu under the Ad Extensions tab. They are very simple to set up, only requiring your phone number.

When setting up new call extensions, you have a few features to pick from – the main one being whether to utilize Google forwarding phone numbers. Google forwarding numbers allow you to have access to call reporting which, depending on your business, may be a good way to track AdWords conversions. Google forwarding numbers are Google’s way of charging you per call a user makes. When enabled, AdWords generates a forwarding number that will be displayed in your ads instead of your actual phone number, thus allowing Google to track calls.I suggest enabling Google forwarding phone numbers. The call data is very useful for tracking number of calls and call durations, and is worth the price of a click in most cases.

Location Extensions

Location extensions allow you to list your business’s address in your ads. There are a couple of different ways you can get your address to show. If you have a Google Places account for your business, you can link that up so your ads will pull in information directly from there. If you don’t have a Google Places account, you can manually add new addresses.

To set up, select Locations from the View drop-down menu under the Ad Extensions tab. If you have Google Places, link your account to a campaign by clicking Addresses from Google Places and selecting the correct account (if you are not already logged in you will be prompted to do so).

If you do not have Places, select Manually Entered Addresses and +New extension. You can then enter in your business information and apply it to all of your campaigns.Once entered, your address could appear in a similar format to this ad:There a few other types of ad extensions. Learn more about the various ad extensions by visiting Google’s AdWords Help Center.

After you get all of your ad extensions set up, your account should be ready to start showing ads.

Watch out next Friday for our final post on tracking the success of your AdWords account.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.

The post Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Ad Extensions appeared first on Portent.

Post #1: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Account Structure

Post #2: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Understanding your Campaign Settings

Post #3: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Keywords

Crafting engaging ads is vital to the success of your AdWords campaign. Ads need to be informative, eye catching, and relevant to what a customer is searching for. Ads that are bland are easily overlooked, while ads with irrelevant ad copy can result in wasteful clicks from unqualified customers.

In this post, we will dissect an AdWords search network text ad, while providing some best practices that could make you a ton of money.

Ad structure

Text ads are broken up into five main sections, each with their own rules and restrictions. Every ad has a headline, two separate description lines, a display URL, and a destination URL.

Headlines are the most prominent part of your ad and are the part that a customer will actually be clicking on. This means headlines for each ad should include important keywords that are relevant to search queries. You have limited space to get the attention of a customer as Google only allows for 25 characters in the headline.

Description lines are a little longer than headlines, allowing for 35 characters per line. These two lines give you an opportunity to sell your product or service to a customer. These lines are comparable to an elevator pitch. You may only have the attention of a potential customer for a second, so you need to make that second count by using strong calls to action, convincing them to click your ad instead of the one right above or below.

Display and destination URLs

Each text ad has two separate URLs, the display and the destination URL. The display URL is what a customer will see when viewing your ad. Display URLs can be customized to further explain where exactly the ad is sending the customer. They must be 35 characters or less and contain the same domain as the destination URL. By making clear and descriptive display URLs you can reduce wasteful clicks from unqualified customers.

The destination URL is the actual URL where your customers will be sent when they click your ad. They are behind the scenes of your ad, as customers do not see them. It is important to select a destination URL that will serve as a strong landing page, enticing customers to convert. There are many factors that contribute to strong landing pages. Here are a few tips for making your landing page more successful.

Best practices

When crafting your ads, it is important to follow a few best practices that will help your ads look clean and clickable.

Always use title case and proper punctuation. AdWords allows you to use question marks and exclamation points, but not in excess (one exclamation point per ad – use it wisely). In most cases, use punctuation at the end of each description line to ensure that your ads will flow the way you intended, no matter how they get formatted.

There are many different ways to go about crafting great ad content. You can make your ad edgy, playful, direct, informative, etc… To decide which approach works best for your business, you should run A/B ad tests. Create about four ads for every ad group that utilize different calls to action and highlight different aspects of your product or service. Allow them to run at the same time so you can get a feel for what is working and what isn’t.

After you have crafted strong and engaging ads, it is time to start digging a little deeper into more advanced settings by setting up ad extensions.

Watch out next Friday for our next post on setting up and utilizing ad extensions!

Feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments.

The post Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Crafting Engaging Ads appeared first on Portent.

If you have ever re-organized an inherited AdWords account to get in line with best practices by moving keywords into new campaigns and creating new ad copy, you may have noticed how you don’t immediately get the results you were expecting.

In fact, you may have concluded that all of the work just made your account worse.  This is actually a common theme when it comes to Google AdWords – taking a mediocre account and trying to make it into a great account usually comes with some growing pains.

If you have an AdWords account which you don’t optimize often and subsequently leave it be (more or less) without any significant changes to campaign structure for an extended period of time, it has the tendency to “settle in.”  The back-end system which runs all of the keyword bidding auctions seems to get used to your account and adapts to it.

In this scenario, you might wind up with an account which gets you click and conversion metrics you’re comfortable with.  However, you’re unlikely to see much improvement.  Your account just “does its thing” and gets you predictable results.

I have an AdWords account and I want to improve it

Let’s say you have an account, like the one above, that you don’t touch very often and have come to realize is in need of some restructuring.  For example, there are only a handful of campaigns where each has over 30 ad groups with an average 200 keywords and 15 ads in each one.

• You want better control of your campaign budgets and more granular ad groups.
• You can see certain keywords over-spending and other keywords not generating as many impressions as they should.

So, you re-organize the account into several more campaigns.  All of the keywords are the same, but are now in more granular, tightly-themed ad groups with 3 or 4 ads in each ad group.

The account looks much cleaner, better organized, and in-line with AdWords’ best practices – you give yourself a pat on the back.

However, the following week, you check your click and conversion metrics to find your average cost per click has risen by 50%, your click total has decreased by 15%, and your conversion total has decreased by 30%.  At this point, your eyes widen past a point that should be physically possible, you attempt to pull out your hair, and you scream obscenities in a midst of confusion and frustration.

In the name of all that is good and just, what the #&$% happened to my account?

On the surface, it doesn’t look like you really changed anything – but in reality, you changed a lot more than you thought.  When you move a keyword from one ad group to another, you’re technically deleting it – including deleting all historical data associated with it – and creating a brand new keyword.  This means the quality score and history your keyword has attained disappears completely.

Let’s say keyword X has a quality score of 7 and accrues 500 clicks per month at $1 average cost per click.  After “moving” keyword X to another ad group and letting it run for a week, you see that it has a quality score of 4 and an average cost per click of $1.50.  In this example, Google no longer has the historical data attached to keyword X that gave it a higher quality score and, thus, a lower average cost per click.

OK, but I still need to make my AdWords account better.  How do I improve my account without blowing it up?

Before changing anything, download a full copy of your entire account – campaign structure, ad group taxonomy, keyword statistics, everything.  Use this to gauge the performance of your changes over time.  Worst case scenario: if you cannot continue with your optimization efforts, you can always re-upload your old account which will, in short order, begin achieving predictable click and conversion metrics again.

Do not change everything at once and upload all new campaigns from AdWords Editor at once.  Doing so is the metaphorical equivalent of pushing the big red button – it will cause your click metrics to spike drastically in directions you don’t want them to.

Implement changes methodically and strategically – start re-organizing your poorest campaigns first, then work your way to the ones you consider the best over weeks, months, or as long as it takes to be systematic and effective.

I get it, but how long will it take me to see the results I want?

Your initial performance for the first month or two will likely not be as good as the month or two preceding these changes.  This dip in performance usually lasts 2-3 months, but can be shorter or longer.  For this reason, it’s best to complete a re-organization process like this when your business has hit its point of low seasonality.

But, after this initial dip, you’ll begin to see results which reflect its improved structure:

So don’t get discouraged with the early dip in performance.  With the proper planning and enough patience, you can take your mediocre AdWords account and make it great!

For more Portent PPC know-how, feel free to check out our latest ebook on Product Listing Ads, or browse the PPC category of our blog.

The post Why Re-Organizing Your AdWords Account Can Fail in the Beginning appeared first on Portent.

eBay commissioned a 26 page study through their research lab with one of their researchers and some reputable sources (a Univ. of Chicago Assistant Professor & UC Berkeley Associate Professor), citing some reputable resources (like Google Chief Economist Hal Varian), doing some pretty in depth research and even formulating their own algebraic equation to express ROI to explain and back up their conclusions.

I have to say I don’t totally disagree with it.

Here’s the abstract of the study:

Internet advertising has been the fastest growing advertising channel in recent years with paid advertisements on search platforms (e.g., Google and Bing) comprising the bulk of this revenue. We present results from a series of large-scale field experiments done at eBay that are designed to detect the causal effectiveness of paid search advertisements. Results show that brand-keyword ads have no short-term benefits, and that returns from all other keywords are a fraction of conventional estimates. We find that new and infrequent users are positively influenced by ads but that existing loyal users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by paid search account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative. We discuss substitution to other channels and implications for advertising decisions in large firms.

Now before the PPC marketers out there get all wound up, here’s a quick recap with details per the study:

• eBay is calculated to spend $51 million on AdWords annually
• eBay wondered what would happen if they stopped buying on their brand keywords like “eBay”
• Bing/MSN was included as the first experiment in the turning off of branded search. Google remained the control. Only 5.9% of traffic is estimated to have been unrecovered by organic on Bing.

• The same brand keyword test is rolled out with Google, resulting in a 3% loss unrecovered by organic.
• eBay wondered what would happen if the stopped buying as much on some of their 170 million (historically speaking) unbranded keywords in certain DMAs. They turned off spend in 30% of their 210 DMAs.
• A random sampling of those DMAs left are split into control and test groups.
• The non-brand left to run is calculated to attribute only a .44% increase in sales.

It goes on to explore customer and product response heterogeneity (types of customers/visitors as they relate to the bigger picture) as well as channel substitution and how they derived ROI with this fabulous equation:

It’s nice that they were able to afford what I’m sure was a very costly study to prove one thing any search marketer could have told them- “you’re a major brand/household name. If someone types in “eBay XXX” you’re going to show number one for organic and they’ll just click that instead of the paid ad since your SEO isn’t a train wreck.”

Google is of course going to show the most relevant “eBay XXX” it can find in its index. It’s not a shock that turning off your brand keywords led to an increase in organic sales and saved you some money. Any competitor that’s going to go after eBay brand terms is going to get nailed in CPC and Quality Score as well as be banished to the right rail for ad placement more often than not. That’s how the system is supposed to work.

So it’s pretty cool actually to show some numbers and proof that super mega brands could save themselves a few bucks by not bidding on their brand…despite what their Google reps might say and even myself. (I’ve been known to encourage and buy on branded terms, but then again, the client wasn’t eBay, Amazon or Macy’s.)

The Non Brand Keywords

The non-brand side is where I have some disagreement and wonder if the researchers in question were search marketers themselves and how much they understood in regards to the finer points of PPC to draw their conclusions from.

170 million keywords is an awful lot. $51 million in spend means that Google AdWords reps had to be pretty heavy handed and involved in the processing of these monies. I know from personal experience that when you come to them and say “I have a million dollars to spend” they get really helpful with all kinds of places that you can spend that million with mixed results and advice.

Now don’t get me wrong, the people behind these suggestions are often times brilliant, super nice and mean well. But let’s face it, there’s a vested interest. It makes you wonder how the account got that big and how many calls with Google ended with “we’ll build out all those new campaigns for you right away!”

It’s been a long time running joke with PPC marketers on the quality of the eBay, Amazon and Target ads. Those guys will buy and sell anything- literally:

The Portent PPC team used to spend Friday afternoons googling around for the craziest or most nonsensical ads we could find, thanks to a liberal use of dynamic keyword insertion.

While I don’t think eBay needs to be handing $51million over to Google AdWords every year, they might want to take a second look at the quality of the buy they were making.

In conclusion: can eBay live without AdWords?

Duh, yes. They’re eBay.

Should they cut everything off entirely?

Well…the researchers accounted for seasonality, brand awareness, DMAs, volume, types of customers (frequency and recency) but not the part where the quality of the work being done was scrutinized. I’m not into drinking the Google Kool Aid, but I am in defense of good PPC work.

All else, they’ve got enough money for for twelve 30 second Super Bowl ads now.

The post eBay Proves They Can Live Without AdWords appeared first on Portent.

We’ve discussed it, talked about it, webinar-ed, convened around the water cooler, blogged and tweeted. Opinions are hot, high, frequent and mixed. One thing is for sure, it’s not going away.

Each time it seems as if the proverbial dust has settled, more about EC is announced.

Each week a Google webinar reveals a few more nuggets of information to be absorbed, processed and disseminated to teams, clients and execs through a J.J. Abrams-like lens flare blast of Google sunshine and rainbows. (I consider PPC marketers lucky to have a community with so many intelligent folks who can read between the lines, follow their investigative instincts, and take screenshots like there’s no tomorrow.)

But, as I said during the PPC Hero Webinar on Enhanced Campaigns:

It’s going to be OK.

It’s not pretty, but you know why there’s so much fuss, so many blog posts and tweets?

Because PPC marketers CARE

Genuinely, control-freakily care.

Not merely because Google has just made a ton more work for us all (which they did), but because overnight, they dropped a mega announcement that affects what many of us have spent anywhere from a few months to many years on – tweaking, optimizing and obsessing over paid search accounts.

Hours have been spent reporting, analyzing and discussing with clients and in house: preparing for seasonal highs and lows while searching for unique methods and tools to build ROI and lower CPAs.

It is this same pride that most PPC marketers take in their work, their fierceness to defend their clients against evil defaults and wasteful spend, that makes them the wonderful control freak, analytical, creative people that they are.

And you know what?

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A PPC marketer that has that much passion, curiosity, skepticism, and conviction can manage my accounts any day.

I have a Carl Sagan quote hanging in my office for occasions such as this:

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.

The rest of the quote follows.

Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.

Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.

And the same goes for PPC

Question the $40 billion dollar machine. They’re not fragile human beings or out to save the world. They’re a business – a for-profit, private business. They have a legal team, a board of directors and ridiculous resources. You won’t hurt them.

Test it. Try it. Make it work for you. Break it. Rave about it. Rant about it.

Repeat.

(Thanks, Dr. Sagan.)

The post Confessions of a PPC Control Freak on Enhanced Campaigns appeared first on Portent.

If you’ve followed my blog musings in the last year or so at Portent, you’ll know that I’m a bit of a dashboard nut.

My Perfect Google Analytics Dashboard post took off in ways I never imagined. (Thanks guys!)

But here’s the thing: I was lying to you all – or misleading you, anyway. There is no perfect dashboard. There are many.

The New Google Analytics PLA Dashboard You Need

Elizabeth wrote about the Google Shopping transition going down on October 17th. It’s all moving to a paid service through Product Listing Ads (PLAs).

With that move comes the need for greater analysis and insight. What greater way to do that than a dedicated PLA dashboard in Google Analytics?

So you have a choice: either scramble for a way to track this after the transition, or steal this dashboard now and be prepared!

The Anatomy of the Product Listing Ads Dashboard

Much like the dashboards I’ve shown you before, the layout on this one is very intentional:

• Most important stats: Top Left
• Sexy graphical element: Middle
• Some detail, but not too much: Right, Bottom

Let’s walk through the widgets individually.

PLA ROI

How much did I make? How much did I spend to make it?

Two stats that are essential to any paid advertising campaign, and PLAs are no different.

I have a rule about not putting anything on a dashboard that you could get by applying basic math to existing metrics. But since we’ll want to watch ROI very closely out of the gate in October, I’ll make an exception here:

PLA Impressions & Clicks Timeline

How many people are seeing my PLAs?

Whether you’re just launching your product feed or if you’re uploading it manually, it helps to visually see when your impressions start kicking in (or when they drop off):

PLA Product Performance

Which products are people buying when they click on your PLAs? How much is that worth to your bottom line?

Ad Group Clicks, Conversion Rates & Revenue

Can I break down PLA performance by ad group?

PLA campaign structure will usually dictate that you establish ad groups geared towards either adwords_grouping(s) or adwords_label(s) that align with the product categories in your feed.

This widget will tell you which of your themed ad groups are pulling their traffic and revenue weight and which ones are wasteful with the clicks:

Matched Search Queries for PLAs

Which keywords trigger my PLAs?

This, my friends, is the Holy Grail of PLA advertising. Before this report, it was tricky to figure out which searches were actually triggering PLAs, short of some inventive tagging in the adwords_redirect field of your feed.

But it turns out the queries can be seen in the Matched Search Queries report, which can then be added to a dashboard widget:

Installing the PLA Dashboard

Easy, peasy:

Click here to install the PLA dashboard

Or paste the link into the browser you’re currently logged into Google Analytics (GA) with. Either way, GA will prompt you to apply it to the profile of your choosing.

Configuring the PLA Dashboard

Every widget in this dashboard assumes a couple things:

1. That you have Google AdWords and Google Analytics properly linked and are utilizing Auto-Tagging, or that your AdWords Campaigns/Product Feeds are Manually Tagged properly with utm variables.
2. That the AdWords Campaign you’re running PLAs in has either “PLA” or “Product Listing” in the campaign name.

If #1 isn’t true, go fix your tagging! It’ll behoove you to have that fixed, even if you’re not running a PLA campaign.

If #2 isn’t true, my widgets allow you to fix it. In each widget, there’s a regular expression that looks like this: (PLA|Product Listing|Custom)

Simply replace “Custom” in the regular expression to match the campaign name you’re running PLAs from. Like this: (PLA|Product Listing|My Campaign)

Do this in the all the widgets and click “Save” and you’re good to go!

Run Your PLA Campaigns Fearlessly

With this data at your fingertips, you’re equipped to optimize your PLA efforts and reap the rewards.

Be sure to comment on this post with any questions!

The post Steal This Product Listing Ads Dashboard Before Wednesday appeared first on Portent.

Or, you’ve got a client with 400+ products, terrible navigation and not helpful internal site search. (It was like dropping someone off in a Whole Foods blindfolded and telling them they have 30 seconds to bring back six bulk vegan chocolate chips. Go!)

Here’s a real instance on where I used Visitor Flow and Site Search in Google Analytics to convince a client to let me have some wonderful PPC-only landing pages featuring products of my choosing!

Identify

So this one just takes some common sense. When you use the site as a “user,” can you find things? Is it intuitive? When you perform example searches, do you get frustrated? Do your bounce rate, time on site and pageviews look great but no one wants to buy anything? Average order value order refuses to grow? If so, it’s time to start digging.

Start Stalking

If you’ve never used Visitor Flow in GA, you really should, even if it’s just to play with it. You can really “visualize” where visitors come in and where they go. In this case of this client, we were seeing the visitors come in from various pages and too many of them are having interactions with internal site search.

But, the overall PPC site metrics, are 4+ pages per visit, almost 3 minutes on site, 33% bounce rate. My concern here is the reason that’s high, is because they’re having to “hunt” for what they want. So, I need to prove that it’s not because I am driving irrelevant traffic and instead it’s that they find the one thing they’re looking for, they just can’t find the second and third, which is attributing to my low average order value.

Matching It Up

I know the days that I made major changes to the account, including tripling their spend for the holidays, thanks to a handy annotation I made in GA, so I went and looked at their internal site search stats to see if there was a correlation. Lo and behold, we turn up PPC, site search use skyrockets.

OK, so how am I proving that it’s not because I suck at bringing in relevant traffic? Pull the revenue and transactions and compare. They were making money and sales, just not making as much money and sales as they could be.

In fact, I couldn’t get the average order value to budge more than $1 month over month with the exception of Black Friday.

The Solution

Since there was no plan or resources in the short term to improve upon or change site navigation, product categorization or internal search, the answer was landing pages. Let me simply present the desired items on a single page with a giant ADD TO CART button. (Ideally, if they had piles of money, they could do something like real time offers or a recommended products program to really bolster average order value, but I think you can sense they did not have the capital for this.)

The takeaway: go play with visitor flow in GA. It’s fun times.

The post Using Visitor Flow and Site Search in GA to Prove You Need PPC Landing Pages appeared first on Portent.

This just got a bit more competitive is all. Oh yeah, and less free. If you’ve been following along with the recent announcement that Google AdWords will be discontinuing the free product listings through Google Product Search, then you’re with me already. If you haven’t- then breaking news for you!

In a nutshell- Google is making product feed submissions and displaying products a paid thing. So if you upload a product feed through Google Merchant Center (or Google Base as it’s sometimes called), then you care about this. You also care about this if you use Product Listing Ads (or PLAs) in Google AdWords in conjunction with a product feed in Google Merchant Center. You really care about this if you have only been using Google Merchant Center and NOT AdWords.

Let’s break it down, because in the end we’re talking about FIVE different Google products that could come into play for you.

Google Product Search– the section of Google.com where displays results come from product feeds and through Google web crawls. This was free to show your product feed in.


Google Merchant Center/Base– the interface where you upload your product feeds, view statistics of the same and get all your info on what’s accepted, what’s not and where you can “optimize” your product feeds using attributes provided by Google. Still technically free- but no one will see anything unless you pay.

Google AdWords– I think you know what this is. What you care about here is the auto targets tab in the AdWords user interface. More on that later. Also, never free.

Google Shopping- The product formerly known as Google Product Search. The results in this search result area will all be paid inclusions, drawn from product feeds submitted through Merchant Center, as well as organic listings.

Google Trusted Stores- a Google Trusted Store is a merchant that has applied to be in the program and passed a shipping and customer service check by Google. It requires a piece of javascript code and an additional order code on shipping/receipt pages as well as a tab-delimited data feed that is submitted daily.

Google collects shipping data (length of time to ship, speed of shipping) over the course of 28 days and 1,000 orders. During this “monitoring mode” an error free month will get you into the program, after which you get a nifty Google Trusted Stores badge to show alongside your AdWords text and product listing ads. Be sure to check out the implementation requirements and integration before signing up. The program just got opened up more from the “submit and hope for an email” – see how you can get started here. You care about this in connection with Google Shopping because of the badge it’s going to “bling” your ad out with.

Google Analytics- When uploading feeds to Google Merchant Center, you used to tag the back end of destination URLs (I hope you did at least) with the designation of utm_souce=google+products or something similar so that when you looked in your GA stats you could separate Google organic from Google Product Search. You really should do this if you haven’t been.

What this means for you and managing PPC

• Get to work now, so you have extra time to get ready for holiday. If you’re not already taking advantage of product feeds, you should. The absolute best way to manage this going forward? Create a new campaign and ad groups just for product listing ads.
• The new system isn’t keyword based, so don’t mix it with your keyword based ad texts. (If you add keywords to the campaign or ad group with your PLAs and no text ads, they won’t do anything but sit there.)
• Review and possibly use all the available attributes in AdWords now: product type, brand, condition, adwords labels, adwords groups.
• Figure out a taxonomy before you upload on how you’re going to group products- use your existing AdWords account structure to make life easier on yourself. (If that’s a mess, fix that first.) For example: say you have a housewares campaign that houses ad groups for utensils and blenders. You’re going to want to create a grouping or group for utensils (spatulas, whisks, spoons) and another for blenders. Auto Targets are set at the ad group level, so you’ve got a lot of flexibility here.
• The difference between groups and labels? Groups can be arbitrary. Name the group and assign products that same group name – they are now a “group.” But- it can only be one value. So “blenders” or “utensils” not “blending utensils” or “down comforters.” Labels can have multiple values like “kitchenware, blender.” See the Google Merchant Center Help article for more on this.
• Review the required attributes for product feeds and get them in there.
• Name your products descriptively. Stick to 70 characters or less. Put a keyword in there and put it up front. For example: “King Down Pillow Feather Core” not “Down Pillow” or “240 Thread Count Reversible Hypoallergenic Siberian Goose Down Pillow Set”.
• Watch out for special characters like & % or < to avoid encoding errors, especially when using XML format.
• Fill in the product description uniquely and descriptively, 500 to 1000 characters. Writing the same thing for 80 products isn’t going to help you on relevancy to Google or searchers. Remember- you’re paying for these clicks now.
• Don’t use the first 100 characters for instructions, shipping info or overly descriptive “fluff” – you might get 500 characters, but not all 500 are going to show. Get the important sales info in up front.
• Find a way to automate an upload if possible through your cart. Get out-of-stock items out, new stuff in, don’t let your feed expire.
• Get familiar with the auto targets tab, it’s about to become very useful to you. You’re going to use it to filter, group and see what is going on.
• Advertisers that start using PLAs now get a 10% discount from AdWords. More details here.
  
• The Google Merchant Center Help Area with sample product feeds, lists of attributes and troubleshooting fun is sticking around and staying right where it is.
• If you can’t edit the feed for AdWords attributes or don’t have access to the product feed, your best filters are going to be product type and brand, which are hopefully at least provided to you. Otherwise, PLAs aren’t going to do much for you as you’ll be at the mercy of what Google finds “relevant.”

The most important thing? Just get your house in order now. Don’t wait till October. Sign up for updates from the AdWords or Merchant blogs to see when the official release will be – late summer is the current target.

Does this mean that you’ll now start seeing questions about the product feed program on the AdWords Advanced or Fundamentals exams? Probably.

Perhaps we’ll even see a new track of advanced to choose from: search, display, analytics and shopping!

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