Now, I love my coworkers but they also set pretty high bar. When I inherited a major cosmetics account from my colleague Michael Weigand, I knew I had my work cut out for me, specifically in the holiday season.

Throughout the year I kept track on my progress versus Michael’s results. Call it friendly competition (I must crush him). In September I started doing Holiday season preparations. I found that while we were still producing similar levels of revenue, over time our ROI had started to dip.

I’m the dark blue line

When I started examining individual campaigns, I discovered that the most dramatic ROI changes were happening in our branded campaign.

The gap widens

When I looked inside the branded campaign, I found that the major workhorse of the campaign was the exact match version of their brand name. That’s not especially surprising to anyone, I’m sure. What was a little more surprising to me was that the impression share on this keyword was only at around 80%.

My campaign regularly spent under the budget I’d set for it and I’d never received a “limited due to budget” notice from AdWords. So I was a bit puzzled at missing out on 20% of search volume for an exact match keyword set to advanced delivery with what by all accounts should have been a sufficient budget.

What I found was that as I continued to “optimize” the account by adding new keywords, it started to siphon away the impression share that my original keyword was exposed to. The bigger the campaign got, the more confused AdWords became.

Confused is putting it politely, actually. AdWords was straight up dumb in how it chose what keywords to match to searches and how it allocated budget between them.

I’m already a big believer in segmenting campaigns by match type, keeping my exact match keywords in their own campaign separate from broad or phrase. With the impression share issue I was having I decided that this time I would take it a step further.

I separated the exact match brand name keyword into its own campaign with its own budget separate from everything else. I was taking no chances with leaving money on the table for my best keyword during the holidays. When you do this you actually want to move everything else into the new campaign- leave your prize pig alone.

We made the change in October. The results blew my mind. In the previous year during the holidays we saw ROI start to drop as a function of the major increase in holiday traffic. Keep in mind ROI dropped from fan-freaking-tastic to just regular fantastic (official units of measurement).

What we saw as we went into the holidays this year was that our ROI went up at the same time that traffic spiked. When we looked at the holiday season (Nov-Dec) we managed to increase ROI by over 30%. The traffic spike plus the surge in ROI combined for an overall increase in revenue of more than 60%!

This is why there is a picture of money at the top

So do the results translate? Will it work for other brands? Will it work for your brand? We wanted to know.

So we tried it again.

My colleague Timothy Johnson and I looked at one of his client’s accounts. They were seeing year over year decreases in PPC after a huge improvement in organic rankings had reclaimed a bit of the online search pie.

The two channels together were cooperatively outperforming last year’s revenue. Sometimes, though, that explanation just isn’t going to get you off the hook with a client who wants to see improvement in every channel, every year.

We noticed a similar trend that our exact match name wasn’t getting quite the exposure that it could, so we followed suit and gave it its own campaign and a budget it couldn’t possibly spend.

Without adding a single keyword to the account, we increased visits by 11%, revenue by 41%, and transactions by 46%.

I’ll say it again; we didn’t add a single keyword and we didn’t take anything away from SEO. Organic revenue actually grew at the same time.

Do you have any high performing keywords that aren’t getting their fair share of impressions? Your brand name is definitely a good place to start looking, but is by no means your only option.

The main thing I want to get across is that if you have a keyword that’s performing well and it’s important that it shows as often as possible, don’t give AdWords any chance to do otherwise, because it will. Because AdWords is dumb.

Photo Courtesy Of: 401(K) 2013

The post Are You Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns To Death? appeared first on Portent.

Display network campaigns and search network campaigns are inherently different and should not be treated the same way. Display network advertising works a lot more like “traditional” advertising, which requires you to pull the attention of a user away from whatever he or she is focusing on. Search network advertising is far more targeted and requires you to persuade users who are looking for your type of business.

Although they are very different in practice, they are the two components that work together to complete your efforts in paid search. To help you master both of them, I’ve come up with five diametric pairings as keys to each type of campaign:

The Five Keys to Display Network Campaigns

1. Brand Awareness

One of the most important things to recognize about display network campaigns is that they will have a dismal conversion rate compared to your search network campaigns. This does not mean they’re worthless; it just means you have to direct your focus somewhere else. Branding should be a big part of your efforts in this regard. The more you advertise your brand and the more people see your ads, your brand’s awareness level increases. Even if a user doesn’t click on your ad, going from “I’ve never heard of this company before” to “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of these guys before” is a big first step.

2. Quality Image Ads

How often do you see a random text ad on any site you’re on and bother to read it? I am going to go out on a limb and bet that frequency is “very rarely” or “never.” Making text ads effective on the display network is very hard to do. If your goal is to grab the user’s attention, you’re going to need something more: banner or video ads. If you have a solid banner ad (looks professional, descriptive copy, clean images that give the right connotation for your business, etc.), you are much more likely to get a click on the display network. Amateur, overly-crowded, and/or flashy banners will make you look like a fool though. Make the best impression possible on users and use high-quality banners or videos.

For the love of everything good and decent, don’t make these kinds of ads.

3. Specific Short-tail Keywords

You don’t want to blanket the entire internet with your ads; there’s too much potential for irrelevant impressions and clicks. Instead, you want to focus where your ads will be displaying. One way to do that is by using relevant keywords that will trigger an impression on a page that matches those keywords. You don’t want to limit yourself only with long-tail keywords that often have to be in phrase or exact match to stay relevant. Likewise, you don’t want broad, one-word or two-word keywords that could cause your ad to be shown everywhere. Use specific short-tail keywords that can create a ton of impressions on relative webpages along with specific long-tail ones.

4. Campaign/Ad Group Variance

Keywords are not the only tools you can use to focus targeting. Managed placements can limit which websites you want to display your ads on. On top of that, interest targeting can also be used to target a certain category of websites pre-defined by Google. These options can be used in combination with or instead of keywords. Use multiple display network campaigns with each of these options (or some combination thereof) and see what works best for you and your advertising goals.

5. Remarketing

This is the single biggest advantage you can utilize in the display network. When a user clicks on your ad, a cookie is used to track them. This gives you the option to advertise specifically to people who have clicked on your ad before (or exclude them if you’re trying to reach only those who have never visited your site). There are several different remarketing strategies that you can use and each allows you to speak directly to a certain set of users. This may seem a little bit like “big brother is watching you,” but remarketing can significantly help the return on your display network efforts.

The Five Keys to Search Network Campaigns

1. Brand Control

A big advantage the search network gives you is the ability to give users the ideal first impression of your brand after they search for it. If you bid the highest amount for your branded keywords (which hopefully have high quality scores), your ad will show at the top of the search results page. That means the first thing a user sees after searching for your brand is the ad copy you want him or her to see. If you’re in the midst of a PR snafu, the search network can help you manage “spin” efforts. If you have a relatively unknown brand, the search network will allow you to give the best initial impression possible. It’s your brand; help move the conversation surrounding it in the direction you want it to go.

2. Text Ads with the “Big Three”

The best and most effective text ads master three components: appeal, exclusivity, and action. You’re allowed just 130 characters total in an ad; that’s all the space you have to persuade a user to click through. You need to make your ad clean and coherent so that it’s visually and grammatically appealing to click on. You need to include some ad copy that informs the user why you’re better than all of your competitors. And, most importantly, you need to give the user a call to action no matter how self-explanatory you think it is.

3. Negative Keywords

Good search network campaigns utilize long and short keywords in varying match types to maximize their click-through and conversion potential. Great search network campaigns utilize negative keywords to maximize that potential even further. Negative keywords allow you to filter queries that will trigger an impression and prevent queries that are likely irrelevant to your business from doing so. Ignoring negative keywords is nothing short of foolish; using them well can boost your conversion rate and lower your cost per acquisition.

4. Tightly Organized Campaigns/Ad Groups

This is one of the most basic fundamentals of PPC. Campaigns should be neatly organized in a manner that reflects your website and makes sense. Ad groups should be just as organized and even more specific. This way, you can write ad copy that pertains directly to a tightly-knit group of keywords and, by that measure, directly to the search query of a particular user. Well-organized ad groups lead to more qualified clicks and more conversions. Poorly-organized ad groups will leave you with little more than money wasted.

5. Stellar Landing Pages

When it comes to the search network, your keyword organization and ad copy will only take you so far. As the old cliché goes, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t force him to drink it.” You can persuade a user to click on your ad, but you can’t force him or her to buy from you. In order to assist the potential for conversions, your landing page needs to kick ass. It needs to master the big three (appeal, exclusivity, action) in its own way and persuade a user to make a conversion. Without a good landing page, your PPC efforts are nearly pointless.

Give him a reason to drink.

Five pairs of components – each work in a different way depending on the network. PPC advertising is an entangling web of cause and effect that needs to be managed at a swift pace. Some campaigns are easier to execute than others, but all of them have the potential to succeed. So long as search and display campaigns are separated out into individual entities, the rest can be sorted out and managed effectively.

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