While bidding on the branded terms of your competitors is not an innovative practice, poor execution is something we see over and over again. Poor execution when buying on your competitor’s brand names is a terrific way to flush your ROAS down the drain.

When looking to go after this type of paid traffic, it is important to look at two sides of the paid search user journey- first, your account and campaign setup as the advertiser, and secondly, the experience visitors are taken through on your website after clicking your ad. Tying those two pieces together is your best chance for success when advertising on your competitor’s branded search terms.

Below are six actionable tips to implement immediately when bidding on competitor brand terms:

First, we will start in your PPC account.

1. Dedicate a specific budget

Set aside a portion of your account budget dedicated just for generating traffic from the brand names of your competitors.

When assigning this budget, go ahead and throw away your last-click attribution model and account-wide performance metrics— these types of campaigns typically convert at much lower rates than other traditional paid search ventures.

2. Separate competitor brands into individual campaigns

Search volumes are going to vary depending on the size discrepancy of your competition. If you set up one campaign to hold all competitor keywords, the competitors with the highest search volume will end up spending the highest portion of your campaign budget. Your largest and most searched for competitor should not necessarily dictate that they are your most important competitor.

To give those less searched for yet still important competitors a chance to have their customer base captured, segment each competitor into its own campaign to ensure your budget is spent under your control.

3. Customize ad copy

Find a way to make a connection between the users search query and your ad. It goes along with that whole relevance thing. Just because you are in the same industry as your competitor, a searcher may not know that and may have never heard of your company. This is your first chance to introduce yourself and create a connection between your company and your competitor.

Wading through the waters of Google’s trademark policy can be tricky when potentially dealing with trademarked brand names.

Finding a clever way to incorporate both your brand name and your competitor’s into an ad can position yourself for a huge win, leading to strong click through rates.

Once a user clicks on an ad, we must shift our attention to landing page experience.

4. Solidify a connection between your company and your competitor

Once a user hits your landing page, solidify the bridge between you and the specific competitor that user was searching for. Your visitor is familiar enough with your competition to search for their brand name- they probably know that competitor’s product line and the need it fulfills. Your ad created the connection for them, your landing page should drive home that connection.

5. Directly highlight why you are better

You know your product. You should know your competitor’s product. Now speak directly to why you are better. You have to convince a visitor who had the intent of learning about an alternative solution that you are the best option. Directly call out what you do better than a given competitor.
In an ideal world, set up an individual landing page designed around each competitor you plan on competing directly with.

6. Funnel to a soft conversion

Once your ad is clicked on, a connection is made, and persuasive messaging compels a visitor, look to convert them through a soft conversion. Free trials, whitepaper downloads, and free product samples are good ways to do this.

Provide great value to them at no charge— that can motivate visitors back to your core offerings, which is where you collect revenue and tie back value with your paid ads.

By following these six actionable tips, you can begin driving value on your competitor-based paid search terms.

What techniques have you used to drive value when bidding on competitor branded search terms?

The post Six Ways to Win on your Competitor’s Branded Keywords appeared first on Portent.

Ever since Google AdWords introduced enhanced campaigns, targeting mobile traffic effectively using mobile bid modifiers has been an important strategy for all PPC managers.  Some of you may have mobile bid modifiers set in your campaigns already, but aren’t seeing very good results from mobile traffic.  Others may have your mobile bid modifiers set at -100% because mobile traffic has never been very reliable for you in the past.

We all know mobile traffic is becoming increasingly important; the percentage of mobile users on the web keeps growing.  Having an ineffective or non-existent mobile targeting strategy in your PPC campaigns will not be a viable option for much longer.  You need to figure out a way to target these users effectively so you can maintain profitability.

Solution

One simple way to figure out what your mobile bid modifier should be for any given campaign is to focus on the difference in average value per session or per user between computer/tablet traffic and mobile traffic.  If you’re trying to answer the question of how much more or less you should bid for a mobile user, then it stands to reason to reference the average value of these users compared to other traffic.

For example, there’s a campaign in which the average value per session is $2.99 for a non-mobile user and $1.63 for a mobile user.   This is a 45% difference:

Since mobile users are 45% less valuable on average than non-mobile users in this campaign, we want to bid down by 45% for mobile traffic.  Hence, the mobile bid modifier should be set to -45%.

Results

We at Portent tried this strategy with one of our e-commerce clients, applying the appropriately calculated mobile bid modifier according to the example above to all campaigns.  The before & after results are as follows:

As you can see, changing the mobile bid modifiers to coincide with the differences in values we were already seeing allowed us to make mobile targeting efficient and profitable.

Do you have any strategies for setting mobile bid modifiers?  What results have you seen?  Share your ideas below.

The post Getting Started with Mobile Bid Modifiers appeared first on Portent.

I agree with my fellow search colleagues in the area of outrage, it’s just not acceptable what is being taken away in favor of a murkier, harder to control setting in terms of managing your keyword list. Some of us were using true exact match in a very specific and profitable manner and this loss of control seems senseless.

For example, we have a couple of clients that have a huge brand name, brick and mortar stores, online presence and a rabid social media community. We’ve been using the exact match of their one word name to dispel same named entities and direct traffic to the appropriate places, at a great CPC and high CTR. Everyone wins in this scenario, Google gets money for the clicks (instead of organic), users find what they’re looking for and we get the visits for Google at a great rate with the corresponding transactions.

So that brought me back to the WHY. Seriously, WHY?

The default setting for new campaigns is close variants, so only those that are well versed in PPC marketing would know to not only change that setting  but also why you would want to change it. Additionally, the advanced search community practitioners number far less than those out there new to running their own campaigns for their business, in house or otherwise, so what would it hurt to leave that level of control available for those that know how to use it?

The claim by Google is that only 7% of queries are misspellings and that we’re missing out on those queries. I would say that if I had two campaigns, one for that true exact match and one for the rest, would I not I still get that query anyway? The claim that it would “simplify” things and therefore you would only need one campaign with the close variants argument ignores that now we’re going to have to comb through search query reports (which aren’t available in real time) to add negative keywords, after the fact. And after we may have paid for a click or two as well, which if you deal in $100+ clicks is just not OK.

So, again, WHY?

The conspiracy theorist in me started going to a couple of different places; the timing, surprise and overall oddness of this change just isn’t sitting right. At least with enhanced campaigns it was clearly a money thing. (It’s always a money thing, but that trail was a lot easier to follow.)

1. Rolling this change out in September, right before holiday, means that Google will be capitalizing on matching more ads to queries, driving up clicks/cost as traffic volumes increase.
2. Google’s filed a few patents focusing on entity names, relationships between queries and intent and their database about entities (especially since acquiring Freebase) has swelled to over 250 million. This means that they can match a query for “Dec” to “December” and “Michael Jackson” to whether or not you mean the singer or the Homeland Security guy. Check out Bill Slawski’s recent article on this.
3. Then check out how Knowledge Base Entities can be used in searches– these example queries may be longer and in question form like, “what is the movie where Scarlett Johansson is the computer” and more likely will trigger the result you’re looking for based on the additional attribute information given in the query, especially when checked against their Knowledge Base. Whereas if you were to search for “Her” as a keyword, the SERP could be very different looking. Are they trying to close that gap so that they can start showing ads on those longer queries more often? It’s very unlikely that you’ve bid on that phrase in a keyword list.
4. The accuracy and quality of matching has improved in AdWords immensely in just the last few years.  Stop and think about what “broad” match meant in 2007 and the types of queries that would match the keywords on your list versus how it works now in 2014. This is probably where the confidence is coming from in a move like this. If the search query report still resembled anything like 2007 with a broad match, people would have stopped using the platform.
5. How long do you think it is before we get “intent” or “informational” as bidding options? Or something along those lines? Aren’t we already kind of doing that with Google Shopping and Product Listing Ad units?

My hope is that we (the search community) are able to change Google AdWords’ mind on this loss of control, because as long as people still type words into a search box, keywords are still relevant, and until we are in a place where we can control these intent, entity and attributes like keywords, we’re still going to need that level of control.

Sign the petition here, if you haven’t already.

The post Unexpected Loss of Control: Google AdWords Exact Match Controversy appeared first on Portent.

Still, despite her best attempts at teaching me the value of plus signs, quotes and brackets, some habits die hard.

The wide net of broad match, though often shunned in favor of more stringent match types, still has its place in the world of paid search. However, as Google and Bing-Hoo race to loosen the elasticity of these matches, wrestling your matched queries into submission becomes a river of tears labor of love. Fortunately, there are ways to process low-relevance queries in bulk without need for any scripting chops or a surplus of free time.

Enter Fuzzy Lookup.

Fuzzy Lookup is an add-in for Microsoft Excel that simplifies comparative text analysis and allows for variable thresholds of output similarities. Such a tool has countless potential applications for anyone working with large sets of data. For our purposes, Fuzzy Lookup will enable us to prune our search queries using our bidded keywords as matching criteria. The output can then be used to build large sets of negative keywords and, ultimately, maximize the quality of traffic being driven by non-exact keywords.

Before we get to work, you’ll need to download and install the Fuzzy Lookup add-in from Microsoft. Once finished, open a blank Excel workbook and look for the Fuzzy Lookup icon in the ribbon of your Excel window. Salvation lies within.

To populate your workbook, grab a list of your bidded keywords and the corresponding search queries. It doesn’t matter if you pull these from reports or just download them directly from the AdWords UI, but keep your initial selection to one Ad Group. This method is capable of processing much larger lists of keywords, but a smaller selection will serve you well when setting up for the first time.

Paste each list in a separate worksheet, using descriptive headers like “Bidded Keywords” and “SearchQueries”. Once both are in place, highlight either list and click the “Format as Table” button in the Excel ribbon. Which style of table you choose is entirely up to you, but do remember to indicate that your table has headers. Do this for both lists, and then click back to your Bidded Keywords worksheet.

You should now have two worksheets, once with a table of raw search queries, and the other with a table of bidded terms. I know how exhausted you must be, but mop that e-sweat from your iBrow and let’s see this one through. “TEAM” on three!

There’s a tab in the Excel menu titled “Fuzzy Lookup”, and a button by the same name behind it. When you click the “Fuzzy Lookup” button, it searches out all tables within the workbook, regard less of how many worksheets are present. A sidebar control panel will appear, and you should see the Fuzzy Lookup has already Identified your tables.

I generally keep the Bidded Keywords table as my Left Column, and my Search Queries table as my right.

Now, because I have 23 queries that I’m looking to match, I’ve set the Number of Matches to exactly 23. Experiment with lowering this number as you explore the tool and see the difference in the results that Fuzzy Lookup returns. I also keep my “Similarity Threshold” just West of center at around 0.33. Again, the specific results you’re after may be hiding behind a different set of conditions, so give yourself some time to try out alternative settings.

Finally, if my Bidded Keywords table is on Sheet 1 A:A, then I’ll highlight Sheet 1 B1 and click “Go”.

Note: Make sure the “FuzzyLookup.Similarity” option is checked.

Above is a picture of the output I receive using my lists of Bidded Keywords and Search Queries. For a little extra flair, I’ve added color scales as conditional formatting.

With this information, I can use the similarity score both to identify similar terms I may consider actively bidding on, and to identify low-relevance queries that could find a home in a negative keyword list somewhere. No pulling and comparing reports, no manual examination of hundreds of queries, just a free plugin, some swift fingers, and a lot of leftover time.

So what do to with that time? Here’s a thought: VLookups. Try adding in engine-side performance data (CTR, CPA, Impressions, etc) and see what correlations you find. What is the similarity threshold beyond which your CTR takes a dive? What are the low-similarity but high-impression terms that are artificially deflating your overall CTR?

Go forth, geek out, and keep it fuzzy!

The post Harvesting Bulk Negative Keywords with Excel appeared first on Portent.

The Problem

Operating as a standalone service under the Portent brand name, PPC Essentials had been earning the majority of its sales leads through the authority and name recognition built up by Ian Lurie and Portent’s clout.

Once we moved to a new domain without that authority and brand recognition fully attached to the program, visitor volume on the newly created ppc-essentials.com was slow to gain traction and inbound leads were down.

Facing a lack of brand awareness and identity in the competitive space of PPC management, the PPC Essentials team looked for fast and effective ways to create awareness in an effort to drive high quality website visits and, in turn, sales leads.

This problem may be one that many of you face with your own businesses which is why I have laid out a tactic we approached in an effort to drive brand awareness and in the end, lead generation.

The Solution

YouTube Video Campaigns through Google AdWords.

Featuring a 60-second service demo video, we developed a promotion strategy designed to outreach our video and service though in-search, in-display, and in-stream ad options on YouTube.

Targeting similar demographics in line with our current program personas in combination with targeted keywords closely related to our core service and the problem we solve, we ran a three week trial promoting our video.

The Results

We were blown away by what happened next.

The following statistics are from the entire three week campaign and are compared to the three weeks prior to launching our video advertisements:

The improvement in our onsite engagement statistics was great but, at the end of the day, what we really cared about was seeing an increase in lead generation.

Let’s look at those lead generation statistics.

Onsite conversion rate over that same time frame doubled and then some:

Not only did those new visits convert at a higher rate on their first visit to the site, but driving a new influx of visitors allowed us to fill our remarketing pool as well.

Those visitors who came back to the site through a remarketing ad converted at a rate four and a half times higher than those remarketed to before we activated our YouTube ads.

Those sharp increases in conversion rates coupled with a flood of new visitors created exactly the results that we were looking for. The leads generated during the three-week campaign increased substantially, providing work for our sales team and a new marketing weapon to use in our arsenal.

By segmenting a highly targeted audience identified through client personas, understanding the market we work in and problem we solve for small business owners and marketing managers, PPC-Essentials.com was able to increase lead generation volume by 450% through the promotion of a 60-second service demo video over a three-week Google AdWords Online Video ad campaign.

Segmenting those same demographics and targeting for your business, as well as creating a short and engaging demo video, can provide you with the weaponry to drive further awareness and conversions on your emerging website.

The post Exploring the Potential Impact of Google AdWords Online Video Ads appeared first on Portent.

This post is brought to you by our special guest, Toni Voutilainen. Toni is a passionate PPC practitioner from a Finland-based Internet Agency Tulos Helsinki, operating in Scandinavia. Tulos and Portent are conducting a pilot of an International Geek Exchange program – this article is the culmination of Toni’s visit here to Seattle.

This October, AdWords will celebrate its 14th anniversary. Given the fact that it’s Google’s main revenue source, the search giant has developed the platform with staggering speed.

Some of the recent updates have been quite controversial (like forcing advertisers to target tablets and PCs together), but for the most part I personally think 2013 was filled with great updates. Recently Larry Kim asked PPC practitioners about their favorite AdWords updates in 2013 and wrote a nice wrap-up of them.

Yes, the tool seems to be getting better by the day. But still, if you’re a practitioner that spends most of his days optimizing accounts you probably agree: Google could make AdWords still so much better for advertisers. I have my pet peeves, I’m sure you do, too. So here’s my top wishes for AdWords in 2014 (hint hint, Google!):

1. Show me Statistical Significance

I love testing ads, not just because it’s very effective for getting better results fast, but because you can learn so much about your target audience in the process. But if you’re not careful your A/B testing efforts can be as good as guesswork if you’re making decisions based on statistically non-significant data.

There are 3rd party tools and whatnot that you can use for calculating stat significance yourself, but I really, really, really wish Google would build an integrated calculator into AdWords that would reveal the statistical significance of the metrics you choose. Now AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) was an important step in the right direction back in the day, which brings me to my second humble wish.

2. AdWords Campaign Experiments, out of beta soon?

This is one of the best tools within AdWords, but still probably one of the most underused. Yes, ACE, hidden at the bottom of campaign settings, has been around since 2010 and still isn’t out of beta as if Google never decided whether it will stay or not.

ACE is a great tool, but it has serious limitations – for example, you can only have one active experiment per campaign and you can’t experiment with campaign settings. I can only imagine how much more interesting and easier ad A/B testing or justifying higher bids or budgets would become with a ‘full’ version of ACE, where you could have multiple (not overlapping) experiments in a single campaign. So I really hope Google will release that in 2014.

3. More Attribution Data into Bidding

If you didn’t know it already, Last-Click Attribution is officially dead. It is all too easy to go wrong with bidding if you limit yourself to only looking at last-click data.

One of my retail clients was in a challenging spot with more and more competitors fighting for clicks at the same point in the search funnel – close to purchase. By simply experimenting with certain high search volume and potentially low converting searches and utilizing search funnel data I was quickly able to see ways we could introduce the clients eCommerce site before the competition in a very, very profitable manner as there was virtually no competition. My take for the lack of competition is because the client’s competitors are only looking at last-click conversion data and thus don’t know better.

I could probably do much better if I Google allowed importing a larger multi-channel view, which we thankfully already have in Google Analytics, straight into AdWords. We could easily factor in more of the important metrics in bidding. And talking about Analytics…

4. Expanding GA Remarketing into Search

Remarketing is powerful. But when you’re able to segment your audience according to Google Analytics metrics and then remarket, that’s powerful times ten.

You can already now use either the basic remarketing script from AdWords through which you can target people according to the pages they have visited or update your Google Analytics code, populate remarketing lists within GA and use the vast selection of metrics only available in GA for segmenting your heart out. That’s like remarketing 1.0 vs 2.0.

Now Google already has expanded their basic remarketing script (1.0) so that it can be used for retarget prior visitors not only via display ads but search ads also. Powerful stuff. Now imagine how interesting this form of search retargeting becomes if Google does the same for GA remarketing (2.0).

With that we would be able to retarget prior visitors according to Device Category (no more lumping tablets with PCs! This already works fine with display remarketing, by the way), Browser, Operating System, Visit Duration, Days Since Last Visit, Exit Page, Source, well, you get it.

5. Labels and Automated Rules in AdWords Editor

AdWords Editor is great for bulk changes, or nearly great. That’s because it still doesn’t support the use of labels or automated rules, which is a very needed basic functionality.

For example, being able to label a large set of promotion ads (especially banners) to be run for a specific time period and setting a rule that activates and pauses them – that’s something marketers want and need. Not having those available in a bulk editing tool just seems silly.

6. Historical Quality Score

Quality Score isn’t a KPI, but it’s still a decent proxy indicator of how well you are doing with your CTRs, quality of ads and landing pages relative to your competition, and so on.

It would be much more useful, though, if Google allowed us to see how your Quality Scores has developed with time – of course preferably not only your keyword QS, but that of your account, campaigns, ad groups, ads and sitelinks too. To gauge your progress now, you would have to store keyword reports or use AdWords scripts, which is unnecessarily cumbersome.

7. Secondary/Backup URLs

If you work with retail clients that are not utilizing a feed solution (or AdWords scripts) you probably have had this problem: ad URLs turns bad for whatever reason, perhaps the product is not sold anymore, or is out of stock and you’re wasting money taking visitors to that page.

It would be great if by default Google allowed us to set up secondary or backup URLs for ads that would activate under predetermined conditions, like whenever a landing page turns into a 404 or has certain content on it. Less waste, happier advertisers.

8. Paid and Organic Conversions

One noteworthy update Google recently introduced, is the Paid & organic report where you can compare how you rank organically with the searches you are targeting with AdWords. While it’s nice to still get some organic keyword data, Google has chosen not to share a somewhat key factor in it all – conversions from the two channels, which would make the data much more useful. I hope Google goes all the way with that soon.

Oh, I could go on and on – I was going for just a top 5 list originally. Overall, the more Analytics we get directly into AdWords, the better. But even with some of these updates I’d be very happy to make Google’s next earnings report even prettier.

I’m expecting a great year, how about you? What is on your wishlist for 2014? Tell me below in the comments.

—

Portent wishes to thank Toni (we’ll always have salt licorice!) for visiting and encourages every agency to exchange geeks worldwide.

The post An AdWords Wishlist for 2014 appeared first on Portent.

Transcript:

Ariana: Hello, and welcome, everyone, to the next installment of the Portent Webinar Series. My name is Ariana and I will be your moderator for today’s webinar, which is Waste-Per-Click – 10 Ways You’re Losing Money on PPC, with our very own Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Search Marketing at Portent, Speaker PC – [laughter] PC – PPC Wiz, and Co-Author of Web Marketing: All-In-One for Dummies. Uh, um, we would love it if you would join us all in this awesome webinar. There are a couple ways you can do that.

You can ask questions within the Go-To-Webinar Questions window, or Tweet your questions using the #portentu. So that’s #P-O-R-T-E-N-T and the letter U. And just so you know, in case you miss out on any of today’s webinar, or you want to review it later, don’t worry; you will receive a follow-up e-mail, which will contain a link to this recorded webinar, a Slideshare link to the presentation slides, and a bit.ly bundle for any resources that Elizabeth will be using in her webinar.

So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Elizabeth. Hey, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Hello. Thank you for having me today and thank you everyone for joining us. And as we said, today’s – today’s focus is on waste-per-click, or the 10 ways that you’re losing money on paid search. It will focus on the Google AdWords platform, but I also snuck in some things about Bing Ads as well. I do anticipate that this will be on the shorter end of our Portent U webinars, just because, you know, it doesn’t take that long to talk about 10 things. But also, what I would like is at the end of the presentation, if you have time before noon before lunch, I would like you to go back into your AdWords and Bing accounts and double-check on a lot of the things that I’m going to talk about today and make sure that you’re not in violation of any of these, um, points that I’m going to bring up today.

And so you’ll have some time to go in and change your account if – if you should need to. Uh, without further ado, let’s see. This is the Portent U hashtag once again, so those of you that missed the spelling of it or tried to put in Y-O-U, it’s just #portentu, and we’ll have those – Tweet those in and we’ll get those to us at the end of the presentation. And so first things first, what is this all about? Um, there’s a lot of wasted – there’s a lot of money in – being wasted in PPC, and it really personally drives me crazy. It seriously is a personal pet peeve.

And I would like to stop the madness. But first, who am I? Why should you even listen to me? I, as Ariana was saying, am the Senior Director of Search at Portent. That is me. I do write about paid search a lot; um, a lot, a lot. And I also like to talk about it obviously ‘cause I’m here today. I have about seven years’ experience in the paid search field now. I actually started as what I thought was a paper-clip manager because I didn’t even know what it was, so that does go to show you that if you, uh, if you really want to, you can pick this stuff up pretty quick.

I work here. This is the Smith Tower in beautiful downtown Seattle. This is not what the weather looks like today, but this is what – where Portent is approximately located, and I did try and put the, uh, little pointy there where – about where the 17th floor is. And I actually think that might be my office there on the corner. So I actually, over the seven – over the seven years, I’ve managed millions of dollars literally. I’ve seen millions of dollars. I’ve managed millions of dollars.

I’ve seen other accounts and I’ve owned accounts. And then the one theme that I see across the board is even if it’s a small one-person business and/or a large multinational, you know, Forbes 500 company, they make a lot of the same mistakes when it comes to PPC. And these are the kind of miss – what we call the kind of mistakes that no one likes to admit. These are the – the secret shame – or are what I refer to as the secret shame kind of PPC mistakes. These are the kinds that no one likes to talk about when they find them.

They just kind of quietly fix ‘em, and that’s why at the end of this presentation, I highly recommend that you go and, uh, take a look at your account settings and make sure that you’re not doing any of these, uh, shameful, shameful tactics. So without any further ado, here are the top 10 things in Google AdWords that I’ve seen repeatedly in PPC accounts that only do one thing, and that is they burn money. They really do. And I love this graphic, so I hope everyone else also does.

Google AdWords, number one – targeting the search and display networks together. So this was an oldie but a goodie, and unfortunately, one that I’ve seen repeatedly. In fact, I was at the SMA West Conference just this last March. We had somebody submit their account to be looked at. Uh, the account was actually in Spanish as it was being run in Mexico, but we didn’t actually need to be able to speak Spanish in order to see that these search and display networks were being targeted together. They were racking – the display network was racking up thousands and thousands of impression and clicks.

They had spent 90 percent of their budget, their monthly budget for this month-long comp-; uh, contest that they were running on the display network, and they couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t get it to perform. And the reason was because they were targeting the search and display networks together. The display network was taking all of the budget away from the search terms, and they just didn’t have the money go for search. So the difference between the two, search would be where you go to Google.com and you type in the query and you hit go and you see the text as there and someone clicks on ‘em, which is a much more targeted, uh, method in, on acquiring a visitor versus a display network – where the ads are being shown alongside or inside of content, and it’s a lot noisier space and you’re trying to pull somebody away from the content that they’re already viewing.

So even Google has admitted that this is a best practice to target the search and display networks separately. When you go into your settings account here at the campaign level, you need to say not search and display, like I have circled here in the red, what you want to have is search only or display only. And as I said here in the little box; if you only remember one thing out of all 10 of these for Google AdWords, this is the number one thing. And so yes, I did start out with the big one, so anyone who signed in late, I’m sorry.

Alright, number two, you want to start with a new campaign – uh, you do – if you start with a new campaign, do not do enhanced CPC bidding right away. Wait until you have some conversion – conversion data first. Then you try it. Enhanced CPC is a tool that Google AdWords allows at the campaign level automatically with a new – new campaign or an old one that tries to use your conversion tracking data to optimize your bids for conversions. You do pick a max enhanced CPC, but what I’ve seen over time and account over account is the system is not that smart.

It is actually too stupid to figure out what a good CPC is for your data because you don’t have any data yet. So make sure that you have some data first if you’re going to try enhanced CPC. Do not do it on a new campaign. It is one of the most wasteful things that I’ve ever seen. Number three, not setting any mobile bid modifiers. So with enhanced campaigns, for those of you that don’t – aren’t already aware, on July 22nd, Google AdWords – AdWords will be transitioning all campaigns to enhanced campaigns that have not already been manually transferred over. So if you don’t know what enhanced campaigns is, you better write this down and Google it because it is a really, really important thing.

Any campaign that is – or any account that’s been created ever and has not already been manually switched over, what’ll happen is computers and – or desktops and tablets will be combined into one. So here in this screenshot, you can see them separated out, but you cannot bid separately for them. They will be lumped together. Uh, mobile devices are automatically put at the same bid as computers and tablets within that campaign unless you set a mobile bid modifier. So in this case, we have a plus zero.

Google wants you to do adjustments in the – in the upwards directions. You might actually want to do it in the downwards direction. So if your site is very, very terrible looking on mobile, you’re going to want to bid down on mobile bid modifiers. So for example, I do have a client whose – whose site is very, very awful, um, when looked on a mobile device, and in order to counteract rising CPC costs and spend on mobile devices that doesn’t – don’t – don’t convert, we actually put negative 100 percent as the mobile bid modifier to keep it from showing as much as possible.

So if you have enhanced campaigns, make sure that you have a mobile bid modifier. If you haven’t moved over to enhanced campaigns yet, make sure that you start looking at that ‘cause July 22nd, they’re going to do it for you. And if they do it for you automatically, this is what it’s gonna say. It’s gonna say plus zero. It’s going to inherit what the rest of the campaign has, and you’re going to be saying, “Ouch,” at the end of July.

Number four, no negative keywords. This one is also an oldie, but people repeatedly don’t do it and it makes me very sad, and that is why there’s the very ugly-looking sad face there because it just – you have to have negative keywords at some level; either at the campaign level, at the ad group level. You can do it as a single word or you can do it in a list format. So for those that aren’t aware, if you have keywords that are – happen – apply to multiple campaigns, so let’s say, you know, the cheap, wholesale, inexpensive, clearance, discount kind of list, you can make a list out of that and apply that same list to multiple campaigns.

You don’t have to add those one by one by one to every single campaign or ad group that you would like to have them applied to. Use negative keyword lists, use negative keywords. You should go into your account, go under the keywords tab, click the button that says CL Search Terms and it’ll show you what is – what’s – what – what queries triggered your ads. You will find negative keywords in there if you don’t know where to find them.

Number five, [sighs] clicking on your own ads. This one makes me laugh so much but I cannot – cannot stress how many times I have had clients – I had one client who racked up $500.00 on himself because he just couldn’t stop clicking on his ads. He had to see where they would go. Just – just don’t do that. There is an ad preview tool within the AdWords interface that you can do to see what your ad will look like as it – as it shows, and then you can check the URL there. Do not click on your own ads. But honestly, Google has made it so you can’t really miss.

Okay, time out since we’re about halfway through the Google piece. I’m going to take a short break. We’re going to look at these kittens. Uh, thanks to Katie for putting this together. I’m sure it took at least an hour of – of well-spent time. We also have my puppy, Lumi. Everyone, welcome to summer. Anyway, as I was saying about PPC, number six, using broad match for all keywords. Now, [sighs] a lot of people when they first start PPC, they just put the words in. They don’t think about the different match types. Different match types really do make a difference, especially if you’re trying to do what I – we call head terms or single – eh, what could be considered like a single word term or something that’s very, uh, high-traffic, like innovation.

You should never, ever, ever bid on innovation by itself. This is terrible. Collaboration, these are some – this is a screenshot from something I actually found. These are terrible. You can see the amount of impressions I got racked up; I didn’t even want to reveal the cost on these kind of stuff, and the – obviously, the conversion rate was horrific because the – a single word collaboration in a broad match means that it pulled in anything and everything that was even remotely close to around collaboration. Now, Google will do some filtering as far as relevancy to – to the account and to the page, but you’ve basically given them a blank check in which to say, “Alright, for anything, you know, related to collaboration, go ahead and show my ads.”

And that is also why you see in the quality score column on the right a 1 out of 10, which is about the worst that you can do other than not showing at all. So do not use broad match for all your keywords. If you’re not sure when you start a – start a new keyword list or new ad group, start with the phrase match. Work your way down or up from there. Phrase is a good place to start.

Number seven, okay, this one is a little bit trickier and not a lot of people know about it. So this is people in my targeted location versus people searching for or about my targeted location. By default is people in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location. This is not good if you’re trying to do any kind of geo targeting whatsoever in – at the campaign level. So if you’re just targeting the United States for your campaign level, it’s okay. It’s not great. I recommend people in my targeted location, especially if you’re watching the pennies at all, usually Google’s pretty good at the country level as far as targeting.

But when it comes to just, say, the Los Angeles area, you want people in my targeted location because that – this setting can trigger then for someone in like Virginia who might be searching for Los Angeles car rentals, which you may or may not want to be advertising to them for, but it does mean that it can show up in Virginia and maybe perhaps you were trying to segment Virginia traffic separate from Los Angeles traffic ‘cause people searching in Los Angeles are looking more for like a zip car kind of thing, whereas – or a replacement car ‘cause they got in an accident, where someone in Virginia is looking more for a rental car because they’re visiting or, uh, becoming a tourist.

So you may have different goals in which that you’re trying to segment these audiences. This default can pull in people from other places around the country as far as that goes. So if you are tight on your money or you are really trying to really narrow down – let’s say you only deliver to people in the Hollywood area, you want people in my targeted location. You – especially if that’s the only area that you serve.

Number eight, ads set to optimize for clicks when you have conversion tracking. So this is the default, optimize for clicks, shows ads expected to provide more clicks. You have a couple ways – you can see you have about four different options here. If you actually want conversions over clicks, I would recommend optimize for conversions or the rotate evenly or indefinitely, depending on how – if you’re doing active ad testing. If you’re doing active ad testing, you want the rotate evenly. If you are not doing active ad testing, let’s say you have your – your – your set group of ads. You have three ads that you’ve continually, um, depend on, you want to go – and you have a conversion-based goal, go with optimize for conversions.

Clicks is just the one that, uh, ideal for most advertisers is actually pretty much a lie unless you’re just trying to get piles of traffic. If you want optimized – if you want conversions, pick optimize for conversions. You don’t have to set a separate bid or anything else. You’re just telling Google, “Go with the better ad as far as conversion rate.” Or if you’re doing a test, rotate indifferent – indefinitely.

Number nine, targeting the U.S. and Canada together. Uh, this is also a default that applies to new campaigns. So if you have an account but have some – some history to it and you start a new campaign and all the other campaigns are targeting the United States, Google usually picks that up and puts the default as United States. If it is a brand-new account or you’ve only got a couple campaigns and you go in and you start a new one, this is – this will show up. They will bundle the United States and Canada together unless – and if – this – this could be something that costs you a lot of money if you don’t ship to Canada, if you – for example, we have a client that does ship to Canada, but the shipping rates are incredible – uh, like basically triple what they are in – in the Continental U.S.

So Canada needs to be separated – separate and targeted separately. And this also goes for maybe you have a Canadian website so you want to make sure that you have the Canada traffic going to the Canada website and the U.S. traffic going to the U.S. traffic – U.S. site. And number 10 for Google, ignoring Google search partner network performance. This was one that a lot of people forget about, especially if they’re new to the PPC game and they just start digging around, this is not something they often dig around to. So the difference between a Google search and a search partner is that Google search is the Google.com; you go there, you type something in, you hit go.

That is all things that are – occur on Google.com. Search partners are – is a nebulous list that we kind of have partial glimpse into out there in the world. So AOL is one. Ask.com is one. These are all places that use the Google search results to display organic results but also ads, but it is technically not a Google property and it is not a Google.com result. So in this case, this is a real example of someone who, uh, is using Google search and Google search partners, and as you can see, the search partner network is really driving a lot of their impressions. And in the case of another, uh, campaign there, only 23 percent of their overall traffic is actually coming from Google search.

Now, you can see the CTR’s pretty low across the board, but at the same time, look at the cost differential between how much you spent on Google search versus search partners. The next level to be – that isn’t on this screenshot, the next level to look at, would be what is your conversion rate for each one of these, what is your CPA for each one of these. It may be in your best interest to actually disable the search partner network from – at the campaign level. So when you go into the campaign level and you go under the settings, there is a checkbox essentially where you can undo search partners and just target Google search.

So if you haven’t ever looked at this, you really should. And on some cases, we have clients that do quite well on the search partner network, and it is perfectly fine to leave them paired together and let them run and everything’s hunky-dory. But in some cases, if you were – especially if you’re tight on budget and especially if you can’t figure out, you know, maybe your CPAs start – your CPCs started, your CPA just dropped off the face of the earth, this is a good place to come look and see for troubleshooting if maybe all of a sudden AOL decided to like you a lot and show your ads repeatedly.

Okay, so pro tip; half of these tips are settings-based. You can go fix them right now. And – well, actually right now; you should wait until the end of this webinar and then go do it, maybe in the last 10 minutes or so. Um, but these are a lot of things that can go in your account at the campaign level settings, at the account level settings, the ad group level settings. Go take a look and see what it is that you can fix.

Now, we have our Bing bonus round, so technically, the webinar was called 10 Ways, but you know, that doesn’t take very long, so let’s go ahead and get some Bing Ad stuff in there too. I mean, they are – they do – they count. There’s traffic in there. So number one, separating search from content network performance. So, uh, Bing Ads has three, uh, areas in which you can target, and so I’m going to go – there’s a couple of ‘em in here. So the first one is search from content network. Now, once upon a time, the Google display network actually used to be called the content network.

They rebranded it and that’s how we know it today as the display network. Very good job, Google. Now, MSN also has the same kind of content network. So these are sites that are, um, belong to the – to the network they’ve applied. They show Bing Ads ads on their pages and they receive, you know, a piece of the – the piece of the click if – if somebody – somebody clicks. But you should treat it the same way you would a Google search versus a display network and separate them, uh, the search network from the content network.

By default, these are all enabled, so you want to uncheck the content network box. If you do want to target content network Bing Ads, do a new campaign. The content network on Bing Ads is far less traffic than AdWords. AdWords has a tendency to just drive up impressions like crazy. The content network on Bing is a lot less, um, robust in that way, so you won’t need to watch it as heavily. But it is something you’d definitely want to separate because you want to be able to tell the difference in performance between the two.

Number two, alright, separating search from search partner for network performance. So as I was saying, there are multiple aspects to the Bing Ads, uh, interface, so there’s search network or all search networks, as you can see here; Bing and Yahoo! search; Bing and Yahoo! syndicated search; and the content network. So we already went over the content network. The one here that I’m talking about is by default, that button there is checked; all search networks, which is Bing and Yahoo! search and syndicated search partners. Do not advertise on the search partner network with the same – in the same campaign as Bing and Yahoo!

So Bing and Yahoo! search owned and operated only is – are ads that show on bing.com and yahoo.com. And no, you can’t actually segment the traffic from between the two, so when an impression or a click shows, uh, from Bing and Yahoo!, you don’t know if it was Bing or you don’t know if it was Yahoo! They call it the unified marketplace and you will never know. It will always be a mystery.

But the syndicated search partner network is – is a little bit different. It is [sighs] they have sites, for example, I believe it’s [sighs] PC World belongs to this, uh, is a syndicated search partner. So when you search on PC World, you will see ads within the search results. That is a syndicated search partner. Some of those are more accurate than others. My experience personally has been pretty horrific as far as the – the targeting capabilities. It’s not been as accurate as we’d like to see it. There have been improvements in the recent past, but whatever you do, if you’re going to check – test the syndicated search partner network, separate it out; do a new campaign. Keep it the heck away from your Bing and Yahoo! search.

Number three, over-layering the demographic and time of day and day of the week bids. So hang on; let me break that down a little bit ‘cause I think somebody’s eyes just rolled in the back of their head. So on Bing Ads, you can segment or you can increase bids based on the day of the week and the time of the day and demographics. So you can do all of these things at once. But if you do ‘em all at once, you actually just told Bing Ads increase whatever my last max CPC is that I’ve set forty percent if you over-layer.

So be very cautious about how many of these you layer on at a time because you could literally throw yourself, you know, 100 percent or more of your original max bid. So in the case here, you know, on Wednesday, I did plus 10 percent. And – and the other thing is you can only go up in 10 percent increments, so you can’t just pick 5 or 17 percent or, you know, 3 percent here and there. It’s 10, 20, 30, 40. So you can see how that can stack up pretty high pretty fast.

So if you don’t have, um, if you don’t have the – the need to stack up all of these, then don’t do it. If you want to test it, that’s fine, but just watch out that you’re going to be layering that up a good 40, 50, 100 percent in some cases. Uh, if you’ve got time – and you can also at the same time, if you see these checkboxes here, you can uncheck, uh, certain times of the day and days of the week as well if you needed to help balance out, um, the layering of the demographics and time of the day. Number four, okay. So this is also one that a lot of folks don’t know.

You actually trump, if you have ad group settings, campaign settings. So if at the campaign level you had, you know, location and, you know, your time of day and day of the week and all that kind of stuff set up, and then you went into your ad group and you’re like, “You know, I think I want to have my ad group show at certain times of day that’s different,” that’s great ‘cause it’ll – it’ll trump the campaign settings.

But let’s say you did that and then you forgot and then you wanted – in that one single ad group, you had changed, you know, the day of the week – the ads not to show, you know, Monday through Friday and you forgot, you’re like, “Man, I want to turn that back on for all of the ad groups.” And you go into the campaign setting and you change it there and you think, “Oh, yeah, it’s good,” it’s not good. You need to go in the ad group and either have it so that it defaults to the campaign settings or matches up with what you want to do.

Just – so just know that whatever you set at the ad group can trump what is at the campaign level. And last but not least, number five on Bing Ads, new ad groups may default to all locations worldwide. So this doesn’t always happen, um, with, uh, continued accounts. You do – if you do a new ad group, it may default to just whatever your other ad groups are targeted to, so like in United States. But if it’s brand-new, this sometimes comes up where you have all locations worldwide. So make sure, and if you create a brand-new ad group, that it doesn’t say all locations worldwide, but it has the United States or the – or that you have this little thing underneath here that says, “This uses your campaign setting.”

I actually don’t trust this too well. If – if I were you, I would just go ahead at the ad group level and put the United States just because you never know, although the ad group, as we were saying, even though it says this uses your campaign setting, with that ad group trumping the campaign setting, I would just go ahead and put it to United States. Okay, so questions. I want to remind everyone as we said, it was going to be on the shorter – shorter end of things. I only had 10 things to say about AdWords 5 things to say about Bing, but I wanted to leave lots of time for questions, and I also want everyone to go back to their accounts and check their settings.

So if you have questions, let’s get ‘em in to #portentu, or type ‘em in the, uh, WebEx question box here. And just for everybody to know, these are the links if you want to go check it out. I actually didn’t have any resource links within this webinar in particular, but this is my – what I call my modest bragging bundle, which has all of the information in there for all my other slide show – share, uh, presentations, the Dummies book, all those other eBooks I was bragging about at the beginning, the Portent blog; there’s a lot of good things in there, uh, so why don’t we go ahead and go with questions.

Ariana: Thank you, Elizabeth. [Clears throat] Those were – excuse me – [clears throat]…

Elizabeth: Technical difficulties.

Ariana: Sorry about that. Those were some great twit – tips. I’m sure that some pocketbooks are going to feel a little bit better after implementing those tips there. Um, so don’t forget, the resources at the bundle and, uh, we’re open for questions. Um, put it in the webinar question box or Tweet us, um, with the hash-tag portentu. Uh, I have a couple questions already in.

Um, Chris asks, uh, “I’m wanting to use PPC to drive people to turn on the radio, not click. I could design creative to drive that message. Here’s my question. Would you buy that CPC or CPM? Uh, CPC seems to – seems like I’d get more impressions since I don’t want, um, want it to be a click.”

Elizabeth: Great question, Chris. CPM, don’t ever do it unless it’s like a media buy or some kind of run of site thing and you’ve really got no other chance. If you’ve got the chance to choose between the two, always pick CPC ‘cause anything after that is a free impression.

Ariana: Great. Uh, question from Chad here. “Do you need conversion tracking and so on to optimize for conversions?”

Elizabeth: Yes, you do. So the AdWords conversion tracking actually is pretty easy, uh, comparatively to a lot of the other conversion tracking codes you might have to do. You literally just go under tools and analysis. Conversion tracking is there. You set up what it is. I recommend one, maybe two at most, because it does aggregate the conversions. So if you have like a sale but you also want to track downloads, pick which one you want or – or be very cognizant when you go in and you start looking at your number of conversions because obviously, a download is going to be worth less than a sale, uh, and you might actually – accidentally, uh, inflate your conversions.

So if you get that little bit of conversion code, write that in; you know, set up a new conversion in AdWords. You’re going to get a little snippet of code. You grab that and you put it on your conversion page, which is probably like a thank you or receipt page, and then every time that fires, it goes and hits back into AdWords and lets it know that one conversion has been recorded.

Ariana: Awesome. Uh, Dror asks, “Will – will you post the – the webinar?” And yeah, we’ll – there – at the bundle here and, um, the e-mail follow-up, you will get a copy of the link to the slide share and the recorded webinar. Um, Nildari – sorry if I say that incorrectly – um, “How much conversion data do I need to collect before activating enhanced CPC?”

Elizabeth: Excellent question, and unfortunately, it is really on a case-by-case basis. Um, enhanced CPC is something I approach with – with caution, uh, as far as the amount of conversion data required. What I’ve found repeated is you at least need to have more consistency than, uh, an actual number. So if you were consistently having conversions like a daily – on a daily basis, like two to three, and you get like a couple of weeks in, that should be enough information for data – for – enough data for Google to start making smarter decisions. But if you’re really sporadic, so let’s say on Sunday, you have five conversions and then Monday and Tuesday you had zero and then Wednesday you had one and then Thursday was like three, that’ll take longer.

I recommend if you’re going to be really – if it – if they’re coming in really sporadic like that, I would say at least a month before you start approaching that. I would do it on one campaign and I would watch that campaign first before just applying across the board.

Ariana: Uh, question from Ryan. “I’m on a small budget and my average cost per click is high, resulting in less clicks and less leads than I’d like to see in my investment. [Clears throat] What’s the best way to go about mark – making improvements?”

Elizabeth: Ooh, my favorite, so the – the small business question. So first and foremost, I start looking at times of day and day of the week. When do I not need to be spending? So take a look at your conversion data. Is anybody even looking at Sunday at 3:00 in the morning? Uh, when are you high? When are you low? That’s one thing you can start doing right there is kind of cutting off when.

The next thing you can start looking at is if you don’t want to cut it off is adjusting the bid, like by percentages during the – those parts of the day. So maybe you cut it back by about 50 percent. You can show up, but you don’t need to necessarily fight for the first position. That’s a couple – one thing I would do. I’d also take a look at maybe even shutting off entire days, like if I don’t even convert on Sundays, maybe just turn it off. Uh, let’s see. What else?

Um, take a look at your keyword list. See what it is that you can cut as far as what’s been a high cost and what’s been, um, not converting as well as the other things. Where can you spend more money? Another thing you might take a look at is do you have a single campaign – did you stick everything in a single campaign and you’re making every ad group in there fight for the budget that’s left? Move things out that are doing well for you so that it has enough room to breathe and potentially get more conversions for you in order to make – maybe make enough money to do – try other things.

Ariana: Um Mari– [clears throat] excuse me. Hang on. Uh, Marianne asks, “Any advice for us listeners managing a Google foundation grant campaign?”

Elizabeth: Ooh, unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of clients that come across the board with Google foundation grants other than, uh, it’s a really cool program and they have a pile of money, uh, in which to go for. So I mean, if you have come across Google grant money, use it all. Get all the data that you can because eventually, you may get cut off, in which case at least you have the data to make better decisions with going forward.

Ariana: Um, so you were talking earlier about people clicking on their own ads. So this kind of was in that same – I’m sure the people that do that also do a search for their Google. So Chad asks, um, Chad asked, “Why do I not see my ad when I Google a particular keyword?”

Elizabeth: I hate this question. Um, because it’s always the one that – ‘cause it’s always at that certain – somebody always does it right at the most inopportune time. So there’s a – there’s a myriad of reasons on why you might not see. So one might be geographic restrictions. You may not be in the area in which you were targeting. I’ve had that happen before. An East Coast client – or actually it was a West Coast client who was visiting his mom on the East Coast and asked me why he couldn’t see his ads. And I said, “Where are you?”

And he said, “New York.” And I said, “Where are your ads targeted to?” And the answer was Washington. So that would be one. Uh, another one might be time of day. You might’ve run out of budget, and so if they ask you at like 4:00 in the afternoon, they might’ve run out of money at like 1:00. Another thing just could be site and search – search behavior. So Google does kind of track your search behavior. If you’re more, um – so for example, if you go to your site a bunch of times and then you Google yourself, do – you actually have a higher chance of showing up, uh, because Google is tracking the kind of behavior that you are doing and you’re – it’s going to show you ads for sites that you’ve already been to because they know that you were – you have a propensity to go there.

Um, any other things might be sometimes it just doesn’t show every single time. You just have to have a little patience. I really – like I said, recommend if you’re going to Google yourself, do it first thing in the morning and don’t click on it.

Ariana: Uh, Mike asks, “What’s the best way of determining how much to spend each month?”

Elizabeth: Okay, so that is actually less of a paid search question and more of a marketing and business question. So I kind of liken paid search budgets to a craps game. You set amount of money – set – set aside a certain amount of money and that is the money that you spend on PPC. And if it doesn’t work, you don’t spend more. So you don’t go to the ATM and get more and spend on a cold table. You – you take a step back and you need to reevaluate. When it comes to picking the initial budget in the first place, you can do a lot of keyword research through just the AdWords tool with the traffic estimator or the keyword planner and get a look at what the CPCs might be.

Take those CPCs, kind of multiply that by the amount of clicks that you think could – you know, across the – that are projected for the month, and then you kind of have a general budget of at least how much Google thinks you could spend on those words. Take that and then the next thing I say is if that number makes your – your stomach drop into your knees, that’s not the right number. You need to have something – or you need to select a budget that won’t make you paranoid and make – won’t make you log in every five minutes to make sure you didn’t spend more than a certain amount.

Always set daily budgets in a way that make it so that you can sleep at night.

Ariana: Uh, Maryanne asks again – uh, “Any advice for customers that want to launch PPC campaigns targeted to foreign countries?”

Elizabeth: Ooh, okay. So you can do a couple different things. So if it’s a massive amount, then you might want to consider separate accounts. But in this case, I would say it’s probably on the smaller end. So you want to definitely set that up by campaign. So one country per campaign ideally. Uh, if you’re going to lump foreign countries together, at least keep ‘em together on the same language. So don’t put, you know, all the – don’t put Turkey in with China. That’s just a bad idea.

Uh, also the time zones kind of thing. So European Union, you can technically align a lot of those, like – so like Ireland and England you could probably put together in the same campaign. But depending on what your goals are, you’re going to want to be very conscientious about how you organize those because for one, you’re spending in U.S. dollars in a foreign country. Um, and then at the same time, you want to be able to see what the performance is across a per-country basis. So definitely different campaigns for each country.

Ariana: Uh, Chris asks, “Do I need both AdRoll and Google to cover my bases, Facebook, et cetera in retargeting/remarketing? Also, do I need to include something about remarketing in my site’s privacy policy?”

Elizabeth: Indeed. So Google remarketing, you can do for just, you know, the Google display network essentially. AdRoll will get you on the FBX or the Facebook Ad Exchange, and that is a great place to be. They do have a self-service, um, package. You can sign up for it and you can kind of go through that. You do have to put some remarketing code on in order to participate it, and you do have to put something in your site’s privacy policy. In fact, AdRoll won’t run your ads unless you can pass this, uh, this little test that they have about it.

So they will – I believe it is they click through, they take a look at it, and it’s pretty specific language that they’ll give you to put on your site. It does need to be on there. It does need to be obvious. Um, and if they kick it back, you can – the best way to get a hold of ‘em is actually using the, uh, the chat feature through AdRoll or through, uh, e-mail support.

Ariana: Excellent. Uh, another question from Mike, um, “In – are there any content networks or search engines outside of Google and Bing that are affiliated markets – uh, networks that are worth looking into?”

Elizabeth: Um, yeah, you could do – I guess, well, affiliated networks, eh, a lot of ‘em are garbage. Um, I really recommend checking out PPC Hero’s list on, uh, second and third-tier engines, so like their 7Search and ABC and, uh, Business.com, those kind of places. It really depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to sell e-commerce retail kind of stuff, a lot of those don’t work very well. Or they’re just too low a traffic in order to pay off in the amount of time that you put into them. Um, but they’re definitely there if you want to look, uh, as if you’re looking for more. Like Ad Marketplace is a good one if you just want to – like for a traffic standpoint.

Uh, and a lot of times, they’ll help you kind of optimize to what it is that you’re trying to achieve. And I’m trying to think; there was one other one recently. They’re literally popping up left and right. I would actually just take, like I was saying, take a look at PPC Hero’s, uh, second and third-tier search engine guide, and you’ll have a pretty good idea as far as to – you know, what you might want to do and what you might want to choose. And actually, one other thing; I didn’t finish Chris’ question I realize, and he asked if he needed both AdRoll and Google.

It depends entirely on how big your budget is and how much you want to – how much you want to cover. Facebook covers different – a completely different audience than the Google remarketing will. So it depends, like I was saying, it depends how big you want to go. But yes, it will cover different bases. Um, Google’s the cheaper on, and it’s the easier one to start with. Uh, AdRoll is very – the self-service platform is easy to use though.

Ariana: Okay. [Clears throat] Another question here. When does it make sense to look into placement on LinkedIn and Business.com?

Elizabeth: Ooh. Business.com I only really recommend if you’re like a B2B. Uh, I haven’t seen great returns on it, but it is there. And I’m talking about B2B like lead generation more than trying to sell something directly. LinkedIn, I’ve seen mixed results, depending on what it is that you’re trying to do and what it is that you’re offering. If you’re going to do LinkedIn, I recommend something like a download or a webinar or a free this or that ‘cause you’re trying to get them in at the beginning of a – kind of like a sales funnel.

Don’t look to LinkedIn to sell directly. Don’t look to LinkedIn to just fill a lead funnel. You’re actually just trying to get them to complete some sort of small action. I see a lot of success with, um, like recruiting companies trying to get people in that are trying to, you know, sign up for a headhunter. I don’t see a lot of success with getting, uh, services sold and, um, uh, not services – or services and products. But if you’ve got like a job that you want to advertise or a webinar, a download, free trials are good things. But otherwise, LinkedIn is quite expensive on a per-click basis.

Uh, so you want to take that into consideration on how – on how much it’s worth to you to get someone in the start of your sales funnel.

Ariana: Uh, Dave asks, “How would you approach growth for an established account that has hit a plateau?”

Elizabeth: Excellent. Okay. So one of the first things we like to do when we have something that kind of hits a – hits a plateau like that is take a look at the keyword lists and take a look at what you’re bidding on already. So you’re probably going after a lot of the obvious stuff, but some of the things you could also be going after might be behavioral, um, or how someone might use something. Uh, when’s the last time you Googled yourself as far as those keywords go, what else – and I’m talking about just like Google search suggests, like type it in slowly and see what else is kind of coming up.

Um, take a look also at the – what products haven’t you tried or maybe you’ve already tried a while ago and you maybe you didn’t do it quite right, go back and take a look. Uh, if you haven’t – if you think you’ve hit the – hit the wall on AdWords, you actually might try Bing. Um, Bing is a good place to be these days. Uh, Bing also – if you’re – it’s an e-tail or retail e-commerce; you might take a look at product feeds, if you haven’t already taken a look at product listing ads or any of the comparison shopping engines. Bing Shopping is actually free if you can establish – uh, get a feed in there.

Um, let me see what else. As far as a plateau, have a third-party person look at it. Have somebody who does paid search that hasn’t looked at – hasn’t seen it before take a look. They’ll come away with at least three things right off the bat.

Ariana: Um, Brad asks, “Are you seeing that advertising on Yelp works or not for local businesses?”

Elizabeth: I actually – sorry, Brad – I haven’t actually played with Yelp much for advertising, uh, for local businesses. I personally, as I use Yelp, can’t imagine that it’s doing that hot, uh, overall ‘cause mostly all I see is tanning. So either someone is trying to drop me a hint because I live in Seattle or it’s – requires a budget that may or may not be, um, amenable to you for local businesses. I do know that Google – Google Local or Google Maps has, um, recently come out with their – they’re finding at least study wise that the advertisements are doing better than the markers on the map, so that might be something to take a look into.

I’d be really curious to see more about Yelp actually.

Ariana: Evan asked, “What was the handle for questions again?” It’s portentu – #P-O-R-T-U – [laughter] I can’t spell today. #P-O-R-T-E-N-T and the letter U. Uh, Marianne asks, “Any thoughts on advertising on Angie’s List?”

Elizabeth: Marianne, I’ve heard that Angie’s List is the devil, so [laughter] you probably shouldn’t advertise there. Now, um, I don’t personally have any thoughts on advertising on Angie’s List. I will say it is very compelling. The amount of advert – the amount – just the pure amount of, uh, vendors on there and the amount of traffic that they pull, they do have a huge brand. They have advertising all over the place. They would have the volume. I wouldn’t completely dismiss it, but I have heard some horror stories about it.

Ariana: Uh, Dave, follow-up question is, uh, “Is it worth it to submit to – is it worth it in submitting keywords to second-tier engines to prompt growth?”

Elizabeth: Yes, actually. If you wisely select your second-tier engines, uh, instead of just kind of spitting ‘em out all over the place, it is worth it for – to – to try and push growth. You won’t see a ton of growth. I mean let’s face it; most of it’s on Google, then it’s on Bing and Yahoo! and then it kind of steeply drops off from there. But it is completely worth it, as most of those tend to be much cheaper. The cost per click, let’s say, on Google, if it’s $2.00; on those second-tier engines, you’re looking more at like $0.50.

Ariana: I have a question, Elizabeth. Um, how often do you, uh, rewrite campaign ads?

Elizabeth: Pretty often actually. So if we’re running a test, and it depends entirely on the amount of traffic that’s coming in; so if it’s a very slow-generating ad group because you’ve got a lot of long-tail keywords in there, it takes this a while to kind of get the – get statistical significance in which to change it. Then there is also the gut feeling. So honestly, when you look at a group of ads and, let’s say on a weekly basis, and you look at it and maybe the – the – the competition’s a little bit close, you can use a couple of things. You can use what’s called PPI, or profit per impression, and that’s something that Michael Wiegand has written about on our blog as far as how to calculate that.

So if you – it looks pretty close as far as CTR and CPA and CPC and all that kind of stuff, you can try to use the impression metric to try and break the tie. Uh, but I do tend to rewrite ads on anywhere between a one to two-week basis, uh, because I don’t rewrite them for every ad group every time. So I do rotate which ones. So in aggregate, it’s probably about more on a monthly basis that an ad group will see – that will have enough data to warrant an ad change.

Ariana: Cool. Uh, Dror, thanks for letting us know that the link, um, to the SlideShare, we’ll get that fixed, um shortly after this webinar. Um, for anybody who tried clicking on it, it says private, so we’ll get that published.

Elizabeth: I blame SlideShare ‘cause I set it [laughter] to go public at 11:00 AM. [Laughter]

Ariana: So something up with their – with their scheduling issue.

Elizabeth: We’ll fix it.

Ariana: Yeah, we’ll fix it. Um, Evan asks, “What’s your opinion on Google PPC keyword suggestions?”

Elizabeth: So Google is – and I also agree with Dave; he blames Ian for the SlideShare. I also blame Ian [laughter] for everything. Um, what is your opinion on the Google PPC keyword suggestions? So the nice thing about Google’s keyword tool or the keyword suggestion tool is that are – they are typically terms that have – they have seen in the recent past. So um, usually at the first pass through, you’ll find a few good things, maybe you know, about 25 percent’ll be useable the first time through you ever use it. Uh, what happens afterwards though, as you – you know, you get like a year down the road, it keeps suggesting the same things to you that you didn’t want the first time.

Now, you can classify certain ones as completely irrelevant and Google does try to recalibrate what it’s showing you as far as suggestions. But honestly, the older the account gets, the harder it gets to use that tool and the more the suggestions actually just become, eh, whatever. So that’s when I would turn to the like the Google search suggest and something like UberSuggest is the tool, or trying to look at other, uh, keyword places like, uh, like behaviors like I was saying earlier about behaviors or alternate, um, uses or, uh, even competitors.

Ariana: Are there any other questions out there in the webinar world? I’ll give it just a couple more minutes and we’ll wait for anybody who’s thinking on a question to put it in. Um, don’t forget you will get a reminder e-mail or a follow-up e-mail that has a link, uh, to the Slide Share and the recorded webinar so you can have all the great audio as long as – as well as the Slide Share. Um, and uh, we, um, have a webinar coming up in July as well. Uh, every month we try to do webinar the last Thursday of the month. And July’s webinar is on the 25th, uh, hosted by Katie Fetting, our Marketing Director.

Um, and I believe the title, uh, I forgot to put it down in here, but it’s Seven and a Half Ideas for Becoming a Brainstorming Genius I believe. Um, so I’m excited to see that. Um, let’s see. Uh, Evan, you say you can only link 10 analytics. Uh, didn’t get the rest of your question there. Does that make sense to you?

Elizabeth: No, sorry, Evan. You can only link 10 – he might be a wrong window thing. Um, [laughter] Katie’s website – uh, just Katie’s webinar should also be updated on the Portent site. And I do remember it has something to do with brainstorming and something to do with being a genius, [laughter] so it’s not to be missed.

Ariana: Um, okay. Uh, if you have any more questions for Elizabeth, you can directly Tweet them to her at e – I always read it, “Eb eBay”; uh, E-B-Kendo, uh, E-B-K-E-N-D-O. Uh, make sure to use the hash-tag #portentu. Um, and uh, as Elizabeth said, it’s on our website for the next webinar July 25th. It’s also on our Facebook, um, marketing tab. So if you have any further questions or want to sign up for the next webinar, check it out. Um, well that – okay. Um, thank you, everyone, and have a fantastic day.

The post Waste-Per-Click: 10 Ways You’re Losing Money in PPC [VIDEO WEBINAR] appeared first on Portent.

When I was 8 years old I wanted to be a paleontologist. So…very…badly. I even had a jean jacket with dinosaurs painted on it with jewels and sequins. (Hey, it was the ’80s.) Then I discovered the amount of biology and sciences (mostly the dissecting and looking at the insides of living animals) that turned me off of it eventually. Never once did I think I was going to be a search marketer…especially since the Internet didn’t so much as exist then.

And that seems to be the case with most PPC-ers today. There was just no way we were going to be able to predict that we’d be doing what we’re doing today. But, what if you were in college or going to be now? How could you go about starting out on the path to search marketing, especially when “Internet marketing” isn’t quite a mainstream major? (Heck, it’s barely a class at most colleges yet!)

So I took to the Twitter stream and asked the #PPCchat community a few questions about what courses they took in school and what advice they’d have for anyone looking into PPC today. Check out the result—I think you’ll find that they make a lot of sense and contain some pretty solid advice. It’s a small (but powerful!) sample. When I go looking for advice, these are the folks I ask.

About you questions:

1.  If you went to college, what did you graduate with? (If not, say n/a)

Most of the respondents did attend college, only 2 did not and 2 had Masters Degrees in addition to their Bachelors. The degrees conferred upon our survey respondents ranged WILDLY from Spanish, Nutritional Science and English Literature to the more closely-related (to PPC) group of Business Admin, Communications, and Neuroscience.

Interestingly, the three respondents who had graduated from college in the last 3 years were all Business Admin majors.

Full list: Urban Studies, Business Admin, English Lit, Media Studies, Spanish, Nutritional Science, Neuroscience, Communications, Mass Media, Graphic Design, Telecommunications.

Takeaway: A degree isn’t required, but it definitely lays a lot of groundwork for well-rounded skills in writing, organization/deadlines, related coursework and possibly a football team to be ashamed/proud of on occasion. The consensus was that if you’re NOT going to get a degree, you’re going to need a PPC or marketing internship of some kind for highly relevant work experience. High school or an online certification alone (like the AdWords exam) isn’t enough to get your foot in the door.

2.  If you could go back – would you have chosen something different?

Only 3 of the respondents would have chosen the exact same major/minor that they had originally. All others would have picked either something completely different or kept their original major and added a minor.

(That whole hindsight is 20/20 thing.)

3.  If you enrolled today, what would you major in?

Of the respondents that would have changed something or picked something else in the first place, they all answered one of the below:

• Marketing
• Business
• Computer Science
• Statistics
• Psychology

So, listen up kids—those are the 5 fields you want to take a good hard look at.

About the industry

1.  What classes would you recommend today?

18 specific classes were recommended as coursework that would benefit a future PPCer on the path to a Bachelors (listed in order of importance with the group):

• Excel (Shocker! And the highest vote getter)
• Statistics
• Javascript/Basic Coding/HTML
• Photoshop/Graphic Design
• Psychology
• Speech
• Writing
• Data Visualization
• Persuasion Theory
• Critical Thinking
• Finance
• Advertising/Marketing
• Math
• Consumer Behavior
• Business Ethics
• Finance

The respondents were not given any direction on this question, like examples, nor were they told what any other respondent had already given, so this is a bit more of a “free form” suggestion list. But you have to admit, looking at the current PPC landscape, this is how you would build yourself a “PPC degree” within one of the 5 majors from Question 3 in the About You section.

2.  Should PPC be a “major” or should it be “Internet marketing” or something else?

The answers given were really great, well-thought-out and varied. I think what this really brings to light is that even amongst ourselves, we’re not sure what the future of PPC in colleges is going to look like. It is, however, across the board agreed upon as something that should be added to marketing or advertising majors in general – as a class, a major, a minor – anything.

Here are some highlights of the responses I received, without identifying info:

I would say PPC would be more suited towards internships/mentorships/apprenticeships. It takes a special combination of ambition, analysis, and creativity to make it in the PPC world.

Internet marketing. While majoring in marketing, not one of my classes ever used the words SEO or PPC once… most marketing programs are outdated and focus on a more traditional approach to marketing.

Definitely should be a sub-set of a marketing/digital marketing program. There’s no need to take a class solely on paid search advertising every semester/quarter.

I think Internet marketing degrees programs will begin to pop up around the country. I took an e-marketing class in school where we focused on AdWords and blogging. To me strictly a PPC major seems too small as far as classes required to take for a major degree.

Not sure PPC should be a major. But a marketing major with an emphasis in Internet marketing would be pretty awesome.

It could easily be a major, and I think it should be.

PPC as a major might be too deep in the weeds. A major encompassing Internet marketing as a whole would be helpful. PPC, SEO, social, email, etc. They all play together – might as well be proficient in them all.

I’m not sure that PPC alone should be a major – it’s a set of skills specific to a handful of vendors. It could certainly be a class or emphasis within a digital marketing major, but any PPC major would be immediately out of date.

PPC should be its own major. The field is so expansive and has enough material and knowledge for students to learn.

Honestly, I’d be willing to hire someone who had an analytical mind, a savvy understanding of the digital world, and good communication skills and teach PPC mostly on the job.

It should definitely be part of Internet marketing, but I don’t think that Internet marketing should ever be a class. I think it should be an internship position that the school secures with specific, well-off companies that are known for doing really great things.

I think it should be a course, or series of courses. College isn’t about silo-ing yourself into one thing, but about experiencing a few things and figuring out what you want to do. PPC is a great field to get experience in as a student (see – Google Online Marketing Challenge), but if you come out of college as a one-trick pony you’re deciding your career before you start.

3.  AdWords Exam – good class material/exam or no?

The Google AdWords certification exam is a two-part online test taken by pretty much every professional PPC person. It’s the de facto way of saying you can prove you know what you’re doing – at least somewhat. (And you get a badge to prove it!) It’s actually meant to be somewhat difficult and not just any slouch can sign up, take it, and pass in the allotted hour time. You need to know the answers.

Opinions varied a lot on this one, splitting pretty evenly on whether or not the exam is classroom material. The opinions against it were pretty strong; citing issues such as timeliness, practical application and not giving Google $50 more dollars.

4.  AdWords Challenge – good class material or no?

This one was very straightforward—all you marketing professors out there, if you’re not already doing this, start looking into it. I can tell you as someone who hires PPC professionals and interns, when I see this on a resume (especially if they were on a team that placed or got ranked) they move to my “maybe” pile pretty immediately for consideration for the first round of interviews. (Provided they bothered to change the “to” company to the correct one and didn’t address me as “Dear Sir.”)

Sage one-liners for the next generation

As if all of these questions weren’t enough, I asked one more “open” question that turned into my favorite part of this whole exercise.

One-liners of sage advice for the next generation:

Regardless of school, get as much on the job experience as soon as possible. – @obiwankikobi

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. Expect rough waters and tackle them as learning experiences. – @ghong_ssm

Learn an actual marketable skill while in school (javascript or something like that) – @aTimJohnson

PPC will constantly change – know the fundamentals, common strategies, and basic theories. The rest will change so often that you’ll need to be able to adapt on the fly. – @ryanmoothart

Learn how to understand data sets and create actionable items from that data. – @Kearns89

Practical application. Practice what you learn with something you like. You’ll remember it better. – @ebkendo

PPC: the perfect industry for paper clip enthusiasts – @iNeils

There is always more to learn. – @LukeAlley

Figure out how to make a living doing something you love doing. Acid test for this: when you’re engaged in that activity, you lose track of time. – @Szetela

If you think you want to do online marketing or PPC specifically, get yourself an internship or part-time gig. You have no idea what it’s like until you do it. – @RickGalan

Show that you are passionate about PPC. Always be reading the latest blogs, asking for more to do, and challenging conventional wisdom. If you have the passion for your job, the results and personal growth will follow. – @Matt_Umbro

Never stop learning – @John_A_Lee

Don’t learn in a bubble! Follow PPC pros online, read blogs, & participate in #ppcchat. – @timothyjjensen

Never turn down an opportunity offered to you because you think you aren’t qualified; someone thinks you’re qualified or else they wouldn’t be offering it to you. Take it. Never close the door. – @jazaye

If you can demonstrate an aptitude for learning, along with critical thinking and communication skills, you can learn PPC. And you’ll set yourself up for success in every field. – @Mel66

Take courses that interest you from the best professors, not the easiest graders. – @bigalittlea

That’s it! I’d like to thank the following PPC peeps for playing along and offering up their advice and experiences to share:

• Aaron Levy SEER Interactive
• Chad Kearns Portent, Inc.
• David Szetela FMB Media
• Jasmine Aye Distilled
• John Lee Clix Marketing
• Kiko Correa Portent, Inc.
• Luke Alley Avalaunch Media
• Matt Umbro Exclusive Concepts
• Melissa Mackey gyro
• Neil Sorenson ZAGG
• Rick Galan 1-800-Contacts
• Ryan Moothart Portent, Inc.
• SungGil Hong Spectrum Search
• Tim Jensen Overit
• Tim Johnson Portent, Inc.

The post So You Want to Do PPC When You Grow Up 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 Ads

Post #5: Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Ad Extensions

After building your account structure, populating ad groups with keywords, and crafting enticing ads to drive clicks to your site, you may think your work is done and it’s time to give your campaigns the green light.

Not so fast.

The ability to enable tracking features for key performance indicators such as transactions completed or leads generated is essential for not only managing your ads after activation, but tracking the success of your paid search effort.

In the end, if you cannot tie ad spend to revenue coming back into your business, it is going to be difficult continuing to justify your need for paid search ads.

There are two primary ways advertisers can track the success of their advertising efforts.

1.  Google AdWords conversion tracking

Within the platform, AdWords offers a simple and easy way to implement conversion tracking code that records when a visitor hits a pre-defined page on your business’s website.

This is type of conversion tracking is your best bet to find out how many people hit that ‘thank you’ or ‘confirmation’ page after completing a goal.

To begin the setup of AdWords conversion tracking, click the Tools and Analysis tab across the top of the AdWords interface.

Then, click Conversions.

To create your first conversion, click the +Conversion button.

Name your conversion something besides ‘Conversion #1’. Phrases like ‘Lead Submitted’ or ‘Transaction Completed’ are a good bet when getting started.

Keep your Source as a Webpage, and save the changes.

After saving your changes, the next item up is to choose your Conversion category.

Conversions are grouped by Purchase/Sale, Signup, Lead, or View of a key page.

Select the category that applies best to the goal you want visitors to complete.

After the category has been selected, choose the Markup Language for your conversion coding. Most advertisers will stay with the defaulted HTML, but if your site is coded in CHTML, XHTML, or WML, there are options for that as well.

Save your changes and move on to the final step:

Determine whether you will make the site changes on your own or if someone else will make those changes.

Then your code will populate and look something like this:

This code needs to be pasted between the <body> and </body> tags of the page you want to track. It is crucial that the page you choose to track is only reachable by visitors who complete you goal.

For most businesses, this is a thank you or confirmation page hit directly after submitting contact information or completing a purchase.

Click Done to complete the setup process.

Once the coding has been added in the appropriate place on the correct page on your site, your work is done.

2.  Linking AdWords and Google Analytics

For some businesses, simple AdWords conversion tracking may be enough to get by. However, partnering your Google Analytics profile with your AdWords account can open up a vast amount of insight that takes your tracking to the next level.

By linking these two accounts, advertisers can access AdWords traffic site usage metrics like average time on site, pages/visit, and bounce rate.

More importantly, for e-commerce businesses with the appropriate analytics tracking code on site, advertisers can track revenue figures directly traced to visitors who click on their ads.

With that kind of data, advertisers can see exactly how much money goes in and how much they earn from their paid search effort.

To get started, click the Tools and Analysis tab across the green stripe in the AdWords interface, then click Google Analytics.

Next, click the Admin tab in the upper right hand corner of the interface.

Then click the account which holds your active Google Analytics profile.

Locate your active profile, and click the corresponding star to the left of the profile name. Do not click the profile name.

After the profile star is highlighted, click the Data Sources tab.

Then click Link Accounts.

The final step in the process is to make sure your ads are auto-tagged and that your active profile is selected.

Click Continue to complete the process and finalize the linking between your AdWords and Analytics accounts.

Now that your AdWords and Analytics accounts are married, you are ready to roll.

With a soundly built account and the proper conversion tracking in place, the management portion of your work begins – which is where all the fun happens.

Having trouble implementing AdWords conversion code or linking your Google Analytics account?

Feel free to ask questions or provide insights in the comments.

The post Building Successful Low Budget PPC: Tracking your Success appeared first on Portent.

The only problem is that Google releases roughly five billion changes to AdWords every day or two (a rough guesstimate on my part). With only so many hours in the day to watch Twitter for new product announcements, it’s really easy for something to go unnoticed or slip through the cracks every now and again.

For instance, I was rather surprised one day when, while doing research for a client, I did a search on Google and found this.

Did you catch that? No?

How about now?

So am I the only one who missed this one?* You can target sites like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter in your Sitelinks Extensions!

*I’m totally not by the way, I asked all of my coworkers and they hadn’t heard either.

Third party sitelinks still need to follow the same rules as normal sitelinks (unique pages, accurate descriptions, no linking to downloads, etc.) but can lead to any of the social media properties listed.

You’re not always going to want to direct users away from your main site, but third party sitelinks can be an extra tool in your PPC arsenal. Using them to gain likes or followers is a start, but what about other possibilities? Running a contest on Facebook? Let people searching for your brand know about it. Hosting a branded hangout? Send users to your Google+ page. Customer support search? How about sending them to your Twitter profile?

Enhanced campaigns also add an extra level of versatility and accountability to the equation. Enhanced sitelinks bring with them better reporting and ad group level targeting. You’ll know exactly how well your third party sitelinks are performing and whether the investment is worth it.

How about you? Did you already know about third party sitelinks? How have you been using them?

The post Google AdWords – Third Party Sitelinks appeared first on Portent.