The problem with most multilingual pay-per-click campaigns is laziness. Many advertisers will launch international campaigns without consideration for accurate translations and culturally relevant messaging. Thankfully this problem is easy to overcome with a little extra consideration and planning. So before you launch a multilingual pay per click campaign, take to time to focus on the following best practices:

1. Translations. Translations. Translations. The success or failure of a multilingual pay-per-click campaign lies in the crux of translations. The quality of translation is the most critical component, and thus should receive the most attention and consideration. Many advertisers are guilty (often unknowingly) of translating ad copy in a literal sense without consideration for localization. When this happens, ad and landing page copy is often confusing to a native speaker, decreasing the effectiveness of your campaign. Not to mention, literal translations stick out like a sore thumb, native speakers can immediately pick up on the lack of consideration for their language, and will immediately dismiss your message.Don’t fall victim to this common mistake. Don’t use a simple online tool. You need a human! Spend time researching a quality translation service at the onset. A quality translation service will read the content in English, then rewrite the content to it conveys the same message and tone in your language of choice. Once you receive translated content, run it by a native speaker to ensure the job was done right.
2. Leverage Existing Campaign Structure. Campaign structure is very important with a multilingual pay-per-click initiative. Regardless of the quantity of languages targeted, campaigns and ad groups should be separated based on language. You can only set language and geographic targeting at the campaign level in Google, so your language breakdown must be at this level.Leverage your well-organized campaign structure from your English-targeted campaigns. To build a campaign in another language, duplicate the structure (but not the keywords) of your English campaigns. Next, modify the keywords (see multilingual keyword research below), ad text and landing pages accordingly.
3. Pay Attention to Your Campaign Settings. According to the AdWords help section, “the AdWords system looks at a user’s Google interface language setting to see if it matches one of the languages that your campaign targets.” If your campaign only targets “Spanish” for the campaign settings, then the ads will only serve to users who have designated “Spanish” in their Google account. For example, a user is searching on Google.com and has their personal account settings set to “Spanish,” then they will see ads from Spanish-targeted campaigns. Similarly, if someone is searching on Google.fr the language default is French, etc. If you are targeting users in a different country that speak one common language, then set your AdWords campaign to target that language.However, depending on your campaign objectives, this type of language targeting may narrow your search too much. Particularly when you are targeting a bilingual audience. In this case, you can expand your campaign targeting by changing your campaign settings to target more than one language.
4. Conduct Multilingual Keyword Research. Don’t just translate your keywords! In most cases, keywords or phrases can have multiple meanings when translated in another language. If you use a direct translation, then your keywords or phrases may not be relevant to your product. Conduct multilingual keyword research to best target keywords in the targeted language. Get started on your keyword list with the following:
   • Search Query Report. Run a search query report to identify existing foreign language keywords that are serving your ads.
   • Competitive Research. Refer to competitor ads and landing pages to identify keywords or phrases that are relevant to your campaign. Note, be aware you’re your competitors translations may not be accurate. Always run these keywords or phrases by a translation service or a native speaker prior to launch.
   • Translate Existing Keywords. Start with the keywords that you are targeting in English. Hire a strong translation service to identify the most common translation for that keyword or phrase—be careful of taking direct translations!
   • Ask a Native Speaker. Once you have completed your keyword research, run your list by a native speaker. This simple step will identify any red flags in the translations. It can also spark new keyword-targeting opportunities.

   If you plan to target a campaign in Spanish, you need to target keywords in Spanish. While some advertisers target Spanish speakers with English keywords and ad text, it is strongly recommended to cater your messaging to the native language. First, keywords in other languages are much less expensive, so you will see lower cost-per-clicks within these campaigns. Secondly, your campaign will be much more relevant to your target audience if you speak their language. Take the time to translate your entire language-targeted campaigns, this simple step may give you a leg up over your competition.

5. Use Language-Specific Ad Text and Landing Pages. Translated ad copy and landing pages are mutually exclusive. You cannot have one without the other. The landing page needs to play off of the cultural promise from the ad text. So, if your ad text is in Spanish, then your landing page needs to be in Spanish. To maximize relevance and effectiveness of your campaign, both ad text and landing pages need to be translated to the targeted language.As with keywords, both the ad text and landing pages should not be a direct translation of the English copy. I apologize if I am starting to sound like a broken record, but work with a strong translation company to translate your landing page and ads from English to your targeted language. A strong translation service will make adjustments to cater to local dialects and cultures. Landing page localization does not just stop at translations— incorporating culturally relevant images, design and color schemes also should be considered to improve relevancy.

Have your launched a multilingual campaign? Please share your experience and suggestions!

In most cases, the way to most effectively reach a local audience is to combine geo-targeted PPC campaigns with accurate local listings. No matter what the user’s intent, your presence in both the ad space and local listings will help convey that you are a reliable resource.

Geo-Targeting

So let’s start with the three options you have for setting up your PPC campaigns. The first is to create a geo-targeted campaign, which allows your ads to only show in specified locations. The best part is that you have a wide array of areas that you can choose from, including countries, cities, and even a certain radius around your location. The second option is to add geo-qualified keywords to your campaigns, which are keywords that include the location in them, but any searcher, in any location, can see them. The third option would be to place geo-qualified keywords in your geo-targeted campaign, but the strategy you choose will be dependent on your target audience, and what makes the most sense in how to reach them.

Once you have identified the best way to reach your target audience, and you’ve set up your geo-targeted campaigns, you can move on to verifying your local listing information.

Setting Up Your Local Listings

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all have a local listing center where you can set up and claim your business. However, I prefer to use GetListed.org, because you can set up and manage all three from one interface. It’s also a great way to keep tabs on the reviews your site has received, and keep a to-do list of the items that will help your local listings rank better.

Upon entering your company’s name and zip code, you’ll be taken to the snapshot page where you can see how many, if any, of your listings have been claimed in the engines.

From this page, you can click the links to claim your listing, and you are taken through a simple two to three step process. During these steps you will be able to enter valuable information for your customers like store hours, accepted forms of payment, and a description of your products or services. Once you are finished, you will have a direct line to each of the local interfaces where you can see that your listings have been verified, and you can make any necessary changes as time goes on.

Advanced Location Settings In Google

In addition to preventing your listing from being hijacked, claiming your listing can also benefit your PPC campaigns in Google. Under campaign settings, you now have the option to show relevant addresses with your ads to searchers that are in your targeted area. When you think about it, what better way is there to stand out to your potential customers than to have a relevant geo-targeted ad along with an accurate address?

In order to turn this feature on, after your listing has been claimed in Google, click on the campaign you want to edit, and go to the settings tab. Under Locations, Languages, and Demographics click on the link that will allow you to show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced). From here you will see your location extension options.

Though it is possible to enter an address that has not been verified, the benefits of claiming your listing far outweigh the effort to do so, so I would not recommend skipping that step.

Positioning Your Business For Success

Marketers today consider local search to be the fastest growing online division. And according to Michael Boland, program director, Mobile Local Media (MLM), The Kelsey Group, “As mobile data consumption rises, we expect local marketing to be a big winner. There is a strong correlation between local search and the mobile use case, which will cause a good portion of the ongoing mobile application boom to focus on local.”

Positioning yourself with geo-targeted PPC campaigns and tying them to your claimed local listings will help you get ahead of your competition, and establish a local presence where qualified consumers are. Doing the work today will help ensure that you are ready to ride the wave of local and mobile search, and your money will be spent on the most qualified traffic.

What is JavaScript?
JavaScript in the simplest sense is a scripting language that uses browsers to do the work for a command. It can be used to dynamically generate many types of elements on a page, but today I’d like to focus on one particular example.

We have a client who receives their leads via phone. For all online marketing campaigns, they direct visitors to a single landing page that uses JavaScript to automatically show a designated phone number to anyone visiting from each of their PPC, SEO, and email marketing campaigns.

How JavaScript Can Affect Your Tracking
Though few people know how to, it is possible for an end user to turn off their JavaScript, and this will certainly affect the accuracy of lead tracking for anyone using a method similar to our client’s. The primary problem, from a lead attribution standpoint, is that these users will not be shown the PPC phone number, so if they call and convert, that lead will be attributed to a general campaign instead.

To further complicate matters, once a user has their JavaScript turned off, they are untraceable in Analytics, so you will not only lose the data on who is seeing the correct information, but you won’t know that they visited your site in the first place. If you are noticing that your leads are low, you might want to check your web server logs, and compare the number of visitors to your landing page to the number that Analytics shows. This would at least give you an idea of how many people you aren’t tracking in Analytics, and since the reason is likely that their JavaScript is turned off, you would also know that they didn’t see your dynamic information. The downside of course is that you won’t know where they came from, nor how many of them converted, so you would have to make a business rule about how many of the leads were attributed to each of your advertising efforts from the bucket of “untracked” visitors, which compromises accuracy.

If you find that you are having tracking issues due to a lack of JavaScript support, there are different solutions available, depending on your time and budget. Making individual landing pages for different online marketing campaign types would help, because you eliminate the need for dynamic content. If using JavaScript is the most efficient solution for you or your client, make sure that both parties are aware of the potential lead discrepancy caused by JavaScript-disabled users. You should also ensure that the default landing page is unique from all other pages so you will still be able to create lead attribution estimates as described above.

No matter what type of campaign you run, it’s important to understand who is seeing your ads, and reacting to them. Using your PPC data in conjunction with your web server and Analytics data will help you gain a better understanding of the full user experience, and help you effectively track customers while fulfilling their needs.

This post has been edited from it’s original version based on continued research.

Within the confines of a PPC ad text you need to be relevant to your keywords, list as many benefits as possible, be unique and stand out from your competition, and include a clear call-to-action. As you strive to to incorporate all of these tactics into your ad texts you shouldn’t loose site of the fact that you’re trying to connect with real people.

While monitoring your click-through rate and conversion rate, also the time-on-site, pages per visitor, percent of new vs. return visitors and a plethora of other available stats, you need to remember that these numbers represent people. These stats are numerical representations of how well you have connected with your target audience, and the individuals who make up your audience.

Paid search marketing, and marketing in general, is all about making the right connections with the right people. People have hopes, dreams, needs, fears, likes, dislikes, and the list goes on and on. Your PPC ad texts should address these core concerns.

Often, when writing PPC ads, we focus on why some should click on your ad. A core concern/emotion that is often neglected is fear (or perhaps apathy). You should also take into consideration why someone wouldn’t click on your ad. What keeps someone from clicking on your ad?

This is the great thing about search marketing: someone is searching for you (or someone like you). Don’t take this for granted; you have to take the next step to convince them that they’ve found exactly what they’re looking for.

When optimizing your ad text performance you should think about this: if a user searches on a keyword that is relevant to your products/services, and they see your ad copy (which is keyword-focused and benefit-driven) but they don’t click on your ad. Seems like everything should be in place. So, what fears or concerns is holding a user back? Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic ball to tell you why a specific user, or group of users, aren’t attracted to your ad.

Of course, the best to way find out what works is to split test your PPC ad copy. However, before you write copy to test, you need to meditate on what your audience is looking for. How does your product/service solve their current problem and what can you say in your ad text that will talk to your audience’s core concerns?

The answers to these questions will be different for every advertiser. However, once you have developed a few ideas, molded them into new PPC ad texts, then I wholly suggest that you split test your ads to see if you’ve addressed these issues.

This brings us back to stats. Yes, that which I earlier suggested you step away from to get some perspective, I suggest that you turn to when learning if you’ve improved ads. This is the best way to know if you’ve enhanced your messaging. So, this is a rough outline of the process:

1. Think about your customer’s core emotional concerns
2. Review the ad texts you have running now
3. Meditate on why certain ads have the best response rate
4. Meditate on why certain ads are failing
5. Think about why someone would *not* click on your ad
6. Review your competitors’ ads
7. Write new ads that address these concerns
8. Launch your new ad texts
9. Monitor the performance of your ads
10. Repeat the process and continue to refine your messaging

And the same goes for your landing page. We haven’t even touched on landing pages! You should think in similar terms for your landing pages as well. But that is another article for another time.

It could come down to the fact that your competitors are talking to your audience with more success. Reviewing your competition to see what they have to say could be very enlightening. And it could be that the majority of users aren’t finding what they want at all.

The 95 characters within a PPC ad text (not including the display URL) can be very complicated. The success of your campaign hinges on your ability to appeal to your audience on numerous levels. Be the solution to your audience’s problem/query, address their concerns, and you’re well on your way to success.

First, I’ll describe what I found within one of our AdWords campaigns. Since one of our client provides international service, one of our campaigns was targeting a wide range of countries. As we were targeting a wide range of locations, the ‘All Languages’ setting was chosen as our default setting.

Overall, this international campaign worked well. Each month we generated a good number of leads with a cost-per-lead below our target CPL. However, good campaigns can always perform better. As part of our on-going optimization strategy we ran a search query report in order to find new keywords to add to our account as well as find new negative keywords to improve our traffic quality.

Upon running a search query report, we found quite a few search queries that weren’t even in English (but all of our keywords are English). Here is a short list of search queries that matched for the term “hydraulic pump repair:”

accident barrage hydrolique dans le monde
accumulator hydraulisch
accumulator rexroth
acheter vendre verin hydraulique pour fendeuse
aeroquip
yollu vana hidrolik
apparatuur of systemen hydraulisch druk
ñlkmhftgtgtr rexroth
bobina rexroth 12v
bomba linear de pistões axiais vickers
camion hydraulique
camper hydrolisch
groupe hydrolique
groupe idrolique
grszesio chydra?lik
havayla çal??an hidrolik
haydrouliekbedrijven
hitroli ciftarafl?silindirliftler
hydrauliek onderdelen
hydraulische steuerung
hydraulisk klippebord
hydraulisze agregat
idrolique a villeneuve de marsan
karakteristik fluida hidrolik
la pompe hyd cabire
le nom de huile de frein hidraulique
macam macam hidroulik
matériel professionnel pinc idrolique
ogloszenia hydrallik wroclaw

The reasons these queries were a problem is three fold:

• The most important reason is that these terms were not converting into leads
• Our ads and landing pages are not targeted to these languages
• The point-of-contact for our client doesn’t speak these languages so communication issues could arise easily

So, why was this happening? This was happening for a few different reasons:

• Within this campaign, our language setting was on “all languages”
• We were targeting broad match keywords
• We were targeting a wide range of countries in a single campaign

Remember, location targeting is set at the campaign level. When targeting an international audience you you should keep few a things in mind:

1. When targeting a specific country, you are targeting the Google domain extension for that particular country. For example, if you’re targeting Canada, your ads will appear on www.google.ca. However, your ads will show only for a certain user if your language settings match their user preferences.
2. Also, your ads will appear according to IP address as well. If someone is located in Canada but they use Google.com for their search, your Canadian-targeted ads will appear here as well.
3. The language settings are important when targeting an international audience. Each Google user sets their own default language. If no language preference is set, the default language for that specific Google domain is chosen.
4. For example, if you target Spain but your selected language is only targeted to English, more-than-likely most your traffic is coming from users with an IP address in Spain who are using Google.com. However, if you add Spanish as a targeted language, then you’ll receive traffic from Google.com as well as Google.es.

And this is why we were seeing so many different languages in our search query report: we were targeting numerous countries with numerous languages. Now that’s some expanded broad match!

We are optimizing our international distribution by employing these tactics:

• Running a geographic report in AdWords and creating campaigns for the countries that are currently generating the most leads with the lowest CPL. And we’ll eventually create campaigns for each country we want to target.
• For now, our language setting will be English. We want to maintain a good Quality Score and displaying English ads for foreign keywords may hinder our score as the keywords aren’t in the same language as our ad or landing page.
• Also, we’ll target phrase match as opposed to opening up the broad match flood gates.
• Yes, Google does provide a translation tool so we could create ads in specific languages but for now, we want to have more control over our messaging. And I’m uncertain as to how accurate these Google translations are. If they’re anything like Babblefish, I’ll stay away.

In summary, casting a wide net within international waters can generate mixed results and you need to pay attention to the details. One of the most important aspects in AdWords is that you can control everything (your settings, at least) so make sure that all of your campaigns, whether they are domestic or international, are as focused as possible.

If you’re thinking about doing any kind of ad scheduling or day parting, there are a few tips you should follow before deciding to turn off your ads or even simply adjust your bids on a particular day of the week or time of day.

1. Run the right reports: Running the right reports is essential before you make any decisions on ad scheduling. If you’re running a lead-based account only, you should be looking at the amount of PPC spend versus the number of leads you’re generating for a particular day or hour.

However, If you’re managing an ecommerce client you’ll want to track the amount of PPC spend versus the amount of revenue you’re generating for a particular day/hour.

For either type of client, it may also be a good idea to determine which day or hour you’re generating a higher cost-per-lead.  If there are a few hours in the middle of the night where you’re finding your CPL to be too high, you can adjust your bids automatically to decrease during those hours, and increase back up to normal all other hours. But we’ll talk about that strategy in a few minutes.

2. Large sample size:  Another tip is to be sure when you’re running reports that you’re pulling enough data over a long period of time to get a large enough sample size. Pulling data for the past few months may be okay for some accounts that spend a lot of money and generate a lot of leads during that time. But for other accounts, you may have to go back much further than that. Even for clients that do generate a lot of revenue/leads and spend a lot, I go back as far as I can.

3. Look at multiple metrics: When it comes to a lead based account, your main focus may be on amount of spend versus actual lead generation and that’s okay. But perhaps look at some of your other metrics too like cost-per-lead, and click-through rate. We know that low click-through rates can drag down your overall account Quality Score. You may be surprised to see that during a few hours in the early morning your PPC ads are spending, not converting, but are also generating a very high click-through rate. If that is the case you may not want to pause those ads during those hours or you may see a drop in Quality Score. Instead of pausing ads entirely during those hours use the bid adjustment setting so your max CPC bid is set to only 50% of what it would normally show at, meaning your position would drop and you would receive much less traffic and generate less spend, but you’re ads would still be showing and your click-through rate may or may not drop any further.

4. Adjust bids by the hour: When thinking about ad scheduling, I would stick with adjusting your PPC keyword bids by the hour before making adjustments by the day. Lowering your keyword bids by the hour is going to make less of an impact than lowering your keyword bids on a particular day, for an entire day. So start off small, then work you way up to larger changes that could make more of an impact on your accounts performance.

5. Auto increase bids: By dropping your bids automatically during less profitable hours of the day, you can also increase your bids automatically in the same fashion. During peak times of the day where traffic is high and leads and/or revenue is good you can set your bids to increase during those times only to maximize your PPC revenue.

To get ad scheduling going, begin running your reports. For a lead generation report by hour you’re going to have to use Google Analytics.  If you’re tracking revenue, you can go into your Analytics account and select the revenue section, then total revenue. Above the graph and below the date range there are small icons you can click on that will give you revenue data by the hour, day, week and month. Click on the first icon to view revenue by the hour.

To set up ad scheduling after you’ve run your reports, simply click on the campaign, click settings and under ‘advanced settings:  schedule, start date, end date, ad scheduling’ click on edit.

You can then switch back and forth from basic mode, which is pausing your ads during either full days or certain times during the day, or you can select bid adjustment mode which allows you to either increase or decrease your bids during certain days or hours of the day.

I think ad scheduling and day parting, when done correctly can truly help increase an account’s performance.  Not only can it help minimize spend during non profitable hours of the day, but it can help increase profitability when search and conversion times are peaking throughout the day.

Inspired by a PPC Hero reader submission, this post will review some pitfalls that you need to be careful of when using dynamic keyword insertion.

Pitfall #1: Entering the DKI Code Wrong

Both beginners and experienced pay-per-click managers can fall victim to an incorrect keystroke. Whether it is a misspelling, missing space, or extra punctuation, most of us are guilty. However, when it comes to dynamic keyword insertion, a wrong keystroke can make the difference between a highly targeted ad text and ad spam. You have to be very careful how you type in the code. With one mistake your ads will end up irrelevant and in this case, spammy.

In the example below, the manager incorrectly entered the DKI code by adding an extra space before the colon. So the DKI code was entered in as {keyword :Eligo} versus {keyword:Eligo}. That extra space before the colon makes all the difference. When you enter the DKI code, confirm that there are no errors by taking the time to double check your work.

Pitfall #2: Misspellings in Ad Text

Bidding on misspelled keywords is an age-old practice for pay-per-click. But when you are using DKI with misspelled terms, those keywords are going to end up in your ads. In this example, all of these accounts were bidding on ‘chilrens’ to capitalize on a common keystroke mistake in search queries. For all three advertisers, their ads utilized DKI for headlines and the misspelling ended up in the title.

No matter how targeted and relevant you ad is, having a misspelled keyword in the headline or description will automatically hurt your credibility. To avoid this, restructure your pay-per-click account so all misspelled keywords have their own ad group… and don’t use DKI in this ad group!

Pitfall #3: Using DKI for Broad Match Keywords

In the cases below, the pay-per-click managers have combined DKI with broad match keywords. So when a searcher types in ‘Obama’ or ‘Leg Amputees’ they are served ads that are both irrelevant and confusing. Correct me if I am wrong, but I am certain that the Secret Service would not approve the transaction if I tried to purchase President Obama at an online bookstore.

The goal of using DKI is to serve highly relevant targeted ad text based on search query. Relevancy is hard to achieve with broad match keywords because you have a lot less control of when an ad is served. Do not use DKI when you are running broad match keywords. In many cases your ad text is going to end up with non-relevant terms.

If your ad texts look similar to the examples above, then you ad groups are too broad to begin with. Make sure your ad groups are structured properly for DKI so that every keyword in the ad group can appear in your ad text. Also consider your match type. DKI is best implemented in conjunction with exact match terms. By using exact match, you can define the keywords that will appear in your ads, and tailor the ad copy so it remained relevant across multiple search queries.

Pitfall #4: Creating Generic Ads

Formatting is crucial to creating relevant ad text using DKI. I often see DKI headlines that use only one keyword like our example below. This means the entire headline is one word, when is not optimal when you have 25 characters to work with. These headlines often look spammy, and in most cases, do not have high click-through rates.

Boost your headline relevancy by including another keyword similar to the example below. Of course, this format assumes that your ad groups are structured properly. If you cannot achieve something similar, then you need to consider restructuring your campaigns into more targeted ad groups.

Now you know some of the common pitfalls for using dynamic keyword insertion. Always remember, DKI should be used with extreme caution. It should only be used in the case of giving relevancy an extra boost. It should not be the crutch of your pay-per-click campaign. But when you decide to use it, make sure you don’t fall victim to these pitfalls!

For more examples on improper uses of dynamic keyword insertion, check the Your PPC Sucks blog.

You may have noticed the relatively new column within your Yahoo! account titled, “Targeting.” Within this column you can adjust your demographic and geographic targeting, as well as your ad scheduling preferences. Here is a quick screen shot:

Within this screen shot, the little clock emblem indicates where you can adjust your ad scheduling for each campaign.

To turn your ads completely on or off, you can adjust the times for which they show. Within the screen shot below, you can see that I have selected to run my ads from 5am-10pm on Monday through Friday, and we’re not showing ads at all on the weekends.

So, that strategy isn’t too complicated to implement. With this feature you also have the option of increasing your bids during certain times of the day. However, of course, leave it to Yahoo to only allow you the option to increase your bids, but you can’t decrease them during certain times of the day. But there is a work-around to this shortcoming.

I want to adjust my bid automatically within the screen shot below. You can see that I can either increase my bid by per a certain percentage, or I can increase it by an actual dollar. amount.

If you want to solely increase bids during certain times of the day, then you’re all set! However, if you want to have higher bids in the morning and lower bids in the evening, then you have a little bit more work ahead of you. One way to work around this limitation of only being able to increase bids is this:

1. Determine what your bids should be during your high-bid time of the day. Determine what your bids should be during your low-bid time of the day.
2. Within your campaign, set your keyword bids to the lowest price that you’d like them to be during the day.
3. Adjust your ad scheduling settings to increase your keywords to your highest bids during those high-traffic, great ROI times of the day.

With this method, you set your bids to the lowest point and then use ad scheduling to increase them automatically. This way, in a sense, you are increasing and lowering your bids to improve your performance.

Ad scheduling can be a great way to improve your PPC campaign’s performance by targeting the best time of day, while shifting focus away from those times of the day that don’t generate a great ROI. You just got to know how to work the system.

Here are some skills/traits that you need to manage your PPC campaign effectively:

Statistics

Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data (according Wikipedia). This is the main driver behind PPC analysis and optimization. Having a thorough knowledge on how to collect and interpret data within your account is mission critical.

You also need to understand how to present this information as well. This presentation of data could be within your team or, even more importantly, to clients. Your clients (or upper management) are not in the accounts every day and they don’t have as clear of a picture as you do in regards to the direction of your campaign. Providing the right statistics in the easiest way possible is a must.

Information architecture

I know what the standard definition of information architecture is but I like this phrase so I’m going to re-appropriate it for my own usage. This skill/trait refers to the logical categorization of similar search terms into themed groups. Or other in terms, creating awesome PPC account structures.

You have to be able to find themes, patterns, and parallel user intent within disparate phrases in order to create an account structure that is likely to generate excellent results as well as enhance your AdWords Quality Score.

Psychology (Human information behavior)

The psychological element is the middle ground between science and art. As paid search marketers, we need to understand the thought patterns and intentions of our search engine audience. What are they thinking? What are they looking for? How can they be convinced that I have what they’re looking for? When conducting keyword research, creating account structures, writing ad copy, and optimizing landing pages, these are the questions we’re trying to answer.

You need statistics to give you some great insight to answering these questions. This is why ad text testing and landing optimization are so important. However, from trying to understand the online buying cycle to determining why a certain ad has a higher click-through rate involves understanding the mindset of your audience as well as hard-fast stats.

Copywriting

Now we’re getting to the artistic end of the spectrum. Writing great PPC ad texts requires a certain finesse that goes above and beyond ordinary copywriting skills. This is because you only have 70 characters to tell someone who you are, what you have to have offer, why they can trust you, and why they should disregard everything else on the SERP and click on your ad.

This requires tapping into your creative side. You need make bold, convincing statements within a very, very small amount of space. When every character counts (literally!), you need to have a strong command of the English language (or whatever language in which you write PPC ads)  in order to truncate a great deal of information into a few brief phrases.

Graphic design

This where your landing page optimization comes in (and this is an artsy skill). Yes, you need data in order to tell you how your landing pages are performing. And performance data can tell you what is appealing best to your audience. However, you need analytical and artistic skills in order interpret this information and turn it into images, copy, and an overall design that engage your visitors.

As you can see, successful paid search management requires a blend of scientific and artistic skills. This is what makes our industry so interesting! And there are many more skills that are helpful to generate great PPC results, but hopefully this list will get you thinking about your strengths and weakness. Where can you improve?

I recently began working with a client that uses fairly complex tracking systems to monitor the profitability of their pay-per-click business. A part of this tracking system required me to setup tracking URLs at the keyword level to monitor both online and pay-per-click call performance. Thanks to autotagging in Google using the gclid parameter, I only had to append the call tracking URL (i.e. ?param=a&param2=b) in AdWords. For Yahoo and MSN, I was required to combine the call tracking URL with the &utm=source parameter. Thus the source of my pay-per-click tracking issue.

As the month continued, our cost-per-sale continued to rise, and we were not seeing pay-per-click sales attributed to Yahoo and MSN. Sales from the pay-per-click campaign were attributed to organic and/or direct, which was really hurting our bottom line. So I needed to resolve this issue, fast!

Resolving URL tagging is relatively simple if you know what to look for. If you have problems with tracking search engine performance with 3^rd party campaigns, it is most likely one of three things (from my experience):

Problem 1: 301 Redirects
Believe it or not, but 301 redirects can often strip your URL tracking, and categorize per-per-click traffic into organic or direct. This includes the gclid tracking code for AdWords and the &utm=source tracking parameter for other search engines. It is easy to find if this is your issue. To test the gclid, enter the destination URL into your browser with the following appended at the end:  www.yoursitehere.com/?gclid=test. The gclid should remain at the end of the URL when the page loads. If it disappears, then you are losing your tracking info.

Solution: Update the destination URLs in your pay-per-click accounts so they point directly to the final destination. If you are pointing your pay-per-click ads to a redirected URL, then your tracking may be stripped in the redirect.

Solution: Ask your website developer to configure your server to pass the gclid and all other tracking parameters.

Problem 2: Tracking Parameter Order
Check the order of your tracking parameters. Your &utm URL tagging needs to come before any additional tracking parameters. If they are in the wrong order, then you are not going to properly track performance. In the case of my client, I initially setup the Yahoo and MSN URLs with the call tracking parameter first, and the URL tagging second. Here is an example:

www.mysitehere.com/?param=a&param2=b&utm=source&utm=cpc&utm=content&parameter

Under this structure, the call tracking parameters were effectively stripping the &utm=source in Google Analytics. So similar to the case of 301 redirects, my pay-per-click traffic was counted as organic and direct.

Solution: Reorder your tracking URLs so the &utm=source tracking code comes before any additional tracking parameters. Your URL should follow this structure:

www.mysitehere.com/?utm=source&utm=cpc&utm=content&parameter&param=a&param2=b

Problem 3: URL Structure

If you are still having problems tracking 3^rd party campaigns in Google Analytics, then your issue may lie with the &utm=soruce tracking parameter setup using the Google URL Builder. If you do not properly format this tag, then Google Analytics will not record traffic properly.

Solution: Take a closer look at your &utm=source parameters to confirm everything is correct. Check out How to Troubleshoot When Tracking 3rd Party PPC through Google Analytics for a more detailed review of the problem.

3^rd party URL tagging is a great resource for tracking pay-per-click campaign performance, but you have to do it right to reap the benefits. These are all very common problems with URL tagging and thankfully the solutions are simple to implement. Please learn from my mistake and make sure you setup your URLs correctly. But if you are experiencing tracking problems, use this as a resource to quickly find and resolve the problem.

Have you experienced other issues with URL tagging? Please share your problems and solutions with us!