Ad Position Basics

First, let’s start with some ad position basics. As of November 2011, Google considers your ads to be in one of two areas of SERP real estate, “top” or “other.” Not specific enough for you? Let me illustrate. Ads in the top position are outlined in red below, and ads in the “other” position, which in this example is the side of the page, are outlined in orange.

Here’s where things get a little hairy. Google recently decided that ads could be shown on either the side or bottom of a SERP. Translation: “other” means side or bottom (outlined in purple below).

Keep in mind that if ads show on the side of a SERP they will not be on the bottom, and vice versa, so side vs. bottom ad position is an either/or situation. Google’s reasoning behind showing ads at the bottom of pages is that for some searches the natural flow of a searcher scanning from top to bottom has yielded higher click-through rates (or so they say). Ads will only show at the bottom once they’ve already been shown on the side, and, of course, which ads are shown on the bottom of a page is something determined by Google behind the scenes.

What does this all mean? In short, knowing your average position doesn’t really tell you exactly where on the page your ads are showing, but you can determine whether yours ads perform better at the top or side/bottom of the page.

Finding Your Optimal Position

“Why wouldn’t all my ads perform the best at the top of all SERPs?” you just asked yourself. Well, many reasons. Maybe your top of page cost per click is too expensive for you to see a good return on ad spend. Or maybe your competitor’s ad position is having a shading effect on your ads, and people are just more inclined to click on your ad when it’s on the side or bottom of a SERP.

Whatever the reason, you can easily view top vs. other segmentation in AdWords. On the Campaign, Ad Group or Keyword tab in the AdWords interface, go to segment in the sub menu below your tab headings and choose “top vs. other:”

Then you’ll see the break down of your account metrics by page position for both Search and Search Partners:

As you can see in my example above, this particular account clearly performs better on the top of search results pages for this specific time period. To get a complete snapshot of your account’s ad position performance, I would create a report that segments your account’s metrics, including ad position, monthly for the past year. Take note of how your account metrics have improved (or not) as your ad position has increased or decreased. Once you can identify a definite trend, you will know the position in which your ads perform the best, and then you can optimize your account accordingly. How might you optimize your accounts for a specific ad position? Excellent question.

Optimizing Your Account Toward A Specific Position

As of April 2011, Google retired their AdWords position preference option, which let you specify which positions you wanted your ad to show for. While this system wasn’t perfect, it took a lot of guesswork out of achieving an optimal position. Google stated that they wanted to dissuade advertisers from focusing on a specific position, but we all know that it can be a good account tune-up to spend some time analyzing this data.

So, how do you optimize your account manually for a certain position? If you want to target a higher position, focus on your keywords’ quality scores. This will improve your position and lower your cost per click. Obviously if you determine your optimal position is below the first spot, you’ll want to focus on conservative keyword bids. Don’t be afraid to lower your bids if you need to come down in position to achieve better performance.

In regards to quality score, sometimes a low quality score is okay, but if you want to have the most control over your campaigns, you might want to consider segmenting your account by quality score to have more of an effect on each campaign’s position. Your branded terms, for example, might have lower quality scores, but are valuable in terms of gaining name recognition. Likewise, your competitor keywords probably also have a lower quality score. For more information about when low quality score keywords are okay, check out our post on this.

If you want an estimation of what bid you would need to achieve a specific position with any given keyword, you can use Google’s Traffic Estimator. This tool allows you to enter a keyword and a cost per click, and will show you your estimated ad position. You can also enter a daily budget amount to see how that would affect your estimated daily clicks.

You can access this tool from the Tools and Analysis menu in AdWords:

This might be labor intensive to do for all your keywords, but it can help give you a ballpark range to start with for your keyword lists.

Closing Thoughts

While ad position in AdWords can be fluid, and actual page placement a never sure-fire bet, it’s still good to analyze and optimize your account for a position that conclusively yields the best results. You may find that this boosts your account performance, and if not at least you’ll know that your account is not effected one way or the other by its page position. Also, if your page position starts to mysteriously drop down and you haven’t made any drastic changes to your account, don’t forget to take a look at your competitive landscape. External factors, i.e. your competitors, can dramatically change where your ads are showing.

If I’ve left out any tips for using ad position data advantageously, feel free to let us know in the comments below. I hope this has helped clarify some things for you in regards to ad position!

Last week we had our monthly full-day training session at Hanapin and the following lists and helpful hints were a product of one of our small group sessions that day. The entire team agreed to having learned a thing or two and we’ve seen increased results in our productivity already!

1. Use a/your to-do list. Maybe you went to check that list I was talking about before and realized…you forgot to make it! Now is the time to get serious about keeping track of all the tasks you need to get done in a given day, week, month or year. Having all your tasks in a running list keeps things from falling through the cracks as easily, which is never a bad thing!
2. Develop a routine. This can be a small or as big as you want, but make a part of your schedule typical so you can plan for something. Pull spend numbers every morning, check email, make a coffee, answer blog comments…you see what I mean? Having the smallest tasks planned out to start or round out a part of your day can make it feel more manageable and again, keeps you from forgetting things as they become monotonous.
3. Break things up. Not like…your desk and chair, but your big tasks. If you have one big project you’re dreading, try breaking that project up in to smaller tasks that you can check off quicker and more frequently. You’ll feel more accomplished as you check things off and that motivation will keep you pushing through to finish the project.
4. You are not Superman. You are also not a first grader. What’s this mean? Don’t put too much on your plate and don’t leave it too empty. Accepting too many tasks leaves the most organized person frazzled because, as it turns out, the day does not get longer no matter how hard we wish. However, idle hands, they say! Give yourself credit for what you can get done in a given time and load your plate accordingly. Leaving holes with ‘nothing to do’ makes time go by slower, too.
5. Close the circle. Once you’ve completed a task or project, put it away! This fulfills the sense of accomplishment for a job well done and also allows you to move on to the next task (never done, right?). This is also the time to follow-up with anyone else on your team that may need to know the results of whatever you were working on so everyone knows the task is complete.
6. Start tomorrow today. This might make it sound like I’m insinuating the key to time management is to just never sleep, but I promise I am not. All I’m suggesting is before you leave the office or stop working for the day make your to-do list for the next day. This way, you can make sure to note whatever didn’t get done from today’s list for first thing on tomorrow’s list. It will also help you sleep better tonight knowing you’re prepped for the next day, trust me. Work this in to your routine from tip #2 and thank us later!
7. Stuff comes up, but don’t forget it! Within a day’s time, there are many conversations where a quick comment a colleague makes reminds us of something we need to do…write it down! I have more than one post-it pad at my desk and I take at least one to every meeting I attend. I can then take notes on extra things that need to be added to my to-do list and add them to the master list according to priority once the meeting is over. This also keeps my to-do list fairly organized, which is also extremely helpful.
8. Speaking of priorities…a fatal flaw to any plan is the inability to prioritize the steps to implement the plan. Basically, put the cart before the horse and let me know how far you get. When you go to make your to-do lists, assume you’ll make a few drafts and even scribble a few arrows around to show that this now needs to be done here. The important note is that when you’re ready to start your day/week, you have the most important tasks at the top of your list that way in case you don’t get to something, it will be something that can stand to wait until the next day.
9. Yes! You can say no! As I’ve mentioned a few times, things will come up throughout any given day that you are requested to do that you hadn’t planned on. Sometimes you have time, and sometimes you don’t. When you can say yes you should and when you can’t, politely decline or give a reasonable delivery date based on your current task load. Everyone wins!
10. Give yourself a break, man. When you get a big task or a chunk of small tasks complete, take a few minutes to soak in the chill. Rewarding yourself with a few minutes looking away from your computer screen or whatever you’ve been focusing on for hours is one of the easiest and best ways to re-motivate yourself to keep busting through that list and get to the end!

Now that we’ve shared our tips for how to more effectively manage your time, tell us what you do to keep yourself organized, productive and on task! Share your ideas and experiences in the comments section below and thanks for reading!

Here’s a recap of all the posts we covered this week for quick reference if you need it:

Ad Testing Best Practices (Dave)

Setting Up Ad Testing (Felicia)

Implementing ad Ad Test (Sarah)

Ad Testing Challenges (Kayla)

If you have any questions, comments or additional tips about ad testing, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to us in the comments section below. Otherwise, happy ad testing and thanks for reading!

My single most important piece of advice for keeping your PPC sanity is not in what you should be doing, but what you shouldn’t be doing. That advice? Don’t ever make a change without fully understanding your desired outcome. It seems pretty simple yes? I think so. Unfortunately, I can say that this doesn’t always happen. You aren’t always going to achieve your desired outcome, but if you don’t understand what you’re shooting for, how can you stand behind your decisions? This advice falls through so many different aspects of PPC. Setting up proper tests to measure success, knowing what changes influence what metrics, understanding when to focus on what, but mainly just knowing what and why you are doing are all important aspects of this.

By not thinking through the potential outcome of your changes you run the risk of heading down the rabbit hole. Allow me to explain. If you have a nicely performing account and take a laissez-faire approach to a change, followed by another change, followed by another change, the collection of those changes can put you in a bad place. What’s worse is getting back to the original performance is three steps away and because you weren’t paying attention to your desired outcomes to begin with, you might not be able to retrace your steps precisely enough. Rebounding from these mistakes takes time and what might be a small issue today could be a large issue when compounded with others later.

On the other hand, if you know what your desired outcome for every single change you make is, when your test runs through conclusion you can make an immediate determination of success and fully implement the change if it worked or reverse the change if it didn’t. As I said before, you aren’t going to have a 100% hit rate in achieving your desired outcome. It’s acceptable when it doesn’t happen, so long as you reject the test. If you don’t understand what you were shooting for and move right into the next change, you’ve introduced too many variables before concluding an existing test and that’s simply crazy.

Step One: Tracking Indicator Icon Check

If you opted-in to the tracking indicator option (AdWords only) for your conversion page when you enabled the particular conversion type you’re checking (see screenshot below, accessible from the Conversions option in the Tools & Analysis tab drop-down menu), then you should be able to navigate to your ‘Thank You’ or final conversion URL page and simply look to see if the ‘Google Site Stats’ box is showing. If it isn’t, your conversion code is likely not placed correctly, or at all, and you either need to fix it yourself (more on that in the next step) or alert your client to the issue if they placed the code. If it is there, move to the next step. If you never opted-in to this option or are having trouble with conversion tracking in Bing, also see the next step!

Step Two: View Page Source Code

To complete this part of the test, either as your first true step or as a second step to the tracking indicator icon, all you need to do is access the live version of your ‘Thank You’ or conversion confirmation page and right-click. You’ll see a small menu of options and you’ll want to select ‘View Page Source.’ A window will open that shows you the entire coding structure for the webpage. Scroll to the bottom and check to see if your conversion code is placed directly before the final </body> tag.

If the conversion code is visible in your source code but appears higher up in the page code, it may be technically disabled by the surrounding code. In this case, simply access your page code (or alert the client if you can’t access the code) and move the conversion code to appear directly before the </body> tag. If you view the source code and can’t find your conversion code anywhere, it may need to be replaced or was not placed on the correct page.

In both these instances, you’ll want to get back in the interface and copy the conversion code to place appropriately on your confirmation page. If you have allowed this task to be handled by the client or you do not have access to the back end coding, also be sure the conversion code was not placed on another page, as you may start to see (if you aren’t already) false conversions in the interface.

You can access your standing conversion codes in AdWords from the Tools & Analysis>Conversions tab and in adCenter from your campaign-level Advanced Settings by selecting ‘Show code’ beneath the conversion tracking options.

AdWords Conversion Code Retrieval

adCenter Conversion Code Retrieval

On the other hand, if you view the source code and your conversion code is placed correctly, then it’s time to run a test conversion! Next step…

Step Three: Run A Test Conversion

Once you’ve confirmed your conversion code is placed correctly and on the right page, you’re ready to actually send through a test conversion. As a best practice, I run a test conversion anytime I set up a new account or new conversion segment to make sure I catch any initial issues as quickly as possible, but it’s especially important to revisit if you are currently or recently having conversion tracking troubles. First things first, make sure you clear your browser history and cache and enable cookies if you have them disabled normally, then complete the following:

1. Choose one of your cheapest CPC keywords and use that as your query in the appropriate search engine (if you’re having trouble with tracking in Bing, don’t Google your keyword…Bing it!).
2. Click on your populated PPC ad. This is an important step! You can’t go directly to your site and complete a conversion without first passing through a PPC ad in order to see the data in your advertising interface.
3. Submit a conversion! Depending on your client, or your business if you’re managing PPC for yourself, you may either need to complete a form with contact info or complete a purchase (lead gen vs. ecommerce). In either situation, make sure you’re prepared or that you prepare your client to handle the test conversion. If you or the client are in charge of the CMS for an ecommerce account, you’ll want to make sure the order is cancelled on the back end to keep the product from shipping or from being fully charged to the credit card you used. If you’re representing a lead gen account either for yourself or for a client, you’ll want to make sure you get removed from any email blasts or databases in the future (typical result from filling out an online contact form) so as not to “waste” resources.
4. Wait patiently, grasshopper. This is hands down the hardest part of running a test conversion…the waiting. It takes a few hours, on average, for the interface to show conversion numbers so you have to literally move on to something else and come back later. If you come back and see your conversion in the interface from your queried keyword, then you’ve found success and likely fixed your issue with moving the conversion code to it’s appropriate place in the page code. Still not seeing any triggered conversions in the interface? The most important thing to remember now is that you shouldn’t assume you’ve completely stopped pulling down leads or sales, you just can’t see them or manage your account as easily as before. The game is not over! You are more than likely still getting leads and sales, you just can’t directly give the credit to a particular keyword in the interface. I posted a couple months back about how I managed an ecommerce account without conversion tracking and will be posting later this month on how to accommodate for this issue with a lead gen client, as well (eyes open!). Your next step is to find a way to manage the account without conversion data that continues to bring in leads or sales for yourself or the client until the situation is resolved.

If I had one piece of advice for PPC managers who have or suspect they have conversion tracking problems, it would be this:

You definitely can’t throw up your hands and refuse to manage your own or your client’s PPC until conversion tracking is fixed because what if it never is? Some websites just don’t support conversion tracking and if your, or your client’s, site falls in that hole, the PPC world does not stop turning and people will continue to click on your ads unless you turn them off. Turning off your ads only means you are most assuredly not making any sales or gaining leads, rather than just not being able to attribute them to a particular keyword. Choosing to stop optimizing from lack of conversion data won’t get you anywhere but angry and bitter and will more than likely result in the loss of a client if you can’t find a way to keep going. Determine a strategy that works and that you can optimize from until the storm clouds move on. If they don’t, you’re already managing the account without it, so the transition will be much smoother!

You can also check out this troubleshooting tool from AdWords to attempt to track down your problem that way.

Let us know what you think! Have you had broken conversion tracking problems before? How did you handle, test or fix it? What did you learn that you could share? Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below and as always, thanks for reading PPC Hero!

Search Marketing campaigns are focused on numbers and stats even while managing campaigns of as little as £5 a day. Each ad group, campaign, keyword requires an in-depth search on what you want to gain from it and what are your goals with it – unless your company has billions of dollars to spill over search marketing without worrying about the results. As they famously say – Marketing is just another form of Statistics.

Enough of the general rant, I will come down to the core topic – key features to look for in AdWords for dummies coming from experts as their best practices.

Quality Score

Every campaign’s budget changes and often they depend on the key goals and financial condition of the company. Quality Score is one of the key metrics that determine the cost per click along with the position of your ads.

Having a strong focus on the number you get in your quality score keeps your budget in a healthy shape. What could be more exciting than draining your competitors budget and knowing about it?

Score who? What am I talking about?

The best explanation of quality score is given by Google, “Quality Score for Google and the Search Network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and the better its ad position.”

Google’s earlier model of calculating advertisers rank was very straight forward the algorithm only multiplied click-through rate with cost per click to determine ads position. As the system got more intelligent and complex this model became more complex as well, it now includes Quality Score as part of the measuring algorithm to determine the price per click, ad rank and the frequency of ads. Quality Score on its own is a mix of many small but important factors. The breakdown of these important factors is as following:

• Click through rate
• Relevance of keyword to its adgroup
• Landing page quality
• Relevance of keywords to the creative (ad copy)
• Overall account performance history
• Load time and other relevancy factors (secret sauce as Google calls it)

How to check Quality Score in your AdWords Account

Here are two ways to find your Quality Score in Google AdWords:

The Customize columns command tells you whether each keyword’s Quality Score is “Poor,” “OK,” or “Great.” To enable the command:

1.    Sign in to your AdWords account.
2.    Select the relevant campaign and ad group.
3.    Select the Keywords tab.
4.    Click Customize columns at the top of the ad group table.
5.    Choose Show Quality Score from the drop-down menu.
6.    Click Done.

The Status command tells you the actual numerical value of your Quality Scores. To access these values:

1.    Sign in to your AdWords account.
2.    Select the relevant campaign and ad group.
3.    Select the Keywords tab.
4.    Click the icon in the Status column next to a keyword. The Keyword Analysis field appears. The second section of this field indicates the keyword’s Quality Score.

A quick tip to improve quality score:

Quality Score is not something you can win overnight, it takes a lot of time, sweat and micro analysis of all the above factors but once you get it right, you have mastered the art of keeping your money in your pocket for the worst of times.

Click Through Rate

After knowing your Quality Score, the next thing to look for is click through rate. It is helps determine if your keywords and ads are targeting the right audience, it also helps in benchmarking which techniques and keywords are performing better over time and are completing your campaign goals.

CTR? Customers that Run-away? I am confused.

If you do it right, customers will not run-away but run towards you, hoards of them bringing lots of cash and we definitely like the sound of that. This all sounds very exciting but how can we calculate CTR and use it to our advantage?

Calculate CTR in your AdWords account

Calculating CTR is as easy as adding 2+2 but is as important as the cash in your bank account.

Click through rate = total number of clicks *100 / total number of impressions.

For example a website with 100 impressions and 2 click would have 2% click through rate and an ad of 56,892 impressions and 234 clicks would have a click through rate of 0.41%.

Tips to improve CTR for your campaign.

Improving your CTR is an art and the best way to master it is to try again and again with all the variations’ of keywords and creative lines that you can think of.

Here’s a link to a blog post on PPCHero with tips to increase your CTR but if you are focused on improving your CTR during your holiday seasons, a few pointers in my earlier blog posts might help.

Conversion Rate

In essence, conversation rate means how well our campaigns are achieving our goals. In my earlier posts on the basic guide to conversion, I explained it as the core metrics to follow which would gain you the most in your campaigns.

Conversion rate is integral if you want your vague goals to be more specific, benchmarking, campaign improvement and even goal alteration.

Calculating conversion rate is another straight forward process but setting it up is another whole dive on its own.

Conversion Rate = Total Conversions/ Total Views x100

Total conversions and total views can be replaced with whatever variable you are trying to calculate, if your goal is only lead generation you can use the lead forms or demo requests divided by total number of visits to the landing page times 100.

Tips to measure conversion rate:

As most of the digital practitioners I know highly recommend it and I will endorse that as well ‘never measure conversion rate without setting a goal’. Setting goals not only help you realise your current position, compare it with past, includes seasonality but also keeps the campaigns in sync with over all campaign or company goals.

Search Query Report

Managing keywords and search query reports is one of the most important tasks while managing a PPC account. Search Query Report allows you to see the exact term that a user typed into Google.

Unless your campaign only has exact match keywords, it will most certainly get some level of unwanted impressions. When you see impressions on your unwanted keywords it decreases your click through rate which in result decreases your quality score meaning you will end up paying a lot more for the same ad listing position in result pages.

Search reports not only give you negative keywords but it also helps you understand the searchers behavior, your visitor’s behavior and search queries that are taking place in your market. Therefore an in-depth study and pattern segmentation will help you target your visitors according to their needs.

How to run a Search Query Report in your AdWords Account

Go into your Google AdWords account and click the keyword tab. Select the date range that you want to get the report at. Your recent campaigns might not have enough data to show thus the reports data retrieval depends upon the size and amount of traffic your accounts receive.

Once you hit the ‘All’ options the report will run and show you all those search queries that triggered your ads.

Search Query Report is also useful for deleting existing low performing keywords and replacing them with new better targeted keywords and more popular search query keywords.

Finding Negative Keywords

The next best advantage of Search Query Reporting is finding keywords that you do not require in your campaigns but are sucking your budget. Seeing how your ads are being triggered may help you notice irrelevant searches. You can easily find these negative keywords isolate them and add to your negative list for a clean, crisp ad campaign saving you adspend and increasing your CTR.

Almost every keyword should appear in the ad text

Google bolds the search results if the search keyword matches the keyword in the ad text. This attracts researches eye and increases the likelihood of getting better CTRs – which Google rewards with better ad positions and lower CPC. Keeping this formula in mind every ad group should be tightly linked to the keywords and ads in the ad group.

Faseeh Shams is a Marketing Executive at Traffic Smart, developer of Adthena, a Competitor Analysis Search Intelligence Solution which is used to deliver the most in-depth and thorough results available for benchmarking, campaign improvement and infringement monitoring.

I was at a friend’s Christmas party and this guy started making small talk with me and asked me what I did for a living.  Once again forgetting that few people know what PPC stands for — let alone what it is — I nonchalantly told him I ran a PPC firm.  He of course scrunched out a pretty puzzled look and asked “PPC?  What’s that?”  I went on to give him the PPC spiel, explaining about keywords, geo-targeting, AdWords, etc., etc.

At the end of my bit, including a few stats about the success rates of PPC, the guy, whose name I discovered was Mark and had just started his own company four months ago, said, “Dang.  Sounds like I need to start doing that.”  So we talked about pricing with agencies and he told me there was no way he could afford it right now.  I mistakenly ended the conversation and moved on at the party.  Stupid me.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that I should have told him people can do their own PPC.  Admittedly, for startups like Mark’s, PPC agencies are often a bit too pricy.  So why not do some of your own?

With a little research and exploration, you can make quite a dent with PPC.  Here are five basic tips I came up with for people who want to do their own PPC:

1. Use specific messaging to differentiate your ad from others. Use two or three terms to make the phrase specific and unique.
2. Have goals, a budget and conversion tracking — PPC campaigns without conversion tracking have no way of measuring success. Never spend any money without it.  Consider using Google’s free code for conversion tracking.
3. Monitor geographic success. Google offers a tool called The Dimensions tab that allows you to track PPC campaigns by region. If a campaign is not generating sales in a particular region, exclude it. Conversely, if a particular region generates high sales, consider creating a second campaign to target that region and language.
4. Have sensible landing pages for ads. If the ad promotes women’s shoes, be sure it links to the website’s page for women’s shoes. This may seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised at how many ads don’t have logical links to the pages they advertise.
5. If all else fails, use an agency. PPC is a tricky art that can be time-consuming and costly if you don’t have the necessary skills and knowledge to run a campaign. Agencies specializing in PPC have the know-how and resources to drive a time and cost-efficient campaign.

So, go to.  Do a little preliminary research, explore a bit and make your PPC campaign successful.  PPC is a powerful marketing tool and with the right methods in place, it can drive revenues for your company and give you a forerunner presence online.  And don’t hesitate to speak up if you’ve got questions. We’re here for you.

PurePPC.com provides full service pay-per-click management and consulting services to clients all over the world. Unlike other PPC agencies that dabble in multiple services, the team at PurePPC.com focuses on delivering the best results through pay-per-click marketing. PurePPC.com has managed millions of dollars in PPC spend and has saved its clients hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing costs.

Want to know your account better? Find out if your PPC account falls into any of these personality types described below.

1. The Happy Account 

This account is like a happy and easy going baby. It works well from the get go. It generates high quality traffic and the cost per clicks and click thru rates are good. Every improvement to this account makes it even more profitable.

Strategy:

Even though this account is a low maintenance account, don’t ignore it. Give it a little TLC regularly (manage bids, add negatives), and it will continue to be profitable. You can also use this account to test new PPC features such as ad extensions and product listing ads.

2. The Predictable Account

As the name suggests, this account is very predictable. This account has predictable high and low seasons or trends. We see this behavior in retail accounts which generally have high seasons during Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

Strategy:

Use this predictability to your advantage,

1. Prepare your account to take full advantage of high seasons. Increase bids and budgets during the high seasons and lower them during the low seasons to meet the ROI goals.

2. Launch remarketing campaigns and display network campaigns to generate more traffic during the high season.

3. Analyze the trends. Use day parting and geographical targeting to make the campaigns more profitable.

3. The Energetic Account 

This account is a very active account. It generates lots of traffic and has multiple campaigns, keywords and ads. New keywords or ads get lots of impressions and clicks, so if you are not watching, this account can become unprofitable very soon. Just like an energetic baby, this account needs a lot of attention to keep it out of trouble.

Strategy:

Monitor the account closely.

1.  Manage budgets and bids closely since they have significant effect on campaign performance.

2. Plan ahead and prepare your account before any major seasonal highs or lows.

3. Perform experiments on keywords, adgroups and ads before adding them to your account.

4. Set alerts and rules to notify you of any problems.

4. The Moody Account

Just like a moody baby, the performance for this account is very unpredictable. One month the conversion rates are great and every one is happy, the next month they plummet without any obvious reason. I see this behavior in accounts which have low traffic and fewer conversions.

Strategy:

Basic strategy for this account is to make the campaign predictable.

1. Avoid broad match keywords since you have no control over the matched search terms. Use phrase match, exact match and few broad match modifier keywords.

2. Use lots of negative keywords.

3. Avoid using this account to test new PPC features. Add new features to this account when you have seen significant improvements in other accounts.

5. The Grumpy Account 

This account is a high maintenance account. No matter what you do, it seems like this account is never happy. Improvements to the account, such as adding negative keywords sometimes have adverse effect on campaign performance. But once the account shows progress, it is very rewarding. I have seen this behavior in accounts which sell high end goods or technical products.

Strategy:

Meet the basic need of the account.

1. Study the customers and industry. Do an in-depth keyword research to find out what your customers are searching for.

2. Use long tailed keywords and avoid head terms if possible.

3. Add industry specific keywords like product names and terms with industry specific jargon to the campaign.

3. Add industry specific jargon to the ad copy to attract the right audience. You may have a lower click thru rate, but the quality of traffic will be better and more likely to convert.

Understanding your account’s personality type and finding the strengths and weaknesses of your account can help you make the account more profitable.

So what is the personality of your PPC account? Is it a happy account, a moody account or does it have multiple personalities? What are your strategies for dealing with your account?

Reference article: http://www.pnmag.com/parenting/your-babys-personality-type

This post is from Archana Pawse of Mission Web Marketing, an Internet marketing agency located in Santa Barbara, California. Mission Web Marketing offers an assortment of web marketing services, including Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Marketing and Web Development.  Archana has Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Microsoft Adcenter certifications.

1. Looking at Your Accounts in 2D

3D isn’t just for James Cameron movies. When you manage your keywords only by CPC, CTR, QS, Average Position, and CPL you are looking at a two 2 dimensional version of your account. Managing this way can seriously hurt your career and endanger your accounts.

Below is an example to help illustrate my point. Most people manage their accounts by cost and CPL. The first shot shows a report for a hypothetical account that shows CPL over a three-month period.

The first month is used as a baseline, and you can see that by December, CPL has seen a 19% increase over October. That’s bad, and you’d be tempted to take some drastic action to get back to the $52 CPL you had in October.

Now let’s say after seeing this you give your client a call to ask about lead quality. A simple request for closing lead data gives you the information you need to see if the leads, at a higher CPL, are as good, better, or worse than previous leads. Here’s what you see:

You can see that while leads are $10 more, sales are $15 less than they were in October. Most clients would be thrilled to be getting more clients (57 in Dec. over 48 in Oct), and would renegotiate your CPL goals if need be.

By looking at what happens to leads after you send them to your clients, you create a more 3 dimensional view of your account. This creates the opportunity to make better decisions and create more value for your clients.

2. Only Building Commoditized Skills

I can teach someone to do bid changes in an hour. A SQR might take a full day to show someone how to interpret it, pull out meaningful keyword additions, and negatives.

Creative ideas that lead to making the needle move are rare: ads that increase CTR by 100% or more happen, but not by accident. Analyzing thousands of lines of data in Google Analytics to determine 50 keywords that never directly convert assist 25% of all your conversions and then know how to act on that information is talent.

These are the skills businesses pay for. It’s assumed you know (or will quickly learn) how to do the basic PPC tasks. What businesses are looking for are people who take that to a new level. I can buy software that handles my bids, budgets, and keywords for me. I haven’t found any software that can look at an account and recommend a complete restructure that includes geo-specific targeting, Search, Display, and Mobile specific campaigns with ad copy that speaks to where users of each vertical are in the sales funnel.

3. Making Others Feel Dumb

The PPC industry is rife with jargon, and while this makes it faster and easier to communicate with others in the field, it makes people who don’t understand them feel like outsiders. But being like most people, they probably don’t tell you they don’t understand. Even if they do ask you to explain, they might still not fully understand., but instead of feeling dumb, they let you move on.

There is a simple way to make sure you don’t assume anything and possibly alienate the person on the other side of the table from you: when you communicate with anyone, focus on protecting his/her self-esteem.

Instead of saying,

“Your impression share on remarketing is 40%, and that 60% IS lost is budget related, so I am going to reallocate spend.”

Say,

“I know you understand impression share, and how it works. But do you mind letting me explain how I use the term, and what I think we should do based on where ours currently is?”

Then give a brief explanation along with your recommendations.

Doing this takes the pressure off your client/boss to know what you are talking about and opens the door for real communication. You’ve made it about you explaining it and not about them now knowing what it is.  Chances are a lot of people will argue that they want to sound smart, that they have to prove value and show they know what they are talking about. Look, most people want to sound/be smart, but think about the smartest people you know. Do you think they are smart because they talk over your head? Or do you think they are smart because they can take complex topics and turn them into something you can understand? I know for me, it’s the latter. In fact, if someone talks over my head I typically assume they don’t know enough about what they are talking about to explain it to me.

4. Thinking that Hitting Goals is Enough

Ideally, businesses set their goals based on their business objectives. At the most basic level your CPL goal, for example, is typically born out of what percent of revenue a business can afford to pay in marketing costs. If a sale generates $1,000,  they want to keep their marketing costs at 10%, and it takes 10 leads to create a sale, then your CPL goal is $10. ($1000 / 10% allocated to marketing costs = $100 divide that by the 10 leads it takes to get a sale = $10 CPL)

Because this is how goals are set, it’s easy to think that if you hit those goals the client is happy. Unfortunately, it’s typically not that straight forward. The way I look at goals is that they tell me what the worst acceptable level of performance is. This means that if I am hitting a $10 CPL every month, but nothing else positive is happening, I am performing at the worst acceptable level possible

A common phrase to hear is, “The goal was $10, and I was at $9.75, why were they unhappy?” They weren’t happy because first, you were just barely hitting the goal. Also, you didn’t return their emails quickly, you didn’t seem to care about what happened to the leads after the received them, the leads closed at a lower rate than other leads, and on and on.

So if you are hitting your goals, how do you know if your client/boss is unhappy? Here’s a question I have asked a client that I felt might be holding something back from me:

“Whenever a client moves from one agency to another they always say that the first agency was great. The people were smart, they worked hard, and they got results. But… blank. That blank might be that they didn’t communicate enough, or they couldn’t implement changes quickly. Whatever it is, it’s usually something that the agency wasn’t aware of. My job is to prevent that from happening to Hanapin Marketing. So let me ask you, I know you’re happy, after all we are hitting all our goals, but if you had to pick something you were dissatisfied with, that “but… blank” statement, what would it be?”

Those are four mistakes I see happen regularly that keep people from advancing their careers in PPC.  What mistakes do you see PPC managers make that go beyond simple errors and tragically hurt their careers?

As PPC pros know, a campaign is never finished, and that’s a big challenge for your average resource strapped non-profit. Even if they can somehow lasso the know-how to set up a campaign, they rarely have time for ongoing optimization. As a result they only end up spending a small fraction of their grant. A Google Grant is a terrible thing to waste. Just think what a $10K a month in AdWords love could do for your favorite cause.

The Wren’s Nest, a literary museum in Atlanta, Georgia devoted to preserving the legacy of author Joel Chandler Harris of Uncle Remus fame, was in just that situation. They were chugging along spending about six or seven hundred Google bucks a month and getting about 30 visitors to their site.

I helped them more than double their spend, and their CTR, using some basic best practices. You know, things like organizing their keywords into themed adgroups, using keywords in the copy, and relevant URLs. In comparison to the daily grind of poring over reports and trying to wring ever more out of mature campaigns, this was fun, like fishing with dynamite.

The other thing that made it really fun: total creative control and a virtually unlimited budget. The Wren’s Nest was so happy to get help with their campaign that I didn’t have to do a whole lot of hand holding or selling them on my ideas. I was free to try anything I thought would work, without worrying about hurting my client’s bottom line. How often does that happen managing a for-profit campaign?

I found the Wren’s Nest through Media Cause, a non-profit founded by ex-Googler Eric Facas to connect non-profits with search marketing and social media professionals who want to donate their time and skills, and maybe learn a thing or two in the process. This is a great way to have some good, clean PPC fun, broaden your skills, test your ideas, and add to your resume. And since you’ll be helping a good cause, you’ll not only be a PPC hero but a real hero at the same time.

Lynn Bruno is an independent marketing strategist, AdWords certified professional and do-gooder in Cupertino, CA. She can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnmbruno.