Call Metrics & Its Benefits

If you’re driving traffic through any form of internet marketing campaigns you are always looking for ways to track its effectiveness and justify ROI for your ad dollars. This is a great way to justify the offline conversion of your traffic and add value to your clients by letting them know the real effectiveness of a campaign if you are ultimately driving sales leads or calls over the phone.

How To Setup Call Metrics

1. First, go into your Adwords campaign under the Ad Extensions tab and add a Call Extension to your campaign.
2. Establish what the phone number you want those calls redirected to.
3. Check the box to use Call Metrics and you’ll be able to establish whether you would like a toll free number or a local area code number associated with your tracking that will be displayed. This brings up another factor of marketing and the local spin of your business if this applies to you. Users love to see local phone numbers and know that they are talking to someone local, so if you are a local business then I would recommend using a local phone number. Even if you need to start separating out campaigns for different geographic areas to achieve this the extra effort is worth it.
4. Either way now Google will use its Google Voice platform to assign you a phone number and they will handle the forwarding and tracking of that number. Another thing I want to mention with this is there is also another feature I have skipped over. The Call-Only Format is only possible to use if your device is capable of making phone calls. This could be any mobile phone or computer with Skype or a VOIP system. This will disable the functionality to click the headline of the ad and go to the website, and give the user only one option to interact with the ad and that is using the Click To Call functionality. If you’re trying to drive sales through a phone number then who doesn’t love a 100% conversion rate. Also, if you haven’t broken out your PPC campaigns and separated out a mobile strategy then you need to do that as well.

Google also announcing a few other changes with this launch:

1. More detailed reporting. In March we enhanced Call Metrics reporting to show the time, duration, and caller area code for each call. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re now making reporting available at the ad group and campaign level for manually-dialed calls (subject to minimum volume). And you’ll still be able to segment reports to compare how many calls were received from mobile clicks-to-call and how many were manually dialed after the ad was shown on a desktop, notebook, or tablet computer.

2. New pricing for certain calls. A $1 USD (or equivalent in CAD) charge applies to manually dialed calls completed to your Google forwarding numbers. These calls occur when a potential customer on a desktop, notebook or tablet computer sees your ad and dials the number shown.

Pricing for mobile clicks-to-call remains unchanged, whether you use Call Metrics or not. They continue to be charged as regular mobile search ad clicks.

3. Call Extensions replace Phone Extensions. To reduce possible ambiguity, we’ve renamed Phone Extensions to Call Extensions.

Reporting On Your Call Details

An extra feature that makes this even more valuable is the way in which we are able to report on this data. If you go into your campaign and look under the Dimensions tab you’ll want to view the Call Details information. This will give you:

• Start Time Of The Call
• End Time Of The Call
• Status – Received or Missed Call
• Duration In Seconds
• Caller Area Code

This information is very valuable because it gives you very valuable information regarding the effectiveness of your PPC budget. Also you should be using this data to setup your Day Parting strategy to further target your ads to drive the most ROI.

(click for full-size image)

(Sourced by Google Inside AdWords)

This report follows the announcement made by the Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian, back in April about Understanding the Average Position metric where he explained “there is a big difference between when your ad appears in position #1 above the search results and when your ad appears in position #1 on the side.” Hal further explains, “This distinction is important, since, on average, ads that appear above the search results tend to get substantially more clicks than ads that appear on the right-hand side.” This distinction is clearly highlighted in the report.

There is a big difference in performance when an ad appears in position #1 at the top of search results and when an ad appears in position #1 on the side.

To help advertisers capitalize on that, Google last week announced its new “top vs. side” Adwords report segment. Advertisers can use the report to see how ads perform above and to the side of Google search results. While there may come a time when top vs. side targeting or bidding options are available, for now it is useful just to segment the data to help make bidding decisions and analyze comparative performance before and after changes.

The report will help you note how well your ad is performing be it on the top or the right hand side of the search result. This is done in Google’s bid to help the webmasters perk up their search optimization campaigns. The main aim seems to be to help you evaluate the relationship that exists between the location and the clicks and conversion of your ads. In addition to that it will also aid brand advertisers to get a transparent views of the location and the times their brand terms are being placed above the search results.

How to make use of the data:

Perhaps you must be wondering, “Okay all of that sounds good, but how do I actually use it?” Andrew Truong, from Google explains “To segment your performance data by where your ads appeared on Google and Search Partner search results pages, you simply need to add the “Top vs. Side” segment to your data table. Here’s how:

1. Select the Campaign, Ad groups, Ads or Keywords tab of your AdWords account.
2. Click the Segment button in the toolbar above your data table.
3. Select Top vs. side from the drop-down. Results will appear in rows beneath each of your ads.”
So, follow these simple steps and avail the services that are on offer by Google AdWords. The report sounds very productive. This report it will help you make better bidding decisions.

Google says that, “We expect that these personalized annotations will help sites stand out by showing users which search results are personally relevant to them. As a result, +1′s could increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to the sites people care about.” The +1′s will also be considered by Google just like it uses social signals from other services to determine a page’s relevance and ranking. It works quite like the Facebook ‘Like’ option.

How it works

When you run a search, with your Google account signed in, and find a quality page in the organic search results, you can click the +1 button and recommend it (the site or page) to your friends. The next time your friends sign in to their Google account and run a similar search, he/she will find that you have recommended a particular site or page. Your friend can then quickly follow the recommended link knowing it is worth a visit as it has been recommended by someone he/she knows and trusts.

The +1′s, according to Google, will make search even more personal and relevant. Users can recommend the content, ads etc., that are of high quality and the site or pages that has the quality content gets human recommendations and can expect better ranked for their quality. Here is a video of the +1 button released by Google. You can visit the Google Webmaster Central Help Center for any further +1 related queries.

Google outlined some of the most popular examples of rules that AdWords users have created to help you take better advantage of the feature.

Click here for details on how to set up these types of rules. You’ll need to adjust them to meet your business needs and goals.

Scheduling ads

• Turning on/off special ads for a promotional event
• Turning on/off certain ads on a repeating basis (e.g., every weekend)
• Turning on/off a special ad campaign for a promotional event

Pausing low-performing ads or keywords

• Pausing low-performing keywords based on success metrics (e.g., high cost per conversion)
• Pausing low-performing ads based on success metrics (e.g., low CTR)

Bids and bid scheduling

• Adjusting bids for keywords based on cost per conversion
• Changing bids to reach a desired average position
• Raising bids to ensure ads show on the first page
• Bid scheduling (e.g., a higher bid during certain hours of the day)

Controlling budgets and cost

• Increasing budget for campaigns that convert well (using cost per conversion)
• Budget scheduling (e.g., higher budget on certain days of the week)
• Pausing campaigns that have spent a certain amount partway through the month
• Pausing campaigns that have received a certain number of clicks partway through the day

General examples

• Understanding how to make a rule work on one, several or all campaigns
• Excluding keywords from a rule

To learn more about Automated Rules, please visit Ad Innovations. Happy automating!

From Google

The market is always changing. Today you might be the only one advertising a particular business on search engines, by next month you might already have five more competitors, and six months later…you get my point. When there are more and more competitors bidding for the same keyword, the minimum bid for that keyword is most likely to increase by a significant amount. If you don’t keep an eye on your biddings regularly, your ads might fall to very low positions, and in the worst scenario, your ads will stop displaying once the minimum bid exceeds your current bidding.

This is just one of a million reasons why PPC management is important. If you have a small or home business, you can probably do the management in-house; and if you are a big company with hundreds and thousands of products, you can always contract a search marketing company to do PPC management for you as well.

If you are doing PPC management in-house or by yourself, one thing to avoid is making changes too often. Randomness in the market is almost inevitable. One ad may perform exceptionally well today, but crappy the very next day. If you make changes on a daily basis trying to counteract the fluctuations, you are more likely to hurt your campaign than actually improving it. Plus, there will a significant time lag between the moment you made the changes and when the changes starting to impact your campaign.

We’ve got requests from our clients in the past asking us to do “ad testing” on a daily basis. We simply told them “it’s impossible. We need time to gather accurate data.”

With each change that you make, let it run for a few days, a week, or a month if you have to. Make sure you have gathered enough information before you make your next move.

To increase traffic to your blog, you have to be effective in your website promotion activities. This may include your blog appearance, SEO, social media promotions and email marketing.

See below:

Blog Appearance

1. Blogging Platform: There are several good and free blogging platforms available online. Most famous platforms are WordPress, Joomla, Blogger and Drupal. WordPress is the most preferred platform by many bloggers and it is also originally designed for blogging. But if you want to put some dynamic functionality like social networking and ecommerce features, you may consider using Joomla and Drupal.On the other hand, it is also possible if you want to create your own blog site from raw. Hence, it will take you more time unlike setting up a site using WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. Also, in using either one of these three options, several modules and plugins are already available for your convenience plus worldwide support communities that are willing to help you out with your platform issues.
2. Color Theme: Your choice of colors is very important for your blog appearance. Through colors, you can trigger different emotions of your readers. Most blogs tend to use light colors for their backgrounds, and dark colors for the texts, (such as White & Black) this makes the content more readable for general users.
3. Navigational Layout: Make your layout navigational. Organize your links and blocks well. Make your recent posts and most famous articles are accessible to your readers. Study and experiment well for your ad positions. Also, putting them in the right places can make your number of click through higher.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

1. Relevant Content for Your Focused Niche: When we say relevant content, it means content that is helpful to readers.The web is continuously being updated every day, where users are continuously looking for good content that relates to them, aim to publish new content on a daily, or weekly biases that will link to your audience.
2. Link Building: The number of back links is essential if you want higher page ranks. Like voting system, search engines will determine your website relevance with the number of link presence you have on the web.. These links can be achieved in various ways, Submitting to bookmarks is an effective link building activity, or by writing guest articles, or even networking on social media websites.
3. Public Relations: Public relations like press release and article submissions can also help you promote your site, increase back links and expose more your website.
4. Ping: Submitting to ping sites like Ping-O-Matic everytime you made changes in your site can trigger the search engines to visit your website and index your new pages.

Social Media Promotions

1. Twitter: Recently, Google started indexing twitter pages. Therefore, whatever you tweet in connection to your website will affect your online presence. Be creative with your tweets, add your keywords and link them to your website. However, re-tweet other helpful posts also to gain more followers.
2. Facebook: Facebook is now the largest social networking site on the web. Everyday billions of users are interacting on this site, which is an enough reason to invest time and promote your websites on Facebook.
3. Other Online Community and Blogging Sites: Aside from Twitter and Facebook, investing time to other blogging sites and online communities like forums and other social networking sites can gain more exposures to your websites. Prevent spamming, post relevant comments that would help others. With this, you are not only promoting your blog, but you are also building relationships to your peer bloggers.
4. Commenting on other blogs: Create a list of blogs that you would read regularly, and which relate to your business. Aim to leave useful comments on articles that are published on these blog, be creative with your comments, by writing comments that would provide extra value to the post and readers.
5. Forums: A good way of building your presence and getting users to your blog, is by using forums. Register with forums within your niche, and answer few questions that the users ask, do this regularly, over time you would build your brand awareness and start to drive traffic to your site. When answering questions, be as helpful as you can, and provide answers that would be effective and helpful to all reading that question.

Email Marketing

1. Pitch Page for Mailing List: Sending emails to people who do not give you any permission to do so is loud and clear spamming. Do not do this. Create a pitch page or pitch block in your website where your readers can submit their email address to subscribe to your newsletters. You can get embed codes for this by using tools like Aweber or FeedBurner.
2. Good Layout and Content: Sending an attractive and corporate looking e-newsletter can prevent your recipients to hit the “spam” button. Be creative with your layout and give them good content. Put links directing to your website. Also, offering some games, rewards or other promotions can be a good call to action to your readers to visit your blog.

Guest Blogging

Last but not the least also, have a presence as a guest blogger on various authority and related sites of your industry. As guest blogging is more than writing a blog post for some other blog, it has got many benefits, which can improve your image as a blogger and also help you promote your own blog by reaching out to communities established by these blogs.

Having your ads show up at the top of Google requires more than just money to bid on keywords. Google assigns each ad a Quality Score based on the keywords you are targeting. Google says it looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A high Quality Score means your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Here are 5 strategies to improving your Quality Score and your PPC campaign on Google.

1. Get rid of ads with a low Click Through Rate (CTR) – Your CTR is an important part of calculating your Quality Score. Ads with low CTRs lower your Quality Score, which means it costs you more to run the same ad. Also, Google assigns Quality Scores to ad groups, so a low CTR can also affect future ads. Be sure to constantly test slightly different wording and pick ads with the best CTR to bring in more customers and lower your CPC.
2. Remove keywords that aren’t helping – Bidding on highly keywords that are relevant, but very general, may hurt your keyword performance. Large companies may be able to outbid you on the more general keywords, so try to focus your keywords to be as specific as possible.
3. Add content to your website and landing page – When creating a website or landing page for your PPC campaign, use extremely unique content and constantly update the information. One way to do this is to create a blog for your website that is updated regularly. It not only shows you at being an expert in your specific field, but it also creates new content that will help improve your Quality Score.
4. Include information about your company – Having a clear “About Us” page on your website and a privacy policy for anyone who gives your company their information helps improve your Quality Score. Transparency is a key factor in calculating a company’s keyword Quality Score.
5. Have fast-loading pages – A slow-loading landing page equals a bad user experience to Google. Things like large images, animation, and flash graphics can all slow down your page load time. Also, if your website goes down and Google sees that, then that will hurt your Quality Score as well.

Running a successful pay-per-click campaign on Google means paying attention to your Quality Score and improving it wherever it is possible.

Here are four ways to refine your AdWords campaign to see where money spent is producing the best return and to adjust settings to maximize return on investment.

1. The Segment option. This is one of the newest additions to AdWords. The Segment option is available within your Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords tabs. Within each, the options are different, but allow for viewing of your results in specific ways of measurement. This can include breaking into specific units of time, such as weeks or days of the week.

By viewing your data this way you can discover what weeks are most active for a seasonal market, as well as information such as which days of the week are most prone to getting better conversion rates. By knowing this data, you can reduce costs where your conversions are more expensive, increase bids where you are seeing better conversion rates, and in all these ways increase ROI.

2. A-B Split Testing for ads. This can be one of the most effective means of increasing CTR for your ad groups. Have two or three ads active for each ad group. After a number of clicks (ideally at least 20 clicks on each ad), choose the better performing ad. Replace the more poorly performing ad with a different ad copy. Repeat the whole operation to find which advertisement will produce the best CTR or the best conversion rate.

Doing this can often improve your CTR by a factor of 2 or more, and a higher CTR improves Quality Score as well as increasing lead generation. To get an accurate reading for proper A-B split testing, make sure your campaign setting for Ad Delivery->Rotation is set to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”.

3. Remarketing with the Audiences tab. This is an element of AdWords that works only for the Content Network. When the Audiences tab is enabled, you can create remarketing lists to target specific visitors to your site. By placing code on specific pages within your site, a cookie is put on all users who visit these pages.

Then when they visit other sites with similar targeted themes, a very relevant ad is shown to these users to give them motivation to return to your site to make a purchase or opt-in. This works by reaching out to visitors who had visited your site previously and displayed some kind of interest in that market. Often this remarketing approach can increase conversions by contacting people who have an established interest in your products and reconnecting with them.

4. Changing advertising frequency/rate settings. Advertising can be adjusted in AdWords to not just advertise for certain days and hours of each day, but the amount for CPC can be adjusted to raise or lower bidding rates for certain days and hours. The setting is within each Campaign settings area, under Advanced settings->Schedule and choosing Ad Scheduling, the selecting “Bid Adjustment” inside the scheduling option.

After doing research for performance for specific days within your campaign you can make changes to cut costs and increase ROI nicely. For example, after viewing that you are getting little or no conversions on certain days of the week, you can pause these days with this setting. In the same way, any days that have better conversion rates can have an increased bid amount to maximize CTR for those days. This can all help improve business results for your AdWords campaign.

By knowing about and using these different options within AdWords you can greatly improve your pay per click results. AdWords optimization is a definite way to increase ROI and open additional opportunities to expand your marketing methods. Properly using these techniques can cut costs, increase profits, and help you make the most out of this powerful tool.

Every contestant is obese. When a SEO is first contacted by an internet business, whether to join the In-House team or as an outside consultant, it is very rare that the website they start work on is doing well at all. Almost certainly, the website will be fat, out of shape, and will require work, whether through link building (working out), or on-site optimization (diet and lifestyle). If things were working out great and the person had great control of their site or their SEO services, they wouldn’t be contacting you, the personal trainer.

The process takes a long time. SEO is not a quick fix. While we can make some quick, immediate changes to a website (diet and lifestyle), it takes long term commitment to link building (exercise) and maintenance of the website to get to our ideal image, which is a front page rankings. Hopefully, these front page rankings will convert traffic into customers (dates!).

Every person requires a different trainer style. Every client and company is different. Some clients will require ninety e-mails and countless phone-calls to finally change their title tags (dietary habits), while others will do so instantaneously. Some of these clients will like you a little too much and start calling you even when you shouldn’t be working. This happened to Bob Harper in Season 8 with Amanda – I know, I thought it was a little weird too.

• Claim your local listings on the major sites (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, 4Squared, Best of the Web, City Search, Angie’s List).
• Set up a fan page on Facebook and a Twitter Account.
• Set up a blog on your site (www.your site.com/blog) and create a new post for each of your most frequently asked questions. *Tip push those posts out via your Facebook & Twitter account.
• Update the “title tag” on each of your website pages & make each title unique. *Tip use localized / keyword rich titles.
• Make sure that your full company name and address are listed at the bottom of each page of your site along with a “text link” navigation structure.
• Create a simple video about your services & upload it to YouTube. *Tip Title the YouTube Video with those same localized / keyword rich keywords.
• Get Links! Be sure that you have a link to your site from any and all associations that you belong to (E.G. Trade Association, Chamber of Commerce, Networking Groups, etc).
• Set up a pay-per-click account on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing).

If you take care of these simple items your local presence will be more optimized than 99% of the sites in your market and you will start to see Your Company dominate the web in your area for what you do. Local business SEO work is based on our client’s geographical target market. Site optimization focuses on local link building through local listings and directory submissions to increase city specific traffic.

Author: Josh Nelson

1. CTR: how often your PPC ad gets clicked in comparison to how often it’s shown.
2. Quality of your landing page: SEO variables (off page and on), page performance and transparency (more on this in a second).
3. Quality of your overall website: SEO variables (off page and on, for your entire website and company transparency.

Example:

<META NAME=”distribution” CONTENT=”global”>
<META NAME=”Language” CONTENT=”English”>
<META NAME=”Copyright” CONTENT=”Company Name“>
<META NAME=”author” CONTENT=”Company Name “>
<META NAME=”Publisher” CONTENT=”Company Name“>
<META NAME=”Designer” CONTENT=”Poonam Bhatt”>
<META NAME=”Revisit-After” CONTENT=”3 Days”>
<META NAME=”distribution” CONTENT=”Global”>
<META NAME=”audience” CONTENT=”All”>
<META NAME=”Robots” CONTENT=”All”>
<META NAME=”Geography” CONTENT=”Company Address“>
<META NAME=”city” CONTENT=”New York City”>
<META NAME=”country” CONTENT=”USA”>
<META NAME=”rating” CONTENT=”General”>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Expires” CONTENT=”Never”>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”CACHE-CONTROL” CONTENT=”PUBLIC”>

Page Title Tag

The Title Tag must contain no more than 60 characters (generally, 100 characters may be indexed). This is the text that appears in the blue title-bar of your web browser.

Author Information – bio Tag

The Author Tag is for the person who wrote the material for the site. Normally people add up their names such as content writer, developers, SEO and SEM.

Website Subject Tag

The Subject Tag is for what your site is about. Music, Home Remodeling, Security, search engine optimization, etc. You can use upto 100 characters to write an ideal subject title for your website.

Page Description Tag

The Description Tag can have up to 150 characters. Generally, we use 200 to 250 characters in the description Tag which may be indexed, although only a slighter part of this amount may be displayed. You can find page description under the Google Results for a particular keyword search just above the teaser url path. Normally we call this a site or a page snippet. In other words this is a quick summary of the information on the page.

Classification Tags

Classification tag is quite similar to description but more in detail.

Keywords Tags

In the Keyword tag you can use everything relating to your site rich content that you think someone will search for to find your site. Its all upto you how many keywords you use to optimize your website. In general we create contents and then optimize them for a particular keyword targeting to that content.

Geography Tags

Where are you located? You can use Geography Meta tags to provide information about your geo location to the search engines. Like, if you are living in the California, USA, you can put a full street address (USA, CA, Montero, and St.12) in Meta Tags.

Language Tags

Is your site in English, Spanish, French, German or what? You can use Language Meta Tags to supply language information to search engines. In other words this Tag is used to known as localization tag.

Copyrights Tags

Who is the Owner of the site? We use normally a Company Name in copyrights tag e.g. Smart Solutions Net Technologies ®

Zip Code Tags

Enter your zip code in Zip Code Met Tags. You can use your state or city Zip Code to supply the local information to the Search Engines.

City or Town Tags

Your City or town name. E.g. New Mexico Nevada.

Country Tags

Your Country, you must use all names in Country Meta Tags e.g. USA, United States, United States Of America, America, etc.

Revisit-After Tags

This tells search engine how often this page updates. (Eg. 25 days) Mostly search engines ignore this Meta tags and to follow their own policies of visiting a website.

Distribution Tags

This distribution Meta tags normally used to publish a website in some limited areas and regions where the webmaster or a site owner needs to get traffic.

Robots Tags

You can use robots tags to direct search engines to index your pages with noidex, nofollow, index, follow links on a page. The values ALL and NONE set all directives on or off: [ALL=INDEX,FOLLOW] and [NONE=NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW].

The above Meta tags are in detail and complete, these meta tags will be added after the “html” tag and used to put before the “body” area of the page. You can use these Meta tags globally for your website or can add up for a particular page. This article has shown that how easily you can write such advance Meta tags without doing hard work on them. You can also use such free online tools to get Meta tags. But I’d recommend you to do not use these services for security reason. I’m hoping that this article will help you to create such advance Meta Tags for your websites. In the next article I’ll explain how to write effective page titles and page description for a particular page or a website.

• AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE)

This tool, which is currently in beta, lets you test and measure changes to your keywords, your AdWords bidding, ad groups and placements. Basically you run your existing campaign alongside an experimental campaign.

You choose what percentage of auctions you’d like each campaign to participate in, and then watch what happens. If your experimental campaign is significantly more successful than your original campaign, you can decide to apply the changes to all of your auctions.

• Analyze Competition Feature

Google has added a new tool to the AdWords Opportunities tab that allows you to see how your campaign performance compares to the average performance of other advertisers. Google measures such indicators as click-through rate, average position, and impressions.

It shows these metrics for each of the different categories that represent your offerings. It can help you identify which aspects of your campaign are inferior to your competition, and then prompt you to improve those aspects accordingly.

• Ad Sitelinks

Ad Sitelinks let you add additional links to pages within your site in your ads, provided your ads appear at the top of search results. The idea is that more people will click through to your site if you offer them more options. The feature was introduced in November, though this summer Google add a couple of new characteristics.

One new characteristic is that additional links can be condensed into one line of text (previously the only option was two lines). The other change is that advertisers no longer need Google’s approval to set up Ad Sitelinks for their campaigns. You can set up Ad Sitelinks in the Campaign Settings tab.

• Keyword Diagnosis Tool

This new tool lets you see which of your pay-per-click keywords are currently prompting your ads to show, and why the other keywords aren’t spurring ads. You can access it from the More Actions drop-down menu within the Keyword tab.

If you want you can limit your diagnosis to a particular country and/or language. If you are seeing that certain keywords are not resulting in ads because of Quality Score issues, you might decide to resolve those issues. Or you might choose to increase your bids to get your ads shown.

• Broad Match Modifier

This new AdWords management feature lets you create keywords that are more targeted than broad match and have a greater reach than phrase or exact match. To implement this feature, you put a plus sign (+) in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word following a (+) sign must appear in the user’s query exactly or as a close variation.

The words that are not preceded by a (+) sign will prompt ads on more significant query variations. This feature will likely drive more traffic for those switching from broad match, and attract more qualified traffic for those switching from phrase or exact match.

• Reports Moving to Campaigns Tab

The AdWords Report Center is slowly being phased out as performance reports are moved onto the Campaigns tab. According to Google, it’s best to put performance information on the same page where you manage your campaign.

Reports include campaign reports, ad group reports, and account-level reports. They will specifically be stored in a new part of the Campaigns tab called the Control panel and library.

• Google Ad News

In June Google unveiled Google Ad News, a website that aggregates advertising news, including news related to AdWords. The site is organized into advertising categories, including search advertising; mobile advertising; and TV, radio and print.

For advertisers and advertising professionals with little time to sift through the categories, a top advertising news category provides Google’s most valued advertising-related articles. Articles come from such publications as The Detroit News, Business Week, and The Guardian.

10. Spyfu: Spyfu provides competitive intelligence for keywords and ad copy. This is a great tool to identify any keyword gaps you might have with your competitors. There is a pro version, but the free version gives you the big picture overview.

9. Geo Keyword List Generator: This is a great tool for building out geo modified keyword list. Just add a zip code and radius and this tool will pull in all cities, zip codes and abbreviations of relevant geo in that area.

8. Typo Generator: Similar to the geo generator, but this tool quickly produces common misspellings and typos of the desired search term.

7. Niche Keyword Finder: This is a great resource to ensure your bases are covered with your keyword portfolio. This often picks up themes that would normally go unnoticed.

6. Keyword Mixer: A quick way to build out a long-tail keyword list.

5. MSN Ad Lab: A full range of tools ranging from audience intelligence to keyword research. I also recommend adding the free Excel plug in.

4. Compete: Very similar to Spyfu, but sometimes the results differ, so it’s best to reference both sources.

3. Ad Words Wrapper: This is a great tool for creating match types.

2. Keyword Map: Another keyword generation tool, but this will display the results visually and showcase areas of possible expansion.

1. Google: There are really 11 resources included in this one.  Rather than going through each one individually, I’ve provided a little blurb about some of the ones used more frequently. I recommend using and researching all of these on your own though.

• • Google Ad Words Editor – This is a great time saver for building and setting up huge campaigns.
  • Google Website Optimizer – This tool allows you to test and optimize site content and design.
  • Google Analytics – Provides much of what an expensive analytics package can for free.
  • Google Insights for Search – A great keyword tool for determining seasonality and trends.
  • Google Mobile Ad Preview Tool – Offers a quick way to see your ads on mobile devices.
  • Other Google tools include: Google traffic estimator, Google Alerts, Google Trends, Google Ad Planner, Google URL Builder and most recently the competitive tools through the Ad Words dashboard.

A keyword database is a completely different approach to research and manage PPC keywords. Compared to a keyword list, it’s:

• Private and proprietary
• Easier to organize and manage
• Easier to update and expand
• More actionable
• Collaborative

Essentially, it’s a flexible infrastructure that enables you to work with large numbers of keywords and quickly determine which pockets of keywords have the most business value. You can then translate your database into a highly effective PPC campaign structure.

Building a keyword database isn’t difficult, and as your campaigns scale, you’ll find it much faster and easier to keep things running smoothly. Here’s the five-step process to build an effective keyword database for PPC marketing.

Step 1: Start your PPC keyword research

The most important part of a keyword database, naturally, is keywords! To build a comprehensive, up-to-date database, it’s important to look at keyword research as an ongoing process, aggregating keywords from multiple sources.

Here are four sources, both public and private, that will help you gain a complete picture of the terms you should be using in your campaigns:

• Public keyword tools: A traditional Web-based keyword suggestion tool is based on popularity; remember that overall popularity doesn’t guarantee relevance to your audience.
• Historical site logs: Your server logs are a great source of keyword data—they contain a record of the real search queries that have led people to your site.
• Web analytics: The keyword reports in your analytics provide a continuous stream of new keywords. Incorporate those new insights into your research.
• Search query reports: The search query reports in AdWords Editor are another source of real data. These tell you the actual search queries that have triggered your PPC ads.

Pooling these sources gives you a personalized database that is highly relevant to your business. Be sure to keep your research up-to-date with traffic and conversion stats to see which keywords do the most work in your PPC campaigns.

Step 2: Segment and organize your keywords
Better keyword research gets you a lot closer to more profitable PPC campaigns, but to reap the full benefits of your research, it’s crucial to organize your keywords into small, manageable groups of closely related terms. This process will improve your campaigns by enabling:

• Better landing pages: It’s easier to write targeted, high-ranking copy around close-knit keyword groups.
• Better ads: Similarly, you can quickly write relevant, compelling text ads for well-structured keyword groups (aka ad groups).
• Better click-through rates: More relevant pages and ads grab a more qualified audience, so your CTRs and conversion rates improve.
• Better Quality Scores: High CTR and relevance lead to high Quality Scores, so you pay less for better positioning.

A well-organized database structure makes everything else you do for PPC, from adding new keywords to managing bids, simpler and more effective.

Step 3: Cut out waste with negative keywords
With strong keyword research, you can identify profitable keyword opportunities. But for high ROI, it’s equally important to identify and eliminate waste. This means discovering negative keywords, or irrelevant terms that eat up pay-per-click advertising budgets without generating quality leads.

Here are a few ways to find negative keyword candidates:

• Generic negative keyword lists: These aren’t a bad way to get started, but remember that generic negative keywords may not apply to your specific niche, and many are likely missing.
• During regular keyword research: When looking for relevant keywords, also keep your eyes open for suggestions that aren’t relevant to your business.
• Search query reports: Regularly look through your search query reports in AdWords and remove irrelevant keywords from your ad groups.
• Organic log files: By using your own log files for negative keyword discovery, you can catch irrelevant keywords before they trigger your ads.

Step 4: Create strong, targeted text ads
The next step is to write text ads for each keyword/ad group. If you followed the above process, your ad groups are already highly targeted, so it should be simple to write strong, targeted ads. Here are some tips for writing effective PPC ad copy:

• Include the top traffic: driving keywords in the title, text, and display URL of the ad when possible.
• Don’t overgeneralize: address a specific segment of your audience.
• Test several ads for each ad group. Google will rotate the ads so you can see which works best.
• Always include a call to action.

In addition, to maximize Quality Score, your ads should clearly be relevant to their associated landing pages.

Step 5: Repeat as necessary to maintain gains
One of the benefits of a keyword database is the ability to expand your research without losing control. So keep monitoring, testing, and tweaking your campaigns to improve results. And keep adding keywords from your analytics! The keywords your clients use to find you are among your most valuable marketing assets.

Here are some Pay Per Click advertising tips that will help you get started:

1. Establish a Budget – This may seem simple and obvious but creating a budget and sticking to it is the best way to keep from overspending and falling victim to bidding wars for popular search terms.

2. Develop a PPC Marketing Plan – Creating a plan in the early stages gives you a template to follow which should include thorough research of your industry, your competition, and a prioritized list of your targeted keywords and phrases.

3. Consider your Target Audience – Spend some time assessing who you want to click on your ad, the search terms they are likely to use, and how broad or narrow your intended demographic may be. Determining your audience in the early stages will help to inform your decisions in every phase of the campaign.

4. Identify Niche Opportunities – Instead of focusing on the most popular search terms where costs and competition will be steep, think about specific two- and three-word phrases that may have been overlooked by your competitors.

5. Write Compelling Ad Copy – You have a finite amount of space, so choose every word carefully to entice your audience to click on your ad. Most web users know the difference between sponsored and organic search results but if your ad copy leads them to believe that the link will help them find what they’re looking for, your click-through rates and sales will take off.

6. Craft Custom Landing Pages – This is essential. Each ad must take the viewer to a landing page where they can quickly and easily find what they need. Always remember that web users scan content and the decision to stay or look elsewhere is made in seconds.

7. Create and Analyze Performance Reports – These reports will tell you which ads are underperforming and which are exceeding expectations. Use this data to fine tune and adjust your marketing plan. Track your results at regular intervals.

The following tips provide the framework for developing a successful and cost effective pay per click campaign.

Time/Day Parting – Google allows advertisers to determine the day of week or even the time of day they want their ads to display. This can be a very useful tool for small business advertisers who know when their customers are most likely to look for their product or service. By setting your ads to display at only high performance times you increase the effectiveness of your campaign and reduce your costs.

Match Types – Gone are the days of simply adding keywords that are all set to broad match and hoping for a return. Sure, casting a larger net brings in more traffic, but it also punishes your budget. The quality of that traffic might also suffer depending on the chosen keywords. Try using the available match types, especially exact match, to control costs and which searches are actually displaying your ads.

Negative Keywords – Selecting negative keywords to offset unwanted traffic is an absolute must for any campaign, large or small. For example, f a florist that sells only fresh flowers and plants might want to include the negative “artificial” to prevent traffic from artificial flower type keywords. Using negatives also allows you to pursue higher volume keywords without the exposure to unrelated searches.

Geo Targeting – According to a 2009 TMP/comScore report, 80% of consumers expect businesses in their search results to be within 15 miles of their location. This definitely doesn’t apply to all industries and regions, but it should provide a starting point with your targeting. It’s important to mention that with Google’s targeting granularity, you could potentially target your business out of traffic if it’s set so small that only a few people will see the ads.

Other Search Engines- Google has the lion share of the search market, but they also carry the highest bid prices. Bing and the like might not offer the volume that Google does; however, smaller search engines often have lower bid prices, which ultimately produce lower conversion costs. Test out a small budget on these other engines to start looking at your PPC efforts as a portfolio.

Keyword Development–The Google traffic estimator tool might show you that the keyword “new shoes” generates 1,500,000 searches each month, but that doesn’t mean it’s a quality keyword for your ad group. To maximize your budget, think locally and specifically. For example, if you’re in the printing business, expand past the generic and more expensive “printing” keywords;  pair them up with location identifiers to better define your product and audience. By using the keyword ”printing shops Denver 80202,” you pay less for a consumer that is further along in the buying cycle.

External deep linking is something a lot of websites neglect, which can cause you to be at a big disadvantage with your SEO strategy. Websites spend too much time optimizing their home page to rank for their high level keywords, and send all external links to their homepage while neglecting their deeply indexed pages.

Benefits of external deep linking include:

1. A more diverse link portfolio because the links pointing to your other indexed pages are likely to have other keywords associated with the links, therefore your top level domain will be more powerful because of the diverse links and because the keywords in those links are likely to be semantically relevant to the top-level keywords you are trying to rank for
2. External links to other pages within your site increase your rankings for those medium- and long-tail keywords which increase your overall traffic
3. More traffic from your other pages increasing in ranking means better top-level rankings because aggregate traffic is an important factor in your search rankings

Internal deep linking can help if you are finding it hard to gain external backlinks to your deeply indexed pages.

Creating more unique content is important too. This is certainly something that seems to be said too much by SEOs, but it’s true because there is a direct correlation between better rankings and more indexed pages, as well as volume of links. Of course, quality comes into play too, but we won’t complicate things too much with all of that right now.

More content can be really useful for your SEO strategy in a number of ways:

1. More indexed pages show you are a more trusted source because you will have more content relevant to your niche and the keywords you are targeting
2. More pages means more opportunities for links to those pages, and more deep linked pages increases the diversity of the links you receive
3. As always, more pages mean more opportunity to target long-tail keywords and ranking for those keywords won’t be hard so your overall traffic will increase, and if your traffic increases, so will your search rankings

Making sure you are investing time and effort into external deep linking and more content creation will be important if you want to increase your search rankings. Do not just link to your homepage and try optimizing that only because you will notice that there is a ripple effect when you link to other pages within your website since all your rankings will increase. These benefits work best for websites that do not have many external links pointing to their inner pages. For websites like SearchEngineJournal where many links are pointing to deeply indexed pages rather than just the homepage and where new content is published each day, doing more external deep linking and adding more content would just be redundant.

Google launched an important new tool that prevents your ads from showing on poorly-performing sites: the Category Exclusion tool.

Remember why content campaigns drain ad dollars? You waste budget because contextual ads appear on sites that are “poor quality,” meaning visitors to those sites are not likely to convert, even if your ads garner clicks.

We’ve discussed several strategies for controlling which sites carry your ads. The Category Exclusion tool simplifies the job by allowing advertisers to exclude whole swaths of site types.

To find the tool, click on Tools under PPC Campaign Management. First you’re allowed to choose a campaign. Though you can choose search campaigns, you shouldn’t — the tool really only acts on keyword-targeted and placement-targeted content campaigns.

Having chosen a campaign, you’ll see the familiar site exclusion text field where you can type or paste the specific domain names of sites that shouldn’t carry your ads. But you’ll see two additional tabs: Topics and Page Types. Let’s start with Topics. Here’s an example of what you’ll see:

click to enlarge

Here’s Google’s explanation for each of the topics that can be excluded:

Conflict and tragedy

• Crime, police, and emergency: Police blotters, news stories on fires, and emergency services resources
• Death and tragedy: Obituaries, bereavement services, accounts of natural disasters, and accidents
• Military and international conflict: News about war, terrorism, and sensitive international relations

Edgy content

• Juvenile, gross, and bizarre content: Jokes, weird pictures, and videos of stunts
• Profanity and rough language: Moderate use of profane language
• Sexually suggestive content: Provocative pictures and text

But Google doesn’t trust its intuition, or yours, to lead to an intelligent decision about which site topics to exclude. The tool shows you, based on your campaign’s history, exactly what you’re risking by excluding sites within each topic.

In the example above, the advertiser would probably be wise to exclude sites in the crime topic, since the CTR has been a dismal .52%, with no conversions. But the advertiser might think twice before excluding sites in the juvenile topic, since despite the poor CTR, clicks from that site are converting at a respectable 7.41%. Notice that cost-per-conversion data is also available, so advertisers can make sure their decisions are likely to result in acceptable ROI .

Let’s turn now to the Page Types tab:

click to enlarge

Here the advertiser is presented with a range of page types that have traditionally yielded poor results for some advertisers. Again, Google’s explanation of each type:

Network types

• Parked domains are sites in Google’s AdSense for domains network. Users are brought to parked domain sites when they enter the URL of an undeveloped Web page into a browser’s address bar. There, they’ll see ads relevant to the terminology in the URL they entered. The AdSense for domains network is encompassed by both the content network and the search network. If you exclude this page type, you’ll exclude all parked domain sites, including the ones on the search network.
• Error pages are part of Google’s AdSense for errors network. Certain users are brought to error pages when they enter a search query or unregistered URL in a browser’s address bar. There, they’ll see ads relevant to the search query or URL they entered.

User-Generated Content

• Forums are Web sites devoted to open discussion of a topic.
• Social networks are Web sites offering an interactive network of friends with personal profiles.
• Image-sharing pages allow users to upload and view images.
• Video-sharing pages allow users to view uploaded videos.

This data is fascinating because it illustrates something I’ve been hearing from Google for some time: it’s not uncommon for pages/sites like parked domains (arbitrageurs) and error pages to yield good-to-excellent CTRs and conversion rates. In the example above, only social network pages yielded poor results, while the others produced results that rivaled the best search campaigns.

So, use the tool to further fine-tune your content campaigns — but watch out for these caveats:

• Not all languages are supported — at the moment only Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish sites can be excluded
• The tool is not infallible — so continue to run Placement performance reports and use the Site Exclusion tool to opt out of poorly-performing sites/pages.

In most cases, it takes a lot for a tenured web site to mess up its search visibility.  In other situations, it doesn’t take much at all. Avoiding mistakes that result in exclusion, penalties and more often confusion for search engines are often overlooked.  Don’t fall victim to carelessness and ignorance when it comes to maintaining the search visibility achieved from years of content and online marketing by avoiding these common mistakes:

1.  Website Redesign

Probably one of the most common situations that result in fluctuations in search visibility involve significant changes to a web site’s design, content, internal linking relationships and the new use Flash, Ajax or JavaScript for navigation. Search engines copy websites and the links between pages. Think of it as taking a picture of your site. If you change your site from what the search engine has a copy of, the new form might not include the same content, keywords and crawlable links.

The worst case scenario is when a company decides to redesign the website and over write all previous SEO work. Upon finding that search visibility has completely tanked, they call up the SEO agency and demand an explanation.

Solution: When significant changes are planned for the company website, work with your SEO to identify how the new design will impact search visibility. Have them map out and prioritize the implications of page layout, content and keyword usage, navigation, links and redirects.

2. New Content Management System (CMS)

Along the lines with a new website design, changing content management systems can create a lot of confusion for search engines. Many companies have had websites long enough that the legacy CMS used to launch the site no longer serves the needs of the organization. Large companies may find that the hodgepodge of CMS used by different business units and acquired companies is inefficient and a common content management system would better serve the organization.

A change in the CMS means a change in the templates that format web pages, navigation and oftentimes the URL structure of pages.  It’s common that major changes in content are rolled out along with new website software and that can spell confusion for search engines. URLs that change can also create confusion. For example, web page file names that previously ended with .asp and now end with .aspx are perceived as completely different.

Solution: While the IT department or web developer will understand the importance of redirecting old URLs to their new counterparts, execution in a search engine friendly manner is another thing entirely. 302 vs. 301 redirects and mapping URLs when there is no logical page in the new system are essential. Identifying the top sources of inbound link traffic to pages and conducting an outreach program to get them to change the URLs other sites use to link to your site is a specialty area for link building SEOs moreso than IT. Simply put, make sure you have a SEO migration plan.

3.  Loss of Inbound Links

In the SEO game content is King and links are the Queen. Or content is the Yin and Links are the Yang. Whatever the metaphor, links are an essential mechanism for search engines to discover pages and signal for ranking them.  Companies that proactively acquire links organically, or that earn vs. buy the links, don’t have much of a problem in this area.  The longer other websites link to your site, the better. But some sites may go offline temporarily or permanently. A blog may decide to remove it’s blogroll or a site may simply decide to remove links to your site. If you change your CMS as noted above, other sites that don’t know this will continue to link to your old URL format (.asp vs .aspx) and that will appear as a loss of links.  If you buy links from other sites and they are detected by search engines, those links may be devalued of any PageRank. There are many reasons for link loss.

Solution: Active content creation, promotion and social participation are essential for building a significant and relevant inbound link footprint on the web. Those links will drive traffic and serve as a signal to search engines for ranking your content in the search results. The key is to monitor your link footprint on an ongoing basis using link building tools that will identify major fluctuations in inbound link counts. Then you can drill down to see where the link loss has occurred and see if you can do something about it. The best defense is offense, so make sure you have an active link acquisition in place so minor to moderate fluctuations in links will have little, if any effect.

4. Duplicate Content

Serving up duplicate content using different URLs confuses search engines. This can happen when sites use queries on a database to display lists of products in a category that can be reached multiple ways. Printer friendly versions of pages, other English language versions of pages or outright copying content from one website to another can all cause duplicate content issues. When an search engine is presented with multiple versions of the same content, it must decide which is the original or canonical version, since engines do not want to show the exact same thing to users in the search results. Anything your website does to make that process confusing or inefficient can result in poor search performance for your web site.

Solution: A professional SEO working with website content managers can help manage broader duplicate content issues for a company website and any micro sites they’re publishing. With press releases, RSS feeds or articles that are syndicated, it’s a best practice to make sure the original is published on your site first, then to have any duplicates clearly link back to the original. Ongoing monitoring can also help with unintentional duplicate content issues caused by other sites scraping your site’s content.

5. You’ve Become a SEO Spammer!

As more content is published and promoted online, more websites are launched and more competition comes into the market, companies will be tempted to achieve the coveted first page listing at any cost.  Many companies that succumb to this temptation do so because of seeing their competition get away with tactics that are clearly more aggressive and manipulative than search engines allow.  Webmasters might see suggestions in forums (often disinformation) or get advice from others doing well in the disposable site, content monetization game.

Engaging in simple things like hidden keywords, redirecting pages to present one version to search engine bots and another to site visitors or publishing numerous copies of the exact same web site using search/replace keyword optimization can all result in negative effects. There are far more aggressive tactics considered spam than that of course, but SEO spam isn’t an area we work with and I’m not interested in promoting unsustainable, high risk tactics.

Solution: Understand the webmaster guidelines from each search engine: Google, Yahoo, Bing.  Don’t violate those policies with the site(s) that are your bread and butter. If you must test, do so with other websites that are not going to affect your business. Rather than focusing on loopholes and exploits, be a better marketer and understand what your target audience wants, what influentials respond to and develop smarter, more creative marketing that can stand on its own to drive traffic and sales. Include SEO in those “UnGoogled efforts” and you’ll realize the added benefit of great performance from your website in search engines as well.

The early days before Quality Score

In the beginning of paid search, auctions existed in a purely capitalistic marketplace where the advertiser who was willing to pay the most for a keyword was awarded first place, the second highest-paying advertiser’s ads were second, and so forth.

It was an easy system to understand and it made sense. However, the ad space became a bit muddled. Advertisers with deep pockets literally took over the search engine results pages on keywords that weren’t necessarily related to their business. For example, a global soft drink company could start to take over terms such as rock and roll, skateboards, or even Britney Spears. These advertisers mostly weren’t trying to cause chaos—they were just trying to reach their target demographic. But in doing so, the sponsored search results for some keywords could potentially contain no results directly related to what a searcher was looking for.

The engines realized that this could be a problem. Google has long maintained that the best thing for its business is to keep results as relevant as possible—including paid listings. To improve the relevance of paid search ads, Google created the Quality Score. Microsoft and Yahoo soon followed with their own systems to improve relevance of ads.

So what is Quality Score?

Simply put, Quality Score is a numeric grade from one to ten (ten being best) assigned to each of your keyword/ad/landing page combinations. The score is updated frequently, calculated at each time your keyword is searched on to account for changes to your terms and creatives. So what’s the value of a high Quality Score? If your keyword is deemed highly relevant, Google will lower your cost-per-click and rank your ad higher than other competitors even if they’re bidding more for those terms. On the flip side, a keyword with a low Quality Score may mean you have to bid a premium price to even appear on a search result page.

How is Quality Score calculated?

We don’t know exactly what goes into the Quality Score black box but we do know that high click-thru-rates (CTRs) are a big piece of the pie. The engines probably correlate high number of clicks as “virtual votes” by past users for the advertiser and figure a good CTR means a relevant keyword.

Google does offer some insight into how Quality Score is calculated in the AdWords help area:

While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the Search Network, the core components remain more or less the same:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Note that there are slight variations to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bid:

• For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position, landing page quality is not a factor. Also, when calculating ad position on a Search Network placement, Quality Score considers the CTR on that particular placement in addition to CTR on Google.
• For calculating first page bid, Quality Score doesn’t consider the matched ad or search query, since this estimate appears as a metric in your account and doesn’t vary per search query.

What do you really need to know about Quality Score?

You’ll have plenty of time to test various tactics to improve Quality Score once the campaign starts, so don’t waste too much time worrying about it right now. The one thing you do need to take into account though is to make sure you keep your ad groups tightly focused. Because click-thru-rate is the biggest weighting factor to Quality Score, you’ll want to make sure that your ads are highly relevant to the keywords in each group so that you get the best CTR as possible. In my experience, as long as you’re getting a good percentage of clicks to impressions, the engines will consider your terms relevant enough to gain fairly high scores. After that, there are just a few things to keep in mind such as ensuring that your landing pages are loading at a good speed and you have some of your ad group’s keywords in your ad text. You do those things right and your Quality Score should be just fine.

Overall, my best advice is to not obsess over Quality Score. There are a couple hundred other factors to PPC success that are just as important. The important thing now is to just make sure you understand the concept fully and do some extra research if you feel you still need some clarification.

The premise that ad popularity and a high quality score leads to improved search advertising results may or may not be true….especially for B2B advertisers. I urge business marketers to challenge this assumption and understand the relationship between PPC quality score and ROI-based results.

Quality Score algorithms

In simple terms, ad position is primarily determined by how much an advertiser is willing to pay for each click (i.e. your bid) and the popularity, or click-through-rate (CTR), associated with your ad. Relevancy also plays a role… and very poor landing pages can lead to penalties.

More information can be found here on Google Quality Score, and Yahoo Quality Index. Details aside, Quality Score causes most advertisers to try and maximize response, or click-through-rate.

Note: Not surprisingly, this methodology also increases the click charges that go into the pockets of search networks!

Tips on PPC targeting

All advertisers should be deploying these PPC best practices to accurately target your audience:

• Select very specific keywords and long tail keyword phrases
• Utilize keyword match-types
• Deploy negative keywords
• Test geo-targeted ads (even for national brands)
• Implement day-parting

This week’s question: ”What have you heard about Quality Score?”

If you search Google on Tuesday, you may notice that the information you’re looking for is a bit “fresher” than it would have been on Monday.

That’s because the world’s most popular search engine has unveiled a new search method called “Caffeine,” which claims to index new information 50 percent faster than Google’s old search.

“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for Web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of Web content we’ve offered,” the company says in a news release on its official blog. “Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

That doesn’t mean Google has changed its search formula entirely, or that search results will pop onto your screen faster than before. Essentially it means that Google is able to find new content more quickly. So, for instance, a new Twitter update that, in the past, would be been missing from search results because Google hadn’t found and indexed it yet, would be posted to Google search results more quickly with Caffeine.

Here’s a promotional video from Google that explains how the search works.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, google built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how  old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

To better understand how Caffeine works, it might help to think of Caffeine as a blog and the old Google as a newspaper. Where a newspaper collects content and then publishes it all at once, at the beginning of the day, a blog is constantly looking for new information and updating on the fly. This is sort of how Google Caffeine works. Rather than collecting big “batches” of Web pages to index for its search, Google is trying to publish more frequently as it goes.

“Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second,” Google says.

“Content on the Web is blossoming,” she writes. “It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average Web page is richer and more complex.

“In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.”

“It’s interesting to see that Google is focusing again on the element of its offering where it does lead the pack: search,” he writes. “That’s what made its [Google's] name, but it’s clear that even if Microsoft’s Bing hasn’t (yet?) won the market share, it has got Google thinking about how it can improve what it does.”

I’ve not seen as many people notice another feature of Caffeine that may be the most “actionable” form an optimization perspective. Google now has more ability to associate data about any particular piece of content they index.  They are explicitly telling us that they are building capacity  into their algorithm to reference more indication of the quality or importance of a document. Also note that a document might not refer to just a web page, it could be a video or other content.

What does that tell us? Yes, your content will get retrieved and indexed more rapidly than ever before. But you also need to make sure that Google gets as many signals as possible that it is worthy of attention. Links to it, reviews of it, “Likes”, tweets and any bit of information that Google might be able to pick up are more important than ever. This has been fundamentally true for some time, but the number and nature of these signals of quality are only going to increase.

Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks. These frequent changes are one reason Google itself downplays algorithm updates. Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.

Google Makes One Change Per Day To Search Algorithm

This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with “item” pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them. For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite.

Based on Matt’s comment at Google I/O, the pages that are now ranking well for these long tail queries are from “higher quality” sites (or perhaps are “higher quality” pages).

Before, pages that didn’t have high quality signals might still rank well if they had high relevance signals. And perhaps now, those high relevance signals don’t have as much weight in ranking if the page doesn’t have the right quality signals.

What’s a site owner to do? It can be difficult to create compelling content and attract links to these types of pages. My best suggestion to those who have been hit by this is to isolate a set of queries for which the site now is getting less traffic and check out the search results to see what pages are ranking instead. What qualities do they have that make them seen as valuable? For instance, how amazon.com has faired during this update, but they’ve done a fairly good job of making individual item pages with duplicated content from manufacturer’s databases unique and compelling by the addition of content like of user reviews.

They have set up a fairly robust internal linking (and anchor text) structure with things like recommended items and lists. And they attract external links with features such as the my favorites widget.

From the discussion at the Google I/O session, this is likely a long-term change so if your site has been impacted by it, you’ll likely want to do some creative thinking around how you can make these types of pages more valuable (which should increase user engagement and conversion as well).

Update on 5/30/10: Matt Cutts from Google has posted a YouTube video about the change. In it, he says “it’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries.” He recommends that a site owner who is impacted evaluate the quality of the site and if the site really is the most relevant match for the impacted queries, what “great content” could be added, determine if the the site is considered an “authority”, and ensure that the page does more than simply match the keywords in the query and is relevant and useful for that query.

He notes that the change:

• has nothing to do with the “Caffeine” update (an infrastructure change that is not yet fully rolled out).
• is entirely algorithmic (and isn’t, for instance, a manual flag on individual sites).
• impacts long tail queries more than other types
• was fully tested and is not temporary

Search Funnels are a set of reports in Adwords that allow you to analyze ad impression and click behavior for campaigns, ad groups and keywords. So why is this important for advertisers? Adwords currently attributes conversions to the last click, but as we all know, few conversions are driven by just one click on one ad. There are usually many touch points with a customer, so the search funnels reports allow us to see the impressions and clicks that lead up to the conversion, which in most cases is just as important as knowing what finally lead to the sale.

What reports are included?

The search funnels reports are found in the Adwords interface under Reporting > Conversions. Click the link on the right hand side of the page, and you will be taken to the Search Funnels section.

Let’s first define the data that you will be accessing from these reports.

First click – The first time one of your ads is clicked.

Last click – The click on an ad that precedes a conversion. All conversions in Adwords are by default attributed to the last click.

Assist click – The click on an ad that precedes the last click.

Assist Impression – When an ad is shown preceding the last click, regardless of whether or not the ad was clicked.

Items to Note:

• The number of conversions in Adwords will differ from the Search Funnels, because Adwords includes conversion from the Google Content Network, and the Search Funnels do not. They also exclude information on organic results, actual search queries, and competitor keyword information.
• Cookie settings – search history is currently set at 30 days, and is not yet customizable.

Reports within the Search Funnels

Overview – Show how keywords and campaigns work together to create a conversion. Data is generated from conversion paths, or the sequence of ad clicks & impressions that lead to conversions. As mentioned above, content network, organic and competitive information isn’t provided.

Top Conversions – This report pulls together the various conversion types that you have set up through Adwords conversion tracking.

Assist Clicks & Impressions – This report is helpful when you need data that is not conversion focused. Assisted impressions are when your ad is shown, but not clicked, but these metrics are important in considering how many touch points you have had with the customer. Once again, you can see data for all conversion types together or individually, and you can drill down to the campaign, ad group and keyword levels.

Assisted conversions – This report shows both last click and assisted conversions. The drop down box allows you to view all conversions, or select one particular type. This will come in handy if you have different types of conversions set up (a sign up versus an ecommerce purchase), and you want to see if there is a difference in how each type conversion is reached. This report also gives you the ratio of Assisted conversions to last click conversions, so see below on the details of how to analyze this metric.

First Click & Last Click Analysis - First click and last click analysis reports allow you to focus on conversion paths that began or ended with a specific campaign, ad group or keyword. Once you are on the level you want, you can choose any other report in the drop down (while staying focused on conversions).

• For example, you can choose the top paths report in drop down. Once you are there, the breadcrumbs will show you that you are in a subset of conversions. You will stay drilled in until clicking on a main navigation report.

Top Paths – Shows most common conversion paths, and how everything works together to create conversions. Choose keyword in the dimension drop down box, and you will see the most common path for keywords. If the same keyword is repeated, it represents two clicks for that keyword that then leads to a conversion. As with the other reports you can also view data on the campaign and ad group level. If you select keyword path (impressions) you will see the sequence of keywords that showed your ads, regardless of whether the ads were clicked or not. This data closely represents the breadth of related keywords people are searching for prior to converting.

Time Lag – This section represents the time it takes customers to convert. If it takes a lot of days before a conversion, you will know that your customers are in the research phase of the buying cycle. However, if conversions come on the first day, and the rest of your research shows that there was only one click and one keyword, you will know that your customers are coming to you on those terms when they are ready to buy. The hours data represents the first 24 hours in hour segments.

Path Length – This report is a high level diagnosis that allows you to see how many clicks it takes to get a conversion, and the type of conversions. As mentioned before, different conversions may take more clicks. You can also see how the value of your various conversion types changes by clicking the value link. The data represented here is the percentage of your revenue that is attributed to paths of different lengths. Additionally, if you change to the impressions view you will see how many times people saw your ads (without clicking) before converting.

The search funnel reports can be overwhelming when you first look at them, but it is important to keep in mind that the additional data that is provided is just one more way we can make educated decisions. Start with the overview reports and familiarize yourself with the broad data like understanding on average how long it takes before your customers convert, and identifying if your campaigns tend to have more assisted or last click conversions. From there you can dive deeper into the data, and ensure that you are benefiting from it, and not just spending time looking at more numbers.

Along with the tips above, remember the following:

• Keywords play three roles in a conversion path. Last click (immediately preceding the conversion), assist click (immediately before the click that leads to the conversion), and assist impression (ad is displayed but not clicked).
• The ratio of assisted conversions and last click conversions is a quick indicator of whether the keywords serve more in the role of last click or assist click. A value close to zero means they are last click, and a value close to 1 means they are equally an assist and last click. The higher the number, the more they are in the role of an assist click.
• Some keywords in your Adwords campaigns may not show up in the reports because they only include keywords that play an assist or last click role.
• Assist clicks & impressions report break out information in same way, but for clicks and impressions instead of conversions.
• When possible, have FUN with this data. This is great information that will help you grow your accounts, and at the end of the day that’s the main goal, so enjoy getting there!

Actually, there is an entire procedure to optimize PPC campaigns including writing successful  PPC Ad Copy, Optimizing Your AdWords Campaigns Now, back to PPC landing page optimization.  The tactics I describe in this post will not only improve your Quality Score which can increase your ad position for a lower cost, but can also help convert more people that come to your website.

Now, I will admit that most of these tips are for lead generation, not all of these tips would apply to an ecommerce website.

• Call to Action/Buttons – It’s no secret that adding a call –to- action or a button that is large and very noticeable on your PPC landing pages will help increase conversions. Anything that draws attention to a user is more likely to get clicked on. Tell people what you want them to do on your landing page, don’t just assume they’ll know automatically.

• Minimal Navigation – The key to successful PPC landing pages is keep the user to from getting too distracted.  Remove the top, left or right hand navigation from your main site on your PPC landing pages. Simply have your company logo at the top left of the page with a link to your homepage.  That will be enough for people to click on if they need more information before converting.

• Important information above the fold – Some people who are searching for a service like yours are sometimes in a hurry. If they enter your landing page and don’t see what they need to do within the first 5 seconds, they’re likely to bail.  Be sure that your call to action, button, or form is above the fold.  Be sure to check Google analytics to see what resolution size the majority of your users are currently using. This will help your designers make the important information above the fold for most of your users.

• Easy-to-scan copy – I’ve worked on clients before that use way too much industry language in their PPC landing pages.  You have to think that if an executive is looking for a service they’re likely to ask their assistant, intern or even a receptionist to do research before they engage in anything. While the executive may know all the industry jargon the assistant or intern may not.  Also, these people who are searching for many companies are in a hurry, and simply just scan the copy on your landing page and don’t necessarily read through it all the way. So break up your copy into several paragraphs instead of one large paragraph. And I like to use the rule of thumb to put your benefits or advantages of choosing your company in a bullet list or numbered list so it stands out more prominently.

• Few images to convey professionalism – Some PPC landing pages I have seen have a lot of well, dorky images that don’t convey any professionalism whatsoever.  This can really turn off a potential client and make you look untrustworthy.  Have one to 2 images on your PPC landing pages that show professional looking people, smiling as if they have just engaged in yoru services and are incredibly happy.  Also having too many images on your PPC landing page will make your load times longer.

• Fast loading times – One factor of the Google Adwords Quality Score is the load times of your pages. If it takes more than 10 seconds to fully load your pages that’s way too long. It should take less than 5 seconds. Large flash files, too many images, or animated graphics could hinder your fast load times. Also, if I have to wait for a flash animation to load before I can get information about your services, I’m more than likely not going to stick around or come back.

• Dynamic headlines – Using dynamic headlines on your PPC landing pages is a great way to better target what the user is actually typing in the search box.  Dynamic headlines are generated by tracking URLs that will insert the specific keyword into the headline. This is like using dynamic keyword insertion in your PPC ads, only it’s for your landing pages. If the page headline is more targeted to what the user typed in the search, they’re much more likely to continue reading and complete an action.

• PPC keywords in your landing page copy – Many people think this is only true for SEO, but you still need to include your PPC keywords in the copy of your PPC Landing page. This will not only help improve your Quality Scores, but will also help your users connect better to your copy.

• Short contact form – You could potentially be driving away qualified leads by having a contact form that is too long. If your contact form is running below the fold, it’s too long. You should be able to see the ‘submit’ button above the fold.  Look at your current forms and only require the information you truly need. If someone sees a very long form, they may think, ‘This is going to take too long to fill out’ and could possibly skip that process altogether.

• No Clutter – This is really a no-brainer, but unfortunately too many people make the mistake of dumping too much content on their PPC landing pages.  You should have one main goal of your PPC landing page, not 3, 4 or 5.  Remove any extra copy that isn’t necessarily useful to the user.  Remove any unnecessary images or icons.

If you need any persuasion to make changes to your existing landing pages, just take this for an example:  if you were to make changes on your landing pages, and increase your conversion rates by .5%, add that to your current sales and see how much of an increase that is. You would be surprised how much additional revenue .5% would drive.

If you have any additional PPC landing page tips that will help increase conversions that I have not mentioned feel free to add them in the comments section!

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It’s not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”.

Check Google Guidelines about specifying preferred domain – http://www.google.com/webmasters/checklist/

To Google, http://example.com and http://www.example.com are completely different sites and can display completely different content.

Better understanding of www vs non-www from a SEO Standpoint:

· In most cases non-www and www return to same website, in other words, a duplication of entire site.

· In order to maximize pagerank and the effectiveness of SEO campaigns, we should ensure there is no duplicate content on site.(This is where both the www and non-www versions of web pages are listed in a search engine. This is said to possibly trigger a duplicate content penalty and/or split page rank. )

· Many search engines have filters in place to remove the duplicate listings – this keeps their search results clean, and is overall a good feature. We can avoid potential problems (and get a better view of web data) by specifying preferred domain.

· The popularity of link is split between the two URLS, decreasing the value of each link and subsequently web site content.

I will suggest you to implement 301 redirect on the site without the ‘www.’ to make the site permanently redirect to your ‘www.’ domain. Search Engines will know to ignore the non-www and use the www instead. (Google is only showing the www version.)

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection:

1. IIS Redirect

· In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect

· Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.

· Enter the redirection page

· Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”

· Click on ‘Apply’

2. ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”&gt;

3. PHP Redirect

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com&#8221; );
?>

4. ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/&#8221;
%>

5. ASP .NET Redirect

<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.new-url.com&#8221;);
}
</script>

6. JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/&#8221; );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

7. CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(“http://www.new-url.com/&#8221;);

8. Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.new-url.com/&#8221;
end

9. Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE http://www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to http://www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and http://www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

1. Why do we care?

URL is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects that affect both SEO and usability.

It affects:

• Rankings (placing keywords in the file path is one of the most effective ways to make the keywords more prominent);
• Click-through: a “clear”, “readable” URL can be another reinforcement signal for the user to click it;
• Usability: a good “obvious” URL helps the user understand what the page is about even before entering the page.

2. Keywords in the file name

There is no doubt that keywords in the URL matter (so far they even matter a lot). However this doesn’t mean that you need to stuff your URLs with only keywords. The best practices would be:

• Keywords in the file path occur naturally;
• Keywords in the file path help make the URL easier comprehensible and memorable;
• URLs do not consist of only keywords: here’s a good point expressed by Onreact in his post on top 10 fatal URL design mistakes:
  

  Recently bloggers tend to shorten their URLs in as much as their posting becomes totally boring. I won’t click /2008/06/27/google if I see only the URLs (like, say, in an email) but I will click google-files-for-bankrupcy

3. Word separators

While Google has become much smarter when it comes to identifying separate words in the file path, a dash is still considered the best choice:

4. URL length

While it is still considered the best practice to stick to shorter URLs, the factor is becoming less and less important:

• Usability: Very few people manually type a URL in the address bar. They either use bookmarks or search history (e.g. FireFox / Chrome smart address bar that shows URLs while you start typing the title of the page) or just use Google to find the page again;
• SEO: Google can handle very long URLs (though it is still rumored that it prefers short URLs, I personally don’t see any big difference);
• Click-through: Google now breaks long URL in SERPs smartly: it only shows the parts which use the search term or even substitutes the URL with breadcrumbs.

5. Case sensitivity

We have discussed this before: URLs are case sensitive. That being said, if you have two versions of the URL live and linked to (which is only possible if your site is on Windows server), this means that both lower- and higher-case URL versions return 200 OK status when queried. This will cause some duplicate content issues but Google will most likely be able to figure that out (by choosing one of them). What’s more important is that you are wasting plenty of link juice spreading it between the two versions.

It is recommended to always choose lowercase pattern (just because there will always be people who will link to a more traditional, plain-text version) and to use 301 status code to redirect all other (capitalized, upper-case, etc) versions to the lowercase one.

6. URL Extensions

We’ve discussed URL extensions previously and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter too much if an URL have one or not. There are some pros and cons (listed below) but these are rather minor arguments:

Argument for using an extension: intuitive browsing: seeing an .htlm people may understand that is a page with content, seeing / people may assume that’s a folder. Although there is no direct impact on rankings, an URL extension makes it clear both to a user and a search bot whether this is a page or subdirectory.

Arguments against using an extension:

• Reduce the overall URL length, which is just better overall. Not that the 4/5 characters that are in the .html or .php really add a lot, but sometimes small things can make a difference.
• No problems with any technology changes (moving to anew CMS, etc): no need to redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

7. More URL tips:

• Cool URIs don’t change
• Don’t put dates in the URL.