Archive for the ‘SEM’ Category

I was recently working with a client and struggling with a profoundly low conversion rate coming from search ads. The keywords we were buying were on target, the ads were performing well, and the landing pages appeared well designed. Then I tried to put myself inside the mind of the searcher. When I did that, I realized that the landing pages we were using were not as well designed as I thought, and our ads were missing the mark. The mistake we had made was to consider keywords, ads and landing pages independently. Sure, the ads were relevant to the keywords, and the landing pages were relevant to the ads, but we hadn’t really been thinking about the searcher’s intent through the process. The action we were expecting searchers to take did not fit the need that had motivated them to search. I spend a lot of time thinking about and optimizing for consumer intent, but after making such a mistake, I decided I needed a model against which to judge search ads and campaigns. Following is the model I put together.

Intention – before a person searches, she has an intent: intent to buy a pair of shoes; intent to learn about zanzibar; intent to determine the health benefits of a Blooming Onion; and so on. Some sort of information need driven by intention motivates her to search. When we start a search marketing campaign for a business, we begin by defining personae we intend to target with the campaign. The personae represent categories of intent. For example, shoe-shopping personae might include fashionistas and pragmatists. Fashionistas want to know what’s hot, pragmatists want a trustworthy vendor with a good return policy. We tend to organize our campaigns around the personae we define.

Search – once the person has translated intent into an information need, e.g. “I want a new pair of shoes” -> “where should I buy a pair of shoes?”, she turns to a search engine. While this step in the process garners a lot of attention among marketers, it is largely procedural in nature. Search listings do not address the searcher’s intent (you can’t wear them, for example), nor do they meet her information need in any real sense. They are merely pointers to information. The searcher quickly scans search results, looking for cues that indicate her need will be met by clicking on a listing. The right cues to include are a natural consequence of the personae we’ve defined. We also have to be mindful that there is a lot of information on a search results page. We can provide the right cues, but if our listing is boring or far down the results, it may never get evaluated.

Consideration – after clicking on a listing, the searcher evaluates the content on the landing page. Does it address her information need? She has criteria, conscious or unconscious, with which she will make a quick decision and either move forward or back up. The important thing here is to make sure that the landing page aligns with her original intent and is easy to digest. Too much information and she is likely to back up and look for a more suitable source. Too little information and her criteria can’t possibly be met.

Action – lastly, as marketers, we want the searcher to take some form of action, whether it be to call a number, watch a video or buy a product. Again, it is not a good idea to overwhelm the searcher with too many options, nor is it a good idea to present too few. Some people may be uncomfortable calling and prefer to communicate via email. Some people may want to read technical specifications before buying a product. The main thing is to decide what actions you want to emphasize, and make them as frictionless as possible.

This model bears a lot of similarity to the classic purchase funnel found in many marketing textbooks. It can be viewed as a specific instance of the funnel, applied to search marketing. I find it helpful, but the main point is that different types of keywords and search phrases belie different kinds of intent. When focusing on one stage of the process independently, it can be easy to lose track of that fact.

Nico Brooks is a data geek who struggles to get his head around marketing problems, but he always enjoys the struggle. Two Octobers is an internet marketing company that provides marketing services and strategic consulting to businesses selling to local markets.

A while back, I wrote about setting paid search bids based on ROI. Since then, we’ve been working on a number of CPC Facebook advertising campaigns and have found that the topic of bid setting continues to be important and challenging to online marketers.

With this in mind, we recently created the CPA Bid Calculator.

The calculator takes some of the concepts described in my previous post, and makes it easy for marketers to apply them when making budget and bidding decisions. It is primarily intended to give marketers a better feel for how conversion data can (and can’t) be used to set optimal bids.

Have a look, kick the tires. Is it useful? What features would make it more useful? I’d love to hear your feedback.

I will add the disclaimer that I am not a programmer, so I was definitely learning as I went. We plan on working on more tools to help with optimizing online marketing campaigns. In particular, my friend Dusty Candland and I are talking about creating a free, open-source bid optimization toolkit, and he is a programmer, a damn good one to boot. We worked together at several companies building bid optimization tools, and have some ideas for how to improve that mousetrap. If you like this idea, please let me know in the comments below, or on Twitter or elsewhere. We’d love it if other people wanted to work on the project too.

Most of my friends know I’ve been involved in search marketing for a long time, so I’m often asked to look over Google AdWords campaigns to see why they aren’t performing well. People even pay me to do this. The very first thing I do when I look over an account is to check for various default configurations that should ALWAYS be changed. Google makes it fairly easy to create an account, but their primary goal is to generate revenue, so most of their default settings are geared towards ensuring that they can spend every penny of an advertiser’s budget.

1. Auto-bidding = Here’s My Wallet, Let Me Know When It’s Empty

I hope whoever came up with this idea got a nice raise, because it has to have made Google a boatload of money. The basic idea of auto bidding is to say to Google, “I’m willing to spend up to $X per day, now you figure out how to spend it for me.” If that sounds like a good idea to you, I’ve got some Alta Vista shares I’ve been hanging on to that I’ll let go of for a steal. When auto bidding is enabled, Google will set your bids uniformly to make sure you are spending your entire budget. The “uniformly” part is the bit that will really screw you. It never makes sense to pay the same for all keywords in a campaign. Some keywords are likely to convert better than others, and at the very least the products or services you sell are not uniformly priced.
The fix: specify bids when you create ad groups. Bidding is a complex topic, but there are two primary considerations:

1. Bid low enough that you are not hitting your budget cap. I think of the budget cap in Google as a safety net, and control my spending by lowering bids. The reason for this is the fact that Google will blow your budget on a single click if they can. For example, let’s say your budget is $10/day and you bid $10 for a keyword. You could spend your budget with just one click, when you might have been able to get 10 clicks at $1 apiece.
2. Set bids based on how much revenue ads generate. In simple terms, this means you should pay twice as much per click for keywords that generate twice as much revenue. Here’s the less simple version: Paid Search: Bidding Based on ROI

2. Broad Matching Can Be Very Broad Indeed

I’ve already spent some time explaining match types, so I’ll only provide the short version here. When you add keywords, Google assumes you want to broad match them unless you add brackets or quotation marks. Broad matching means that Google will match your ad to any search phrase they deem similar to the intent of the keyword on which you are bidding. I’m in favor of broad matching, since people search in such weird and varied ways, but it can result in a lot of worthless clicks. For example, if you broad match the term “computer repair”, Google will show the ad when someone searches for “computer repair jobs”. This is a very real example and happens all the time.
The fix: add negative keywords to the ad group or campaign. Negative keywords tell Google not to show the ad when those keywords are present. For example, adding the negative keyword “jobs” would have prevented the issue above. There are two good ways to figure out which negative keywords you should add. One way is to click on See Search Terms on the Campaigns > Keywords tab. That will show you some of the search queries that have triggered your ads. If you see anything that doesn’t make sense, add the offending keyword as a negative. The other way is to enter your keywords in Google’s Keyword Tool and see what comes up. Again, if you see variations on your keyword that don’t make sense, add those as negatives.

3. What Is The Display Network, Anyway?

If you don’t specify otherwise, Google will show your ads on the display network. There are two ways of looking at what that means:

1. Google will show your ads next to relevant blog posts, articles and the like.
2. Google will fritter away your budget on every loser webmaster that has the 60 IQ points required to join the AdSense network.

Google emphasizes the first view, but there are a lot of haters out there that strongly believe the second. The truth is somewhere in between. I’ve had campaigns where more conversions came from display than search, and generated better ROI. But I’ve NEVER achieved good results by letting the default settings be. By default, display will be bid the same as search, and ad group organization that makes sense for search may not make sense for display. On the display network, ads are not matched based on specific keywords, they are matched based on topics that Google views as relating to the ad group as  a whole. For example, I once managed a campaign for someone who sold maps of cities and places in New Zealand. I had an ad group with keywords like “Auckland map”, “Christchurch map”, “Wellington map”, etc. I caught Google red-handed serving my ad on a page that had to do with maps, but nothing to do with New Zealand. And if you bid high enough, Google will start showing your ads all over the place, relevant or not.
The fix: set lower bids for the display network. Ideally, you can do this based on ROI, but a rule of thumb I use when I don’t have ROI data is to bid down until I’m getting no more than half my clicks from display. Also, make sure your ads clearly state important qualifying factors like what you are selling, where you are and whether you are selling to businesses or consumers. That helps prevent irrelevant traffic from clicking on your ad. Sometimes, I’ll even create separate campaigns for display, so I can tweak them with display distribution in mind.

4. One Ad Group Only Makes Sense If You Only Sell One Product

And even then, it may not make sense. When you create a campaign in Google, it is not at all obvious that you are also creating an ad group. I know this because I’ve had to field the question, “what is an ad group?” many times. An ad group is a grouping of keywords within a campaign. Ads are associated with an ad group, and a default bid is set for an ad group. Because Google hides the ad group structure in the default campaign setup process, I’ve come across many campaigns that have a wide variety of keywords stuffed in one ad group. There are a few reasons why this is a problem. One is that ads work much better if they are closely related to the products or services you are selling. A one-size-fits-all ad group means your ads have to be very general. Another reason is that clicks convert to sales at a much higher rate if you land visitors on a page specific to their interests. Lastly, as described above, you should set bids based on the revenue generated by keywords and groups of keywords.
The fix: create ad groups for each product or service you sell, and/or each landing page towards which you are driving traffic.

5. Default Geographic Targeting Is Generally Stupid

This is where my ads will show up if my ads are targeted to Denver Metro:

Um, hello? All of northern Colorado is Denver Metro? I’m pretty sure not too many people are driving the 5 hours from Rangely to Denver to pick up their dry cleaning. If you are targeting a campaign to a state or a country, Google’s targeting works pretty well, but selecting cities or metro areas is usually a bad idea.
The fix: go to the Custom location targeting screen and select a radius around your business. You may find your traffic goes way down, but the traffic that’s left is the traffic you want.

Honorable Mention: How come the AdWords user interface sucks so bad when they can create such a beautiful search UI?!?
I have the AdWords web interface more or less tattooed on my brain, but even I find it confusing. How do you create a second ad group after you’ve created a new account? Where do I find Ad Extensions (and why do I want to)? How come quality score doesn’t just display like everything else?
The Fix: use Google’s downloadable AdWords Editor. It’s not perfect, but it is much better than the web interface.

I admit that I’m being a little hard on Google. In fairness, most of the changes I’ve described add complexity to managing campaigns, and complexity has its downsides as well. On the other hand, there are many cases where Google has erred on the side of spending more of the advertiser’s money, and I can’t tell you how many campaigns I’ve looked at that were driving a lot of traffic and converting to zero sales. Google AdWords is a fantastic advertising medium when managed well, but many businesses never get past the crappy defaults I’ve described here. If you’d like help getting things set up or figuring anything out, please let us know.

Notes on Google Search Mapped Results: Eye Tracking Insights, by ionadas local and Sentient Services.

I saw Mike Blumenthal’s post on this study a few months back, but shame on me, I didn’t click through to read the actual research. Well, I did read the research last night, and it was well worth the effort.

User interface heat maps are eye candy for those of us obsessed with user experience and search behavior, but in reality they aren’t all that useful. They give you a feeling for how users experience a page, but not much more than that. The part about this study I like most is the quantitative analysis they did to accompany the heat maps. For example, here is a heat map showing how users’ eyes tracked the results page for the search “Austin Eye Doctor”:

And here is a quantitative analysis of that same view, showing average total fixation for each element on the page:

I won’t repeat ionadas’ insights, read the study if you want those. It’s not very long (lots of pictures) and well worth it. But a few things struck me as I read it:

• Web search results (as opposed to map-based local results), hardly matter at all for local search, unless they show up above the map results.
• Yes, the top organic local search result is the place to be, but in the case of the “Austin Eye Doctor” query, the ad above the results performed better than all but that first result. Unfortunately, only two out of the four queries in the study had ads placed above map results, so best not to generalize too much.
• Searchers actually seem to understand what they are looking at! This study made me realize that my thinking has been stuck in the past. In the early days of search advertising, a couple of studies showed that searchers didn’t know the difference between search ads and organic search results. Since then, I’ve been assuming that most people don’t understand what makes up a Google search results page, and how the sources of information differ. This study clearly shows that people do have a feel for how the information sources vary, and favor those that are more rewarding.

Note that Google changed the layout of local search results shortly after this study was completed, but I don’t think that significantly impacts my comments or ionada’s findings.

I’ve spent much of the last 10 years building tools that automate online marketing tasks. Early on, I had a grand vision of creating an application that would perfectly distribute marketing investment based on an advertiser’s ROI goals. But along the way, I met a few, very smart people who changed my thinking.

Before I get to them, let me introduce the bread machine problem. Bread machines are great, I’m told. You put a few ingredients in, press a button, and voila!, steaming hot bread comes out. Bread machine advocates will say, “no, it’s not as good as fresh bread from a bakery, but that’s not the point. It’s easy and beats bread that comes out of a bag from the grocery store.” I can’t argue with that.

As a designer of a different sort of appliance, I think I have an idea of what goes through the minds of bread machine designers.

If we just add these settings, people will have more control over the bread they make!

Yeah, but we are not building this for master chefs, it has to be dead simple for our market.

I’ve encountered that problem countless times when designing software. Too many knobs and levers and you’ve lost most of your market, too few and you are helping people achieve slightly better than mediocre results.

So, back to the people who changed my thinking. Each used software I had a hand in designing. First, came Teddie Cowell. He was the epitome of the power user, haranguing me weekly for features and always saying, “I don’t need documentation, just let me see the algorithm.” Then there was Tushar Balsara. His chant was, “API’s API’s API’s!” He used our tool, but was trying to plug it into his own vast and complex system for data analysis. Last was Brendan Kitts. He took our software, asked all the right questions, then built his own. Crafty bastard.

These are the kind of guys who, given a bread machine, will have it out on the table in days, with bits dissasembled and settings overridden. More importantly, these are the kind of guys who produce the very best results in online marketing – I know that because I saw what they were doing for their clients. They made me realize that trying to fully-automate marketing will always produce mediocre results. Building tools that are simple for the user will inevitably lead to the bread machine problem.

Marketing automation is hard because every business has different goals, and advertises in different media, and collects data through different means. On top of that, opportunities are always changing, with new ad products and marketing channels being introduced every day. In my experience, the best solutions usually entail smart hackers like Teddie, Tushar and Brendan, and cobbled together tools with some home-built stitching in between.

If you are a business, don’t trust a vendor that tells you their tool will manage it all for you. Look for the crafty hacker. Most of the time he or she can be found at an agency that also builds tools, or a tool builder that also provides agency services.

Bread photo credit: avlxyz

AdWords “Related-To” Links and the Importance of Negative Keywords

We have come across a number of instances recently where Google is broad matching terms that are barely related to the keywords we are buying. In some cases, the commercial intent of the broad match term is a complete miss with what our intent is for a campaign. If you are buying Google AdWords you need to be aware of this shift and should implement the recommendations we make below. (If you need a primer on AdWords match types, read this article: How to Use Google AdWords Match Types.)

We found one case where Google was matching the keyword “remote access” to searches for “remote control”. The former is an IT term that is very relevant to one of our clients’ business, and heaps of the latter exist in every household. In another example, a user searching for “sewing machine service” was matched with our ad for the keyword “computer service”.

Another broad matching issue we’ve seen recently is the new “Related-to” feature of AdWords. This feature comes up with categories that are related to the category of the keyword you are buying, then broad matches those. Here is an example of the “Related-to” feature in action:

So in this case Google is classifying Thomas Moser as Stickley furniture, then broad matching advertisers who are buying keywords that broad match to “stickley furniture” – that can get very broad indeed. Note that we’ve mostly seen “Related-to” ads appear next to brand-related searches.

Early on, AdWords broad matching stuck to fairly synonymous terms. “Hotel in Las Vegas” or “Hotel Los Vegas”, for example, would be matched to “Hotel Las Vegas”. Over time they have been gradually expanding their definition of broad matching

During my brief stint at Microsoft (in the Advertising Platform & Services division), one of the things we measured was the percentage of user searches for which we served ads. More ads, of course, meant more money, which meant more cupcakes for us (or other remuneration). Pretty safe guess that Google is looking at a similar metric, which explains the broadening of broad.

The safest thing to do to combat this is to stop using broad matching. Unfortunately, that is a bit of a baby/bathwater solution. While Google does make some questionable matching decisions, on the whole broad matching gives you access to a much larger pool of relevant searches.

We recommend two things:

1. Use both broad and exact matching for keywords. This will give you the ability to see how broad match variations perform in comparison to the exact match term. If the quality score or conversion rate of the broad match terms is much lower than the exact match terms, it is likely that they are being poorly matched and you need to investigate (by following our second recommendation). One thing to note is that Google does sometimes get better at matching keywords over time. We’ve seen cases where broad match keywords start out performing poorly, but end up doing reasonably well after a few months.
2. Check the “See search terms” report in the AdWords interface. This report shows you what actual search phrases are being matched to your keyword ad. If you see a match you don’t like, add it as a negative keyword. “See search terms” can be found under Campaigns > Keywords in AdWords. For more on negative keywords, see How to Use Google AdWords Match Types.

These examples are another good reminder of why you can’t just set up an Adwords account and forget about it, and expect Google to spend your money wisely. Keeping an eye on the search terms being matched to your keywords will help you target the right customers, improve the click through rate of your ad groups, and optimize your bids for the best ROI (return-on-investment). And please let us know if we can help.

Hardly anyone goes past the first page of Google results, so you want your ads to show up on the first page, right? That’s why Google prominently displays the minimum first page bid in the AdWords interface, right?

Wrong.

One of the things we do here at Two Octobers is to audit PPC accounts to point out any major problems or opportunities. An issue I often run across is that keyword bids are all over the place. It would be one thing if these bids were set based on return on investment (ROI), but they’re not. A PPC manager has set bids based on the minimum first page bid that Google reports. Here’s why this is a bad idea:

Google (and Bing) sponsored search ads are sold on an auction-for-position basis. On the whole, traffic goes up the higher you bid, whether you move from position 12 to 10 or 2 to 1. To get the best results, it makes sense to inch bids up or down evenly until you’ve hit your budget target or other constraint. As an example, let’s imagine a campaign with three keywords (A, B and C) and a daily budget cap of $50. When you launch the campaign, you set keyword bids at $1.

This results in a total cost of $18 and 18 clicks. You notice that keyword A is not meeting the minimum first page bid, while B and C are. Since you are well below your budget cap, you increase the bid for keyword A to $2 to get on the first page.

Now you are spending exactly your budget of $50 and you’ve gone from 18 to 33 clicks. But what if instead you adjusted all bids equally, from $1 to $1.40?

Now you are spending a total of $49 for 35 clicks. Your ad for Keyword A is still not on page one, but voilá you are getting better results!

These numbers are made up, but the underlying principles are accurate. I’ve simplified things a bit since my goal is to show the fallacy of bidding to be on page one. In fact when I am creating a campaign I do usually vary bids based on my best guess as to conversion rate and average sale. For example, if I’m working on a campaign for a vacation rental in Breckenridge, I will bid the keyword “vacation rental breckenridge” higher than “rental breckenridge”, since the latter could refer to an apartment or rental equipment. I expect that more visits from “vacation rental breckenridge” will result in sales so those clicks are worth more. As I collect analytics data I further refine bids based on ROI.

And some of you out there may point out that traffic volume in relation to bid is a non-linear function (and not always a monotonic increasing function either), and that it can therefore make sense to have uneven bids even lacking ROI data. That is true, but it takes a whole lot of data and math to understand the relationship between bid price and traffic for any given keyword, and it is still not a good idea to set max CPC based on minimum first page bid.

If you would like us to have a look at your paid search campaigns, please give us a shout.

This list is intended for someone who is creating a new paid search advertising campaign. Much of it still applies if you are looking to grow an existing campaign or researching keywords for organic search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, but not all steps will apply in those cases. To keep things simple, I am only going to talk about Google. I usually do most of my research and testing in Google, then copy keywords and campaigns over to Yahoo and Bing.

This process can be fun and instructive if you think of yourself as a psychologist trying to understand how and when your prospects search for what you have to offer. I enjoy constructing theories about what’s in the head of searchers – I’m sure I’m mostly wrong, but it makes it more entertaining.

Spaghetti Against the Wall
When I’m building keyword lists, I don’t worry about how much volume each keyword drives or how much it costs to be in a top position. There’s really no downside to having a lot of keywords, and sometimes your best performers will come from places you don’t expect. I call it the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach – throw a lot of keywords out there, and a few will stick. Those are the ones I spend time optimizing.

Match Types
It is very important that you understand how match types work if you are adding keywords to your account. For an explanation of match types, see the article How to Use Google AdWords Match Types.

On to the to-do list…

The To-Do List (& a PDF version of the list for printing)

1. Get your ad groups going - Ad groups should correspond to individual products and/or services you offer as well as product/service groupings. For example, if you sell a variety of hammers, you should have an ad group for hammers in general, and ad groups for each type of hammer. Use your judgement regarding how specific to go – people might search for “ball peen hammers”, but they are less likely to search for “ball peen hammers with red handles”. The former merits an ad group, the latter probably not.
   When you are first creating ad groups, you don’t need to come up with a big list of keywords for each. I usually create a bunch of ad groups at a time, and I don’t worry about researching keywords until I have them all live. For example, if I am creating an ad group for “ball peen hammers”, I’ll probably create it with the single keyword “ball peen hammers”. It’s more efficient to get ad groups going, then go back and add keywords using the following techniques.
   
2. Add more keywords with the Google Keyword Tool - In the AdWords interface, go to Opportunities > Keyword Tool
   The Keyword Tool is useful for coming up with variations on keywords, but it can also be slow and tedious to go through results. It doesn’t do a good job at all of sorting keyword suggestions by relevancy. I usually sort the results by the column “Local Monthly Searches” (by clicking on those words) to see what keywords get the most volume. “Local” here refers to the country in which you are searching.
   At this stage, I’m mostly looking for high-volume variations. The Keyword Tool comes up with a lot of junk, but I usually find a few worth adding. Since I have sorted by search volume, I go down the list until I hit some reasonable volume threshold, say at least 1,000 searches per month. It may be more or less than that, depending on the category of keyword. To add keywords to an ad group, select the ones you’d like to add and click Add Keywords. You will be prompted to select an ad group.
   
   It is very helpful that the Keyword Tool gives volume numbers, but take them with a grain of salt. It defaults to showing volume for broad match keywords, which can be deceptive. On the left-hand side there is an option to switch it to exact match, which will give you a better idea of how often each individual keyword is searched. The volume numbers are also pretty unreliable. It will often show that a search term gets very low volume when in fact it gets decent volume.
3. Add even more keywords with Google’s Add/Edit suggestions - In the AdWords interface, go to Campaigns > Ad Groups > [select an ad group] > Keywords > Add Keywords
   This functionality is similar to the Keyword Tool, but does a much better job of grouping and prioritizing keywords that are relevant to your ad group. Recently, I’ve been using this tool more than the Keyword Tool to build keyword lists. It works best after you’ve added some keywords to the ad group, so best to get things started with the Keyword Tool. Per above, I use the Keyword Tool to find high-volume keywords, then I use this tool to add more specific variations.
   
4. Spy on your competitors - There are several tools that show which keywords are driving traffic to competitor sites. Looking at what your competitors are bidding-on and optimizing-for can be a good way to discover new categories of keywords and unusual opportunities that the Google tools won’t spot. Several to try are SEMRush, KeywordSpy and SpyFu. I lean towards SEMRush right now, but there is not much difference between the three. Each offers additional capabilities for a subscription, but try out the free versions first.
5. Set initial bids - There are two ways to approach this. If you are on a tight budget, start by bidding low and collect some data before you start raising bids. The downside of this approach is that with low bids it may take a while to collect enough data to make a change. If you are not on a tight budget, bid keywords high enough to get a top 3 position and adjust bids up or down as you collect performance data. This approach will generate sales faster, but you will waste some budget on non-performers as you collect data. For more on setting bids based on ROI data, see this article: Paid Search Bidding Based on ROI

Using this process, I find I can get a typical campaign going in an hour or two. Over time, I’ll go back in and re-apply these techniques to expand ad groups that are performing particularly well, and to look for new opportunities. There are also a number of more advanced techniques people use. I’ll include a couple here as extra credit:

1. The Search-Based Keyword Tool - Go to Opportunities > More tools … > Search-based Keyword Tool
   I find this tool is very finicky, but useful if you can get it to work. It looks at your site and draws on Google Analytics data to come up with keywords relevant to your content. It also tells you which page each keyword is associated with, which can be very helpful for organizing keywords in to ad groups. Google won’t tell you this (as of this writing), but the tool only works if you are signed up for Google Analytics and have your Analytics and AdWords accounts linked. It also won’t work from an MCC login. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t need to worry about it.
2. The Webmaster Tools Keyword Report - Log in to Webmaster Tools  > [your domain] > Your Site on the Web > Search Queries
   This report shows which keywords are driving traffic to your site via Google’s unpaid listings. This can be very helpful for identifying SEO opportunities, but also useful for paid search. You should be bidding on any keywords that are relevant to your business but for which you do not rank in the top few positions. In particular, this tool will show you keywords for which you are getting traffic, but rank poorly in organic search. For example, if you rank in position 9 for a keyword that is one of the top drivers of traffic to your site, you should add it to your paid search campaign. If you are not familiar with Webmaster Tools, click here to learn more: Webmaster Tools

There are also some subscription-based research tools that help the process of managing and growing keyword lists, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery being two of the most well-known. I don’t believe these tools are worth it for an individual advertiser unless you find yourself spending many hours per month managing keywords.

Anyone have other suggestions for getting a keyword list put together quickly? I’d love to hear them if you do!

And if you’d like help with search marketing, please drop us a line or give us a call: Contact Us

Google AdWords allows you to specify a match type for each keyword you bid on. Yahoo and Bing do too, though there are some slight variations in how they work.  The three match types in Google are exact, phrase and broad.  The match type you choose tells the search engine when to match a user’s query to your keyword. Here’s how each match type works:

• Exact: your ad will be served when and only when a user enters the keyword you purchased. If you want to make a keyword exact match, you put square brackets around it when you enter it.
• Phrase: your ad will be served when a user enters a phrase that includes the keywords you purchased in the same order. For example, if you bid on “house music”, your ad will match the query “download house music”, but not the query “new orleans music house”. If you want to make a keyword phrase match, you put quotes around it when you enter it.
• Broad: your ad will be served when a user enters a phrase that includes the keywords you purchased, and not necessarily in the same order. Your ad will also be served when a user enters a phrase that Google deems equivalent to your keywords, such as misspellings, synonyms or pluralizations. For example, if you bid on “denver taxidermy”, your ad will likely match the following queries:
  • “taxidermy denver”
  • “denver taxidermists”
  • “a taxidermist near denver”

  Broad match is the default, so you don’t have to do anything to specify broad match.

Think of match types like funnels. Broad matching is like a big, wide funnel that catches lots of queries. Phrase matching is like a medium-sized funnel that catches more queries than exact, but fewer than broad. Exact matching is like a funnel that doesn’t get any wider at the top, which isn’t much good as a funnel.

Also, while they don’t behave quite like match types, you can add negative keywords to an ad group or campaign. A negative keyword tells Google not to serve an ad when that keyword is present in the query. For example, if you created an ad group with the broad match keyword “denver taxidermy” and the negative keyword “squirrel”, Google would not serve your ad if someone searched for “denver squirrel taxidermy”. If you want to add a negative keyword, you put a minus sign before the keyword with no space, e.g. “-squirrel”.

Here’s a crazy stat: people search 200 million keywords in Google that have never been searched before every single day*. That probably puts the total number of unique queries that have ever been done on Google somewhere in the hundreds of billions. Your goal is to get your ads to show for any of those queries that are relevant to the products or services you sell. The broad match type is the best way to do that, and is what I use most of the time. But broad matching can also result in irrelevant traffic, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on what keywords are driving visits to your site and add negative keywords where necessary. Most web analytics tools have a report that shows referring keywords, and the Google AdWords Search Query Performance Report shows some of the search phrases that were matched to your ad.

One trick I sometimes do is to add both an exact match version and a broad match version of the same keyword to an ad group. This allows me to see the performance of the exact match version, which is often better than the broad match version. Over time, I will bid up the exact match version if it is getting better results. For more on keyword bidding based on performance, see our article Paid Search Bidding Based on ROI.

It’s also not a good idea to just trust broad matching and not bother creating ads with variations of keywords you know are relevant to your business. Broad matching is a good way to catch keywords you don’t expect, but you should include any you do know about in your campaign. Doing so will help you understand the performance of each variation, and you can achieve higher quality scores by ensuring that text ads and landing pages are well matched to each keyword. See our article To-do List: Building a Keyword List for more on building keyword lists.

Lastly, Google’s Explanations of Match Types and Negatives: What are keyword matching options? – Adwords Help

* This stat is derived from search query data in these two posts: This week in search 1/8/10 and By the Numbers: Twitter vs Facebook vs Google Buzz

Businesses new to search marketing and veterans alike can easily come to the wrong conclusions about their pay-per click campaigns.  Imagine you pay $1 each for 200 clicks and you only complete one $50 sale. You’ve spent $200, and only earned $50. You calculate your Return on Ad Spend and you’re earning $.25 for every $1 spent on pay-per-click advertising. You might decide this channel of advertising just isn’t effective, but in fact it is far too soon to tell.

In the previous article, Paid Search: Bidding Based on ROI, we showed how you can use ROI data to determine optimal bids. The methods we described assume that you know the conversion rate of a keyword, ad group or campaign. But in fact you can’t ever really know a conversion rate, the best you can do is to estimate using historical data. This article explains how to use confidence intervals to ensure that your estimates are reasonably accurate.

For example, let’s say that a keyword has had 100 clicks and 2 conversions. Do you know what the conversion rate is for that keyword? The obvious answer is 2%, but the correct answer is “no”. From experience, you probably know that you could get fewer or more conversions in the next 100 clicks. Given a set of sample data, the best you can say is that you expect that the conversion rate falls between X% and Y%. In statistics, this is called a “confidence interval”. A confidence interval also has a “confidence level”. The confidence level describes how sure you are that the conversion rate falls between X% and Y%. For example, an 80% confidence level means you can be 80% sure that the actual value falls between the lower and upper bound of the interval. This means that there is a 10% chance that the actual value falls below x% and a 10% chance that it falls above Y%.

Below is a table of confidence intervals, with the column on the left indicating the number of conversions observed, and the row across the top indicating the number of clicks observed. The confidence level for these intervals has been set at 80%. The cells with white backgrounds show the confidence interval for each combination of conversions and clicks. The confidence intervals are expressed as X% – Y%, with X% being the lower bound, and Y% being the upper bound.

For example, if we observe 3 conversions over 400 clicks, the confidence interval ranges from 0.3% to 1.7% – I have shaded that cell pink in the table. Therefore, we are 80% sure that the actual conversion rate falls between these two values. Compare the ranges in the “500” column to the “100” column and you will notice an important fact about confidence intervals: the more data we have, the smaller the confidence interval. And the smaller the confidence interval, the better an idea we have of the actual value. But also note that there is always an interval – we never truly know the actual value from observed data. Here are a few scenarios demonstrating how this data might be applied:

• Jane buys 200 clicks and gets no conversions and decides that paid search is a waste of money. Lisa points out that there’s a good chance that Jane’s conversion rate is as much as 1% and that she should wait it out a bit.
• Lisa wants to bid based on a target CPA. After buying 300 clicks, she gets 5 leads. He assumes a conversion rate of 0.8%. Given that the confidence interval is 0.8%-3.1%, Lisa is being conservative by taking the lower bound of the range.
• Jane thinks her conversion rate is 10%, but she measures 4 conversions over 200 clicks for her AdWords campaign. She realizes the data is not supporting her assumption: based on the data she can be 90% confident that her conversion rate is not more than 4%.

The main takeaway from this table is that even 500 clicks is not enough to have a very accurate idea of conversion rate, which is why I say you shouldn’t be bidding on most individual keywords based on ROI goals–there generally  isn’t enough keyword-level data to make good decisions.

If you want to test out some confidence intervals of your own, this site has an interactive calculator. Use the binomial confidence interval and change the confidence level at the bottom of the page if you want it to be different than 95%. The higher the confidence level, the larger the intervals you will get. The numerator (x) is the number of conversions you observe, and the denominator (N) is the number of clicks you bought.

The approach I like to take when bidding is to start with an idea of the conversion rate for the campaign as a whole, and set bids based on that, since I have the most data at the campaign level. Then I look at individual ad groups and change bids if the confidence interval tells me that the ad group conversion rate is likely more or less than the campaign conversion rate. Then I look at individual keywords, but only those that have enough data to produce a useful confidence interval.

At Two Octobers we use automated tools to manage bid setting according to these principals, but it’s important to understand the underlying concepts. And bids are just one lever in a campaign. Ad copy, keyword selection and the user experience are at least as important as tweaking bids. More on that to come.

This article gives a high-level overview of a very complex topic. I hope it is useful to you, but please contact us if you would like help optimizing your paid search campaigns.