Archive for category Techniques
3 Million Keywords
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on November 29th, 2011
Google last month increased the maximum number of keywords allowed in a standard Google AdWords account from approximately 50,000 to 3 million. Yes, that’s right, you can now have up to 3 million keywords in your Google AdWords account.
And while most pay per click (PPC) advertisers are probably already doing a fair job at targeting a large number of relevant searchers through their existing keyword lists, there are massive opportunities for PPC advertisers who take the time to research thousands more keywords than their competitors.
Let’s find out why.
1. More Impressions
To illustrate the first reason, let’s consider Google’s phrase match for a moment. By bidding on the keyword ‘sony bravia tv’, and setting it to phrase match, you are essentially saying to Google:
“Show my ad whenever someone mentions the word ‘sony bravia tv’ in their search query”.
The job of phrase match is to show your ads for searches that mention your keyword phrase. You might therefore think this will enable your ads to appear whenever someone mentions the phrase ‘sony bravia tv’ in their search query.
Wrong.
Just because you have chosen to bid on the keyword ‘sony bravia tv’, does not mean your ad is guaranteed to show for any search containing the phrase ‘sony bravia tv’. You are competing with thousands of other advertisers for Google’s search results page real estate, and Google can only show a finite number of ads at any one time (10-12).
When deciding which ads to show, Google will display the ads that are most likely to generate a high click through rate (CTR), and those that have a relatively high Quality Score.
So when someone searches for ‘sony bravia 50 inch tv black’, PPC advertisers who have chosen to bid on a keyword close to ‘sony bravia 50 inch tv black’, and are able to display an ad which is relevant to Sony Bravia 50 inch TVs, is more likely to be awarded the chance to appear on Google’s search results page, than your generic keyword ‘sony bravia tv’, which triggers a more generic ad message.
The percentage of impressions your keywords receive for all ‘available’ searches is counted in Google’s Impression Share metric. The higher your Impression Share, the higher the percentage of available searches in which your ads appear.
The crucial point is this – by researching thousands of relevant keywords, all other things equal, you are more likely to show for a greater number of relevant searches. By researching thousands of keywords, your impressions and click volume will increase considerably.
4 Practical Ways to Lower Your AdWords CPCs
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 27th, 2011
WordStream last week carried out some fascinating research on Google AdWords CPC prices of different sectors. One key finding was that the finance industry carried high CPCs of up to $54.91, while other service-related sectors such as education, law and health also exhibited expensive CPC prices of over $30.00.
It’s All Relative
Since CPC prices are often closely linked to the potential profitability of a sale from that keyword, the CPC price is often a mute point. A ‘bad credit history remortgage’ could be worth $15,000 profit to a remortgage broker, so having CPCs in excess of $50.00 can deliver a strong return on investment.
On the other hand, the keyword ‘New York weather’ has little commercial intention, so keywords such as this tend to benefit from low CPCs.
While this relativity of CPC prices makes CPC comparisons across sectors rather meaningless, most PPC advertisers would jump at the chance to pay lower CPCs. So below are 4 strategies I’ve found useful for achieving lower CPCs, while still maintaining a strong conversion rate.
Source: Wordstream
How to Strike Gold in Google’s Search Query Report
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on March 31st, 2011
Google’s search query reports provide PPC advertisers with two fantastic opportunities to improve the performance of their AdWords campaigns:
- Identify irrelevant keywords which can be added as negatives
- Identify new keyword opportunities for keyword expansion
The difficulty, however, is efficiently and reliably pulling out trends and insights from a raw search query report. According to Google, 25% of searches made each day are completely unique, and 70% of searches lie outside of Google’s Keyword Tool. While this suggests that the large majority of your search queries will have received only a handful of clicks (making trend-spotting extremely difficult), it also presents a great opportunity for identifying new keywords outside of the Keyword Tool.
This article will explore the techniques which can be used not only to identify negative keywords from a search query report, but also identify new opportunities for practical keyword expansion.
3 Steps to Mid-Tail PPC Profitability
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on November 5th, 2010
The beauty of pay per click marketing is that it allows you to choose keywords which are highly relevant to your business. By only showing ads for search terms which closely match the products and services your business offers, you can ensure a high degree of relevancy and strong return on investment from paid search.
PPC advertisers have abided by this relevant approach since the dawn of PPC, knowing that to maximize PPC profitability, ads should be shown for highly-relevant keywords, and not for irrelevant keywords. If you are a synthetic grass manufacturer, for example, you should only show ads for highly-relevant searches such as ‘artificial grass’ and ‘synthetic grass suppliers’, but not for less relevant searches such as ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’. Showing ads for these less relevant keywords would achieve a low conversion rate and yield a poor profit.
Or so the theory goes.
But maybe there is a way to still achieve great results from these less relevant keywords? Maybe there is a way to reach a greater number of potential customers, while still achieving a strong profitability?
There is. But it involves a different way of thinking. It involves a different approach to simply bidding on a range of keywords, showing your best performing ads, and waiting for the sales to come flooding in.
Economics of PPC Pricing: Why Profit Sharing is the Future
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on February 23rd, 2010
In this third post in the Economics of PPC Pricing series, we consider the profit sharing model (you might also like to refer back to the previous Economics of PPC pricing posts on the markup model and the cost-per-sale model). By looking at the cost and revenue structures for both client and PPC agency, we discover that under the profit sharing model client and agency motivations are perfectly aligned, making profit sharing a highly efficient method of PPC compensation.
Although we infer that profit sharing is sound from an economic sense, we find it does have problems of its own in terms of implementation and conversion attribution, and conclude that profit sharing should only be considered once a strong and tested relationship has already been established between client and agency.
So let’s get started.
Economics of PPC Pricing: Why Performance Deals Often Fail
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on February 11th, 2010
For a business looking to hire a pay per click (PPC) agency, cost-per-sale (CPS) performance models are great. The business pays the agency a set price for each sale, so fees are entirely based on the agency’s performance.
From a client’s point of view, this is great. There is little risk – agency fees are only payable once sales come in. Guaranteed profit!
From an agency’s point of view, it’s also great. Each extra sale is extra revenue, so an agency which is confident of its abilities to deliver value from paid search is rewarded heavily (and fairly) for their efforts. Performance-related pay creates an incentive for agencies to invest their best resources and expertise into making PPC campaigns a success for their client.
Researching cheaper and high-converting long-tail keywords, restructuring ad groups to improve relevancy and regularly carrying out landing page testing to increase conversion rate become all the more worthwhile when there’s a monetary incentive. If an agency only gets paid when they deliver sales, it is worth their time and effort to deliver sales.
Sounds too good to be true. Client risk is minimal. Agencies which perform are rewarded. Agencies which don’t perform…well they are forced to perform if they are to stay in business.
So you’ve decided you want to give performance pricing a go. But how exactly would a performance deal work? And how should you go about creating one for your PPC agency?
Economics of PPC Pricing: Why the Markup Model is Flawed
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on November 26th, 2009
Choosing a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) pricing model which works efficiently for both client and agency is a difficult process. A good pricing model should be simple, should create incentives for the agency to perform and should be a fair measure of the work and expertise involved.
One common model that many agencies use is the ‘markup’ model (also commonly known as the ‘percentage of spend’ model). If the agreed markup is 10%, and the client spends $30,000 on clicks, the client pays $33,000, of which the agency receives $3,000.
Nice and simple.
But does it create incentives for the agency to maximise profit for the client? Does it fairly reflect the work and expertise involved at all spend levels?
No.
To Deep-Link Or Not To Deep-Link
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on October 20th, 2009
Landing page selection is an art.
When it comes to choosing landing pages for paid search ads, there is only one rule which must be followed: the page must be relevant to the user’s search query.
Other than ensuring a highly relevant user journey is delivered, there are no clear rules explicitly stating how a landing page should be designed, structured and styled, nor is there a landing page formula which works for everyone. Landing pages selection is about finding out what works best for your business, products, services, target audience, keywords and ads, through ongoing testing and optimisation.
Landing page performance will therefore vary depending on countless numbers of variables, making landing page best practice ambiguous. That said, it is important to be aware of the reasoning and implications behind any landing page strategy, to enable more informed landing page selection and more insightful testing and optimisation when comparing one landing page to another.
So to better understand the issues which arise when choosing landing pages, let’s consider one common dilemma which a large number of advertisers face: whether or not to deep-link.
Intelligent Analytics for Intelligent AdWords Management
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on September 15th, 2009
All too often keywords in a paid search account are evaluated based solely on their ability to generate conversions: leads, bookings or sales. If a keyword has an unacceptable conversion rate or an unsatisfactory return on investment (ROI), it is paused or its bid is greatly reduced.
Sometimes, if conversion data is scarce, click-through-rate (CTR) is instead used to evaluate a keyword’s performance. If a keyword generates only 5 clicks from 1,000 impressions, it has a CTR of 0.5% so is deemed irrelevant. The keyword is then paused or relegated to the second page of search result obscurity.
This is not the right approach. Read the rest of this entry »
How Low is “Low Search Volume”?
Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on August 30th, 2009
Browsing through your Google AdWords account, you notice some of your keywords are not showing due to “low search volume”. Hovering your mouse over the speech bubble, the ad diagnostic tool pops up:
According to Google AdWords Help, your keyword is not showing because not enough people are searching for your keyword.
“Low search volume” keywords are keywords associated with very little search traffic on Google properties. In which case, we suspend your keyword. This state is only temporary, and these keywords will be reactivated if we find that they could start delivering traffic.
So just how much search traffic is “very little search traffic”?
To find out, I decided to count every “low search volume” keyword in an AdWords account over a 3 month period. Of the 2,823 keywords that received at least one impression, 804 keywords (28.5%) were “low search volume”. That’s over a quarter of keywords.
© Calculate Marketing 2010 | 62/261 Domain Rd, South Yarra, VIC 3141, Australia | ABN 96 428 503 114
