AdWords Optimization has moved !!!

Please visit my new AdWords Optimization website. Find out more AdWords optimization tips and secrets to optimize your AdWords campaigns...

Use keyword matching options with negative keywords

Inside AdWords: Quick tip: Use keyword matching options with negative keywords

New AdWords Feature: Display Ad Builder Tool

Still only available for advertisers from US and Canada, this new feature should be available very soon to all AdWords advertisers.

Inside AdWords: Build your own display ads in minutes

Inside AdWords: Fall is webinar season

Inside AdWords: Fall is webinar season

Quality score - Landing page load time

Google AdWords team announced that they will take into account our landing page load time to calculate Quality Score (QS).

The "good news" is that they will grant advertisers a 1-month grace period. I mean if you enter the growing club of the "bad avertisers according to Google", you will have one month to make appropriate changes.

Here are basic recommandations:

1. Check your redirects. Avoid to have too many redirects and high delay redirect pages.
2. Optimize your images for the web (convert jpg to gif, compress your jpeg files).
3. Use third-party web page analysers to get customized advice and tips

Tools to optimize your landing page load time:

- Photofiltre: freeware for pictures. Compress jpeg files. Preview of jpeg file size after compression. Batch process image files.

- Web Page Analyzer : Free web page analysis tool calculates page size, composition, and download time. Gives speed recommendations based on best practices for usability, HCI, and website optimization.

Info from Google AdWords

Download URL Tagging Tool - Google Analytics

Download the free URL tagging tool for Google Analytics






If you're using Google Analytics, I've created for you a free tool that will easily manually tag your destination URL. It's an Excel sheet that generates customized URL to help you track your online campaigns (banners, emails, non-AdWords PPC campaigns, etc.).

You can find it here.

Campaign tracking allows you to properly gauge the success of various ad campaigns.
If you don’t use campaign tracking, Google Analytics may not know how a user reached your site. And you won’t know what marketing effort helped the visitor reach your site.

Why tagging your campaigns' destination URL?

• Find how your visitors arrived to your website.
• Differentiate between organic and CPC
• Organic is tracked automatically
• Destination URLs must be tagged to identify CPC
• Did they come from Google, Yahoo, or MSN
• Did they come by PPC, or Email

You will find more information about campaign tracking here.

AdWords Editor Shortcuts

If you are an AdWords advertiser, you may already use AdWords Editor (if you don't, I can only advise to do so! http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/

So here are the main shortcuts for AdWords Editor. Print and keep them at hand when you're optimizing your AdWords campaigns or launching new ad groups!

Ctrl+O Open account
Ctrl+R Get recent account changes
Ctrl+S Post changes
Ctrl+A Select all items in data view
Ctrl+Z Revert selected changes
Delete key Delete items
Ctrl+C Copy
Ctrl+X Cut
Ctrl+V Paste
Ctrl+K Add keyword
Ctrl+Shift+K Add multiple keywords
Ctrl+L Add negative keyword
Ctrl+Shift+L Add multiple negative keywords
Ctrl+M Add campaign negative keyword
Ctrl+Shift+L Add multiple campaign negatives
Ctrl+T Add text ad
Ctrl+Shift+T Add multiple text ads
Ctrl+G Add ad group
Ctrl+N Add campaign
Crtl+D Add draft campaign
Ctrl+W Exit Editor
Tab Switches between tree view, data view & edit panel
Ctrl+PageUp/Down If cursor is on the tab names (keywords, text ads …), then switches between tabs

AdWords Optimization - Optimize ROI

The first thing we need to know when we are talking about ROI is what ROI is. ROI stands for Return on Investment. But simply put, ROI is how much money you're making after you pay your advertising costs.

What is Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis?
ROI is a comparison of benefits to cost expressed as a percentage of the original investment. Advertisers measure ROI by taking the advertising cost and dividing over a specified conversion.

Common ways of measuring ROI are:

• Cost per conversion
• $10 cost per conversion

• Conversion Rate
• Click to conversion ratio of 2.5%
  

• Conversion value
• $10 in sales for every $2 spent on advertising

What is a conversion?
A conversion is a desired action performed by an end user. Tracking conversions allows you to understand the effectiveness of your advertising.

Common Types of Conversions
Acquisitions – Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
Orders – Cost per Order (CPO)
Registrations – Cost per Registration (CPR)
Leads – Cost per Lead (CPL)
Page Views – Cost per Page Views (CPV)
Sales – Cost per Sale (CPS)
Transactions – Cost per Transaction (CPT)


ROI Techniques for Keywords
Identify KWs falling within target Cost Per Conversion

• What are the top converting words?

• What are the top traffic words?

• What are the most cost-effective words?

• Expand the list of performing KWs to leverage success

• Synonyms, related terms, plurals, spelling variations, etc.

• Ensure top performing keywords are not being limited by daily budget

Identify KWs falling outside target Cost Per Conversion

• Try to isolate factors that are negatively affecting underperforming KWs

• Add negatives, review match types

• Ensure underperforming keywords are not monopolising budget

• Reduce amount of impressions being dedicated to these keywords

• Consider lowering bids to improve ROI

Other things that will affect ROI within keywords:

• Add specific to extremely specific terms
• Brand names, Product ID Numbers
  

• Add conversion focused words
• Buy, purchase, order, rent
  

• Separate spenders from bargain hunters
• Add negatives: Free, cheap, discount
  

• Separate shoppers from researchers
• Add negatives: reviews, how to, prices, trailers, what is
  

• Scrub keyword list for relevant keywords that are not found on the site
• You currently have keyword ‘motorola phones’ but you only sells ‘nokia phones’
  

AdWords Optimization - Optimize Traffic

When we are talking about traffic, we are talking about two different things. First, increasing traffic can mean increasing the number of impressions an ad is showing on. It also can mean increasing the number of clicks an ad is getting for their existing impressions. For the purpose of this section, when we talk about increasing traffic, we mainly mean increasing the number of impressions an ad can show on. Increasing the number of clicks per impressions would fall under CTR. However, when we are increasing traffic, we usually can help them increase the number of impressions and help increase the number of clicks per impression to impact overall traffic numbers even more.

To optimize keywords for a traffic goal, the most important point is to think of new, unique keywords. Not variations of keywords you already have. For example, if you are running on the broad matched keyword ‘dog toy’ and you add the keyword ‘cheap dog toy’ – that is not giving you new impressions. You would be serving on that query already, you are just moving the impressions you are already getting to new keywords. When you want to increase traffic on a term, you need to think of synonyms, abbreviations, etc that woudn’t be triggering your ad – like ‘puppy toy’ and ‘canine toy’.

Look for products on your site that are not currently being advertised – perhaps you are running on ‘dog toy’ keywords, but not your ‘chew toy’ category or your ‘dog bone’ category.

Do not remove existing keywords!!!! Remember, if you have a goal of increasing traffic, it means you are happy with the traffic you are already getting and just want more of it. It is very easy, once you have learned the best practices of optimization, to get your hands on a site and start weeding out keywords you don’t think work for you. Maybe you think they are too general, or irrelevant. Whenever you first devise your strategy, you should always be doing it with your goal in mind. If your goal is to increase traffic, and you remove keywords – are you meeting your goal?

Along the same lines, you do not want to focus on negative keywords. If you are happy with your current traffic and you add 100 negatives that cut your number of impressions in half – are you meeting your goal? If you are adding negative keywords, it will typically only be for keywords you are adding. Since you are adding new impressions, a negative keywords will just reduce the amount you are adding, it won’t reduce the overall number of impressions for that Ad Group. Just focus on high level negatives – only removing what is completely irrelevant. If a query is related at all to the theme of the Ad Group, don’t add it as a negative. For example, if you are adding the keyword ‘dog’ and you are selling dog toys, then you would add negatives like ‘pictures’, because a picture of a dog is completely unrelated to a real dog. But you wouldn’t add anything relevant to a real dog, or real dog owner who may be drawn to my dog toy ad.

• Look to build impressions by looking for keywords you aren’t using on the landing page.
  

• Always add all plurals and singulars of all keywords.

• Look for synonyms and other related keywords (abbreviations, full version of acronyms, etc)

• Add industry specific terms

• Product or brand name

• Common misspellings – only need to add major misspellings, ones where you aren’t even sure what is right. For example, ‘accommodation’ vs. ‘accomodation’ and ‘cannon’ vs. ‘canon’

AdWords Optimization - Optimize CTR

We'll see together how to optimise for a goal of CTR.

When I talk about a goal of CTR, this also contains a few other goals as well:

• Increasing ad rank without wanting to increase the max CPCs
• Paying less per click but maintaining current position
• Getting more clicks for the same amount of money (especially when the daily budget is reached
  

An increase in CTR can meet all of these goals – so this strategy covers them all.

This strategy generally applies to AdWords campaigns with:

• low CTR
  
• many general keywords
• no or limited negative keywords
• poor account structure
• non-descriptive ad text

If an AdWords account has a poor structure, you can improve it by re-organising general ad groups into more specific ones. Specific and general keywords should be broken out – so if an ad group contains general and specific television keywords, like ‘tv, television, sony television, panasonic tv, etc’ then the ad text would have to be very general in order to be relevant to all of those keywords. It would probably read something like ‘New TVs for Sale’ or ‘Name Brand Televisions’. However, if someone searched on ‘sony television’ and saw your general ad text and saw another ad text that read ‘Sony Televisions for Sale’, that user would find the specific Sony ad text more relevant and it would have a higher CTR. So you can leave the general keywords with the general ad text, and move the more specific keywords into their own ad groups – a Sony AG, a Panasonic AG, etc.

Re-organisation will not always be as simple as you can have 10 different products or brands in an ad group that you break into 10 different ad groups. Moreover, it can occur you don't have a strong website structure to base an organisation on, and you don't necessarily sell a bunch of specific products. In these cases, you often need to find themes in your keyword list to determine organisation. Remember that when the user looks at your ad text, it should match the keyword they are searching on as closely as possible. So even if you are running on two keywords that are synonyms of each other, that doesn’t mean they can go in the same ad group. If you're running on keywords like ‘new car’ ‘new automobile’ ‘new vehicle’, if a user searches on ‘new automobile’ and sees two ads, one that read ‘new car’ and one that reads ‘new automobile’ – their eyes will naturally go to the one that matched exactly what they searched. So, by breaking up the keyword list into themes of the synonyms, you then end up with all ‘new car’ keywords together, all ‘new automobile’ keywords together, etc.

In the end, your ad text should be relevant to every keyword in the ad group. The best way to check this is just to scan all of your ad titles and then scan all of your keywords. If a user were to search on any keyword in your list, would every single ad text for that ad group make sense? If not, perhaps you should break those keywords into a new ad group with new ad text. The best practice is that specific keywords, like ‘victoria beckham jeans’ will have very specific ad text, and that general keywords, like ‘designer jeans’, or leftover specific keywords that don’t get enough traffic to "earn" their own ad group will have general ad text that will be relevant to everything.

To sum up:


Most determining factor of a good CTR is keywords matching the ad text – therefore a strong structure is imperative


• Re-organise general Ad Groups
• Specific and general keywords should not be together
• Look for themes in keyword lists
• Ad text should be relevant to EVERY keyword
• Specific keywords = specific ad text
• General keywords = general ad text


When you are looking at the keywords in a CTR optimisation, you want to find keywords that have been performing very well and expand on them – finding new variations and synonyms. You also want to add a lot of negative keywords. Negative keywords are one of the fastest ways to affect CTR as it ensures people who would not find your ad relevant will never see it on the page. For example, if I am selling a specific product, like an iPod, and see that a lot of people are looking for ipod accessories and I only offer the iPod, I would add negatives like –accessory –accessories –cover –covers. Doing this, you can make general terms more specific. However, if even negatives do not make a general keyword specific enough, then you can determine whether you should change it to an exact match – to make it as specific as possible. The last resort would be to remove keywords that were still too general even after adding negatives or changing the match type. In that case, you would remove the general keyword and add more relevant keywords in its place. If you are removing a lot of impressions with negatives or changing match types or deleting keywords, you want to try and replace some of that lost traffic with new, more relevant keywords that they are not already showing on.



The biggest technique to improve CTR in ad text is to make sure your keywords are in the ad title. The is what will make the user see the relevant of the ad. Once again, the more targeting your structure, the easier it is to have a targeted ad text. Special offers and promotions are sure to draw a user’s eye and increase CTR. You also always want to test multiple creatives – ideally 3 if you are working with higher traffic keywords. Really get creative in your testing to try and find what works the best. You need to stand out from your competitors. Make sure you are always intercapitalising your display URLs and adding the www. if there is room in the front of your URL. Both of these have been found to increase CTR. Make the ad seem larger on the page by treating the capitalisation of the ad text like one long book title and using as much of the character space as you can. In the end, if you are in a very competitive market place and do not have offers or a brand name that makes you stand out from your competition – get creative, be gimmicky. Make your ads rhyme or use really cheesy lines – anything to make your ad stand out. Because you are always testing multiple ads, you can have 2 standard creatives and one that pushes the limits – often you may find that the 3rd text is what catches the eye.

How to link AdWords to Google Analytics

Easy!

You can find the detailed procedure to link or unlink an AdWords account to a Google Analytics account here:

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=55507&query=link&topic=&type=f&onClick=