Instead, I’d like to offer some opinions and raise some interesting debate on just what kind of impact Google Instant could have on Adwords PPC campaigns.

Google suggest may suddenly become an extremely valuable keyword research tool. With instant results on screen, users may scroll between these options a lot more than they used to, knowing that a simple press of the down arrow will switch the results on screen without even having to click. With that mind, for PPCers, it becomes even more important to be bidding on the longer-tail variations that Google suggests automatically or you would risk missing out on potential traffic. I see there being a bigger shift over to these types of keywords.

Take the example above, an advertiser may previously just have been bidding on the term [holidays to spain] which generated huge amounts of impressions. For this particular advertiser, the trend may begin to shift where there becomes a surge in impressions for the longer tail terms Google is also suggesting such as ‘holidays to spain 2010’ or ‘holidays to spain in september’ and so it is paramount that these are bid on too. Bidding on the term ‘holidays to spain’ on phrase match would see adverts shown for the above terms too, but effective PPC optimisation would say that these terms need to be bid on specifically too so that their individual performances can be tracked and adjusted.

Google Instant is obviously going to have an impact on the way our Adwords campaigns perform and how we optimise these going forward, but I don’t think it is something to be feared or daunted by. Throughout Google’s lifetime, changes to their platform or algorithm like we have seen with Google Instant haven’t been uncommon. As advertisers, all that we now need to do is adapt and optimise to a slightly new set of variables. Let’s not forget, all advertisers are in the same boat right now, but it is those that respond and adapt quickly that will be the real winners, and that’s something that we have every intention of doing here at Epiphany.

For a breakdown of the impact of Google Instant Search on SEO and Natural Search check out this post by my colleague Malcolm Slade of the Epiphany SEO team.

If you have any opinions on any of the above discussion topics or any of your own regarding Google Instant, please feel free to comment and we’ll be sure to respond!

An example is shown below. I searched for “restaurants leeds”. The top website shows reviews and offers for many restaurants in Leeds, but the second ad is a lone restaurant with the Local Ad Extension included. When opened up the ad is definitely a focus on the page.

It also shows a user, quite clearly, where the restaurant is and the contact details before they have clicked onto the website. This avoids wasted clicks from those who do not want to eat in that area. There is also the added benefit that for those who are already interested and are just looking for the phone number to book or post code for their Sat Nav, you won’t have to pay for their click as the information they require is presented on the SERP.

One thing I find negative about the Local Ad Extension is that the plus box is not that obvious, and most people will not know about it and are therefore unlikely to notice it. Although it does show the address I don’t think it is very clear. This could change as people gradually become more aware of such tools.

Despite this, I do think it is a worthwhile addition to any campaign advertising local products or services, especially when large competitors are showing above you.

That said; don’t think that just because people like you, you don’t have to put any real effort in – the honeymoon period will quickly run out if that is the case! If you want to improve, please take on board my (and no doubt many other advertiser’s) views and feedback:

• Transparency of click data: In numerous campaigns that I’ve run now, I’ve ensured that all adverts are tagged up in such a way that we can track their exact performance in Google Analytics. The difference in click numbers that Facebook reports compared to Google Analytics can be quite startling – sometimes as much as a 50% discrepancy between the two. When Facebook tells you your campaign has generated 400 clicks on a given day, and you can only see 200 of these have actually been recorded as traffic through to your site, you can’t help but be a bit concerned about what you’re being charged for on Facebook.
• Greater communication regarding acceptable/unacceptable adverts: Now this is an area that Facebook needs to become a lot more transparent in, in terms of exactly what is allowed and what isn’t. At the very least, we advertisers would like to see some consistency! It’s all very well one day disallowing an advert on the basis of the image used infringing their advertising guidelines and quoting those to us. Fine, you think, I won’t use that image again. However, when I submitted the identical advert the day after with the only difference being that it was targeted it towards a different demographic, this was approved no problem. Time and time again this is happening. What am I supposed to do as an advertiser? You’d be forgiven for thinking that your success depends on the ‘sensitivity’ levels of the Facebook employee vetting the adverts on that given day.Increasingly, we are also seeing more and more adverts banned for this reason:
• 
  This is a sight I dread to see when I login to Facebook each day. Your advert could have been running successfully for weeks with a nice healthy click-through and conversion rate, but then, from nowhere… gone, just like that due to negative feedback. How much negative feedback needs to be accumulated before an advert gets pulled is unclear. Would I be surprised if only a handful of reports, despite thousands of clicks, could stop an advert? No. And what’s to stop a rival competitor deliberately reporting all of your adverts, knowing this will happen? Again, greater transparency is needed here from you Facebook.
• Improved advert testing: Now this is one of the most frustrating elements of all on Facebook. Anybody that regularly conducts PPC activities will tell you how vital advert testing is to a successful paid search campaign. On Google, for each ad group we create, we are used to creating at least two adverts. These are then used to split test traffic to effectively assess which advert is the better performer. The poorer performer is removed, and a new test advert is put in its place. Thus, the process of advert testing is established. On Facebook, the importance of advert testing is even more vital, as, other than different demographics, the adverts will have the greatest impact on how well the campaign will perform. You would therefore expect to be able to create numerous adverts, set them all live, allowing Facebook to split the impressions equally (as much as possible, depending on different demographic settings), between all adverts. Not the case unfortunately. Instead, on any given day, Facebook seems to just decide for you, which advert it would like be shown the most, and the majority of impressions register against that version. The next day, it may remain the same, or the system may suddenly decide to show an alternative advert instead. This process makes advert testing incredibly difficult. The only way around this for now, is to pause all adverts except one version, and on that day, this will force Facebook to show that one advert. The next day, pause that advert, and un-pause another. Overtime, you’ll be able to assess the results and decide on the better performing versions.
• A desktop tool a bit like Adwords Editor: Being able to create and upload bulk batches adverts from a desktop-based program instead of creating them one by one via Facebook’s website? That’s the stuff of fantasies surely? I hope not. It certainly would save me a lot of valuable time in my day-to-day job!
• Create a separate interface to login to, moving away from the existing Facebook login: After time, it does become a little tiresome having to login via the normal Facebook login screen, scroll to the bottom of the page to find the ‘Advertising’ link and then take things from there. Could a separate interface not be created just for the sole purpose of managing Facebook ads that doesn’t require them to either use their own personal Facebook account? Or the creation of a corporate Facebook login just for the sole purpose of advertising and nothing else?!
• Improving general communication: That word ‘transparency’ seems to be cropping up a lot already in this blog. But it’s so true – to improve, you need to engage with your users more effectively and take on board the feedback they’re providing you. There is a general ‘Ad Campaign Inquiry’ form on the site as a way of raising any questions you may have regarding a campaign. However, I’ve used this form a number of times to ask questions regarding billing and advert issues and so on. To date, not one reply has been received to any of my questions from the Facebook Ads Team – not good.

  

  If you’re reading this Facebook, there are companies and agencies out there like ours that are willing to spend a lot of money advertising on Facebook because despite a lot of these flaws, we have seen a lot of potential. To do so, we expect a lot more help and support from you in return. Perhaps even an assigned account manager for larger accounts wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world?

  If you really are serious about competing with the big boys in search, then you need to up your game. Do that, and the world could well be your oyster.

  Do you have additional suggestions about how Facebook ads could be improved? Please feel free to comment below.

As this blog may demonstrate, decisions you are making regarding clickthrough rate at an Ad group and keyword level could well be being made without seeing the full picture. Making decisions in PPC without fully having all data to hand, as we all know, is a dangerous and risky practice.

So who are Google’s search partners?

Finding a definitive list of all the websites that make up Google’s search partner network is quite difficult to find, and is something I’m sure Google are quite keen to keep close to their chest. However, we do know that sites such as Amazon and Ebay are part of this network, which gives a strong indication of how your adverts will display when this setting is selected.

With that in mind, how is advertising on search partners different to advertising on Google’s content network?

Well, to be honest, when those search partners tend to be websites such as Ebay and Amazon it’s not really that different at all, which is quite an alarming point. Users that search on websites such as these are looking for a different search experience than those that run their searches through Google’s search engine, which is only natural. A user has reached Ebay for a reason and expects to find what they are looking for there – they’re not expecting to be taken off somewhere else to make a purchase. As such, it would not be uncommon to see poor clickthrough rates from large amounts of search impressions on a site of this type.

Take the following search on Ebay for ‘televisions. The Google search partner adverts display at the bottom of the results page as follows:

Now, on the whole, there is nothing dramatically wrong with these adverts – they are relevant to the search on Ebay. However, to compare the relevance of the adverts here on Ebay, to how relevant they would be on Google’s search results page, it’s a non-comparison. Users are clearly searching initially with the aim of making a purchase on Ebay (perhaps even a second-hand television), and it will take some persuading to divert them off elsewhere to make a purchase. Clearly some users will be drawn in by these adverts to click and convert, and for that reason, there is definite value in advertising on Google’s search partners. On the whole though, as this again illustrates, an advertiser shouldn’t expect high clickthrough rates or even high conversion rates using this medium, but would expect to pay less per click than on Google’s search network (as you would expect when running a campaign using Google’s content network).

With that in mind, best PPC practice would say that a content network campaign should warrant its own separate campaign with alternative bids and adverts and managed separately due to the types of users and lower clickthrough rates you would expect with a content network campaign. Ideally, that is what you should be able to do with Google’s search partners. Unfortunately, that’s just not possible – it is either switched off altogether, or switched on in conjunction with the Google search network – there’s no middle ground.

The impact on campaign, ad group and keyword CTRs

This leads me onto the most important of this piece – if the data for the Google search and search partner networks are amalgamated (as is the standard setting in Adwords), surely the results are a little misleading to the untrained eye?

Well yes, they certainly are. The only way to overcome this is by choosing to segment the data by network each and every time you take a look at the data in your campaigns. But realistically, how many advertisers currently do this each and every time that make decisions regarding performance in their campaigns?

Take a look at some data segmented between the two networks from a campaign we are currently running:

If I hadn’t segmented the data, we would see that the campaign as a whole was achieving a clickthrough rate of 1.63%, 14 conversions at a conversion rate of 0.84%. On the whole, not disastrous, but does this really tell the full story?

When the data is segmented, it becomes apparent that the Google Search campaign is running at a far healthier CTR of 3.9%, with all conversions coming from this network for an again healthier conversion rate of 1.2%. Compare that to the Search Partners which has recorded a less respectable CTR of 0.7% and zero conversions – overall, it is this set of data that is bringing the whole campaign down.

Now consider if this data was not being viewed at campaign level, but at ad group or keyword level instead. If you were to see keywords that supposedly were recording thousands of search impressions, but very few clicks and extremely poor CTRs, logically, through fear of impact on quality score, you may have to make tough decisions as to whether to keep these terms in your campaign. This may not be the case at all – it could be that they’re performing extremely well on the Google search network, but poorly on search partners, and as a result, you could be unnecessarily removing profitable terms from your campaign.

The fear of impacting quality score is not something that needs to be considered as intently as for the search partners as you would with the Google search network. For search partner quality scores, Google state that “performance on the specific search partner is used only”. In other words, you acquire a quality score for each individual search partner site which are then allowed to perform mutual exclusively from each other. So fear not – if your clickthrough rate for a keyword on Google’s search partners is poor, it won’t bring down the performance of your quality score on the Google search network.

An additional factor that is far more concerning, is that it’s not even possible to segment the data at an advert level. With this being the case, how can you effectively test adverts? Again, you could be removing adverts that are showing poor clickthrough rates on the basis of affecting long-term quality score, when this really may not be the case.

Summary

This blog is not suggesting for a second that you should rush out to ditch Google’s search partners. The above data is just one example, and in many campaigns, Google search partners are responsible for healthy conversion figures. With that in mind, any medium that can supply conversions at your target CPA should not be disregarded foolishly.

What should be taken away from reading this piece is the message that it is incredibly important to ensure you have all the data available to you when making important decisions within your campaign. Without all the information to hand, it is impossible to make effective decisions – and effective decisions are the key to any successful PPC campaign.

For example, if I was advertising Sony Digital Cameras, I may include…

• Cheap Sony Digital Camera
• Cheap Sony Digital Cameras
• Sony Digital Camera
• Sony Digital Cameras

… all in the same Ad group (Ok – I wouldn’t, but for the sake of this example, suppose that I did).

If, after a month, I noticed that the conversion rate on ‘Cheap Sony Digital Camera’ and ‘Cheap Sony Digital Cameras’ was much lower, then I would split out these keywords into a separate Ad group. I would then assign them their own bid and advert, providing that they had enough traffic to justify their own Ad group (if they were generating almost no clicks, or they were generating a lot of clicks, but no sales, I may simply decide to remove them completely).

In the above case, I decide to remove them. What’s the result?

If I was using Exact Match only, then I have no problems – the keywords are removed, and my adverts don’t appear for these searches.

But if I’ve got my keywords on Phrase Match, all that will happen is that when somebody searches for ‘Cheap Sony Digital Camera’, my advert will appear, assigning the traffic to ‘Sony Digital Camera’ (Phrase Match).

If you delete a keyword from an Ad group, make sure that you have no other keywords that will catch it on Phrase or Broad Match. If possible, add it in as a Negative Match, to be on the safe side.

Of course, if in the above example, I had decided to move the ‘Cheap’ keywords to a new Ad group, and reduce the bids, I’m liable to get the same result. If the Phrase Match has a significantly higher bid, you are liable to see the clicks appear against this, and your new Ad group with the lower bids will be irrelevant.

So whenever you move a group of keywords to a new Ad group, make sure that the old Ad group doesn’t end up picking up the traffic – use Negative Matching at Ad group level. If you are removing a keyword from the whole campaign, it’s probably best to use Negative Matching at Campaign level.

You need to be especially careful when you have a particularly important keyword in its own Ad group, on Exact and Phrase Match. If you need to split the two versions into separate Ad groups, then you have to put a Negative Exact Match in the Phrase Match Ad group.

So you put it live, and it bombs. Your clickthrough rate is horrific, and you’re left wondering why….

The problem is that your advert looks good on paper, but adverts don’t run on paper. Your advert may be great in the middle of a blank sheet of paper, but how does it look, when there are ten other PPC adverts surrounding it? And what about the ten natural search results just to the left? Does your advert still stand out?

Suppose that you’re an injury claim solicitor. Your unique selling points, like those of all your competitors (!) are that you pay out 100% of the compensation, and you have a policy of ‘No Win, No Fee’. Clearly, these points need to go into your advert.

Actually, you’re in a no-win situation here. If you don’t put these points in, nobody will click on your advert. And if you do, your advert will look just like everyone else’s adverts. This was what a search for ‘injury compensation’ returned a couple of years ago:

So, unless your advert was top, nobody was ever going to click on it. The solution is to be more innovative with your adverts. It’s likely in this case that searchers will assume that they’ll get 100%, with no win, no fee. If so, then highlight another selling point – something that does make you stand out. This is what the same search displays now:

Some advertisers, such as injurylawyers4u and accidentsdirect are still running the same adverts they did over 2 years ago. Others are trying new messages such as including a location in their advert (National Accident Helpline), indicating how quick and easy the process is (Injury-UK, Injury-Direct), or asking questions to try to interact with the searcher.

There are many clever ways to make your advert stand out, but before putting your advert live, it’s essential to consider where your advert is going to appear, and what everyone else is saying.

There is one further point that must be made here. It’s very tempting to make your adverts stand out by sensationalising them. This will improve your clickthrough rate, but bear in mind that PPC is a bit like paying people to enter your shop. Every visitor that you pay Google for, that doesn’t buy anything, is a waste of money. Make false or misleading promises, and you’ll just end up wasting money.

The perfect PPC campaign would attract anyone who is seriously considering buying, but nobody else. This would not maximise your clickthrough rate, just your campaign’s profitability.

But is conducting regular reporting through Google Adwords a worthwhile or worthless practice for those in PPC? I’m sure you already can sense the opinion of this blogger – I mean come on, why would Google place so much information at your disposal if it was all pointless and added no value? Regular reporting is an incredibly worthwhile practice, but it is essential that you know what you are looking for, and when you find it, knowing what you are going to do with that information.

So what sort of reports should we be running on a regular basis, and why are they so valuable?

Account/Campaign Report

Either of the above reports can be incredibly useful when the unit of time is broken down to be viewed by an hourly period. In this format, we are able to see how many impressions and clicks an account or individual campaign is receiving, which are then broken down by each hour of the day.

Why would this useful you may be thinking?

Primarily, this type of report is fantastic for assessing how well your daily budget is performing. If you start to discover a trend in the report where from 8pm onwards most days that the impressions and clicks drop substantially, or are non-existent, then it would be safe to say that your budget is running out far too early. The answer? Drop your bids and assess again a few days later.

Of course, this only works if your campaign is set to accelerated delivery – if it’s set to standard delivery, you will see your budget lasting all day, whether it’s sufficient or not. If you are using standard delivery, you should run an Impression Share report.

Campaign Report with the use of Impression Share (IS)

The use of Impression Share (or ‘IS’ as it can be referred to through Google), is a way of taking the data available from a standard Campaign Report and moving up to a whole other level of detail. The report is run in a very similar way to that of the report described above, with the only alteration being the selection of the ‘Lost Impression Share’ options in the data filters section. The lost impression share can be split into two variables; by rank and by budget.

‘Lost impression share by rank’ allows us to see the percentage of impressions a campaign has lost out on due to an advert position appearing too low (normally by dropping down onto page 2 of search results). For example, if the report displays that a campaign received 1000 impressions in a given day, but had a 50% lost impression share by rank, then we know that we have lost out on a potential further 1000 impressions due to our adverts displaying too low down. This of course would then allow us to assess whether the bid prices need to be increased to boost our advert positions and take greater advantage of total traffic.

A lost impression share by budget is a more detailed version of the campaign/account report mentioned earlier. Similarly to a lost impression share by rank, this will tell us how many impressions were lost due to the budget being spent. If we are seeing that by 8pm the budget has spent, but for the remaining 4 hours of the day we are missing out on further impressions, then decisions need to made about increasing the budget or decreasing the bids. If your advert delivery is set to standard, the daily lost impression share by budget will tell you whether your budget is sufficient, given your bids.

Search Query Report

A search query report is probably the most common report that will be run, or more appropriately, should be running in any typical Adwords campaign.

For those not familiar, a search query report allows us to see all the keyword searches that led to clicks on a campaign over a given period of time. This type of report is absolutely fantastic for a campaign heavily focussed on a number of phrase match and broad match terms. It can be used to identify any additional useful keyword terms that weren’t originally identified when the campaign was set up, allowing us to add these in as exact match keywords going forward. On the reverse side, it will also display any rogue keyword searches that have no relevance to the campaign, which can then be added in as negative keywords.

Take the following as an example:

We have a client that publicises themselves as a public speaker through their own personal website, and has a PPC campaign set up to aid this promotion. One keyword on the campaign is the phrase match “famous talking”. Through a recent search query report, we were able to identify a search had been made for ‘famous talking speakers’. Great – that can go as an exact match from now on I thought. A little further down the search query report, I discover that the campaign had also received a click for ‘famous talking dogs’. Not really what we were looking for! So in that goes as a negative, never to see the light of day again.

Imagine those that don’t run regular search query reports and are missing out on the above? Not only would you be missing out on identifying new key terms for the campaign, but more worryingly, a heck of a lot of clicks and spend could be heading right down the drain.

So is regular reporting worthwhile or worthless in any PPC campaign? I think I’d go as far as to say that it’s essential.

Fortunately, this trait of mine doesn’t extend into my day-to-day working profession, which is a good job, as impatience and PPC don’t tend to be the best of friends!

So why is patience such a virtue in PPC?

Without a doubt, the use of PPC as part of the online marketing mix can offer fantastic return on investment due to its measurability on a number of metrics such as click volumes, bounce rates and cost per conversion. But whilst it would be great to produce amazing results on day 1 of any campaign for our clients, this often can be quite unrealistic.

The work that goes into optimising a PPC campaign will, more often than not, initially follow a similar format each time – extensive keyword research, effective grouping of keywords, regular reporting, advert testing and so on. But that’s not to say that the way campaigns respond will follow the same format. Every market is different, and therefore you can expect varying results. The way a website looks and operates within that market can vary the results even further (especially if it isn’t very user friendly!). With that in mind, it can take time to find that winning formula, with no single factor a guarantee of success over any other.

With the need to work on a campaign over time also comes the need patience, which is where the link is made. So where specifically should it be adopted?

Bid adjustments

“It’s 2pm, and XYCorp’s campaign has only had four clicks so far today with no conversions! It had 30 clicks this time yesterday and 4 conversions – I don’t get it!”. We’ve all been there, but panicking and making rash bid adjustments isn’t going to help. It might just be having a bad start to the day, or there may be other factors beyond your control. Either way, it’s too early to make snap judgements. Be patient and assess again tomorrow – if the poor performance continues, then look to take action.

Advert testing

You’ve decided to write a new advert for that Adgroup with the poor clickthrough or conversion rate. How long do you leave it running before making a decision on its effectiveness? Well, this all depends on the levels of traffic that ad group is seeing. With 10 impressions a week, it’s nearly impossible to tell how well an advert is going to perform after a couple of days. Patience is key, certainly at least until you have enough data to make an informed decision.

Performance of keywords

Using the same theory of giving adverts time to prove whether they have the ability to perform or not, the same approach must be adopted for keywords as well. It can be very tempting to drop a keyword and add it in as a negative if its clickthrough rate is low, and thus potentially harming a campaign’s Quality Score, or if it is failing to convert despite high clicks and spend. But a loss of patience and rash decisions do not work well here. A keyword can have a poor clickthrough rate for many reasons such as a poorly written advert, strong competition or low advert position. A keyword can also fail to convert due to a weak landing page or website in general – this doesn’t necessary mean that the keyword is poor. It is therefore vitally important that all avenues are investigated before action is taken, as you could be removing keywords that in different circumstances could perform very well for a campaign.

So there you have it. Patience is most certainly a virtue… well between the hours of 9-5 it is for me. At all other times, I still reserve my right to sigh heavily in frustration when the person at the cash machine in front of me takes 10 minutes to check their balance!

It appears that the percentage of clicks going on Paid Search is falling, which is potentially a misleading statistic (see my blog on Google and the 80:20 ratio). But they make another, very interesting point.  They indicate that the biggest fall is on brand-name keywords, and quote Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim, who says:
“Is that likely due to a reduction in spend, or Orbitz et al figuring out that they really don’t need to spend so much on paid advertising–considering they’re #1 in the organic results?”

Leaving aside the fact that, in the UK at least, Orbitz are still brand-bidding, this is quite an interesting trend, if true.

The question of whether to bid on your brand name or not has been the subject of many blogs in the industry over the years, but most people are in agreement that you should certainly at least consider bidding on your name.

Back in 2006, Scott Woodard (also at Marketing Pilgrim) recommended bidding on alternative spellings and  mis-spellings of your name, and even slogans: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/12/9-cost-effective-ppc-branding-strategies.html

But the obvious argument that you get from clients is that if they are appearing top for their brand name, and people are looking for them by name, they were going to get the traffic anyway. There is certainly some truth in this, as a large percentage of the clicks on the PPC advert would cannibalise the natural clicks you were going to get anyway. So why bother?

Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing, and Dave Davis at Redfly Marketing both make good arguments in favour of brand bidding: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/03/defend_yourself_bid_on_your_br.htm
http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/5-reasons-you-should-be-bidding-on-your-company-name/
To summarise, these are the critical benefits:
1) The traffic’s cheap. You’ll get a big advantage on your Quality Score, and your clickthrough rate will be high (giving you another QS boost). So in most cases, you’ll only have to pay pence to appear for your brand name. And this spend will often represent only a very small percentage of your advertising spend.
2) Other people can bid on your brand name. There are no rules against it anymore, and if you don’t bid on your brand name, there’s a decent chance that one of your competitors will appear at the top of the search results when somebody is looking for you. It’s like driving past Sainsburys and Asda to get to Tesco – it’s inevitable that you’ll lose some customers, it’s just a question of how many…
3) Natural Search results are in a constant state of flux. It’s quite possible that your website won’t be top for your brand name all of the time, particularly if it’s quite a common name, or consists of an English phrase. This is particularly an issue if you’re a relatively small company, and your website doesn’t have much age or a lot of links to it.
4) Controlling Your Message. You can control exactly what people see when they search for you. You can show your latest promotion, and perhaps more importantly, land them on a page of your choice.
5) You may not rank that well for misspellings of your name. Not everyone knows how to spell your brand name. We used to have an account for somebody who sold Wedgwood products, but I found that more people spelled it Wedgewood than were getting the name right.

From this, it sounds like a no-brainer. But it may not be quite that straightforward. There are a number of questions you should ask before making a decision.
1) What’s it going to cost? We’ve got a client who pays nearly £3 per click to bid on their brand name, despite getting clickthrough rates of 20% – 40%. The reason for this, aside from the high value of the traffic, is the fact that their name is also a common phrase that people search for.
2) Is anyone else bidding on your brand name? If you are a new website, or a relatively small player in the market, there’s a good chance that they aren’t. In which case, if you are top of the search results, you’ll lose very little traffic, if any.

Whether you decide to bid on your name or not, you’ll certainly want to make sure that your affiliates aren’t allowed to bid on your brand. This is a fairly standard clause in affiliate contracts, but there are plenty of unscrupulous affiliates out there who will ‘accidentally’ bid on your brand…

To come back to the original point, it appears that more and more advertisers are stopping their brand-bidding. Why is this?

A few possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, it’s possible that businesses are dropping their PPC campaigns completely. This would certainly fit with the other results in the E-Consultancy report, but it doesn’t really tally with results that I’ve been seeing recently. With a few exceptions, competition appears as high as ever during this recession.

In the past, businesses have often cut their marketing budgets when times were hard – something that has always made little sense to business analysts. Based entirely on my experiences, it appears that this just doesn’t seem to be true this time around.

Another possibility is the effect of competitor brand bidding on your Quality Score. If you’re a small advertiser, bidding on keywords with very high traffic volumes, and very low clickthrough rates, can have a very serious impact on your Account Quality Score, undermining every other keyword in your campaign, for very little reward. On many of my accounts, I’ve removed competitor names, in order to improve the overall account quality.

If this is a common conclusion, and fewer people are bidding on competitor terms, perhaps the argument for defensive bidding is lessened. But I doubt that this is that commonplace – there are very few people out there worrying about their Account Quality Score, perhaps because Google don’t seem to like talking about it…

So, should you bid on your brand name?

On this, I tend to agree with Anil Batra: http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/01/should-you-be-paying-for-clicks-on-your_15.html. Testing is critical if the spend on your brand name is going to be a significant amount of money. Work out how much traffic your brand name drives from natural search only, then add PPC and see to what extent it increases, and at what cost.

This is really the only way to be certain, but if you do decide to bid on your brand name, there is one thing you must do – split it out from the rest of the campaign, at least in the reporting. Typically, the performance of your brand name will be much better than other keywords, and combining them to analyse the performance of your account will make the performance look better than it really is.

For example, suppose that your breakeven cost per conversion is £20. You get a report from your Agency reporting 100 conversions at £15 each (total spend £1500). You’ve made £500, so you’re happy.

But you ask them to break out the brand name, and they show you that your brand name generated 50 conversions at a cost of £2 each, and the other keywords generated 50 conversions at £28 each.

Suddenly things aren’t looking so good. You’re clearly losing money on the rest of your account, but it’s being disguised if the data isn’t being separated out. A good agency will generally break your performance down into Adgroups and Campaigns in your reports, but there are a few out there who don’t…

In summary, I’d say that bidding on your brand name is almost always a good idea, so if you aren’t, I’d definitely test it.

1. Find-me-a-fast-car A large company that wishes to advertise second hand sports cars nationwide. Conversions are not made online, but over the phone. The aim of the campaign is to generate as many clicks as possible for their budget.
2. Creepy Cravings A small company that sells food and equipment for pet spiders, snakes and reptiles. The customer can order online for delivery.

Find-Me-A-Fast-Car

We are talking about a large campaign here where tens of thousands of keywords are delivering hundreds of thousands of clicks. It’s impractical to break the keywords down into individual Adgroups. The user might group keywords together, based on brand names like this

Ferrari (clicks/day)		Porsche				Lada
[ferrari] (100)			[porsche]			[lada]
[testarossa] (11)		[boxster]			[riva]
[testerosa] (6)			[boxter]			[used riva]
[ferrari  testarossa] (10)	[porsche boxster]		[lada riva]
[used testarossa] (8)		[boxster porsche]		[used lada riva]

Second-Hand Ferraris 			Used Lada Supercars
Live The Dream 				Live Your Grandparents’ Dream
Call Us Now For More Info 		Offers Of £50 Or More Accepted
www.find-me-a-fast-car.com 		www.find-me-a-fast-car.com

The question is, should they be splitting these 3 Adgroups down into 15? Let’s say the user currently spends 1 hour a week writing new adverts and adjusting bids. By splitting the keywords up, the user must now spend 5 hours writing new adverts and adjusting bids. For a large campaign like this, we’re probably looking at a more realistic figure of 50 car manufacturers, with 20 keywords per group minimum. That’s 1000 Adgroups, testing two adverts each, which is … a lot of hours. Ok, so our Adwords Expert is a dab hand with Adwords Editor and manages to fit all this advert writing in to their busy schedule, what do they gain? – Let’s see. Splitting up [ferrari] and [testarossa] would almost certainly improve the campaign’s click-through rate with better targeted adverts being allowed, but what about [testarossa], [testarosa], [ferrari testarossa] and [used testarossa]? Consider adverts for [testarossa] with the following titles:

The adverts have been running for 2 days but require another 25 days to reach a 95% significance level! (www.splittester.com) That’s nearly a month to make a small step forward. So what if we leave [testarossa], [testarosa], [ferrari testarossa] and [used testarossa] in the same Adgroup:

The same two days generates enough information to be 80% sure the adverts are different, and only 6 more days to get a 95% significance. It may be that grouping these keywords together has a slight detrimental effect on the clickthrough rate – a few of the keywords may have worked better on the old advert – but the potential benefits of the faster turnaround on the advert test will generally outweigh this. Even if the clickthrough rate on the new advert had only been 11% (39 clicks), the test would still have ended more quickly. But being able to run more tests will lead to more improvements in the clickthrough rate over a period of time, and the time taken to write hundreds of additional adverts could be better spent elsewhere. In this instance, splitting out the keywords would involve four times the amount of work, for just a few additional clicks…

Creepy Cravings

This campaign is clearly different, as the number of keywords is limited and we can see which ones convert. So let’s begin with a clustered set-up:

Spiders 			Snakes 				Iguanas
[spider] 			[snake] 			[iguana]
[spider food] 			[snakes] 			[iguanas]
“spider tank” 			“snakes 			“iguanas”
“spider” 			“snake” 			“iguana”

Because it would be very difficult to write varied adverts that are relevant to all the keywords in these Adgroups, we should certainly split them down:

Spider Tanks
[spider tank]
[spider tanks]
[cheap spider tanks]

This is much better – we can write adverts relevant to the search queries. These are a few of our ideas for adverts, and statistics after a week:

(1) Spider Tank 		(2) Spider Tanks 		(3) Cheap Spider Tanks
Looking For Your Spider? 	Looking For Your Spider? 	Looking For Your Spider?
Put Him In A Tank 		Put Him In A Tank 		Put Him In A Tank

CTR = 13.3% 			CTR = 14.4% 			CTR = 8.3%

Being the experts in campaign optimisation we conclude that advert 3 doesn’t work and it gets the sack. However, are we really making the most of our campaign? Instead of deleting adverts, we run some tests and find that when we move [cheap spider tanks] into its own Adgroup with advert 3 and then delete advert 3 from our old Adgroup this is what happens:

(1) Spider Tank 		(2) Spider Tanks 		(3) Cheap Spider Tanks
Looking For Your Spider? 	Looking For Your Spider? 	Looking For Your Spider?
Put Him In A Tank 		Put Him In A Tank 		Put Him In A Tank

CTR = 14.3% 			CTR = 15.7% 			CTR = 20%

So now we’re smugger than Larry when he said “What about calling it Google?” But have we gone the whole hog? Why don’t we take what we’ve learned and split up [spider tank] and [spider tanks]:

(1) Spider Tank 		(2) Spider Tanks 		(3) Cheap Spider Tanks
Looking For Your Spider? 	Looking For Your Spider? 	Looking For Your Spider?
Put Him In A Tank 		Put Him In A Tank 		Put Him In A Tank

CTR = 20% 			CTR = 20% 			CTR = 20%

So now you’re thinking of changing your name to Mr. Smug and buying the biggest house in Smuggleton. You’ve taken what would have been a very satisfactory Adgroup with a 14.4% CTR and split it up into three Adgroups with 20% CTRs.

Conclusion

In the first campaign there are more clicks to be had than we could possibly afford, and so our aim was to get as many cheap ones as possible. This means we have a huge keyword list which we expand regularly, with Search Query Reports, Google suggestions, etc. The bids have to be increased or decreased every time a change is made to the campaign, which means that trying to tweak every keyword becomes a full time job. We can increase the clickthrough rate on one keyword by writing an advert to match it and testing until significant. The effect may only be to decrease the average cost per click of the whole campaign by a fraction of a penny. This is a lot of effort for such a small gain. However, Adgroups with large numbers of keywords would be able to test many more adverts in that time and perhaps improve the clickthrough rate by almost the same amount, but with much more impact on the campaign. In the second campaign every click has a potential to change the success of the campaign by converting. It is much more important in this case to squeeze out every relevant click. So, in this type of campaign, investing more time into individual Adgroups will yield a greater increase in the profitability of the whole campaign. In a real campaign the choices and results will generally be less obvious, but with work the results can be very worthwhile. For such a niche campaign it’s likely that you’ll have budget to pay for every available click and so getting them is a priority. The cost of each click in such campaigns is less important, so long as the cost per acquisition remains profitable. These are two extreme examples. In the average campaign the choice of whether and how much to split down the Adgroups will be dependent on 2 or 3 factors; How much time you have & how much traffic you get (& if you can’t think of ideas for adverts).

Expanded Matching

When this first came out, it did so with little in the way of warnings. The first I knew about it was when my clickthrough rate collapsed on a few of my campaigns. Suddenly, where I had been bidding on leather beds on broad match, now my advert was appearing on searches for upholstered beds. In truth, I got lucky. Somebody who searched for upholstered beds clicked on my advert. As a result, it appeared in the Search Query report. If nobody clicks on your advert having searched for a term, then you don’t know about it. Even now, nearly a year later, if I search for upholstered beds, there are two adverts for leather beds. I guess some people don’t run search query reports very often… This option was designed to fill in all the keywords that are relevant to your campaign, but that you haven’t thought of. But the problem is that you can’t have Broad Matching without Google throwing in Expanded matches. Since Expanded Matching is totally unreliable, and you can never even tell what searches fire your adverts, Broad Matching has become, for me at least, unusable.

Pay-Per-Action

This sounds like a great idea. Basically, you tell Google how much you’re willing to pay for somebody to perform an action, and Google adjusts your bids accordingly. So I tried it on my two biggest, and most consistent accounts. Both of them had a very predictable cost per conversion, and I set that as my objective. The result? Virtually no traffic. In two days, a campaign that usually collected 250 clicks per day managed only 2 clicks (neither of which converted). But the point is that this is automated. It’s never likely to work very well. Either it’ll bounce your bids all over the place depending on the results from the previous day, or it won’t be sensitive to changes over time, and your bids will always be in the wrong place. It takes a human brain to work out whether the variation in the conversion rate is just random, or part of a more significant trend. Perhaps, with a lot of work, a computer could be programmed to draw reasonable conclusions, but as a rule, the tools implemented by Google tend to be relatively simple. I feel that my test could have been a lot worse , Google could have spent far too much per click. Underbidding may cost me potential sales, but at least I can’t make a loss!

Site And Category Exclusion

Alright , I wasn’t totally honest earlier. I am using this one for a few of my campaigns. The idea of this tool is that you may want to include or exclude certain categories of websites when you advertise on the Content Network. So, for example, you may decide that you don’t want your advert to appear on Forums, or on Video-sharing sites. And rather than input them all manually, this allows you to filter out irrelevant websites en-masse. This sounds great, but it raises two questions. The first one is that if these sites aren’t relevant to your adverts, why are they appearing there in the first place? This is Content Targeting. It’s targeted on the relevance of the content to your website. If it’s relevant, why do you not want to appear there. If (as is more likely), they aren’t relevant, why does Google show your adverts there? But the problem with the whole thing is that it’s just a shortcut to avoid you doing some work. Ever since Google implemented its Placement Report, you have been able to see which sites are working for you, and which ones aren’t. Armed with this information, surely it’s not that difficult to create a Placement Targeted campaign, and choose which websites you DO want to appear on. It doesn’t take very long, and you can always reactivate your other Content Network campaign occasionally, to make sure that you aren’t missing valuable traffic.

Budget Optimiser

This one’s just a bad idea. The idea is that you decide your daily budget, and Google adjusts your bids to get you as many clicks as possible for your money. That’s as many CLICKS as possible for your money. Exactly why would you want to do that? If you’re selling something, you want to maximise the value (or at the least, the number) of sales for your money. If you are generating leads, you want as many leads as possible for your money. So who would possibly want to maximise the number of clicks that they get for their money? I can’t think of many businesses that would find that useful. The simple fact is that clicks are going to be worth different amounts, depending on the conversion rate (and in some cases, conversion value). Google can’t take that into account, so it could easily bid a lot on low-quality keywords, simply because they are cheaper than the more competitive, more relevant terms.

Campaign Optimiser

There’s that word again… Optimiser (optimizer if you’re American). A quick look up on the Interweb tells me than optimization is defined as: œThe decision strategy of choosing the alternative that gives the best or optimal overall value The best value of what? Well, that’s up to you, really. In most cases, it’ll be profit, Google doesn’t know what a conversion is worth to you, But it doesn’t even take into account your conversion rates. Here are the changes it will propose, along with Google’s definition…

• Daily budget adjustment Budget changes can affect your ad visibility and bring you more targeted traffic.
• New keywords Proposals might include new targeted keywords that relate to your landing page.
• Deleted keywords If the Campaign Optimiser identifies poorly performing keywords, it may propose removing them.
• Changed keyword matching options The right matching option can help you reach customers more effectively.
• Keyword CPC bid adjustments Your cost-per-click bid (in addition to your ad quality) affects your ad position.
• Ad text edits The Campaign Optimiser may suggest changes to make your ad text more effective.
• Refined location targeting We will suggest that you target only those regions that perform well for you

So, it will tell you if your budget’s wrong, even though it doesn’t know if your campaign’s profitable or not. It will recommend new keywords , if you’ve ever used Google’s keyword suggestion tool, you’ll know how well that works. It’ll tell you which keywords aren’t working. Based on what? Clickthrough rate? Cost per click? These are not things you want to be basing your decisions on. So Google knows which matching types are appropriate for you? How? If it knows that there are keywords that you could pick up through Phrase Match or Broad Match, then they should be added in on Exact Match. If it doesn’t, then why would it recommend them? Bid adjustments are just a bad idea, for all the reasons discussed already. Advert Text edits??? Google briefly trialled an Advert Text writing tool. It was so bad, I lack the words to describe it here. I wish I’d kept some of the adverts it suggested, but sadly they are no more… Regional Targeting? It all comes back to what Google calls optimisation. They want to maximise your clickthrough rate. Which is definitely not your objective.

Preferred Cost Bidding

Haven’t tried this one, but it worries me a bit. The idea is that you decide how much you want to pay per click, and Google adjusts your bids accordingly. Sounds OK, but one of the few backups that you’ve got if things go wrong is your maximum bid , you can’t pay more per click than this under any circumstances. I’m sure that Google are going to be careful, but how well would this tool work? If you want to pay £0.20 per click, but yesterday, a £0.30 bid generated clicks for £0.19 each, will Google adjust your bids to £0.31? This won’t increase your cost per click by £0.01, as a rule. Either your advert will stay in the same place, and your cost per click won’t change, or your advert will move up a spot, and your cost per click could jump sharply. Extending this example, if you need to pay £0.19 per click to appear fourth, and £0.31 to appear third, then this change would increase your cost per click from £0.19 to £0.31. Which one does Google go for if it’s in charge? The point is that you can’t choose an actual cost per click , it’ll be one of a set of possible values, based on your Quality Score, and the Quality Scores and bids of your competitors…

Optimised Ad-Serving

Of all the stupid ideas I’ve heard in this business, none can compete with Optimised Ad-Serving. Here’s how Google explain it:

œOptimize (default): The system will favor ads with a combination of a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and Quality Score. These ads will enter the ad auction more often.

So, you’re running more than one advert for this to make any difference. Why would you be doing that? To find out whether the new advert is better or worse than the old one? So how useful is it is your new advert gets shown 1% of the time, and the old advert gets shown 99% of the time. You’ll never get decent results. I can only guess that Google want to limit your risk by showing the established advert more often. And it would be useful if you could do this, but a more useful tool would be to allow you to select the relative frequencies that different adverts show. That way, you could show your old advert 75% of the time, and the new one 25% of the time, if you wanted to. A number of times, I’ve done assessments of campaigns for potential clients, and they’ve been testing multiple adverts, but with Optimised Ad-Serving. The result was that they could never optimise their adverts, as one got all the traffic.

Standard Delivery Method

Of all the stupid ideas I’ve heard in this business, none can compete with the ˜Standard Delivery Method’. Except possibly the Optimised Ad-Serving. Here’s how Google explain it: œStandard delivery distributes your budget throughout the day to avoid reaching your budget early on. Your ads will show periodically throughout the day. So, if you’ve got £100 to spend per day, and you’re paying £1 per click, but your budget runs out by 10am, Google thinks your advert should appear and disappear randomly throughout the day. WHY???????? Wouldn’t it make more sense to cut your bids to £0.20, and get 500 clicks per day instead of 100 clicks per day, for the same money? If you only want your advert to run at certain times of day, select those hours for it to run. But randomly appearing? Is there any benefit at all in this?

Keyword Suggestion Tool

Since Broad Matching doesn’t work, it’s not surprising that Keyword Suggestion doesn’t work very well either. I decided to try it out this morning, on a website that sells conservatory furniture. That’s all they sell, and their entire website is dedicated to this one thing. Google’s suggestions? bedroom furniture, leather furniture, lighting fixtures, outdoor lighting, art prints, chandeliers, art education, school furniture, furniture rental, furniture shipping… Need I go on? None of the keywords were even slightly relevant , no mention of conservatories, cane, or anything else remotely useful. Maybe I have already added everything vaguely relevant, but I doubt it, somehow. The tool may have some value , perhaps if you run it, it may give you a new idea for a keyword. But it’s pretty clear that you wouldn’t want to use Google’s suggestions in general.

Conclusions

So, back to the new tool, then. Automated Matching. Google clearly can’t look at my site, and figure out what it’s about , you can see that from the Keyword Suggestion tool. It’s not very good at working out other, similar keywords , you can see that from Broad Matching results. It can’t measure the success or failure of a keyword, since it doesn’t use the conversion information. It can’t determine what you can afford to pay for a click, since it doesn’t know anything about your business. And yet, despite all of that, Google is willing to spend any remaining budget on keywords, without even telling you what they are. I believe that one person can keep an account well-managed in about 10 minutes per day, plus an hour every now and then to do a bit more analysis. Is it really a sound business-decision to give Google control of your money? Automated Matching? I think I’ll pass…

1. All of the competitors increase their bids by 50%
2. The competitor immediately below you increases his bid sharply, to move top.

The first thing to bear in mind is that the number of impressions has no bearing at all of the sweet-spot. If each position gets the same percentage of the clicks, then it makes no difference. In effect, if you double the number of impressions, you’ll double the number of clicks, the number of conversions, the cost and hence the profit, in every position. I’ve assumed that everyone has the same Quality Score here – it’s unlikely to make a major difference to the So, for the sake of simplicity, I’ve left the traffic volumes where they are. They’ll impact the total profit that you make, but not the most profitable strategy. Here’s the first scenario. Each conversion makes a profit of £100, the conversion rates are fairly healthy, and the cost per clicks are quite high.

This is the data for a typical month. The most profitable position is 5th, with a cost per click of £2.11, though 6th position is only marginally less profitable. What happens if everybody increases their bids by 50% for Christmas?

Should you drop down the results page, or increase your bids? In this case, a bit of both. Your CPC has increased from £2.11 to £2.79, and you’ve dropped a position in the search results. Here, the higher cost of staying in 5th has more than outweighed the additional conversions that you’d get there, compared to 6th. On the other hand, leaving the CPC at £2.11 would have cut your conversions by more than half (compared to staying in 5th), which would cost you more in lost profits than it would save you in terms of cheaper clicks. Note that the profit appears to have fallen here, but that’s because I didn’t increase the traffic volumes. If the traffic doubled over Christmas, your profit in 6th position would be just under £20,000. One final note here – in this instance, if the bids increased by more than 15%, the correct position to appear in changes to 6th. To make it drop to seventh, the bids need to increase by a massive 70%. Interesting, but hardly conclusive. This is just one scenario, so let’s try another one. Here, the profit per conversion is lower – £60 – and the cost per clicks and conversion rates are also much lower:

Here’s the scenario for a typical month. The optimum position is 4th, though 2nd – 6th is very flat. So it seems plausible that the impact of a big increase in bids would be greater. Again, increasing the bids by 50% for Christmas…

The results are similar to the ones in the first scenario – you increase the bid, but not enough to retain 4th position in the results. To make 5th the optimum position here, the bids need to increase by a factor of 35% – 82%. Here’s one more scenario – in this case, the profit per conversion is low – £15, the conversion rates are very high and the bids are moderate.

Again, in this example, 4th is the optimum position (I’m not suggesting that this is always the case – it’s just convenient when comparing the results from different scenarios). Once more, here’s what you get when you increase the bids by 50%.

Once more, the conclusion is a kind of half-way house. You increase your bids, but not by enough to maintain 4th position. In this case, the range of bid increases for which the 5th spot is the optimum is 38% – 159%. So what are the conclusions here? In all of these cases, an increase in bids of 50% led to the sweet spot dropping by one position. But this isn’t the whole story – an increase in bids of 30% would have resulted in the sweet spots in the last two scenarios remaining in the same place. And an increase of 100% would have led to the first two sweet spots dropping by two places. So, to a certain extent at least, the impact on your optimum bid depends on your particular circumstances. However, there are two conclusions that are true in every scenario I could think of:

1. You should never reduce your bids.
2. You should never move further up the search results.

So your new bid is bounded by two values, the amount required to retain your old position, and your old bid. At what point between these two values you should set your bid depends on individual circumstances. One further point here – if you see the conversion rate increasing in the run up to Christmas, then there is clearly scope to increase your bids, and possibly your position within the search rankings, as the value of a click increases. Similarly, if your average order value increases, then your clicks become more valuable, in which case you may find your sweet-spot moving up. At the start of this blog, I asked two questions. All of the work so far has been based around a scenario where everyone increases their bids. But what happens if only one competitor does. If their increase doesn’t affect your position (they were above you before they increased their bid, or below you even after increasing their bid) then it makes no difference at all. Your sweet spot will not change at all, barring very unusual circumstances. If they move above you, then there are two possibilities – you can either increase your bids to retain your old position, or you can leave your bids alone, and drop one place in the search results. No other option makes any sense, if you think about it. Regrettably, there is no absolute answer to this one. However, in the vast majority of cases (including the three from earlier) the correct decision is to leave your bids where they are, and drop down one position in the search results. The company that has made this decision has made their campaign less profitable, as well as a number of other people’s campaigns. All of which leads to the conclusion hinted at in the title of this blog. Whenever competition on keywords rises, and people start a bidding war, Google makes more money from PPC. But then, Christmas is all about giving, and not receiving…

Really, this was the wrong question – what they should have been asking was how they could possibly manage a campaign with 250,000 keywords.

Do a few sums, and you see what I mean. Suppose that a typical click costs £0.20. How long do you need to run a keyword before you can hazard even a rough guess at its conversion rate? 100 clicks? If you’ve got a low conversion rate, even this may not be enough. But to get 100 clicks on 250,000 keywords, at £0.20 per click would cost £5,000,000. And how long would you have to wait to get 25,000,000 clicks anyway???

Realistically, the majority of these keywords would get no traffic at all, and 90% of the clicks would come from 1% of the keywords. So you can still optimise the keywords that get the vast majority of the traffic, so the problem isn’t that big an issue.

So what about the other 99% of the keywords? If you can’t optimise them, then what’s the point in bidding on them – they may never be profitable! On the other hand, people keep saying that ‘the long tail’ is the key to successful PPC campaigns.

The above example is quite an extreme one – most campaigns won’t have 247,500 keywords generating very little traffic. But the 90%, 1% issue is probably true of most campaigns. If a handful of big keywords eat your entire budget, how will you ever make the other 99% profitable? They’re supposed to be the most profitable in general, with their low cost-per-clicks and their high conversion rates…

One option would be to pause the big keywords, and spend your entire budget on the smaller keywords. This will, in turn, lead you to find that 90% of your traffic is STILL coming from 1% of your keywords, as the largest of the keywords you didn’t pause take most of your budget. These keywords are probably more profitable, but it doesn’t really feel very optimal!

If you’ve read through my case study you can see how I would go about this problem in most cases.

My keywords are generally grouped by product or service, with extra Adgroups for the more generic groups of terms. So in the case study, I had one Adgroup for each printer, one for each printer type/manufacturer etc.

Then I optimised at Adgroup level initially. I optimised this by trying to equalise the ROI from each Adgroup, such that the total daily budget lasted (on average) just until the end of the day.

This should maximise the number of conversions that you get per day.

Having done this, I look within the Adgroup that’s getting the most traffic, and start adjusting the bids on the keywords that generate the majority of that traffic, looking at the ROI again.

If you have a situation like the printers, where the products are largely similar, once you’ve got a few Adgroups done, you can see patterns emerging. Certain keyword formations will perform better or worse than others. So you can make the adjustments to Adgroups even without having enough data individually. This is quite good, as you can have a stab at optimising keywords that haven’t got enough traffic.

I would also do one more thing here. If a keyword’s had no clicks after a month, I’d delete it. Even if you get a 5% conversion rate, if a keyword gets a couple of clicks per year, it’s not important; it’s just cluttering up your campaign.

Just be aware that there are clear limitations to this approach. Just because a group of keywords works on printers doesn’t mean it’ll work on photocopiers, telephones or PC’s.

Consider again the campaign that I mentioned at the start of this post. He was promoting a worldwide hotel booking service.

Clearly, the approach is likely to be valid here. If “Hotels in Moscow” converts better than “Moscow Accommodation”, then it’s likely that “Hotels in Durban” will convert better than “Durban Accommodation”.

It’s likely that each city has exactly the same keyword list, with just the city name varying. This is a huge opportunity to save a fortune when optimising. Rather than just switching the whole thing on from the start, why not work out using a few cities which keywords are profitable or not, and how much to bid for each type of keyword? Rolling this out on the others would give you a huge head-start, saving you a lot of money.

But if it works here, why not use this approach for any campaign where you have the same keywords in each Adgroup with just a different model number/city?

Sadly, it’s not really something that I can do, in my position here. When a client asks us to start up a campaign on their behalf, they expect us to build it and switch it on ASAP. After all, one of the main benefits of PPC is the immediacy of the results. You turn on a campaign at 9am, and at 9:02, you’re getting clicks.

But if it was my money on the line, and I had a lot of keywords, and only limited cash, I’d probably use this method.

What do you think? Is this better than the ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach? Give me your thoughts or experiences…

• That searchers can tell the relevancy of the site from its advert text.
• That advertisers don’t write misleading adverts to get more visitors to their site.
• That advertisers bid in such a way that their costs are less than their profits from the advert.

Allow me to explain. Points 1 and 2 are essential if you are to judge a WEBSITE by its click through rate – but if the advert doesn’t accurately represent the website, then it’ll get unwarranted clicks. As I understand it, Google will penalise adverts if the traffic immediately leaves the site (?), but I doubt that this off-sets these clicks completely. Point 3 is really highlighting the assumption that the better an advert’s Quality Score is, the higher it can afford to appear in the results. This is only true if they are monitoring their cost per conversion, and trying to set their cost per click to maximise their profits, based on the cpc and conversion rate. But I’m fairly confident that a lot of companies are still of the mindset “top position is good – be there if we can”. Their adverts may be poor, but I’ve managed a number of campaigns, and even with great Quality Scores, compelling advert text, well-designed sites and good products at good prices, they can’t get close to the top of the search results without bidding well over the odds. If Google’s model was working perfectly, then my advert would be top (or close to it, at least). The campaign is ticking all of the boxes, but the searcher is still quite likely to visit the other site. I’ve discussed this ‘numpty’ effect before, and it’ll probably come up again, but does this mean that Google are doing something wrong? Conspiracy theorists would tell you that what Google are really doing is pushing up the costs of advertising in the top positions, so that they can make more money, but as I’ve said, I don’t think they’d risk that if it resulted in poorer quality results. If people stop using Google to find relevant results, it’ll cease to exist. So what can Google do? Should a well-designed campaign run by an agency really outperform a home-made campaign, just because we know the tricks of the trade? Are we as much of a problem as the numpties? Or is everything fine? Google’s market share suggests that their search results must be fairly useful, and their advertising revenue suggests that they can’t be upsetting businesses too much. Is everything lollipops and roses, or are there fundamental problems with Adwords?