An Example of Great Ad Copy On Google AdWords

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Jan. 08

Ad copy is one of the single biggest campaign levers on Google AdWords. Optimize your ad copy and you will experience an increased CTR (which means more traffic). Ultimately, that higher CTR will translate into a better quality score and therefore decreased CPCs with increased ad position. Increase the effectiveness of your ad copy and your ads will also display more sitelinks.

I’m always testing new ad copy. Today, I wanted to share the competitive landscape from the people search vertical (check out the screenshot below). I used to work at Inflection, one of the hottest startups in the Bay Area and a leader in the people search space.

In the screenshot below, check out the first ad for Intelius. Intelius is leveraging the “1) 2)” ad copy strategy. I really like this ad because it illustrates the simplicity of Intelius. I’m definitely not the only one. The fact that Intelius has four sitelinks displaying on a generic term like “people search” means that their CTR is quite high. If your company offers a streamlined service, I highly recommend testing the “1) 2)” ad copy yourself.

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Keeping Your PPC Accounts From Going Offline

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Dec. 03

If you’ve been in pay per click for a while, you’ve probably experienced it. I’m talking about that horrible, horrible time when one or more of your PPC accounts goes offline. It’s always bad. You end up losing valuable conversions, profit, account history, and your competitive edge. It can set you back in your PPC career. Sometimes, you can even go dark during a critical period such as holiday shopping. Today, I’m going to share a few tips so you avoid going offline, can sleep better at night, and look like an absolute PPC rock star!

Tip 1: Remember A Backup Credit Card

Offline

One of my favorite features within Google AdWords is the ability to enter a backup credit card. At one time or another, it’s likely your primary card is going to fail. If you have a backup card, you have a great chance of staying online while avoiding downtime. Just remember to make sure your backup card is a completely different card (and credit card company) from your primary one. For example, if my primary card is American Express, I’ll make sure to have a Visa or MasterCard backup.

Also, remember to have a high credit limit on both your primary and backup card. A backup card is no good if it has a low credit limit and cannot handle large charges that may have failed on your primary card. Make sure to have enough credit to last at least a week in case the issues on your primary card take some time to figure out.

When it comes to adCenter, you cannot have a backup card go into affect automatically like Google AdWords. However, you can have a backup card ready to go. If your primary card fails, just manually switch over to your backup card.

Tip 2: Consider Pre-Pay Billing

If you’re a credit card advertiser, you may wish to consider pre-pay versus post-pay billing. Pre-pay means your credit card is charged before you spend the money. If you always make sure to have a large, positive balance in your search engine account, you will always stay online. However, this can have an impact on your cash flow if you’re spending tons of money. For that reason, I personally prefer post-pay with a backup card in place. Sometimes, since you can’t automatically switch over to a backup card in adCenter, I’ll consider pre-pay on adCenter but have a post-pay on AdWords with a backup card in place.

Tip 3: Consider Transitioning Over To Invoicing

If you’re a credit card advertiser, you are more at risk of going offline. Credit cards fail and billing systems can have issues. If you move over to invoicing, you’ll lose your valuable credit card rewards, but will pick up peace of mind. It’s much harder for an invoiced account to go offline due to billing issues. Moreover, you have a full 30 days from the end of the invoiced month (typically net 30 terms) to pay your bills. The downside? This option only works if you’re a larger advertiser and are able to negotiate a strong credit limit with the search engines.

Tip 4: Leverage Automated and Manual Monitoring

Work with your IT department to get a system in place that pings Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to make sure your ads are showing up. If you are not showing up for some reason, generate an alert. The best alerts are not only via email but involve an escalation path (with phone numbers). It’s easy to miss an email in the middle of the night, but you’ll be able to respond right away if you get a call.

Moreover, have your entire team (both your internal team and your search engine reps) check your ads constantly. I try to check my ads once per hour, 24/7 (except when I’m sleeping). This is part of my Six Essential PPC Campaign Checks. If there’s an issue, make sure a clear escalation path is in place. Also, make sure you have the cell phone numbers for your entire team and your search engine reps. There are times when I’ve gotten calls in the middle of the night and I always appreciate it if it’s going to prevent a major disaster. Best of luck in having 0% unintended downtime for your PPC campaigns!

Image of Offline © iStockPhoto – mattjeacock

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Cyber Monday and Seasonal Bidding Strategies

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Nov. 28

Cyber Monday is upon us! If you’re in the retail side of online marketing, you’ve been preparing for this day for the last few months. It’s not only one of the largest volume days (in terms of raw conversions) but it’s also one of the highest conversion rate days. Most businesses follow some sort of seasonal cycle. If you’re in retail, seasonably high conversions and conversion rates are upon us right now. If you’re in finance, high conversions and conversion rates are just around the corner and will take off in January. Today, I want to walk through a few PPC bidding tips to capitalize on seasonal trends.

Tip 1: Identify Seasonal Trends

Cyber Monday Gifts

PPC campaigns (and businesses in general) follow very similar trends each year. If you’ve been in business for a while, it’s critical to analyze data from past years. Pay special attention to seasonal peaks and lows. I’m talking about those months where conversion rate is high and those where it is low. Once you have identified these periods, you are armed with the information you need to make strategic bid changes, I’m talking about blanket bid increases and bid decreases to all keywords in your AdWords and adCenter accounts.

Why does this matter? It all comes down to profitability. Your margins in paid search are directly tied to conversion rates. The higher your conversion rate, the higher your percentage margin. The lower your conversion rate, the lower your percentage margin. This brings up into tip 2…

Tip 2: Bid Based On Seasonal Conversion Rates

If you’re headed into a seasonal period where conversion rates will be high (and you can afford to handle extra sales volume), I highly recommend bidding up. By doing so, you can reinvest some of your higher percentage margin into more sales volume which should ultimately drive more dollar margin. (Conversely, you may wish to lower bids and reduce costs during low conversion rate months.) Click through rate rises exponentially by position while the bid landscape is typically linear. You will capture a lot more volume by bidding up, so why not go for it during your best seasonal months?

Tip 3: Leverage Automated Platforms For Seasonal Bidding

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know I’m a huge fan of online marketing platforms such as Kenshoo, Acquisio, and Marin Software. I even wrote an SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide Whitepaper.

On a keyword level, I always recommend bidding based on conversion rate. Most SEM platforms offer this ability. They will forecast conversion rate on a keyword level and allow you to bid accordingly. However, today’s tip takes things to the next level. When it comes to seasonality, you’re not only bidding accurately on a keyword level based on conversion rate, but you’re now making blanket account level boosts when it makes sense.

My advice: Understand how much conversion rates will go up (or down). Then, boost all bids when the seasonal period starts. As time goes on, once you’re a few weeks into the seasonal period, start lowering your boost gradually since keyword level conversion rates (the projections from your automated system upon which keyword level bids are set) will start catching up. If you don’t lower your your overall boost, the seasonal increase will be double counted. You may not want to lower your boost all the way, but just remember that keyword level conversion rate projections will catch up and you’ll need to bring back your blanket boost increase at least a little.

Remember to do the exact same on the way down. If you know a low conversion rate period is coming up, make a blanket boost decrease. Then, after keyword level bids start catching up a few weeks in, make sure to gradually remove (or at least reduce) the negative boost.

I truly hope these seasonal bidding strategies help out. I know I’ll be looking for great deals tomorrow. If you’re in retail, best of luck with your Cyber Monday PPC campaigns!

Image of Cyber Monday gifts © iStockPhoto – alexsl

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Optimizing Search Partner Network Traffic In PPC

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Nov. 14

Do you Advertise on Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter? I’m assuming “most likely” since you’re reading PPC Ian. Today, I want to share an old school PPC tip that still works to this day. I’m going to outline a simple, yet highly effective strategy for optimizing your search partner network traffic.

What Is Search Partner Traffic?

Partner Puzzle

What is search partner traffic? Both Google AdWords and also Microsoft/Yahoo! partner with other search engines. In the case of Google, I’m talking about sites like AOL Search and Ask.com. In your AdWords campaign settings, you can choose to receive search traffic from just Google.com or Google.com AND search partners. There is no way within Google AdWords to select just search partner traffic, however you can do this in adCenter.

Search partners offer search-like experiences, they’re search engines. I’m calling this out because search partners are very different than content websites (now known as the “display network” in Google AdWords). Search partners are not AdSense publishers but are typically really large websites that are search-driven.

Understand Your Search Partner Conversion Rate

Before developing your optimization strategy, make sure to measure the conversion rate on your search partner traffic. Is it higher than Google.com (or Bing.com/Yahoo.com) proper, or lower? Most of the time, search partners have a lower conversion rate. Some of the time, however, they do convert higher.

Separate Campaigns For Search Partners

Now that you know what you’re dealing with, you’re ready to optimize. If search partners perform worse than Google.com (lower conversion rate), you will want to create separate campaigns for the two. There’s no way to opt out of Google.com, but that doesn’t much matter in this case. The Google.com-only campaigns will be bid higher so the Google.com + search partners campaigns will get mostly search partners traffic (since they are bid lower). This simple optimization will allow you to bid more effectively based on varying conversion rates between these two traffic sources.

Now, let’s say Google.com performs worse than search partners. Although this case is rare, it does happen. In this case, you really can’t do much. It’s best to have combined campaigns that are opted into both Google.com and partners in this case.

When it comes to adCenter, your optimization is quite easy in both of these cases. adCetner allows you to create Yahoo!/Bing-only campaigns and also search partners-only campaigns. As such, it’s always best to separate the two and bid accordingly. Most of the time (I should probably say all of the time), Yahoo!/Bing-only campaigns perform better. That said, search partners can add tons of incremental value, you just need to bid them lower to account for lower conversion rates. Bonus Tip: When it comes to adCenter, you’ll want to closely monitor the partners driving traffic and block the bad ones. adCenter makes it easy to block bad partners and this step is critical in making your campaign profitable.

So there you have it! While search partners are certainly smaller than they used to be, they still offer strong incremental traffic and conversions. If you create separate campaigns and bid based on conversion rate, you will expand your margins. The only caveat: These tips mostly make sense if you are a larger advertiser driving a lot of traffic in your PPC accounts. If you’re a smaller advertiser, it may be advantageous to employ a unified campaign strategy (ease of use and more data to leverage for optimization).

Image of Puzzle Pieces © iStockPhoto – gehringj

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Protecting Your Brand Name From Link Hijacking

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Oct. 18

Do you run large PPC campaigns at a brand name company? Do you drive a lot of conversions from your brand name keywords (at really low CPA)? Do you also have an affiliate program on a popular affiliate network such as Commission Junction? If you answered “yes” to these questions, today’s paid search tip is definitely for you! I’m going to share some quick tips on protecting yourself from affiliate link hijacking.

First, What Is Affiliate Link Hijacking?

Security

For the purpose of this post, affiliate link hijacking is when one of your affiliates buys your trademark keywords on Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter and intentionally copies your ad word for word, character for character, and even sends the traffic to the same landing pages that you do (on your website, not their own website). The only difference between the affiliate’s ad and yours? The affiliate injects their own affiliate tracking code (versus the tracking parameters you user for your internal paid search program). It’s extremely hard to detect because the ad looks just like your own ad, from your internal campaign.

Typically, affiliates will bid really high so they show up instead of you. Also, they will employ really sneaky tactics such as targeting states other than the one your main office is in (so you will not see what they’re doing with your normal day-to-day sanity checks). Sometimes, they will even leverage dayparting to show up at odd hours (when you may not be checking quite as frequently).

At the end of the day, your company still gets the conversions (they just come from the affiliate instead of the internal marketing team). However, depending on what you pay your affiliates, this could be less efficient for your company. Moreover, it’s just plain wrong. It’s stealing. The affiliate is taking a conversion that should be attributed to the internal PPC team for themselves. Most of the time, such practices are against the agreements you have with your affiliates.

An important point to remember: Many businesses have a path to conversion, especially if you’re in a complex purchase cycle vertical like financial services or B2B. Users will click multiple keywords before buying. The reason the CPA is so low on your TM keywords is a result of your ad spend on other keywords (and media channels). Basically, affiliates that hijack URLs are taking advantage of all your marketing spend on the more expensive keywords (and channels), enjoying the profitable TM keywords for themselves.

How Can You Prevent Affiliate Hijacking?

So, how do you prevent something like this? First and foremost, I recommend looking at technologies like The Search Monitor and AdGooroo. Such tools will help you detect (and therefore correct) such incidents in an automated fashion. That said, they do not work with 100% accuracy. Savvy affiliates will often find a way to outsmart the automated tools. Also, no tool is perfect. My best advice is to couple technology with good old fashioned manual review. Click your own links. Make sure the tracking URLs are correct. Try different states. Try different times of the day. Make sure to cover both Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter. Add it to your PPC Campaign Checks.

If you do happen to detect and affiliate breaking the rules and hijacking your URL, copy the URL (and their tracking code) immediately. Take screenshots. Then, go to your affiliate team (if it’s a different team than your own) and make the case that they contact the affiliate immediately. I’m a one strike and you’re out kind of guy on this topic. I recommend banning the affiliate from your program. However, your affiliate team probably won’t want to see their numbers go down so they may give the affiliate a warning which means they may become a repeat offender in the future. If this happens again, then you definitely need to ban them from your program.

I’m An Affiliate Marketer and Most Affiliates Are Great

I want to close out by making it really clear that I’m personally an affiliate marketer and I have so much respect for affiliates. It’s hard, painstaking work to scale an affiliate marketing operation. Most affiliates are good affiliates. In fact, most are great. These are the affiliates innovating, working hard, and making the Internet a better place. However, there are always a few bad apples (as with anything). This post is really geared towards protecting yourself from those bad apples. I just want to make it clear that most affiliates are good and affiliate marketing is a very important media channel for any business.

Image of Security © iStockPhoto – pearleye

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