I’m now a columnist on one of my favorite sites about search engine marketing, search engine land. Check out my first article on the pros and cons of bid management solutions. In short, I debate the pros and cons of using an automated bid management solution. I won’t spoil it by telling you if I am more pro or con, read the article! I’ll have articles appearing about once a month as part of the In-House column.
SearchEngineWatch responded with a critical blog post on me “dissing” bid management, but I think they missed a lot of my point and I wrote a very polite comment saying so to further the discussion, which they have yet to post. So much for a community dialog! For shame.
Also, check out SEMcast #11, now live on geekcast.fm, also on the topic of bid management.
Lastly, have I mentioned lately that I’m on twitter? I am. For random life updates and some search commentary follow kellpickles.
Tip of My Hat bid management, bid management solutions
Quality Score can be confusing. There’s a bunch of factors, some seemingly mysterious, that can, at the end of they day, seriously damage (or improve) the ROI of a paid search campaign. My bottom line message: pick only relevant keywords and write a good ad that links to a good page. Write lots of good ads and test them to get the strongest one. Let that be your guide and ye cannot fail.
Don’t just take my advice. Google has now released a very simple and useful Quality Score guide. Check it out and go forth to pare out those irrelevant keywords and improve click-through rates.
I know some search engine marketers hate Quality Score, but I love it. Why? Because we pay a much lower cost per click than our competitors for a much better position. Quality score is a reward for running a well managed paid search campaign. When Quality Score becomes your friend instead of your enemy you’ll see what I mean.
Tip of My Hat google quality score, paid search engine marketing, quality score guide
I’ve been a podcasting fool lately, check out the latest SEMcast on Google’s trademark policy change and 5 things I learned at SMX Advanced. Then I also special guest starred in two podcasts for Affiliate ABC’s with Deborah Loxly. One is on creatives for promoting travel and the other discusses the recent Amazon and eBay changes in their direct to merchant ppc rules.
As a reminder you can send me questions via twitter, a blog comment or a youtube video and I’ll answer them in a future podcast. I also accept questions via telegram (singing only) or carrier pigeon.
Tip of My Hat affiliate marketing podcast, search engine marketing podcast
I spend more waking hours on a weekday with Excel than I do my husband. Seriously. Eight or nine hours a day, compared to five-ish. I’ve had dreams about Excel. Which is all just to say, I use Excel a lot. Excel is a super useful tool to help manage paid search accounts, so I thought I’d share my favorite Excel ppc tips.
Math. This is basic, but you can do math in Excel. You should never have Excel and a calculator program open at the same time. You can straight up just type formulas into the cell (ie, 4*5) or refer to cells (A1*B2).
VLOOKUP. A super handy Excel formula. Let’s say you have a list of keywords you can add to your account, but you don’t want to add ones you already have. If you download your account keywords into Excel you can VLOOKUP keywords to add in your account keywords list to see if they are there and if they are (for the formula, return a value of the keyword if its in the list), you can skip them. Also good for marrying up separate reports with a shared element. For example, you might have a report of adgroups with clicks and costs and another report of adgroups with revenue and transactions. Since they both have adgroups, you can VLOOKUP the adgroup name and return the values for revenue and transactions in the click/cost report, making one nice report.
CONCATENATE. Another handy formula. Let’s say you have a list of keywords and you want to add the word “discount” to all of them to add to your account. CONCATENATE “discount” + a space + the cell of the keyword and magically you get “discount keyword”. Just drag the formula down and the list is created. Or likewise if you have brand names + product types permutations you can work through all those quickly with concatenate.
Filtering. Sometimes you have a huge list of keywords that you want to prioritize, maybe adding ones about cruises are higher value for you. Using the filters in Excel you can filter a list of keywords to show any that “contain” cruise. Also handy for answering questions like, how many keywords about Sony do we have?
I know its hard to grasp how to use these formulas by just reading this, definitely check out Excel help for more information! Also practice really helps. These tips and more are covered in SEMcast #7, now available on geekcast.fm.
Tip of My Hat excel ppc tips, excel sem, managing search engine marketing with excel
Just got the news I’ll be speaking at SMX Advanced for the Proving and Improving ROI in Paid Search session - Day 2 (June 3) at 3:00-4.15. Come say hi and hopefully learn something about improving your paid SEM ROI!
I’m very interested in checking out the mobile paid search session and amazing ppc tactics (go on, amaze me!). And I’ll probably attend some of the social media track as well.
I’ll likely do a rundown of interesting tidbits and insights on SEMcast, the in-house search engine marketing podcast I host on geekcast.fm, but I probably won’t live blog the sessions.
Hope to see you there!
Speaking Engagements, Tip of My Hat paid search roi, smx advanced
SEMcast #6 is up on geekcast.fm, or if you subscribe to the feed in iTunes or another software you’ll see it appear. Today’s podcast is all about the dilemma of inheriting a paid search account. The podcast addresses how to restructure and mitigate risk.
In other news, Viator launched their German language site, so willkommen to it. Do I speak German? Nein. Do I run German language ppc campaigns for the site? Ja! How is this miracle achieved? Check out SEMcast #4 and learn best practices for non-English campaigns.
Lastly, have you tried the new Google AdWords interface? Get a preview and provide feedback on the AdWords interface changes.
Industry, Tip of My Hat new adwords design, new adwords interface, paid search engine marketing, semcast, viator.de
SEMcast #5 is live. This time I am joined by super special guest star Matt Nichols who I used to work with at Hotwire. He manages search engine marketing for Pandora, which seems to be everyone’s favorite internet radio service. We chat about Matt’s insights on SEM best practices at Pandora, thoughts on whether to manage search engine marketing in-house versus an agency, and why Pandora has taken a hiatus from paid search engine marketing.
Tip of My Hat
Today is a Monday and some Mondays I just want things to be new. So today, a new WordPress theme, thanks to inove.
Also, there’s a new Viator.com shore excursions site, and yep, I added new search engine marketing for it today too.
I forgot to mention last week SEMcast #4 is available, hear all about best practices for non-English search engine marketing campaigns.
And its only 2 pm, I think I can make a bunch of new adgroups in French today and that should do it. Yay for new Monday stuff!
Tip of My Hat french adgroups, inove theme, search engine marketing, viator shore excursions site
New SEMcast is posted on geekcast.fm, all about running effective content targeting campaigns.
Also send me any questions about search engine marketing you have, I may answer them in an upcoming podcast.
Tip of My Hat adwords content targeting, content targeting
Between Google’s or Yahoo’s reports and your own in-house reporting, it seems like there are a million search engine marketing reports you could run to discover all sorts of interesting trends and insights. But most search engine marketers, especially in-house ones, don’t have unlimited time to play with reports - we have to get stuff done! Improve ROI! Increase revenue! Hence my top 5 reports to get shizz done.
The report name is followed by its top uses and a screenshot of what the report looks like, with fake-ish data.
1. Ad Group Performance Report
- Adjust bids to meet ROI goals.
- A high level report to spot red flags - unexpected increases in clicks, costs, declines in conversion, click-through rate or ROI.
- Run more detailed reports based on findings, dig into issues.
- For search and content campaigns, offered by all search engines.
2. Search Query Report
- Google only report, but you can get at others by using Google Analytics or other reporting tool like Omniture (look at paid search keywords). Search only.
- See what searches are matching to keywords.
- Add good keywords to account.
- Add negatives for inappropriate matches. Sometimes need to add exact negatives -[keyword] when matching to too broad a term, i.e., “Las Vegas” when bidding on “Las Vegas hotels” for example.
- Specify keyword level bids if some keywords merit a higher or lower bid than the adgroup.
- To see “x other unique queries” look at a third party reporting system like Omniture, which does not aggregate those results.
3. Placement Performance
- Corollary to the search query report, but for content. Google only, but again you can look at other reporting tools referring sites to get at content sites for other search engines.
- Block poor converting sites or categories of sites using the Site and Category Exclusion tool.
- Be persistent, new sites crop up all the time and will need to be blocked.
- Not perfect, run reports and request refunds when charged for blocked categories or targeting errors (i.e., appeared for a non-English site when only targeting English).
- Add good performing sites to placement targeting and bid appropriately according to site performance.
4. Ad Performance
- Offered by all search engines, search and content.
- Improve your ad copy or design/message (if image ad) with A/B copy testing.
- Assign conversion tracking at the ad level to gauge best converting ad as well as highest click-through rate. Ideally both should be good.
- Disable auto-optimization at the campaign level for a more even test.
5. Geographic Performance
- Google only.
- Refine country targeting based on ROI performance.
- Often a good strategy to test many countries for a language, especially English, can get easy growth from testing additional countries.
- Remove from targeting countries with no historical sales.
- Remove payment gateway blocked countries. If you can’t accept a payment from Nigeria, don’t target them.
- Actively select each country versus picking whole world blanket option. You may appear for countries not listed if you pick whole world (i.e., Cuba, Iran).
Hopefully this is a helpful rundown on five quick ways to easily cut out poor quality traffic, increase quality traffic, find new keywords and improve click-through and conversion rates.
Tip of My Hat google reports, search engine marketing reports, sem optimization, sem reports
