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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

I know a ton of other bloggers have blogged about this, but I was really impressed by the recent video from Google explaining their ad auction model. Very simply and clearly the components of Quality Score are explained, and their relative weight, as well as how calculations of rank and ultimate CPC paid are derived. Kudos to Hal Varian, an economist after my own heart, for doing such a nice job.

So watch it already!

Industry, Tip of My Hat google auction ad video, google quality score, hal varian google adwords video

I have officially entered the world of podcasting! You can listen and subscribe to the SEMcast on geekcast.fm, I look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions, don’t be shy!

Industry, Tip of My Hat search engine marketing podcast, sem podcast

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away (ok it was Las Vegas, but that seems very foreign to me) some servers were stolen. Vegas is a shady place and sadly we were on the receiving end of some shadiness. At any rate, all we were left with were files and reports people had saved to their personal computers. And yet, within two weeks, and a lot of long days, we had sites up and running again with most of their data intact.

Partially the data people had saved on their machines was really helpful. Lots of database info like prices, product codes, names, and the like were in Excel files. We plopped it into a new database for the site. The rest, like what was on the home page, we retrieved from our soon to be new best friend, the Google cache. Fresher and more comprehensive than archive.org, Google’s cache had pretty much every missing page we needed to rebuild. The process went something like this:

1. Make list of missing pages (basically home page + product pages)

2. Find missing pages in Google by searching for the URL, the code, anything to get the page to show up.

3. Click on the cache link and save the page to a html file.

See the cache link by the red arrow? That shows the web page Google spidered and indexed, as opposed to the live web page you would see by clicking on the result link. Usually there’s not a big difference between what is cached versus live, but there’s a lag between Google’s last visit and a website’s most recent changes. Sometimes that lag is minutes (if the website is CNN) or months if a site is less popular.

4. Give the html files to engineers who parse out all the important data field content and put it back into the database.

5. QA everything, then set it live again.

6. Pesky evildoers find themselves thwarted by technology!

Normally the cache is useful for trying to figure Google’s lag time in updating or seeing a site that might at the moment be unavailable, but should you find some web content has gone missing, its there to help you as well.

Tip of My Hat google cache, missing web pages, website recovery

Quite often I have a big list of keywords to add to a paid search account. One might think that the search marketing provider (Google, Yahoo, MSN) would want to make it really easy for me to add these, after all, more kwyords equals more revenue for them. And in Google it is easy (thank you AdWords Editor). However, about a quarter of the way through a long list, Yahoo invariably kicks up a securiy issue and locks me out of the account for something like half an hour. The error looks like this:

I’ve emailed my Yahoo account rep, I’ve begged and pleaded to have this stop. No such luck. In fact Yahoo contends this only happens if one or more people are logged into the account, which isn’t the case here, its just me. And no, they haven’t been able to prevent it from occurring. Annoying!

Does anyone else experience this issue?

Wag of My Finger yahoo search marketing, yahoo security error