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In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google said it had 1 million advertisers as of 2007. If history is any guide, we can expect the number to be much higher now. The number of advertisers on Google has grown at a steady clip, from 89,000 in 2003, to 201,000 in 2004, 360,000 in 2005 and 600,000 in 2006. (Source: NYT)
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Selling the concept of PPC to the un-initiated is tough. The value proposition is complicated and requires a lot of explaining and proof. Simply telling businesses that you can get more customers, more economically from PPC doesn’t seem to work. I know, I’ve tried.
Microsoft recently commissioned a small report on this and found that whilst businesses understand the need for a website, they still fail to understand the need to drive traffic to it.
73 percent surveyed would rather do their taxes than start a search marketing plan
It’s very common for business websites to be built with the mentality that people will discover it and love it. This is far from the truth, the shear number of sites online mean that ANY new site will have a seriously tough time reaching its market without some kind of marketing spend.
Andy Beal covers the same report over at Marketing Pilgrim: Small Business Don’t Get It–Still Failing to Invest in Search Marketing.
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One of the most common tasks when working with Google AdWords PPC is preparing campaigns in Excel ready to be loaded into Google’s AdWords Editor.
We think the following process is the quickest and most effective method for producing these lists in Excel. A lot of the speed comes from learning the keyboard shortcuts for various Excel commands, as typing keyboard shortcuts is faster than clicking around with the mouse.
The overall goal here is to create 1 Excel sheet for a specific campaign or upload.
There are 3 main pieces of data that we have to create:
The following sheet will contain all of these ready to be uploaded.
Typically, we start with a list of keywords tailored to the product we’re advertising. For this example I’ve used the keyword ‘widgets’ and results from the AdWords Keyword Tool.
This is the most labour intensive part, but also the most important! At this stage we categorise and group the keywords into relevant ad groups; combine miss-spellings into correctly name groups and also edit out and delete keywords that are not at all relevant.
If you add in the Excel AutoFilters you can make life a little easier by sorting a re-sorting the keywords into related themes.
If this is a new campaign, you’ll probably want to start by bidding well within in your budget.
In this example, we’re using Ad Group level search and content bids. To create different bids for different ad groups you need to ensure that the bids are present on every line of the Ad Group.
At this stage it may look a little redundant to enter bids for every line in an Ad Group, but as you’ll see later it make sense to fill out the sheet as completely as possible…
OK, we’re almost half-way through creating a our campaign. Now we’re moving on to the most labour saving part of the process.
Creating individual pieces of ad text for an entire campaign from whithin the AdWords website interface can be extremely labour intensive. Doing this in Excel is a massive time-saver.
The time saving comes from Excel copy-down feature, this can be used either by copy and pasting cell contents or by using the fill handle in the bottom right hand corner of the selection marquee.
As you can see in the animated illustration on the right you can very quickly create sequential lists of data or you can quickly copy and repeat the same data. When you combine this with formulas and text it is becomes a very powerful way of quickly creating ad text.
For the headline we may as well keep things simple and use the Ad Group name, we can do this with the formula =A2.
In description lines 1 and 2 we are going to use ad copy that is relevant but that can also work accross the whole campaign.
The display URL will simply be the url of the site.
The destination URL is simillar but we like to track everything we do in NetInsight, which means we need to add some tracking parameters to the query string. Using Excel this is nice and easy as we can use a formula to dynamically grab the right data.
To do this you simply copy and paste the right columns in the right order for the 3 main multi-input panels in AdWords Editor:
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Negative keywords are really powerful and should always be used to improve the relevancy of any PPC ad group. This article covers advanced use of negative match types.
Tip #8: Match Types & Negative Keywords – AdWords Help.
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AdGooroo are saying search advertising has increased this quarter. They say this is surprising despite economic gloom, but maybe search advertising will stay strong as it’s still more affordable and effective than traditional media.
http://www.adgooroo.com/q408_midquarter_update.php
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Whether you’re already using Google AdWords or completely new to it, the Sky Rocket Inc. AdWords Tuneup! is a quick, affordable way to get more out of PPC advertising.
Whether we’re working with existing accounts or creating new ones for clients, we ensure that you have admin access to the account. This means you can choose whether to manage it yourself, pay us, or even use another agency entirely.
The Sky Rocket Inc. AdWords Tuneup costs about $400 USD (subject to account size).
Drop us a line today for further details.
Ad spend not included.
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I like Google’s approach to email. Gmail is online, search-able, threaded and has the capacity to archive all the email you’re ever likely to receive. You needn’t forget anything ever again, just as long as that thing is captured in a Gmail.
However, I’m not so keen on using the Gmail website. These days my web browser is over-loaded with open tabs; so if there is a better desktop or mobile client available I will opt for that instead. The Apple Mail and iPhone Mail clients are nicer to use than the Gmail website and they add another layer of traditional email functionality.
I use IMAP to plug multiple Gmail accounts (Sky Rocket Inc., PickupPal & Personal) into my laptop and phone. Getting this right was not easy and it’s the reason for writing this post, saving the settings for future reference.
First of all, you have to set-up your Gmail accounts to use IMAP.
You should do this for every account you wish to access from your desktop and mobile email clients.
Not only do we have to set the main preferences, we also need to tell Apple Mail to use certain Gmail folders instead of it’s own defaults.
You can access the Apple Mail Account settings from the Mail menu (Option+,), then click on Accounts.
I use 3 Gmail accounts each with identical settings, here are screen grabs for each of the 3 main panels Account Information, Mailbox Behaviours and Advanced:
As the client synchronises with Gmail you will see your Gmail folders listed in the left-hand panel of Apple Mail. N need select the Gmail Drafts and Sent folders one at a time and tell Apple Mail to use them as Apple Mail Drafts and Sent. Do this with the Use This Mailbox For command in the Mailbox menu.
From the Home Screen click on Settings, Mail and then Ad Account…
The iPhone comes with a automated set-up function for Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, .Mac and AOL.
Do not use the Gmail option for setting-up Gmail IMAP, instead select Other.
On the IMAP screen enter your details, you can refer to Apple Mail settings for this.
Here are the settings screens for one of my accounts:
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AdWords was originally built for everyday users with no specialist skills, these days AdWords is a very complicated product and its ever-increasing array of features can be daunting to new online marketers.
At Sky Rocket Inc., when we’re working with existing accounts, or starting afresh, we follow a checklist. The AdWords Checklist below focuses on the important areas of PPC advertising without getting lost in the minutiae of the AdWords interface.
Only show your ads in regions where people can act on them; if your product isn’t available in a certain area, don’t show your ad there.
Start thinking about the type of person you’re looking to attract with your campaign, this will inform your keyword choices later.
Google search and content networks provide VERY different types of traffic and the general rule is that content converts lower than search. So, enable both, but also make sure that separate bidding is enabled.
Day parting is a very powerful way to present your ad to people at times (day or week) when they are most likely to act. However, to be certain what those times and days are, you first need to collect more information from your analytics software. We will cover this in more detail in our posts on analytics.
Ad Group naming is an art and it’s here that we really start thinking about the keywords the Ad Group will contain and how relevant that is to the landing page. We find it useful to create and name Ad Groups based on core terms. Core term Ad Groups contain keywords that are directly related to the core term or name of the Ad Group. For example: if you have an Ad Group called Red Apples the keywords contained should all have a strong relationship to that core term. Red apple, red apples, juicy red apples, ripe red apples, best red apples, red apples online, red apples for sale would be good examples of keywords. You should not include ‘green apple’ keywords; for these, you should build a separate Ad Group called Green Apples, or if there were no green apples available on the site, you needn’t bother and use a keyword negative -green in the Red Apples group. The core term concept of Ad Group building is about creating silos of related keywords that describe something on your website.
Generally with core term Ad Groups you will have 1 single, or a few related, landing pages for each Ad Group. This is easier to manage than mixed term Ad Groups with all sorts of different landing pages. Ad Groups should be tightly focused on the contents of the landing page. You will improve performance of the Red Apples Ad Group if the landing page contains text and images related to red apples.
Using core term Ad Groups you will find the Ad Group level search and content bids give you greater control of ad spend. This means you can forget about keyword-level bids for the time-being and leave that for another day.
AdWords comes with a very advanced Keyword tool that you can use to research keywords and there are many other good options available from 3rd parties: Wordtracker, Compete, SpyFu, KeywordSpy, etc. However, the best research tool is your own mind, experience and cunning. The problem with the AdWords Keyword tool and the 3rd party options is that everyone uses them which means you will be bidding on keywords that already have a lot of competition.
You can expand keywords by combining core terms with other related terms to create whole new keywords (here’s how in Excel).
Keyword mining is one of the best places to get keywords, but first you need access to your websites log files. Hidden in these log files is valuable information about which sites your users came from, and more importantly, what search queries they typed into search engines like Google. Mining keywords allows you to see exactly what people type and you can use these queries as your own keywords to enrich and improve the performance of your Ad Groups.
Make an effort to really understand how negatives can reduce unwanted impressions and improve CTR. Always be thinking about good negatives to add to your Ad Groups, every Ad Group should at least contain a few.
We all make spelling mistakes, so your Ad Groups should always contain common miss-spelled keywords.
Be sure to include plurals and singulars if relevant. The AdWords system is supposed to handle this for you, but it’s far from perfect. You will get extra clicks if bid on plural and singulars.
Always use keyword insertion in at least 1 line of ad text if not all 3, because Ads with inserted keywords always enjoy a higher CTR. Don’t worry too much if it spoils the grammar of your copy, research suggests that no-one is reading anyway, instead users just scan through search results and ads looking for keywords.
Copywriting is an emotive, artful practice and often it’s not entirely clear what copy will work best. So write variations and test the performance.
Again, it’s important that your ad directly relates to the content of your ladning page.
Always use Ad Group level content bids, there is huge volumes of traffic on content, but because the quality is not as high as search you want to pay less for it.
The big problem with the content network are popular, low-quality sites (like MySpace) sending thousands of clicks you don’t want. Use your analytics software to identify these sites and negativise them. Be aggressive and shut down any source of traffic that is not working for you.
If you focus on understanding and improving these areas you will go a long way to improving your campaigns.
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