Google Launches Free AdWords Express App For iOS And Android Devices In The US

Today, Google launched a free app for Android and iOS devices for AdWords Express, the simplified version of Google’s search advertising platform designed for small business.

The app has all the features of the web version, allowing advertisers to edit ads and set targeting parameters more easily from their mobile devices.

Google is also making targeting more flexible. Advertisers can target ads by their own zip code, city, state as well as in other areas around the country, though the extended targeting is available only in English-speaking countries at this time.

The app is now available in the US on Google Play and iTunes. Now, if we could just get an app for AdWords itself.

Competitive Analysis: The Most Valuable SEO Tactic You Ignore [Data]

When it comes to getting ahead in search, experts agree that competitive analysis is critical.


International search engine optimization (SEO) consultant Aleyda Solis observes:

One of the most important activities for any SEO process is the initial competitive analysis.

In a nod to how important she thinks it is, she created a sophisticated workflow to guide SEOs through the competitive analysis process.

Loren Baker, Founder of Search Engine Journal, agrees that competitive analysis is an essential tactic in the SEO repertoire, and makes several observations about the benefits that it brings:

By knowing what your rivals are doing in their SEO and social media space, not only will you have a better knowledge of their online marketing strategy, but you can also emulate what is working for them, and generate internal ideas to stay proactive.

Search Marketers Agree On Importance Of Competitive Analysis

Three-quarters (74%) of the 467 marketers that my employer, Conductor, surveyed agree that competitive analysis is “important” or “very important” to their SEO success.

Search professionals agree on the importance of competitive analysis, but does their time investment and acquired skill in competitive analysis match their stated level of importance? The data show that search professionals believe they have a long way to go when it comes to their competitive analysis competence: 57% rate themselves as only a 1-6 on a 1-10 scale.

Given the frequency with which the search results change — Google releases 500-600 algorithm changes per year, on average – regular revisiting of competitive analysis is needed.  Despite this, only 29% of marketers surveyed say they do competitive analysis more frequently than once a month.

Why Don’t Search Marketers Give Greater Mindshare To Competitive Analysis?

The experts agree — and search marketers themselves concur — that competitive analysis can be immensely valuable as a tactic for search marketers. So why the dissonance? Why don’t marketers give competitive analysis more mindshare?

Josh McCoy suggests it may be a bit of shiny object syndrome:

Many who are eager to “get ahead” with their search engine optimization (SEO) program are typically consumed with the latest and greatest SEO techniques, how they are sure to work as well as fantasizing over their list of targeted keyword terms.

That is, search marketers tend to focus on the latest and greatest at the expense of the tried and true. Or, at minimum, in a long list of to-dos, competitive analysis is ranked below the activities perceived to be more closely tied to ROI. Whatever the reason, McCoy concludes that it should be on more equal footing, taking “a position of high importance.”

At the end of the day, those who are doing little competitive analysis may not be immediately able to do it with the regularity that they truly desire. But those who carve out regular time to do competitive analysis and educate themselves on best practices will end up happy that they did so.

Stock image used with permission of Shutterstock.com

How Hard Should You Press The Gas Pedal In #Paid #Search?

The following post contains a number of metaphors strained to the breaking point; viewer discretion is advised.

An enduring truth in the paid search business is that paid search managers and marketing teams spend far more time thinking about tactical minutia than they do thinking about what are far and away the most important questions to the business:

“What is the ultimate objective of paid search for our company? And how do we measure success against that goal?”

If the goals and measurement have been thoroughly fleshed out, considered and analyzed, then it makes sense that attention be focused on the “how to” questions — but often, it seems that applying scrutiny to the goals themselves leads to changed success metrics that have far more impact on performance than any number of geeky tactical maneuvers.

Every company can articulate their goals, but sometimes scratching deeper reveals shaky rationale supporting them.

For companies that budget search spend, marketers need to ask:

• “Who determines the budget and what criteria do they use?”
• “Are these criteria the same or different than those used to determine the budgets of other marketing programs online and off?”
• “At that budget, do you expect a profitable ROI? Breakeven? Investment for long term growth? Brand exposure?”
• “Does the budget rise and fall with market opportunity or is it rigid quarter-to-quarter?”
• “How do you measure and think about the “R” in ROI?”

For companies that set efficiency targets for non-brand search and allow the advertising spend to rise and fall with opportunity, a different set of questions should follow:

• “Great! What’s the basis of that ROI constraint?”
• “How does that ROI relate to business profits? Screamingly profitable? Breakeven? Investment?”
• “How does the marginal ROI compare to your average ROI?”
• “Does your “R” factor in all relevant success metrics like cross-device, offline spillover, registries, email sign ups, catalog requests, etc.?”
• “Over what time frame do you think about getting the return: the first interaction with a customer, or is some notion of lifetime-value folded in?”

Much of this boils down to how aggressively a company can drive marketing without wrecking.
Google recently launched an initiative to help advertisers think more carefully about performance marketing objectives and asked me to do some evangelizing with them.

Maximizing Profit Vs. ROI

 Nicholas says that “the best way to increase profits from your digital marketing investments is to make profits your main KPI. It seems self-evident, but very few advertisers are actually doing this.”
His point is that too often companies take as their goal maximizing ROI — a ratio — rather than maximizing profit — which is what you put in the bank at the end of the month. Increasing bids may decrease ROI as a ratio, but may drive enough additional volume to more than make up the difference.

He is right, of course. Picking only the lowest hanging fruit yields great per-piece profitability, but not much total profit. If the goal is profit maximization, then the proper approach is to first pick the lowest hanging fruit (of course) but to also pick the fruit higher up the tree as long as the value of the fruit picked is greater than the time/cost of picking it.

Let’s look at the math of diminishing marginal returns and we’ll see this clearly. As spend levels increase, efficiency inevitably decreases because we buy wisely, grabbing the most efficient opportunities first leaving less-efficient opportunities left over to choose next.

Threshold 1 on the graph represents Observed ROI Maximization. Threshold 2 represents Observed Profitability Maximization. Threshold 3 represents Return Maximization at Breakeven Profits, and Threshold 4 Represents Return Maximization at Some Investment.

Putting The Pedal To The Metal

To switch metaphors, just for fun, Nicholas sees some advertisers putting the car in drive but hardly putting any pressure on the gas pedal. They’re content to idle forward and “save money” on gas, but they don’t see the opportunity-loss associated with going so slowly.

He advocates for moving from 1 to 2:

Moving from ROI ratio maximization to short term profit maximization is an unmistakable, indeed unquestionable win.

However, many advertisers already go well beyond that. Most of our clients spend at least to observed breakeven (position 3 on the graph) on non-brand search.

The marginal ROI (slope) is negative moving from 2 to 3, but the loss is justified on the grounds that the portfolio comes in at breakeven. This allows the company to generate the maximum observed return from search at a breakeven investment overall.

But how do marketers justify going beyond position 3? At that point, not only is each conversion coming at a loss on the margin, but the collective whole is underwater, as well.

How can that ever make sense? To many smart marketers it does, and the reasons for that perspective involve some combination of the following arguments:

• We don’t see all the conversions driven by paid search. There are cross-device effects, there is spillover to brick and mortar, people drop cookies reducing the observable conversions. Factoring in this hidden value makes the additional investment wise.
• The graph above only accounts for short-term ROI. The lifetime value of the consumers engaged is more than enough to justify additional investment.
• Growing the customer base is valuable in and of itself. It leads to more customers to market to via email, direct mail, re-marketing display ads, social media, etc. This increases the natural lifetime value of a customer.
• Growth gives additional clout with vendors. Volume discounts and co-op marketing dollars go to the companies that sell more product. Publishers can charge more for advertising on site. Insurance companies can spread risk over a larger base. Bigger is better.
• Broader awareness creates more buzz, more PR, more word-of-mouth marketing, more in-bound links and social mentions. One of the most under-appreciated components of customer lifetime value is the propensity of happy customers to spread the word to their friends, which is vastly more powerful given the connective tissue of social media, Pinterest boards, etc.
• There is brand value to prominence on the SERP, and visits to website and apps. Engagement and awareness has value even if hard to measure.
• The media buyers get to spend like drunken sailors, I should be able to, as well!

Okay, I haven’t heard anyone use the last argument explicitly, but they’ve kinda hinted at it, and vastly different ROI expectations between marketing channels is a bit hard to understand.

How Far Should You Go?

Nicholas at Google is certainly right that pushing from 1 to 2 is certain to be rational. Whether moving from 2 to 3 or even into 4 makes sense may depend on the shape of the curve.

If the marginal ROI drops like a rock, it could be that the channel is effectively maxed out, either because you’re at the top of everything that matters to your brand, or your competitors are being so much more aggressive it doesn’t make sense to chase them.

However, if bidding more aggressively generates material incremental returns, consider the extent to which the arguments for 4 apply to your brand. What’s the lifetime value of a customer for you? How significant could untracked spillover be? What is the Word-of-Mouth value of a customer?

To this last point — if the answer is, “I have no idea,” consider doing this down and dirty analysis:

1. Do a survey of 100 random converting new customers on your website who reached the site through a brand search or direct navigation and who had no prior interaction with other marketing channels as best you can tell.
2. Ask them: “Why did you come to our site that day?”
3. Tally up the fraction of these new customers who say something like ‘a friend/relative suggested I go to your site.’ Call that X. You might be startled at how large X is.
4. What fraction of all customers are new customers coming in via brand search or direct load? Call that Y.
5. Multiply X and Y and call that Z. Might Z represent the number of additional customers brought in by WOM of other customers? Would that materially increase the direct lifetime value a customer?

Hacky, yes — but sometime hacks are valuable enlightenment.

Whether 2 is right for you, or something more like 3 or 4, will depend on many factors. Ultimately, more aggressive advertising, into the world of untraceable effects, needs to result in a healthier P & L. If it doesn’t, maybe easing off the pedal is right.

Hope this is helpful fodder for discussion.

Drive carefully.

Stock image used with permission of Shutterstock.com

13 Reasons Branded PPC Campaigns Are Beneficial For B2B Brands

Branded PPC campaigns are a difficult concept to swallow for many marketers. Why would someone pay for a branded term they already (and will always) rank first for in organic search?
In the B2B world, paying for terms surrounding your brand can yield numerous benefits. Here are the top 13 reasons you should consider building a branded campaign for your B2B brand.

1. Domination In SERPs

Having multiple listings on one search engine results page (SERP) is a way to deliver a wider range of brand messaging to searchers. It also creates more opportunities for searchers to click through to your website.

By appearing in both organic and paid listings, you will be the prominent player in your space. Paying for keyword listings is also the only way you can guarantee yourself that first spot.

2. Control Your Brand Messaging

One of the downfalls of organic listings is that certain guidelines need to be followed to keep in best practices with current SEO trends. Since keyword targeting is a must for organic listings, you are limited in how you can deliver your brand messaging.

With paid search, you can craft your brand messaging to grab the attention of searchers and drive them to your site.

3. Fight Against Competitor Bids On Branded Terms

An effective PPC tactic that has been used for a while now has been bidding on competitor branded terms.

If a competitor is bidding on your branded terms, the best way to fight back is to bump them down a peg by buying your own branded terms. After all, your bids will be much lower and quality scores much higher, whereas competitors have to shell out a lot of dough to compete for your terms.

4. Branded Terms Are Cheap

Some of the cheapest keywords you’ll ever bid on are those of your own brand. Bidding on your own brand usually costs pennies per click. These dirt-cheap clicks will also generate high click-through rates (CTRs) and quality scores.

5. Build Account Equity

Aside from being cheap, having high CTRs and earning high quality scores, this level of performance will also help build account equity.

Although account history doesn’t directly affect ongoing quality score, it has long been speculated that maintaining an account over time that follows best practices, gets good quality scores and achieves high CTRs does have an effect on the success of your future campaigns.

(A few things I have noticed that may be related to account history are keywords starting out with higher or lower quality scores, and quicker approval on ads.)

6. Accelerate Buying Decisions From Current Prospects

Users searching for your brand already have some level of familiarity with your brand and products, whether it’s from a colleague, tradeshow, direct mailing piece or other channel. These users may be anywhere from the beginning to the end of the sales cycle.

By bidding on branded terms, you have the ability to send these prospects to a landing page to get your company messaging, thought leadership material and other assets in front of them to move them further down the sales cycle. An organic listing just sends them to your site, with little control of what content you want to put in front of them.

7. Paid Traffic Can Convert More Effectively Than Earned Traffic

PPC landing pages are usually optimized to drive users to complete a conversion action. Because of this, conversion rates tend to be higher on these landing pages than on regular website pages.

As mentioned in my previous point, people who click on ads for branded terms are already in the sales cycle, and well-optimized PPC landing pages can accelerate that buying decision.

8. Competing In SERPs With Affiliates & Distributors

One of the biggest challenges in search for B2B marketers is having to compete with your own affiliates and distributors.

Your affiliates and distributors want to use your brand equity to their advantage, so they will often bid on your branded terms — especially for product-related branded terms.

If your sales culture has a strong interest in making sales in-house instead of relying on distributors, creating a branded campaign is imperative.

9. Test Out New Brand Messaging

If you plan on creating advertisements and other collateral to promote through other channels, branded PPC campaigns offer a cost-effective way to test new brand messaging.

For pennies per click, you’ll be able to determine if a new brand message is effective before spending thousands of dollars blindly sending it out through other marketing channels.

10. Promote New Products Or Services

Every time a new product or service is created, you have to add new content on your site, create collateral and thought leadership, and use multiple marketing channels to promote the materials. It takes a while to gain momentum through those channels. Ranking in organic search for keywords around the new product or service may take anywhere from several weeks to several months.
Paid search offers an opportunity to rank first in search immediately for both branded and non-branded terms around the new product.

11. User Attention Is Drawn To Ads

Google likes to make money, and AdWords is one of their primary drivers of revenue. With that in mind, they are constantly testing new ways to make ads appear in SERPs.

Example of a branded SERP with both paid and earned listings.

In the past, they have highlighted the ads with a yellow, blue and pink background color to make them stand out above organic listings. Their latest tactic seems to be making them blend in with organic listings. Either way, Google will constantly be testing new designs to drive more ad clicks, because that’s how they make their money.

12. Damage Control

Let’s hope this is never necessary, but if your company makes a big “oops” and becomes the target of negative press coverage, a branded PPC campaign is one solution to push that negative press down the SERPs.

Looking at the example below, you can see that Feedly, a company that recently became the target of a cyber attack and does not currently run a branded PPC campaign, is dominated in SERPs with negative press. This negative press has taken the top position in the SERP, and includes attention-grabbing elements like the thumbnail, timestamps and border.

Example of negative press effecting brand image in search

13. Retaining Traffic After A Search Engine Penalty

One of the most devastating things that can happen to your brand in digital marketing channels is the inability to appear for your own branded terms as a result of a penalty from search engines. Recovering from a manual or algorithmic penalty can take several months before rankings are restored.

A branded and non-branded PPC campaign is one solution to retain search traffic until you recover from the penalty.

 (Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

How Content Quality Analysis Works With SEO

What Is Co-Occurrence Analysis?

In the world of keywords, this refers to an analysis of what words appear most commonly on a page. Imagine you create a page on women’s shoes. You can then analyze the content on the page to see what words are most common. For example, the results of the analysis for your page might look like this table here:

The “Occurrences” column tabulates the number of times the “Word” listed in the column to the left of it appears on the page.

Notice how you don’t see any instances of words like “the,” “and,” and “it” in the list. These are examples of what we call “stop words.” Usually, these words are not of value to this kind of analysis since they are in most cases ignored by search engines.

There are rare exceptions, such as with proper names like “The Office” (a TV show) and “The Home Depot” (the full proper name of this company), but it is not a factor in this analysis.

The Searchmetrics Study

As a next step, you can do this same analysis across all of the pages in the top 10 or more search results for a given search query to see what types of words people use. Searchmetrics did something similar to this in their recent study. In fact, they looked at 15,000 queries involving more than 350,000 URLs. Let’s look at the results of the test:

The Y-axis shows a score for the usage of the relevant keywords. The X-axis shows the ranking position in search engine results pages (SERPs), ranging from position 1 to position 30.
Remember, this has been run across 15,000 different SERPs. Based on this, you see a strong correlation between higher usage of the relevant terms and ranking position. The 0.34 score indicates a strong correlation.

Are We Really Back To Keyword Density?

No, not at all. This is quite different. This is not about one single phrase being repeated over and over again on the web page. It is much more sophisticated than all of that.

In the past days of search engines, this type of analysis was done in a very simplistic way. Simple repetition of a single keyword phrase over and over again was all that was required to get a page to rank highly for something. This led to lots of keyword stuffing by spammers.
Here is a partial snapshot extracted from Searchmetrics Content Optimization tools that shows the kinds of words found in a co-occurrence analysis:

You can see words like “view” and “sale” in this partial screen shot, and if you look at the rest of the report (not shown here) you see other words such as “price,” “cart” and “shipping.” If an e-commerce page does not have such words, then it might lower the chances that the page being analyzed is actually a place where you can buy women’s shoes.

Pages that have an unnatural mix of words may be detected using this type of analysis and judged to be of lower quality or relevance. Searchmetrics also tested the correlation of keyword relevance in 2013, and it looked like a factor in that test as well, but not quite as strongly as it did in this 2014 test.
A search engine will probably do this at a much more sophisticated level than shown here. Below are a few things they might do differently:

1. Extend it to look at certain key phrases.
2. Lower a page’s quality and relevance scores if it does not include a reasonable mix of synonyms. This would be one method for distinguishing pages that are written in bulk or machine-generated.
3. Look at the anchor text in incoming links and include them in the analysis. A similar analysis could be used to determine poor anchor text mix to a web page. Most web pages may not have enough links for this type of analysis, but the home page of many sites might.
4. Too high a mix of “the right words or phrases” could also be judged as a problem.
5. This type of analysis could be solidified even further by picking out a hand-curated set of trusted seed sites. Since we know they are quality sites, they can be given more weight in the analysis to reduce the chances of bad results.

What Does This Mean?

The goal of the search engines is to recognize well-designed web pages that offer a high-quality user experience. That should be your first goal, as well. However, this is a difficult art form to learn, so expect to invest some time in getting it right. Start by recruiting really talented writers to create content that fits the user intention.

Then study the sites that rank well for the terms of interest to you. Go study their approach and learn from what they are doing. You can learn about page structure, key elements to include on the page, and an approach to providing a user experience that works.

Searchmetrics can do this automatically for your keywords and delivers a report of terms and phrases that should definitely be used and phrases that are highly relevant for your topic. And if you can, take advantage of user testing services.

You can try a service like Usertesting.com, or just ask some people you know to take an impartial look at your pages and critique them. The most important lesson from this is that you need to be very holistic in your approach to putting content on your pages and create the best possible experience there. This will be an investment of time, but it will help you both with conversion and user satisfaction.

We can’t say with any certainty that it’s an SEO ranking factor, but the Searchmetrics data shows a very strong correlation between this type of thinking and higher rankings, and that’s good enough for me to know it’s important, regardless of whether or not it’s a ranking factor or not!

AdWords Brings Keyword Bid Simulator Estimates Into Reporting Columns

 With a handy new set of columns, Google is bringing the AdWords bid simulator into fuller view.


From the keyword tab, advertisers can now add several columns to their reporting from the new Bid simulator section offered in the Customize Columns menu. A range of  bid simulator estimates can then be viewed across multiple keywords, replacing the need to need to click the bid simulator icon on each individual keyword.

Here are the new column options (You can ignore the Base max. CPC listed at the top of the menu because it’s a duplication of the Max CPC column already in the reports):

• 50 percent lower than your base bid
• 50 percent higher than your base bid
• 300 percent higher than your base bid
• At your top of page bid estimate

The column functionality also means these metrics can be downloaded and exported — even across MCC-managed accounts. The standard sorting and filter options apply to these columns, and automated rules can be set based on the Bid Simulator estimates.

Google Releases New Tools For AdMob Including Full Google Analytics Integration

Today, Google will announce new features for its mobile ad platform AdMob at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The new features are powered by Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
Rather than having to access AdMob and Analytics from separate interfaces, app developers can now get performance reporting from the AdMob home screen and a new Analyze tab right within AdMob. On the Analyze tab a dropdown menu, shown in the screenshot below, allows users to switch between the full set of reporting for individual apps.

The home screen features a combination of reporting from both platforms and provides a snapshot of conversion and monetization performance, including from in-app purchases.

Google also launched content experiments with Google Tag Manager for apps. The feature will allow marketers to test changes such as in-app promotions and menu layouts in their apps on a subset of users. Testing results will then be available through the Google Analytics reporting interface.

7 Common Pitfalls Of Google Display Network Campaign Management

The Google Display Network has been around for a long time now, yet marketers continue to make many of the same mistakes over and over again. Here are seven common issues that can arise when running a display campaign if you don’t stay on the ball.

1. Unnecessary Pausing Of Keywords

You notice that your display campaign has suddenly started spending a lot more money and your cost-per-conversion has tripled. What’s the first thing you look at?
A lot of people would tend to go straight to the keywords (if targeting contextually) and try to pinpoint the highest spending term to either lower the bid on it or pause it. This is the wrong place to be looking.
If you notice a high surge in spend, always go to your placements tab and evaluate the domains your ads have been showing on. One keyword may well have triggered an irrelevant or new placement, but this doesn’t mean that the keyword needs to be paused.
Often, you can either exclude the placement or add a bid multiplier to it to positively or negatively impact its bid. Don’t forget to look back over a longer time period to see if there are any placements that have been underperforming for a long time — these can be excluded.

2. Not Adjusting Keyword Level Custom Bids

As part of the Enhanced Campaigns rollout last year, Google added a new feature whereby you could apply custom bids to one of your targeting methods and then use bid adjustments to further refine bids for your other combination targeting methods.
If you haven’t changed your keyword-level bids since then, you’ll notice that when you do, it won’t let you until you enable custom bids on them. If you hadn’t made the choice, AdWords will have taken your ad group level bid at the time.

How to enable custom bids

Switch on custom bids at keyword level and start optimizing each keyword! Once you’ve assessed the types of placement coming in at keyword level, you’ll have a better idea of which keywords are performing well (or not).
From here, you can adjust your bids to achieve better results overall. Too often, marketers forget to regularly adjust their keyword-level bids on display campaigns. If you’re not working toward direct response, you can still be adjusting bids to try to gain maximum traffic for your budget.

3. Not Making Use Of Bid Adjustments

Related to the above point, bid adjustments often get overlooked!
You can only set your custom bid for one targeting method; if you’re doing keyword targeting, you’ll need to choose this as your custom bid as bid adjustments (by %) can’t be made in the keywords tab.

How to change bid adjustments for your targeting methods

If you’re doing combination targeting, you’ll want to make regular bid adjustments based on performance to either bid a specified percentage more or less for certain placements, topics or interest categories.
Google has made things much easier for us to further refine our combination bidding, so start taking advantage of it.

4. Having A Static Strategy & Structure

When was the last time you added a new ad group to your display campaign? A while ago? Thought so! Our search campaigns evolve with time, and we’re always adding in new features — but people can forget to do the same with the GDN.
Model your display campaign on David Beckham’s strategy: change and adapt with the latest trends, or set them yourself to stay ahead of the competition!

Test new approaches as often as Beckham changes his hair style.

• Make sure you’re testing out new options available to you such as in market segments and affinity categories which give you increased coverage for your campaigns but a more niche-level of targeting.
• Experiment with bid multipliers for location, device, time-of-day and age, and expand your strategies based on these results. You’ll almost certainly be looking into these different bidding strategies for your search campaigns, so don’t neglect them in your display campaigns!
• Expand your keyword lists; display ad groups have the same limits as search ones now, so you’re no longer capped at 50 keywords.

This next one takes the biscuit for the worst common mistake!

5. Only Utilizing Image Ads

Marketers often forget about text ads — at their own peril. If you’re not utilizing text ads, that means you’re not gaining full exposure on the GDN, as a significant number of sites only allow text ads to be shown.
Text ads have been shown to give great direct response, so they are definitely worth adding into your campaigns. Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in this area, too, as there are some exciting changes coming which will impact the look and feel of text ads!

6. Not Testing Ads

This is another common pitfall, and display campaigns sadly get overlooked in this area. It’s important to test:

• Different sets of image ads
• At least three text ads per ad group
• A variety of image ad sizes (including the newer half page and mobile ads)
• Different styles of image ads such as the new engagement style ads

These are just a few ideas of things to look at, but you get the idea.
For those with a particularly static display campaign, image ads can now be up to 150kb in size, so you can get some much better quality image ads in your account now compared to the 50kb limit that had been set in the past!

7. Expecting The Same Results As From Search Campaigns

Display campaigns can be short lived, if you approach them with the wrong expectations. When starting up a GDN campaign, you need to approach it with the understanding that it will not yield the same results as your search campaigns.
Clickthrough rates will be lower, conversion rates will be lower, the volume of conversions will be lower, etc. You need to launch your campaign with a goal of either raising awareness or trying to gain direct response — and if you’re looking for direct response, you’re going to need to set different goals than those of your main search campaigns.
The GDN will give you that additional reach you need whilst also offering you a lower cost-per-click in many cases compared to your main search campaigns, but you’ll need to continually experiment with all the options available to you to make it work in the right way for you. Don’t give up — keep testing new things!

To Sum Up

There are more common mistakes, but these are some of the main ones I come across when looking at display campaigns that come to the agency where I work.
Display isn’t just something you switch on and leave running, it’s something that takes a lot of fine tuning to get working the way you want it to, and with that, you need to make sure you’re giving it enough attention and budget in relation to your search campaigns. If you’re not running any GDN campaigns yet, hopefully, this will give you a few pointers ahead of getting started!

Photo Image Credit: archives.deccanchronicle.com 

Article Credit :SearchEngineLand.com

Better Ads via Better Sitelinks

Sitelinks are an important part of successful ads.  They show value to potential customers before a click occurs, while also being (along with other extensions) a factor of ad rank.  User interaction with sitelinks is so strong that you should consider them a basic part of your ad text - title, description, display URL and sitelinks.  Optimize the messaging in this space routinely, just as you do with ad text.

Many advertisers aren’t taking advantage of this excellent feature just yet, so before we start optimizing you may need to implement them.  Adding sitelinks boosts the average CTR on an ad by 10-20% (+20-50% when the search is one of your branded terms), so that implementation should be time well spent.

Make sure to have at least six active sitelinks for desktop and four active sitelinks for mobile, but remember that you can go all the way up to twenty total per ad group or campaign.  Sitelinks allow 25 characters for the link itself, and that space allows for testing.  We’ve found that somewhat shorter sitelinks are the most effective, though, so try to keep them closer to 18-20 characters for desktop and 12-15 characters for mobile.

We think sitelinks are a great proven feature, and we also think that they can be made better.

Reporting on Sitelinks

Start by knowing how you’re doing.

When reviewing these statistics, remember to compare sitelinks to one another and not to overall ad performance (as CTR on sitelinks is almost universally lower than a click on an ad, even though an ad with sitelinks will perform better than an ad without sitelinks).  You can also look at a sitelink’s contribution to the entire creative.  If you segment by “This Extension vs. Other” you can see if that extension is encouraging clicks on the headline or other links.

Identify your strong performers in terms of CTR (on the link itself or the surrounding ad), conversion rate, and conversion volume to establish a baseline of what target you can shoot for with low performers.  If certain sitelinks aren’t receiving a lot of impressions they’ve been passed over by the system, which means that you could probably work on improving those first.

(Quick aside - Beyond normal reporting, it’s also a good idea to do a simple sense check.  Are those the six {or twenty} pages that would be the most useful for your customers?  Even if CTR or impressions are low, is there a minority of your users that will find that sitelink very useful?  You may want to keep that link in place for them.)

Once you’ve found what’s not working, try out new text to improve performance.  If CTR is fine but your conversion rate is lagging, you could be sending traffic to the wrong page or setting user expectations incorrectly with a misleading link.  As with your ads, even top performers could potentially be improved upon.  Think about something new you may want to try.

When viewing your sitelink data, the info is available at the ad, ad group, campaign, and account level.  Add or remove these columns on the Ad Extensions tab to determine just how specific you want your info to be.

Testing Your Sitelinks

Pure A/B testing isn’t possible because each sitelink must point to different content.  When you’re identifying what’s lagging behind, recognize that other variables can muddle your results (things like ad tests, bid changes or seasonality).  You can try out variations of sitelinks in different campaigns or sets of ad groups to see what works better, but it’s still not going to be a perfect solution.  Recognize the imperfection of this whenever reviewing your results.

Sitelink testing shouldn’t be as frequent as your ad testing (due to the lack of A/B testing).  Monthly or quarterly reviews might make sense for you, depending on your volume.

Apply ad copy testing principles to your new sitelinks.  Think of distinct calls to action and benefits that relate to a user’s search and the page you’re directing them to.  You can also take lessons from previous ad tests and apply them.  For example, you can use losing (but still strong) ad copy as your sitelinks or their descriptions.

Sitelinks with Additional Detail

You also have the option to add additional detail to your sitelinks, which is great opportunity to prove value to customers before they click.  At present, sitelinks automatically serve descriptions where appropriate.  That feature is going away in the near future, though, so add in descriptions yourself sooner rather than later.

Mobile Sitelinks

Try to speak to mobile users.  Think about mobile intent and how it differs from desktop, and then reflect that way of thinking in your sitelinks.  You’ll also want to keep mobile sitelinks shorter (to around 12-15 characters) to ensure they aren’t cut off.

Closing

You can show users valuable information about your site right in your ads via sitelinks.  It’s imperative that they’re present, and once they’re there you should focus on making them as good as they can be (just as you do with the ads themselves).  Sitelinks not only increase the relevance of your ads, they increase the relevance of the user experience you deliver after the click.

Start The New Year With A PPC Health Check: Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of my PPC Health Check series! I covered account structure, settings, conversion tracking and budgets. Today’s piece will help you understand the areas you need to be checking with regard to keywords, ads and performance.

Reviewing a campaign properly isn’t something that is done in 20 minutes — you’ll need to spend hours checking these things over in detail, depending on how large your account is. Please keep this in mind when checking over your own accounts.

As a further point on ad extensions, below is a great example of an ad that almost has it all (for the adventure holiday company Alpine Elements). Social extensions and seller reviews are missing, but it’s making use of some great image extensions that show the core areas of their business: call extensions, communication extensions, site links and site link descriptions.

If only all ads could take up this much space! You’ll mostly only be able to achieve this on your brand terms as they’ll always be in high positions, but it’s worth trying to add all these extensions to all your campaigns.


Here’s an example of an ad with seller reviews and social extensions. Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? These kind of extensions really make a brand stand out as trustworthy and reliable, and will almost certainly be leading more people to click on one advert over another.



This PPC Health Check series has just covered the main areas you should be looking into — but there are also many other charts you could run for your account to determine whether it’s still in a healthy state or not with regard to performance. This post is primarily focused on paid search campaigns; you will need to look at some additional factors when analyzing campaigns on the Google Display Network.

While this series has focused on settings and the fundamentals of any campaign, it’s important to note that to improve performance in your campaign’s year-on-year, you need to be taking advantage of the many new campaign types that are available such as dynamic search ads, product listing ads, remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) and dynamic remarketing. These will all help you gain additional market share in the year ahead.

Features within AdWords change frequently so it’s important to sign up to regular AdWords newsletters (and watch this column) to be kept updated on anything new that might be useful for your account. If you stay stagnant for too long you’ll be left behind in this industry and end up miles behind your competitors; regular knowledge updating and health checks are a necessity!

A Former Googler’s Routine For AdWords Management

It’s been seven months since we launched Optmyzr’s first tool  at SMX Advanced in Seattle – the Quality Score Tracker – and we’ve been busy adding tools, reports and optimizations since then. Now, one of the most common questions we get is when to use various optimizations — and, of course, these apply no matter what tools you’re using.

There are plenty of daily tweaks to make in any AdWords account, but what are some of the optimizations we do on a regular schedule? While there’s no one right answer for every account, I’ll share some of my thoughts about what to do and when to do it to keep an account in great shape.

Do These At Least Quarterly

AdWords changes all the time — in the past year, we saw one of the bigger changes in recent memory with the forced migration to Enhanced Campaigns. AdWords also frequently launches new features that are less dramatic than Enhanced Campaigns but that can still have a huge impact on how your ads perform. Make sure you’re not missing out on any of these. Here are a few recent examples:

Mobile Bid Modifiers

Now that mobile and desktop ads are all served from a single campaign, are you using mobile bid modifiers for maximum performance?

Be sure you’re looking at how your ads are performing on different devices so you’re not losing money on mobile devices or tablets. With bid modifiers, you can bid lower for mobile clicks and make sure your ROI is similar to that on desktop. Try to avoid bidding your mobile clicks down 100% because that’s not a viable long-term strategy in most cases.

It reminds me of when we launched the Google Display Network and some advertisers were convinced this was a complete waste of money and turned it off entirely. Smart advertisers figured out how to set the right bids, set the right targeting and make this a very profitable part of their business.

I think there’s no such thing as a bad click, just a click that’s too expensive. So make sure your bids are set correctly to take advantage of the growing number of mobile searches. If you don’t do something with them, your competitors will.

AdWords Scripts
I talk about these ad nauseum, but I believe this is the biggest untapped opportunity for most advertisers. The ability to create custom reports, automate your secret sauce and become a more efficient marketer offers a huge advantage to advertisers that are not afraid of a little code (or copy-and-pasting code written by others).

Use AdWords Scripts to automate reports and optimizations you do frequently.

Conversion Tracking
It continues to amaze me how many accounts I come across that spend a lot of money but are not tracking conversions properly. If you’re not yet tracking conversions, figure out a way to start doing this immediately. Either that or go flush some money down the toilet… I’m serious, if you’re advertising online and not tracking conversions, you’ve got a big problem that you need to fix quickly.

If your conversions happen offline, you can now import this with Conversion Import, a tool Google launched in September.

And, thanks to Call Extensions being counted as conversions since November, it’s easier than ever to track calls as conversions without using any third-party tools.

Get A Better Ad Rank With Ad Extensions
The ad ranking formula changed in October: in addition to Quality Score and the bid, the performance of ad extensions is now also a factor. This makes a lot of sense since Quality Score is mostly a measure of CTR, and according to Google, ad extensions like sitelinks improve CTR of ads by 30% on average. So, by factoring the CTR of an extension into the ad ranking formula, advertisers that have added CTR boosting extensions get rewarded with a higher rank for their ads.

Use ad extensions to improve your CTR and get a better rank for your ad.

New ad extensions get launched periodically, so make sure you’ve taken a look at all the ones that are available to you. For example, are you using review extensions yet? They let you enhance your ad with a short snippet from a third-party review of your company. Have you updated your sitelinks with the two additional lines of text you’re now allowed to include? Have you considered setting different sitelinks for different ad groups now that sitelinks are no longer set at just the campaign level?

As you can see, there are always new features in AdWords — so be sure to do at least a quarterly review to ensure you’re not falling behind your competitors.

Do These At Least Monthly

Ad Text Cleanup
Ad text testing may be the most neglected account management task… not surprisingly so, since it’s the hardest to do correctly when using just the AdWords interface. While it’s easy to create new ads (have you tried Ready Ads yet for display ads?), it’s hard to keep track of what you’re testing and how the experiments are going. Even if you set ad rotation to let Google show the best performing ads more often, you end up with a slew of ads that don’t get served much but are still active in your account.

If you’re looking to clean up ads that are not performing well, doing the math to find those ads that are underperforming with at least a 95% confidence is not trivial. We have just launched a preview of a new report in Optmyzr that helps identify underperforming ads. Brad Geddes also has a new tool called adAlysis that helps with ad text optimization. And of course, there’s boostCTR, a company I advise, that’s been in the ad optimization space for several years.

The ad on the left has a 99% probability of beating the ad on the right. Go through your account periodically to look for the losers and delete them.

The next challenge with ad text optimization is finding winning ad text elements. You’re probably using similar lines across many ad groups; but, AdWords doesn’t provide any reporting that aggregates the performance of all headlines, description lines and display URLs.

For that, I wrote an AdWords Script that spits out a Google Sheet with aggregated performance data for every line I use in my ads. I can easily see if the line “Free Shipping” or “Next Day Delivery” has a better CTR. Armed with that data, I can quickly generate a bunch of new ad variations using the better performing text; then, next month, I can use one of the tools to clean up ads that are underperforming and do another round of tests.

Keyword Cleanup

While we are all buying keywords from Google, we should really be thinking about managing queries rather than managing keywords. The reason is that most keywords are not exact matches, so they are getting clicks and impressions from a variety of related queries.

I wrote in my last article that broad match keywords are liars. What you ideally want to do is take tight control over queries that you know convert or are critical to your business. By adding these as exact match keywords, you’ll have more certainty over their rank, cost and messaging.

One of the issues with broad match keywords is that they tend to rank worse for a query than another keyword that is an exact match to the query. That’s because in the case where the query and keyword exactly match, the advertiser has told Google they definitely want to have their ad show — when the keyword is a broad match, there is some uncertainty, and Google typically will rank that lower due to the uncertainty factor.

Add New Keywords From The Search Terms Report
At least once a month, check the search terms report and add converting queries as keywords to the account. You can add them to the ad group that generated the impression or you can add them to a new ad group, or even a special campaign for converting keywords.

When you put the new keyword by itself as an exact match into a new ad group, you’re tightly controlling the messaging in your ad for that one query. When you place the new ad group into a campaign with other converting keywords, you’re able to allocate a separate budget to converting keywords and ideally set that budget to be unconstrained.

Find Negative Keywords In The Long Tail Of Queries
At the same time, find negative themes from your search terms report. Do this by taking the keyword list and running it through a word cloud tool. That way, terms that appear more frequently will be more noticeable and you’ll have a better way to see what words from the long-tail represent a potentially significant volume of irrelevant clicks.

Deduplicate Keywords
When you’re actively adding new keywords to the account, you may find yourself accidentally creating duplicates. This is not a terrible thing, but it does complicate account management. So be sure to clean up duplicate keywords at least monthly. The AdWords Editor will help you find these, and we have a tool that takes it a step further and suggests the best one to keep based on QS, Conversions, CTR and other metrics.

Sculpt Your Account To Drive Queries To The Right Ad Group
One optimization we really like is to look through the search terms report for situations where Google shows a different ad than the one we had written for a particular query. This happens quite frequently in most accounts and reduces our control over the landing page, ad messaging and bids; so, we add negative exact match keywords to limit this behavior at least once a month.

Bid Cleanup
Make sure bids are sensible and your bid management strategy hasn’t just killed off your best keyword without telling you.

If you’re managing bids manually, look for converting keywords where you may be bidding slightly below the first page bid estimate or where your impression share is too low.
Clean up keywords that have spent too much and aren’t converting, especially if they aren’t exact matches.

Do These At Least Daily

There are plenty of tweaks to make in accounts every day. How do you know what tweaks to make? It’s best to have a clear set of reports and metrics by which you’re judging things and give yourself a big enough time window for the analysis. That way, you can steer your account in a consistent direction without making too many changes too fast. It’s like steering a car, you want to look far enough ahead and steer to the middle of the lane you want to be in rather than bouncing from one line to the other by looking just in front of the car’s hood.

For example, if you take too short a view on conversions, you may be missing the fact that some conversions take several days to happen (you can check this in Search Funnels in your AdWords account) and your bid adjustments could set bids lower than ideal.

Look For Anomalies
What I do look for are daily anomalies, or items in the account that are completely off track. For example, are there keywords that are suddenly spending way more than usual and converting poorly? Are there ad groups that show consistently declining CTR? The AdWords engineers wrote some AdWords Scripts that will notify you when some of these things happen.

Analyze Y-O-Y Data
I also like to compare last year’s top-performers to the top-performers now. If there are differences, try to understand why so that you can react appropriately.

Conclusion

So, those are some thoughts on how to manage an AdWords account for success. Stay on top of the performance every day and get into the routine of doing some of the standard optimizations on a weekly or monthly schedule, and do at least a quarterly audit to make sure you’re taking advantage of all the latest capabilities of the system.

AdWords Bid Management And Account Structure Mistakes To Avoid

On my one-year anniversary of working as an AdWords practitioner instead of a Googler, Brad Geddes interviewed me about Quality Score for his WebmasterRadio.fm show, Marketing Nirvana. He asked for my thoughts on AdWords now that I’m a user rather than someone building it, and I thought that was a great question and one worth covering in this month’s column.

I’ve always had plenty to say about the most common mistakes advertisers make, but now that I’m auditing accounts more in-depth and managing a few myself, there are some new mistakes I’ve seen that I think are worth sharing so that you can avoid them in your own accounts.

Bid Management Pitfalls

Handing the reins of bid management to Google or another third party has risks — but perhaps not for the reason I so often hear, which is that Google could use the information to their own advantage. I believe Google wants to use the information to give advertisers the results they want, and I am a big advocate of automated bid management because doing lots of repetitive math and keeping track of lots of variables is something computers are simply better at than your average account manager.

Automating bids is especially useful when you’re working with large accounts; any time you have more than a couple hundred keywords, managing all these manually is just too slow and tedious. But relinquishing all control to the algorithms can have unintended consequences, and it’s useful to understand the risks so you can decide what’s right for your account.

Monitor Your Top Keywords’ Bids Closely

An advertiser I was working with noticed that they lost pretty much all conversions on the one keyword that perfectly describes their business. This happened several months ago, and because they were spending so much time managing long-tail keywords, the drop-off on their money keyword initially went unnoticed.

Be careful about what automated bid management does to the bids of your top keywords. Here a keyword was bid down from the first page.

Only much later (during my audit) did they learn that this keyword had seen a week of poor conversion performance following a landing page redesign. The algorithm noticed it, too, and dropped the bid 60% — effectively taking them off the first page of results. They noticed the conversion rate decrease and quickly fixed the landing pages, but they never looked at resetting the bids for their keywords, so it continued to linger on page 2 of the results. Had the bid algorithm given the keyword another chance, it would have been restored to the first page of results and they wouldn’t have lost a ton of sales.

The takeaway here is that it makes sense to manage head keywords differently than long tail keywords. Even if you put them on automated bidding, you must monitor these keywords closely so that any change in performance will trigger a warning and you can investigate.

AdWords could make this much easier if they allowed advertisers to add charts of keyword-level detail to the interface. Until that time, we have an AdWords Script that builds a nifty little AdWords dashboard in Google Sheets.

Build a dashboard for any campaigns, ad groups or keywords in your AdWords account in minutes using an AdWords Script.

Changing Bids Can Change Which Keyword Is Served

The second issue with bid management is that your carefully calculated bids may not be the ones Google actually uses. Because of the vagaries of how Google selects the keyword from your account that matches the query, it’s possible that lowering the bid on a poorly performing keyword simply shifts its clicks to another keyword that still has a higher bid. This is exactly why we built the Traffic Sculptor – it helps find when Google gives an impression to a different keyword than what you intended. This way, you can be sure Google is serving the ad for your selected keyword, using its bid, ad text and carefully selected landing page.

Budget Constrained Campaigns May Not Work With Automated Bids

A third pitfall I’ve noticed with managed bids is that they may not always play well with budget constrained campaigns. On several occasions, I’ve seen that a campaign that uses bid automation depletes its budget too early in the day, even when ad serving is set to standard (meaning that ads are supposed to be shown throughout the day). Obviously, when the budget runs out by 10:00 a.m. and no conversions happen, it creates a potential vicious cycle — the bid management tool will eventually reduce bids too much and the campaign may entirely miss serving ads at the times of day when they would have performed best.

Account Structure Issues

Another common problem I’ve noticed is with account structure and keyword match types. I still come across accounts that combine display and search in a single campaign and accounts that have hundreds of keywords in an ad group — both not best practices in AdWords.

But one account structure issue that’s a bit more subtle (and that I hadn’t given much thought until this year) is that if you’re deploying a lot of broad match keywords in an account, it’s challenging to see trends or answer questions about why results change. That can make it hard to know if your strategy is panning out. As much as I like broad match keywords for their ability to help discover what users are really typing into the search box, they can make life for advertisers pretty hard….

Broad Match Keywords Are Liars

We’ve all heard that CPCs change based on seasonality or because Google introduces things like Enhanced Campaigns. But knowing how this impacts your account is trickier than just taking a look at the average CPC. The reason is that most advertisers use some degree of broad match keywords in their accounts, and stats for broad match keywords are averages that include data from each of the hundreds of queries that matched the broad keyword. We’ve all heard the adage that averages lie, and broad match stats are averages that obscure what’s really happening.

For example, when you change the bid for a broad match keyword, you’re changing the query mix because it becomes eligible for a different set of queries. The different queries have different CTRs, conversion rates, etc., so it quickly becomes a nightmare to figure out why a keyword’s performance has changed. Was it a competitor, a change Google made, an optimization you did, or simply the fact that your query mix changed? If your results are dropping and you can’t pinpoint the reason, it’s hard to correct the course. So unless you’re analyzing exact match keywords, you’ll have to dig very deep into the search terms report to try and come up with an answer.

To further complicate things, even exact match keywords may see sudden changes in performance because of the aforementioned issue where Google may shift the clicks to another, similar keyword with a better rank. In this case, the best way to understand what’s happening is to run a query report rather than a keyword report.

The Top 10 Reasons Why Your Website Is Losing Sales

The online retail game is not an easy one to win, but new research and analysis might help cast a light on the glaring problems causing your site to lose sales and customers.

Collecting user feedback and complaints from 400 websites over three years, Qubit has narrowed its findings to 10 main problem areas. The results paint a picture of a consumer with much higher expectations for retail websites and their user-friendliness.

Based on Qubit's research, here are the top 10 complaints that online shoppers have about their retail sites of choice.

1. Price

Price has been the top online shopper complaint between 2011 and 2013, and it's maintaining its spot. Qubit's research shows that consumers' biggest gripes about on-site pricing fall into either the "too high for a given product" or the "too high for me" category.

According to Nomis Solutions, consumers are 7.4 times more sensitive to price online than in-store, so it's imperative that your site's prices are competitive with the rest of your market and can offer something others cannot.

2. Product Range

Customers are taking their shopping online for many reasons — one of the biggest being the expansion product availability. Online shoppers want an easier experience discovering items than what they have in-store, and your site should reflect that desire.
Qubit suggests improving your site's product range by investing in site resources such as recommendation engines, dedicated lists for new and seasonal products, and "related item" groupings.

3. Size

Image: J. C. Penney

Many retail sites still don't have reliable or helpful sizing charts for their customers. Online returns are frustrating, and creating even a basic measurement guide can drastically reduce the amount of complaints you'll get from peeved shoppers.

4. Site Functionality

According to Qubit, if Amazon's checkout button was down for one hour, it could lose $2 million in potential sales. Basically, it boils down to this: If you have a feature on your site, make sure it works.
Best practices for maintaining customer relationships in the event of a site issue include being transparent when there are problems and providing an entertaining error message, such as Uniqlo's pictured below.

Image: Uniqlo

5. Latency

Considering how impatient and trigger-happy the average online shopper is, it's clear that site speed is a growing area for complaints. This quick-to-click mentality will only increase in the future, so it's imperative that your site fix any and all latency issues now.

6. Site Search

Image: JackThreads

Nothing pisses off a customer quite like a search bar that doesn't work at Google-like proficiency. To quell the rage, Qubit suggests improving and expanding your site's tagging system and adding advanced search features.

7. Stock Availability

Another recurring user complaint involves stock availability. Though this complaint has decreased since Qubit's last study, it could still pose a problem for your site, as customers expect a greater selection and variety when it comes to online retail stock.
According to Quibit, consumers frequently complain when items that are no longer in stock or discontinued are still displayed on the site.

8. Navigation

If your site isn't clearly labeled and easy to navigate, customers will leave. Make sure your popular items and sales are highlighted and your various pages are easy to find and navigate.

9. Discounts/Sales

One recurring complaint that Qubit has discovered is difficult-to-find discount code boxes. If you're going to offer sales and coupon codes, don't make them impossible to use, as it'll lead to shoppers leaving.
Many retail sites have begun implementing time limits on product purchases, which make the consumer less price-sensitive.

10. Imagery

Image: Macy's

If you're site isn't pretty, you're doing yourself a disservice. Eye-tracking studies show that web users scan first, then read. This means that product images are more important than ever.

According to Qubit, consumers prefer to see multiple images before making a purchase, and want to see clothing on models rather than simply laid out. Adding video content and multiple images can go a long way in getting a customer to make a purchase.

Use Google Analytics To Create Campaigns, Not Just Track Them

We all know that analytics are good for understanding how a visitor behaved on your website — what pages they looked at, what buttons they clicked or what keywords they used to find you. You can also use analytics to track campaigns like email blasts and paid advertising.  That’s pretty basic stuff.

What many beginning marketers and small business owners don’t know is that you can use analytics data to create an online marketing campaign.

Analytics can answer some of the key questions you might ask when you want to create a campaign: Who are you targeting? Where do they live? When should you start your campaign?

You can even pinpoint what content will resonate with your audience and combine that with the who, when and where. Using data to craft campaigns means you’re not just guessing — and guessing is gambling. I’m not saying there’s no place in marketing for the gamble; but sometimes, we need the safe campaign success to build us up to the point where we can take that gamble.

Collecting The Data

As we figure out what data to collect, I like to build a document that will start to take shape as an outline for an ad campaign. I set a time period that seems representative of the season I want to target. If I’m targeting Spring Break Travelers to Florida, I look at data from that same time period over the last two to three years.
My major sections are:

• Timing Target: What time of year are you looking to book, sell, etc.? (If there is no timing target, just leave this alone.)
• Top Converting Traffic Sources: Look at the All Traffic report under the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics.
• Best Converting Landing Page: Look at the Landing Pages report under Behavior –> Site Content and view it with Ecommerce info sorted by transactions descending.
• Highest Visit Count Landing Page: Look at same report as above, but sorted by Visits descending.
• Top 3 Keywords Driving Conversions: This is trickier because we live in “Not Provided” land. You will need to use PPC or Webmaster Tools Search Query data to help you get an idea of keyword phrases that convert.
• Top 3 Converting States/Cities/Metros: Under Audience –> Geo –> Locations, look at cities or states and Ecommerce, then sort by transactions descending.
• Male/Female Conversion Ratio: Under Audience, look at Demographics and then Gender. Apply the Ecommerce info and sort by transactions descending to see who converts more.
• Top Converting Age Group Demographic: Under Audience, look at Demographics and then Age. Again, apply the Ecommerce info and sort by transactions descending.
• Purchase/Booking Window: This is somewhat difficult to gauge in Google Analytics. I recommend looking at Time to Purchase under Conversions –> Ecommerce. The tricky piece is attribution — if you are looking at “Last Click Attribution,” which is the default and where many beginners or small business owners start — then a majority of your conversions will be on Day 0. The reality is that, for a novice or beginner with analytics, this number is likely something you know from dealing with customers and sales or from an internal reservation or sales software you use.

I then take this data and build a campaign. I start with source. A campaign that focuses on Search Engines as a source begins with a different strategy than a campaign that focuses on social media or email marketing.
Once I’ve determined source, I look for content. I look at landing pages, keywords, and demographics to flesh out the best targeted content for my campaign. My last step is to determine how far ahead of time I need to promote this campaign (if at all). If you’re targeting a holiday or a specific season and your purchase or booking window is long (say 30+ days), then you need to plan your campaign timing accordingly.

Let’s build a campaign with example data now:

Metric	Target
Timing Target	Spring Break – Feb 20 to March 31
Top Converting Traffic Source(s)	Email Marketing
Best Converting Landing Page	/rental/blue-swayed-shoes/
Highest Visit Volume Landing Page	/rental/
Top 3 Keywords Driving Conversions	key west vacation rentals, vacation rentals in key west, key west rentals
Top 2 Converting States/Cities/Metros	New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania
Male/Female Conversion Ratio	7:10
Top Converting Age Group	35-44
Purchase/Booking Window	35-45 Days

Now, I’m ready to build my campaign and most of my questions are answered — all using analytics. I can build an email blast with information that caters to women who like a 3-bedroom rental in Key West. Likely, they have a family and are looking to ship about 45 days or so from arrival. Knowing my purchase windows tells me when to start my campaign. This one in particular should be online by January 20 at the latest and run until early to mid-March.

If the best converting rental is already booked, my job is to find rentals nearby that have a similar size, look, feel, location and cost. This allows me to book similar units with a fairly targeted strategy. If you use a CMS software or collect customer demographics, you can segment your email list by age, gender and location. We use PARDOT, but there are others out there that will do a great job, as well.

Now, you have a model and a direction in which to go to start building your first online marketing campaign that originates outside of the “create an email blast for everyone” or “put up some PPC ads.” Your campaign could target Social Media, or even a specific platform such as Pinterest. Successful campaigns are built on what you know about your audience and how you can craft your “story” to hit home with them. Using Analytics to collect this data should get you started in the right direction.

LinkedIn Paid Ads: A Beginner’s Guide

Why LinkedIn Gets Overlooked

There are lots of ways to spend your digital advertising budget today; but, have you considered LinkedIn? Advertising on LinkedIn is a great choice for many businesses. Below, we’ll explore why you should consider it and provide a walk-through of how to create your first LinkedIn ad campaign.

Have you run a campaign on LinkedIn? If not, you are hardly alone. LinkedIn’s self-service ad platform often gets overlooked by today’s marketers and media planners. This could be due to a number of misconceptions or challenges such as:

• LinkedIn is not a typical social network; but, it isn’t a true content platform, either.
• LinkedIn is focused on business connections; so, marketers tend to think of it as B2B only.
• LinkedIn has a much, much smaller audience than Google or Facebook.
• LinkedIn lacks the integration of professional bid management platforms.

Understanding The Value For Marketers

Personally, I think of LinkedIn as a highly-targeted communications channel that offers marketers great opportunity. For starters, it has considerable reach — +259 million members worldwide, with an estimated 100 million in the US.

And, while some might dismiss its “smaller” audience, LinkedIn can actually help you achieve a very precise reach. This is largely due to two factors:

1. LinkedIn provides great targeting options, including the ability to target by job title, employer, role, skills, and interests;
2. LinkedIn profiles contain more detailed and up-to-date “professional” information compared to what people list on their personal profiles on Facebook, etc.

Beyond that, LinkedIn now provides additional value through content with its “Influencers” and “Pulse” efforts. Between both of these initiatives and the value of updates and shared stories, LinkedIn has evolved into more of a content platform that is providing a professional and exciting news feed.

In addition, LinkedIn’s self-service advertising platform has a similar feel to those offered by Google and Facebook. For example, it allows you to design different types of ads, create logical groupings, define bids for specific campaigns, and measure performance with metrics such as impressions, clicks and conversions (if tagged/collected).

Is LinkedIn Right For You?

Now that you know why you should consider LinkedIn for advertising, it’s time to figure out if the platform would be a good fit for your needs. Whenever I look at a campaign, I ask myself a few key questions (see below). If I can answer “yes” to any of them, I know that LinkedIn ads are the right choice for the job:

1. Do I know the job titles of my target audience?
Since LinkedIn offers targeting by job title, it can help you pinpoint your audience. For example, if you are running the marketing department for a law school that helps legal assistants become attorneys, this targeting option would enable you to focus your efforts on the individuals who have “legal assistant” as their job title. As you can see below, there are over 100,000 of them on LinkedIn.

2. Do I know where my target audience works?
This targeting method could be used for a number of different purposes. Organizations could tap into it for recruiting by using it to target competitors’ employees. It could also be used for a targeted sales approach as it can get your brand in front of the right people at a company you are trying to sell to. In addition, this targeting option could be a great job search tool — individuals could use it to get their name in front of decisions makers at a firm they want to work for.

3. Does my target audience have unique skills/interests?
The ability to target by skills and/or interest is great for all kinds of professional businesses. For example, a vendor of analytics software could use it to target individuals who have competitive software or specific analytics languages listed in the skills section of their LinkedIn profile.

4. Do I know the type of role my target audience holds at a company, or their level of seniority?
This might sound like a stereotype, but targeting by role can be very useful, as it allows you to gauge a person’s influence level and salary.

How To Create A LinkedIn Ad Campaign

Now that you have some ideas on how to target individuals on LinkedIn, let’s do a quick walk-through on how to create an ad campaign.

Getting Started:
To create a campaign, you’ll first need the following:

• A LinkedIn account
• Basic understanding of your audience
• Ad copy
• Video (optional)

Now go to the LinkedIn Ads login page and click on “Get started.”  This will present you with two types of campaign options: (1) Create an ad; (2) Sponsor an update.

While this article is about creating an ad in LinkedIn, let me take a moment to tell you about sponsored updates (after all, they are ads, too, just a different type).
Sponsored updates are a great way to get your message directly onto a user’s home feed. The offering is comparable to sponsored content on Facebook, and it is a good tool to use to amplify your content. For example, if you have a great story, interview or other piece of content, you can post it through your company’s LinkedIn account and then make it a sponsored update. (Learn more about sponsored updates here.)
Okay, let’s get back on track. Click on “Create an ad.”

Step 1: Create Your Ad

You should now be looking at the following screen:

This is where you create your ad. To do so, you’ll need to fill in a few fields:

• Campaign Name: Create a name for your campaign. I recommend following any naming conventions you use on other platforms.
• Ad Language: Select the language for your ad.
• Media Type:  Select either a basic advertisement that follows the traditional format, or a video ad that includes a play button on the image.

• Ad Destination:  This will allow you to link your ad to either a LinkedIn profile page or an external URL. If you are driving traffic to your website, I highly recommend that you tag your URLs so that you can measure the engagement and quality of traffic in your analytics platform. If you are not familiar with the tagging of URLs, there are numerous URL tagging tools (like this one).
• Ad Design:  Create your headline and description. Note that LinkedIn is a bit limited in this regard. The headline has a 25-character limit, and the description cannot exceed 75 characters (2 lines). You can also add your imagery here. Note that as you edit your ads, a thumbnail preview appears on the right side. The preview also allows you to toggle the ad size. Make sure you carefully inspect the ad preview to ensure that the image you used is visible and eye-catching.
• Ad Variations:  LinkedIn allows you to create multiple variations of ads. For each ad, you can choose either an external URL or a page on LinkedIn. Note that the choice of location does not affect the price — it costs just as much to send traffic to external pages as it does to send it to internal pages. Also, keep in mind that LinkedIn advertising is push advertising, not pull. That means that your audience is not actively looking for your product or service, so you have to work harder to make sure your ad stands out and captures the user’s attention. For example, I have seen question-style headlines get better engagement than statement headlines.

Sample Ad

Step 2: Targeting

Once you’ve completed your ad, it’s time to focus on targeting. This is where you can really start to leverage the power of LinkedIn.

While some of the targeting options on this platform are very similar to Facebook and Twitter (target by age, friends, company, etc.), LinkedIn allows you to go to the next level. As mentioned earlier, you can target people by job title, employer, industry, and even skills/ interests.
Below is the audience screen that allows you to precisely target and evaluate your target audience:

This screen has a lot of depth and advanced options that will allow you to target your audience precisely. Note that as you pick options, the preview screen on the right shows you your possible reach. Be sure you understand audience size, as it is different from possible impressions or metrics used by other networks.

On LinkedIn, audience size is the number of profiles matching the criteria you have. So, while you might have 2 million registered Math Professors, they might only log in once a month vs. a marketing or IT person who logs in daily.

For example, as I define the location for our sample campaign (United States) and the skills (Tableau, Spotfire, or Data Visualization), LinkedIn tells me that I have 28,793 possible users to show my ad to.

If you feel that your audience size is getting too small, pay attention to LinkedIn’s suggested options. This feature is very similar to Google’s keyword recommendations. For example, when I add Tableau and Spotfire as skills, LinkedIn suggests that I might want to include the following:

When I add Google Analytics to the list of skills in my ad and then choose a non-teenage segment, I get the following audience size, which seems like a great match for my awareness goal:

Keep in mind that the more granular you go with your audience design, the better your ROI will be. For instance, I could create one campaign for Tableau and one for Spotfire, with custom ad copy for each. This approach would deliver a much higher CTR and much more targeted information.

Also, adding the LinkedIn Audience network can expand your reach (it is similar to Google’s Display Network), though I’m not including it in our example.

I also wanted to mention another valuable aspect of a LinkedIn campaign — the ability to turn on “Lead Collection.” This feature allows users who engaged with your ad to send you their contact info and ask to be contacted. It is very similar to a contact form approach, but due to its tight integration with the platform, it’s effortless for the user and has a more secure feel to it.

Step 3: Budgeting

Last but not least, it’s time to turn our attention to costs. LinkedIn offers two basic pricing models: CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). The cost-per-click model has a minimum CPC of $2 — which definitely makes it a higher cost network than Google or Facebook. LinkedIn also offers a suggested bid range to reach the top position.

Personally, I have found that LinkedIn ads are more successful when used for narrow reach efforts. For instance, I tend to use it to reach a very specific segment. Often, I have 20 campaigns running, each with an audience of 5,000. This way, I can have a highly-targeted audience see a highly-targeted ad, and then land on a highly-targeted landing page. Using this approach, I have seen CPC deliver a much better ROI, especially since I have found that click-through rates on LinkedIn tend to be much lower than on other sites.
Going by my sample campaign below, I think an average CPC of $2 would be too high, as it is purely an awareness goal. However, if I was operating Marketing Land, that price might make sense. I imagine the return visit rate and linked conference and advertising earnings would be fairly high. Therefore, acquiring a new user at a cost of $2 might be good ROI.

In terms of budget, LinkedIn has a minimum daily budget of $10. In order to successfully evaluate ad variations, I recommend having at least enough budget for 100 clicks a day. Again, LinkedIn should be about connecting with a very specific audience, so every click should be worth it.

Step 4: Submit Your Ad

The final step in the process is to submit your ad by simply clicking on “Launch Campaign.” Note that LinkedIn reviews almost all ads manually, so your campaign won’t be online until it goes through a quick review process.

Again, when it comes to spending your digital advertising dollars, you have lots of options. Hopefully, this brief article has given you some ideas on how you might leverage LinkedIn’s advertising platform for your next campaign.