13 Questions to Help You Improve Your AdWords Performance

I wish I had this list when I was just getting started with Google AdWords… It would have prevented countless early mistakes that cost me a lot of time and money.

 

The reality is that Google AdWords is a big, hairy beast of a platform and it’s nearly impossible to set everything up correctly unless you follow a step-by-step guide or a checklist.  To make matters worse, AdWords is unforgiving.  Small mistakes like using default settings can end up costing you hundreds or even thousands down the road.

 

 

That’s why today I’m publishing a list of questions you need to answer to ensure you’re not missing any important details.  Whether you’re just about to go live with your ads or they’ve been running for years, walk through the questions below to see if there’s any room for improvement. 

 

1. Are you targeting buying-intent keywords?

One of the biggest mistakes with AdWords advertising is targeting research-intent keywords.  When prospects are doing research, then they aren’t ready to make a purchase so the vast majority of your ad budget will be wasted when you target research-intent keywords.

 

Instead, focus on buying-intent keywords where you know the prospect is searching in Google in order to make a purchase.

 

2. Are your keywords grouped into Ad Groups of similar phrases?

The purpose of organizing your keywords into Ad Groups is not to make your campaign look neat and tidy.  Keyword organization actually plays a critical role in an AdWords campaign because every keyword in a particular Ad Group will use the same ad copy.  That means if you have many different keywords in the same Ad Group, then your ad copy will not make sense for all of them (unless of course you draft a boring, generic ad, but you know that’s not going to work).

 

3. Are your keywords Broad Match, Phrase, or Exact?

By default AdWords will set your keywords to broad match. That means your ads will be displayed on any keyword AdWords considers relevant to your keyword.  Did you know that?  You would assume if you add the keyword “leather journal” that your ads would only display when someone searches “leather journal.”  But that’s not the case unless you use the Exact match type!

 

Phrase match keywords allows AdWords to display your ads for any search that includes your keyword phrase.  Clearly, it’s important to review your match types to make sure you’re ads are displaying on the right keywords.

 

4. Are there any negative keywords?

Unless every keyword is using Exact match type, you’ll need to add negative keywords.  Negative keywords specify words or phrases that you do not want to target with your ads.  For example, if you add “free” as a negative keyword, then your ads would not display for searches that include the word “free.”

 

5. Are your ads 100% relevant for all the keywords in the Ad Group?

This is marketing 101 – match your message to the market.  If your prospect is searching for a “leather journal” then your ads should focus on your leather journal products.  As mentioned in question #2, your keyword organization plays an important role in whether or not your ads will all be 100% relevant.  First, organize your ads into Ad Groups of similar phrases and then you’ll be able to draft ads that closely match your keywords.

 

6. Is the core keyword used in your ad copy?

This should be fairly obvious after the previous question, but it’s worth clarifying.  Review your ads and make sure the core keyword phrase that you’re targeting in the Ad Group is in at least one of your ads.  This will help your relevance score, which leads to a higher AdWords Quality Score, and it tends to also increase your ad click-through rates.

 

7. Do your ads include a compelling offer and call to action?

Search in Google for your target keywords to see what your competitors are offering.  Then put yourself in your prospects shoes and honestly consider which ad you would click on based purely on the ad copy.  Would you really click on your ad or would you click on one of the other more compelling offers?  If you struggle with that question then chances are good your prospects are not going to find your ads compelling either.

 

8. Are All appropriate ad extensions set up?

This one is easy.  Simply check to see if all of the following ad extensions are set up:

1. Location
2. Call
3. Sitelink
4. Callout
5. Structured Snippet
6. Review

In some cases, one of the above will not make sense for your business, but whenever possible set them all up.  Ad extensions tend to increase your click-through rate, which leads to higher Quality Scores, which leads to better ad position for less cost.

 

9. Is your landing page 100% relevant for the keywords and ads?

First of all, are you advertising to your homepage? If yes, then create a dedicated landing page ASAP.  Even if it’s a duplicate of your homepage, it’s important to have a dedicated landing page because you need the freedom to make edits to improve conversion rates.  Plus, your homepage is rarely the most relevant page for all of your keywords.

 

10. Does the offer on the landing page match the offer in the ads?

Often when I review an ad campaign I’ll notice one of two things:

1. The offer promised in the ad is nowhere to be found on the landing page
   
   
2. The offer on the landing page does not match the offer promised in the ad

Both cases will hurt sales conversions, but they are easy to fix.

 

11. Do you have separate Search vs. Display campaigns?

This is another easy one to answer.  Check to see if any of your campaigns are targeting both the Search and the Display network. Each network behaves quite differently and requires a separate campaign to properly optimize your ads.

 

12. Are you targeting mobile traffic with a mobile landing page?

We all know more and more prospects are turning to mobile to surf around, and even buy online.  That’s why AdWords by default will enable all of your ads to target mobile devices.

 

The problem is that many businesses do not have mobile friendly websites.  That means you may be spending precious ad dollars to send prospects to a website that is nearly unusable on a mobile device!  To prevent this, make sure you turn off mobile targeting until you have mobile friendly landing pages.

 

13. Is all the appropriate conversion tracking setup?

Finally, this list would not be complete if we didn’t touch on conversion tracking.  Even the best set up campaign will need ongoing tweaks to keep the ads running smoothly and profitably.  That means you must set up conversion tracking.  Without tracking there is simply no way to optimize your ad campaign because you’ll be flying blind.  Here’s the list of all the conversion tracking you should set up:

1. Webform conversion tracking to measure how many forms are submitted on your website as a result of your ads
   
   
2. Website call conversion tracking to measure how many phone calls are generated from your website as a result of your ads
   
   
3. Ad call conversion tracking to measure how many phone calls are generated from the number displayed on your ads
   
   
4. GCLID conversion tracking to measure offline sales (phone calls or in-person sales) generated as a result of your ads

 

Congratulations! By making it this far you now know how to ensure your AdWords campaign is set up properly.  The next step is to take action and fix any issues that may have been highlighted by walking through the 13 questions above.

 

If you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or simply don’t have the time, Let us know or comment below with your questions.

The 4-Part Framework for Digital Marketing Success

As a kid, I loved puzzles.  It’s not just puzzles though.  I just love the process of discovering how all the individual pieces fit together to make something.  That’s one reason I eventually went on to study engineering in college.

Now, as an adult, I still love puzzles, but I haven’t completed a 1,000 piece jigsaw in a while.  Instead, I focus most of my time and energy these days putting together the puzzle pieces that make up digital marketing.  That’s right, digital marketing is just one big puzzle waiting to be assembled one piece at a time.

But there’s one big difference.  With marketing, you don’t have the finished picture on the box to show you where and how the different pieces will eventually fit together.  That certainly makes marketing a lot harder, doesn’t it?

Well in this article, I’m going to give you that finished picture.  I’ll walk through the proven digital marketing framework so you can see how all of the marketing options available fit together to create a successful marketing plan.

First, The Foundation

Before we dive into the framework, I need to highlight how digital marketing actually works.   If you break it all down to the individual pieces, then digital marketing follows a very basic formula:

(Revenue) = (Website Traffic) x (Conversion Rate) x (Customer Value)

In other words, revenue from digital marketing is directly proportional to how many people visit your website, how many of those people convert into customers, and how much those customers are worth to your business.

Or to put it another way, there are 3 ways to increase your revenue from digital marketing: increase your traffic, increase your conversion rate, and/or increase your customer value.

Also, before we move on it’s important to remember that your revenue will be zero if any one of those 3 variables is zero.  That’s just basic math.  It doesn’t matter if you drive millions of visitors to your website if your conversion rate is zero.  You’ll still end up with zero revenue!

Now that you understand this formula, it’s time to introduce the framework, which I call the 4 Pillars of Digital Marketing success.  These are the 4 Pillars every business must continually work to improve to compete online.

1. Website Traffic

The first Pillar is website traffic.  Obviously if you don’t get any traffic to your website, then you’re not going to be very successful with digital marketing. This is where you need to focus when you’re just getting started.

Think of website traffic like fuel.  You need a constant supply of “fuel” or else you’r marketing will come to a screeching halt.

2. Website Conversions

As I mentioned above, all the traffic in the world does nothing for your business unless you can actually convert it into leads and sales.  For established businesses that already have a steady stream of visitors, improving website conversion is likely the biggest leverage point to increase sales.

Here’s a quick example to highlight this point.  Let’s say your website gets about 1,000 visits per month and of those visitors about 5 convert into sales. That’s a 0.5% conversion rate.  What happens if you can increase your conversion rate to 1%?  You’ll double your sales with the same traffic you’re already getting to your site!  That means you would double your sales with no more investment in traffic tactics like advertising, SEO, social media, etc.

3. Customer Value

Customer value is often the X-factor in digital marketing, yet many businesses ignore it.  Again, I’ll use an example so you can see how your customer value plays a role in your marketing.

Let’s say your conversion rate is 0.5% and your average customer value is $100.  That means, on average one visitor to your website is worth $0.50. That also means you can not afford to pay more than $0.50 to drive a visitor to your website.  If you pay more than 50 cents, then you’ll lose money.

What happens if one of your competitors has the same conversion rate, but a slightly higher customer value of $150?  Well, this competitor can afford to pay $0.75 and will inevitably be able to buy more traffic than you.  Even though the competitor may have the same offer, a similar website, and the same conversion rate, they’ll dominate the market due to their higher customer value.

4. Tracking

The final Pillar is tracking.  Without proper tracking in place, then you’ll be flying blind with very little hope to improve the other 3 Pillars.

Think of tracking like the dashboard of your car.  Could you imagine driving if you didn’t have a speedometer or a fuel gauge?  That would be pretty stressful because you wouldn’t know if you needed to slow down or speed up.  Plus, you would likely run out of fuel with no warning signs.

Proper tacking will guide your marketing decisions by telling you where you need to focus.

Why Most Marketing Plans Fail

July marks the halfway point in 2015 so it’s a great time to review your progress compared to the marketing plan and goals you set in January.  Are you ahead of your projections? Behind? Or are you not sure where you filed your marketing plan? :)

We all know it’s important to set goals and create a plan of attack around January every year.  However, that activity will never have a big impact on your business unless you actually USE your plan.   This is counter to what we learn in school, which is why I think it’s so hard to break the habit.

Why We’re Programmed to Never Review Our Marketing Plans

In school, when we write papers and hand in reports, they are done.  If you were like me, then you probably NEVER read that paper or report again.  The teacher read it, gave you a grade, and you moved on to the next assignment.  That was the process for me in every single grade, including college.

Because of that “training” for about 16 years, we all tend to approach our marketing plan document the same way. We go through the grueling process to write the plan, maybe pull an all-nighter or two to hit our self-inflicted deadline, and then we mark that task complete.

What happens next?  The plan most likely sits on your desk, in a filing cabinet, or in a folder on your computer until half the year or maybe even the entire year has gone by.  Again, this is no different from all those papers you wrote in school and never read again.  It was good exercise to hone your writing skills, but a lousy way to execute and improve your marketing.

Your Marketing Plan Is a Training Program (Not a Report)

The solution to this problem is quite simple: don’t think of your marketing plan as a document or a report.  If you do, then you’ll naturally struggle to go back and review the plan throughout the year.  Remember, our brains have been programmed from school to believe reports don’t need to be reviewed after they are completed.

Instead, think of your marketing plan like a training program.  More specifically, I like to think of my plan like a marathon training program.  Here are a few of the reasons why this change in mindset will help you achieve more of your marketing goals in the remainder of this year.

You Must Continually Review Training Programs

If you have ever followed a training program, then you know that you have to continually review the plan to see what you are supposed to do each day, week, and month.  Personally, I find it’s easiest to print the program and hang it on my refrigerator so that I can quickly see when and what my workout is going to be for the week.  I know if I just stick to the plan, then I’ll be physically ready in November for the marathon.

I doubt many people reading this have their marketing plan hanging on their refrigerator. :)  But if you did have your plan more visible, then you would know what you need to do each day, week, and month to hit your goals.  In other words, you would stay more focused and ignore distractions that are not integral to the plan you already set.

Training Programs Have Clearly Defined & Attainable Milestones

When I was training for my first marathon, I had a real fear that I wasn’t going to finish.  I’m sure just about every first timer has that same fear.  26.2 miles almost sounds impossible unless you’ve done it before.

The beauty of a marathon training program is how it makes each milestone attainable.  By the time you need to run 10 miles, you’ve already run an 8 miler.  By the time you need to run 20 miles, you will have completed an 18 mile run.  Running just 2 more miles doesn’t sound too bad.

That’s exactly what your marketing plan should do as well.  Your plan should list incremental milestones that lead up to your ultimate goal.

Training Programs Are Created By Experts

Would you trust a marathon training program that was created by someone who never ran or coached an athlete to run a marathon?

I definitely would not.  Unless you’re trying to break a world record, someone has already done what you’re trying to achieve.  All you need to do is go find and follow that training program.  I’m not implying it’ll be easy.  It’ll certainly be hard, but at least you’ll be following a proven training program developed by an expert.

The same approach should be taken with your marketing plan.  There are no extra points for creating your plan completely on your own.  In fact there is no benefit at all to planning without expert advice. Find business owners and consultants who have already hit your goals.  Then follow a similar training program.  It won’t be easy, but you’ll have the confidence you’re on the right track!

3 Steps to Reel In Customers from Social Media Marketing

In this article, I'll explain as I walk through the 3 steps to social media marketing success.  You'll see that one step alone doesn't do much for your business.  You need all three working together.

1. Build Your Audience

This should be obvious, but social media relies on first building an audience.  If you don't have an audience then no one is going to read your posts.

When you're first starting out and you don't have an audience, it's like fishing in a pond or a section of a pond that has no fish.  It doesn't matter if you're the best fisherman using the best gear, you're not going to catch any fish!

That means you need to adjust your goals in the early stages of social media marketing.  If you expect to drive sales right away, then you're going to be disappointed.  Instead, focus on tactics to build your target audience first.

2. Engage Your Audience

Now we get to the true secret behind the Banjo minnow.  When you watch the training video, you learn how to cast and reel in the lure to give it the lifelike action described in the commercial.  Again, if you just cast and reel in the lure normally, then the Banjo minnow does not work!  I've tested both ways. 

You must use the technique in the video.

The reason why the lure works is because the action engages the fish -- it catches the fish's attention.  That's the secret to fishing right there.  You need to use a lure combined with the correct action to get a fish to bite.

The same thing is true with social media.  You must engage your audience with the right content, at the right frequency, to maintain the attention of your target market.

3. Convert Your Audience

Finally, we get to the step we all tend to focus on: conversion.  As I mentioned earlier in step 1, it's not realistic to expect conversions when you're just starting out with social media and you do not yet have an audience.  It's also not realistic to expect conversions if you are not yet engaging with your audience as explained in step 2 above.  As you can see, the order of these steps matters greatly.

When you're fishing, you need to first pick a spot where you know there are fish.  That's step 1.  Then the next step is to find the right lure and action that engages the fish you're targeting.  In my case, the Banjo minnow is perfect for catching pickerel!  The final step is to reel in the fish.  That's the conversion step. It's also the part of fishing where you have the most fun.  Everything up until the reeling in is basically hard work and trial and error to find the most engaging lure and action.

In other words, focus on finding the right types of content (informational, educational, inspirational, entertaining) for your social media, and then step 3 will get a whole lot easier (and more fun).

New Upgrade Center For Enhanced Campaigns Lets Advertisers Do Bulk Upgrades & More

Google AdWords is rolling-out a new upgrade center today for advertisers using Enhanced Campaigns. Accessible from the left-hand nav bar on the Campaigns tab, the upgrade center lets advertisers managing several campaigns perform bulk upgrades to multiple campaigns simultaneously and merge selected campaigns in a few simple steps.

The bulk upgrade feature allows advertisers to select multiple campaigns, choose a mobile bid adjustment, view traffic estimates and upgrade their Enhanced Campaigns with fewer clicks, making it easy to upgrade individual campaigns all at once.
The upgrade center also identifies search-only or search+display campaigns that have similar keywords and location targets, and offers a preview of possible campaigns that could be merged. Advertisers can then adjust the proposed settings, ad groups and extensions for merged campaigns.

Google notes that ad groups and budgets will be combined by default, and any campaign level settings and extensions in the Primary campaign will override Secondary campaign settings and extensions.
According the Inside Adwords blog, the upgrade center will roll-out to advertisers over the next few weeks.

How To Determine Your Hourly Bid Multipliers In AdWords

While hourly bid multipliers aren’t new, they remain a crucial tactic for optimizing your AdWords campaigns. They work by reducing your ad spend at poor-performing times of the week and increasing your exposure at the best times of the week. Here, I’m going to share the steps you can take (along with a helpful spreadsheet) to determine your hourly bid multipliers for better campaign optimization.

Step 1: Pulling An Hourly Performance Report From AdWords

On the Campaigns tab in AdWords, go to Columns>Customize Columns and ensure that you’ve selected the appropriate metrics. Performance metrics required for the spreadsheet to function properly are as follows: Campaign, Clicks, Impressions, Cost, Avg Pos, and Conv (1-per-click) — all other metrics selected in the screenshot below are optional:

Once your performance metrics have been selected, hit the “Download Report” button. When prompted, add the “Day of the week” and “Hour of day” segments:

This should provide you with all the data you need to analyze hourly performance at the campaign level.

Step 2: Determining Hourly Bid Multipliers

Similar to the template used to determine mobile and geo bid multipliers, I’ve created a basic spreadsheet to help analyze hourly performance and easily determine your hourly bid multipliers. You can download it here.
Copy and paste your AdWords report into this spreadsheet as directed. From here, you can take a closer look at the following:
a. Performance By Day Of Week

b. Performance By Hour

c. Performance By Hour & Day Of Week

If you have collected enough hourly data for each day of the week, you should absolutely make bid adjustments on an hourly basis. This process can be time consuming, as it requires making adjustments on a very granular level, but the results are well worth it.
For those times with less traffic, you can still leverage daily and/or hourly trends. For instance, looking at campaign #43 in the attached spreadsheet, it appears that there was not enough data collected on Sundays from 4:00 am to 5:00 am to make a specific bid multiplier suggestion — but you might still want to increase the bids, since the data indicate that both Sundays and the 4:00 am to 5:00 am window perform well in general.
The attached spreadsheet will only address those times of the week with sufficient hourly data, while keeping in mind that “bid adjustments for locations, days, times, and any ad group-level targeting methods can be set from -90% to +900%.” Thus, it can help you to determine relevant hourly bid multipliers between -90% and +900% when there are a statistically significant number of clicks:

Step 3: Implement Hourly Bid Multipliers In AdWords

At the campaign level, navigate to the “Settings” tab; then, go to the “Ad schedule” section. The first step is to specify when you want to make bid changes. Select a day of the week from the drop-down menu:

From there, you can you can adjust the effective hourly bid multipliers, as calculated by the spreadsheet:

Conclusion

All of this is fairly straight-forward; however, your hourly bid multipliers need to be maintained over time, hence the importance of a (semi-)automated process. Also, keep in mind that once set in AdWords, those hourly bid changes do not take into account multiple time zones. For instance, if your AdWords account is set to “(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time,” and you want to increase the bids by 20% at 1 pm, then these bid changes will occur at 1 pm PST across all PST/MST/CST/EST locations. As a result, it makes sense to break down your top campaigns by time zone in order to set more accurate hourly bids.

How To Manage PPC Closely To A Budget

A few weeks ago, at SMX West in San Jose, George Michie of RKG, was talking about the challenges of managing enterprise-level PPC campaigns, and he made the interesting observation that you can either manage to ROI or to budgets, but not both at the same time.
The context of George’s remarks was setting expectations with client C-Level executives and educating them about what is and what is not possible with online marketing campaigns.

Maximizing PPC ad spend and managing to best ROI are usually conflicting goals.

ROI Targeting Differs From Budget Targeting

The reason these two goals are generally incompatible is that ROI targeting takes the dynamics of the auction into account and lets the ROI dictate the amount of ad spend. Spend rises and falls based on your ability to deliver profitable results. When you are told you must spend to a specific budget, your budget actually influences the dynamics of the auction and your ability to optimize CPAs.
For example, if you are given an extra $100K and told to spend it this month, you only have a few options available to you in the short term. You can increase bids to get more traffic from higher positioning; but, you’ll pay more for that traffic. You can also allow more budget to flow to your marginal campaigns, which also degrades your ROI.
If on the other hand, your budget is constrained, then you are forced to make decisions like advertising only on your brand terms, slowing down the pace of your ad serving by using standard ad delivery, or simply letting your campaigns run out of money before the end of the month, allowing your competitors to reap the benefits of your dropping out of the auction.
I think that most SEM pros and corporate CEOs would agree that managing PPC campaigns to ROI targets with unconstrained budgets is the ideal budgeting scenario. Common sense seems to suggest that if your paid search campaigns are improving both revenues and profits, you would want to spend as much as you can to keep the good times rolling.
Unfortunately, the reality (and unreality) of corporate accounting and planning structures often dictates that short-term budget targets are cast-in-concrete and to be met at all costs, regardless of business results. In this environment, missing your budget either by under-spending or over-spending is an undesirable outcome, and draws unwanted (and often unwarranted) attention to your campaign management prowess.
So, unless you are one of the lucky PPC managers with unlimited budget as long as you hit ROI targets, or you have the bravado to ignore budgets to prove your management machismo, your best bet is to come in right on the mark.

Staying Within Range Of Your Target Budget

I generally worry about three things when it comes to managing monthly budget targets: (1) going over budget, (2) getting too far under budget and (3) Blowing through our budget before the end of the month. Of these worries, preventing over-spend is probably the easiest problem to avoid.
Preventing Over-Spend
If we are severely budget-limited, taking the campaigns offline when the budget is exhausted is the certainly the easiest option. I don’t prefer doing this because it seems so contrary to common business sense.
However, I have also found that nothing is more motivating to clients than the thought of their competitors gaining advantage by having the search results pages all to themselves! So, sometimes this option works well to free up more funding for paid search.
Going Over Budget
To prevent campaigns from going over budget, the first line of defense is to use the budget settings within Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing Ads.

Bing Ads: Bing Ads allows you to set monthly or daily budgets for your campaigns. If you choose to set monthly budgets, Bing Ads will show your ads whenever they qualify for an auction and then pause them when your monthly budget is exhausted. Alternatively, you can also use Bing Ad’s daily budgeting feature to spread your ad spend across the entire month.

For example, if your monthly budget is $3,000 for a month with 30 days, setting your daily budget to $100 will ensure that your ads show every day. With daily budgeting, you can also set the ad delivery to either standard or accelerated pacing. Standard delivery means Bing will pace the delivery of your ads so that they show throughout the day based on your budget. Accelerated delivery means your ads will show in all eligible auctions until your daily budget runs out.

Google Ad Words: In AdWords, you can’t set a monthly budget directly. Instead, Google calculates an effective monthly budget based on your daily budget setting. AdWords multiplies your daily budget by 30.4 (the average number of days in a month) and uses that value as your monthly maximum spend.

During the month, your AdWords spend may vary, exceeding the daily limit by as much as 20%; but at the end of the month, your budget will not exceed your target ad spend. So, for example, if your daily budget is $100 per day, then your total monthly maximum spend will not exceed $3040. You can also share a budget across some or all of your campaigns to ensure your whole account stays within limits.

Under Spending
Under spending budget is also one of my budgeting worries, and it is a tough one to manage if you get behind. Under spending can happen for a number of reasons: inattention to campaigns, ads that have been suddenly disapproved, another big competitor has entered your space and is eating into your search click volume, or your client suddenly decides they need to dump a lot more funding into your campaigns in the middle of the month.
In big corporations, this tends to happen at the end of fiscal quarters or the end of fiscal years. While no one ever likes to turn down additional budget, dealing with a huge budget bump can be very tricky in the short term.

Tracking Daily Spend

When hitting budget numbers becomes an overriding requirement, it is important to keep a very close eye where we are relative to the target monthly spend and make bid and budget adjustments daily. The challenge is knowing how big or small the adjustments should be, because every day of the week has its own traffic and ad spending profile that needs to be taken into account.
For this reason, we like to take day-of-week spending patterns into account when making adjustments.

PPC Ad Spend Weighted by Day of Week helps inform bid and budget decisions.

The above chart shows two curves. The orange curve shows the average daily spend we need to achieve in order to reach our month end target, somewhere around $325 per day. The second curve, the blue one, shows a spending plan weighted by day of week based on our typical intra-weekly spend patterns.
We developed the curve below simply by taking the daily profile of the last five or six weeks of ad performance, and weighting the ad spend based on how individual days of the week perform as percentage of the entire week’s ad spend. As you see, there is a big difference between Sunday and Monday average ad spending:

Each day of the week has its own ad spend profile.

Using a weighted average can make a big difference in the adjustments you make to your bid and budget allocations day-by-day compared with using a straight line average. For example, when your month begins on a Thursday, and you come in on Monday morning, you’ll see that your daily ad spend might look like this:

Daily PPC Spend plans – weighted versus straight line average.

If you are comparing your actual ad spend against the orange straight-line average target spend curve, you may be  inclined to make a much bigger set of adjustments than if you were comparing things to the weighted average. The weighted average curve looks very similar to your actual ad spend, so you would probably make smaller adjustments.
When we work from a weighted average in managing closely to monthly budgets, we find we are less likely to make yo-yo adjustments – too aggressive one day, and too aggressive in the opposite direction the next.
In general, it is always preferable to work to ROI targets and allow ad spend to drift up and down as market efficiencies dictate. However, if you are required to also keep close to your budget targets, it’s a good idea to keep track of where you are relative to your strict monthly budget goals on a daily basis.

Geographic Targeting In An Enhanced Campaign World

AdWords enhanced campaigns will force many advertisers to change their campaign structures. One of the benefits that have been touted for enhanced campaigns is that you will need fewer campaigns, thus making AdWords easier to manage.
For mobile targeting, this is true, as the ability to target mobile devices is now gone. However, for the targeting features that are left, such as location targeting, you might not want to consolidate your campaigns just for easier management.
In today’s column, we will examine how locations affect your campaign structure and if you should change your structure to match the new enhanced campaign benefits.

Location Bid Modifiers

Most accounts do not have the same conversion rates by geography. In some cases, the changes are small; but in other cases, the changes can be quite dramatic.

In this instance, the CPA of San Antonio is double that of Philadelphia. Therefore, we would not want to bid the same for each of these locations. Before enhanced campaigns, in order to bid separately by location, we would need to create a campaign for each location and set bids based upon the keyword CPA by region.
With enhanced campaigns, this will not always be necessary. One of the great new features is bid modifiers based upon locations. With bid modifiers, you can automatically adjust your bid for each location being targeted.
For instance, we can set our keyword bids as normal based upon some global CPA numbers, and then tell AdWords we would like to bid 32% higher for the Philadelphia region and 39% lower for the San Antonio region.

Before you can set a bid modifier for each location, you must add them to your campaign targeting section. If you don’t add each location to your campaign targeting, then you will not be able to set a bid modifier by location.

The good news is that this is very simple. You set bids as normal and then automatically adjust your bid by region.
The main limitation is that this is a campaign-only setting. If you have some keywords that do better in San Antonio than Philadelphia, but overall San Antonio is worse so you’d want to use a negative bid modifier, you cannot exclude keywords from the bid modifiers nor have bid modifiers at the keyword level. Of course, having that level of control would be incredibly difficult to manage by hand, so using campaign bid modifiers is a nice middle step.
The bad news is that these changes just affect the keyword bids for the entire campaign. They do not allow you to adjust the budget or ads for each region. In some cases, you still want to make different campaigns for some locations.
If you are a national company that has never tried to manage bids or budgets by locations, this is a great feature to get you started examining how various locations affect your CPAs so you can start to bid them separately or even target the users differently by location.
Please note, the geographic bid modifier only works with CPC bidding, either manual or enhanced. As with all bid modifiers, it is not compatible with CPA bidding or budget optimizer. The only exception is that you can bid –100% (setting your bid to $0) to not show if the auction uses that bid modifier.

Controlling Budgets

Several years ago, one of the main issues with splitting out your campaigns by region for bidding purposes was that you might have a single budget target, and you didn’t care which region received the click and spent your money, as long as the correct bid was used and you didn’t go over your total budget.
The shared budgets feature fixed this issue for advertisers and created the opportunity to easily use multiple campaigns without fretting over how to split the budget between campaigns.
Some companies have budgets by region. This is common in areas where there are co-op marketing budgets involved, multiple franchise locations, or physical store locations. If you want to maintain budgets by region, then you still want to maintain separate campaigns by region as you cannot split a budget between regions with enhanced campaigns.
If your regions are large, such as the northeast, southwest, and so forth, then you can use bid modifiers within those regions to tweak your CPCs; however, your overall structure of keeping your regions separate for budget reasons is still sound with enhanced campaigns.

Geographic-Specific Ads

One of the main reasons to separate locations into various campaigns is to ensure that the ads speak to that particular geography. The most common instance of this is adding the region to the ad’s headline. However, it is also done to match offline promotions or test responses to offers by region.
If you have split out your campaigns for the purpose of using different ads by region, you will not want to reconsolidate your campaigns as you will lose your ability to specify specific ads by geography. So, if your main reason to use multiple campaigns is for ad serving, you will want to leave your campaigns separated.

Ad Extensions

The last major reason campaigns were split up by region was for extension usage. You might have different sitelinks, offers, or location extensions you wanted to use by campaign. As none of the extensions have a geographic ad serving component (except for the location extension), if you want different offers or sitelinks by region, you still need separate campaigns.
With location extensions, you can decide to bid differently for someone who is within the reach of your location extension. If you first add your location extension as a location target, you can then set a bid adjustment for someone in that radius.

If you have physical locations where you want the customers to come to your business, this is a welcome change as someone who is within a mile of your restaurant is usually worth more than someone who is 30 miles from your location.

Wrap-Up

Enhanced campaign bid modifiers make it easier to manage location-based bids if all your keywords have similar CPAs by region. The ability to set a bid adjustment based upon the user’s proximity to your location is also a welcome change. If you want a simplistic AdWords account, and yet have the ability to set different bids by region, the new enhanced campaign features are a very welcome change.
If you are an advanced advertiser who wants to change budgets, ads, extensions, or individual keyword bids by region, when you upgrade to enhanced campaigns, you will not want to consolidate campaigns just for location targeting purposes. You will still need to consolidate campaigns based upon device types, but you won’t do it for location purposes.
If you have segmented your campaigns by location, you can still take advantage of bid modifiers within the campaigns as locations often have sub-locations (states have metros, metros have cities, etc.) that will commonly have different CPAs by each region which you can micro-manage with bid adjustments. If you are using location extensions, then please take advantage of bid modifiers by location extension reach.
The launch of enhanced campaigns is one of the biggest changes Google has ever implemented, and it will change how AdWords accounts are created, structured and managed. While enhanced campaigns gave additional features to location based bidding, this new campaign type should not force you to reorganize most account structures based solely upon location targeting considerations.

How to use Google Trends as a Keyword Selection Tool

When you are looking for a way to find your keywords for your SEO or for your PPC – you have a lot of free tools you can use for your research.

If you are searching for “used cars” you can get information about how many people are conducting a search for that special word or words. Use free tools like Google Keyword Tool. Or you can use WordTracker.
You will get the information about how many times a phrase is searched for, and  information about words or phrases that are very close to your target keyword. So in our example you will maybe get information about “blue cars” or “new cars”
But with Google Trends you can go much further. First of all it will show you how popular the keyword is over time, showing if your keywords popularity is rising, falling or staying steady.
So let’s say you are not sure if you want to do SEO for the term “blue cars” or “black cars”. Go to the search” and you will see this picture. Don’t write the quote marks, you just write the phrases with a comma between the search phrases. You can compare up to 5 different words or phrases.






 So the “black cars” phrase is very steady and the “blue cars” phrase is rising and falling but is always higher than the phrase black cars.
Google Trends is also a very quick way to get information about singular or plural version of your searched keyword or phrase. Here I will compare “blue car” or “blue cars”.







 Here you can see that there will be much more traffic for the word car than for the word cars.





 To the right you will see the volume of news stories related to your keyword. Below you can see the result from selected cities, selected world regions and by selected world languages.

Google Trend can’t tell you everything
Use Google Tend as a keyword tool. But you will need more research. Google Trend can’t tell you how many times a keyword has been searched. You can compare two or more graphs but not the actual number of searches.
Even though you found the most popular keyword or phrase it doesn’t tell you how competitive the market for that keyword is.
Maybe you will have no change at all to get into top10 for the phrase “Blue Cars” but you will have a great change for the phrase “Black cars” even though the popularity is much lower. And therefor you can get more traffic from that phrase.

Use Google Trend as an inspiration
Start using Google Trend and get inspired. And when you have found a word or two you will need to go to tools like Google Keyword Tool. But Google Trend is a great tool.
And yes.. It’s FREE.

Surviving Google AdWords’ New Enhanced Campaigns

In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?,"From a article from Feb. 2012, Someone questioned whether the then unprecedented decline in cost-per-click rates would be a blip or a trend. One year later, Google apparently thinks it's a trend, as Google is requiring all advertisers to adopt its new Enhanced Campaigns.
This will likely reverse the decline in CPC rates that resulted from increased adoption of smartphones and tablets, when advertisers expected lower conversion rates from mobile traffic, and bid down their mobile campaigns. With the new rollout you will still be able to bid down mobile phone clicks, but the way you do that will be much different. If you don’t properly migrate, you’ll be automatically opted into mobile campaigns — paying higher rates — and that could significantly impact the profitability of your campaigns.
To be clear, Google’s transition to Enhanced Campaigns is an important evolution in AdWords, and confers many benefits. It’s important that you prepare for this transition, however, or it could jeopardize the profitability of your campaigns.
Five important changes you should prepare for are as follows.

1. No Segmenting for Tablets

In the past, you’ve been able to segment different campaigns for tablet users and traditional computer users. But now you will no longer be able to. The reason this matters is that many merchants bid their tablet CPCs lower or higher depending on their rate of conversion from tablet users. Since you won’t be able to target unique bids to tablet users, you’ll need to factor this conversion rate impact into your overall bid strategy, which may require you to make significant changes to your bids.

2. No Mobile-only Campaigns

In the past, you’ve been able to create mobile-only campaigns — i.e. smartphones — that target specific keywords, and you’ve been able to adjust bids for individual keywords based on performance. After Enhanced Campaigns rolls out, however, you will have less control. You will have to adjust your smartphone CPC rates, on the campaign rather than the keyword level, by creating “mobile bid adjustments.”
This screenshot shows how the campaign level bid adjustments looks for mobile devices. In this case we’re setting the mobile bid adjustment to 20 percent. In other words, if you are bidding $1 per click on desktops/tablets, your bid for smartphones will be reduced 20 percent to $0.80.

Campaign level bids will need to be adjusted for mobile devices.

3. Campaigns Automatically Opted-in to Mobile

This is perhaps the biggest reason to take control of your migration to Enhanced Campaigns, by following prompts Google will display inside your account, like the one below.

Campaigns will automatically be upgraded to Enhanced.
If Google automatically upgrades you to Enhanced Campaigns, than your campaigns will automatically be opted into Google's mobile network, and you will be paying higher rates for mobile clicks than might be profitable for you. This has the potential to hurt a lot of small businesses who don’t know any better.
The right time to migrate may not be now, however. Once you migrate you cannot revert. If your campaigns are already designated by device, you may want to wait a few months and migrate immediately before the forced upgrade takes place. Companies operating smaller campaigns that just target searches from traditional computers, however, can migrate to Enhanced Campaigns as soon as they’d like.

4. Sitelinks Now Available at the Ad Group Level

In the past, Sitelinks — i.e., additional links below the main body of the pay-per-click ad — could only be setup at the Campaign level. But now they can be setup at the Ad Group level. To understand why this is important, consider the example of an online retailer bidding on the phrase “baseball cleats.” In the screen shot below, you’ll see the advertiser has Sitelinks set up — advertising “Name Brands Up To 80% Off,” “Gift Cards,” “New Arrivals,” and “Baseball Bats.”

Sitelinks can now be set up at the Ad Group level. In this example, Sitelinks are "Name Brands Up To 80% Off Every Day - Gift Cards - New Arrivals - Baseball Bats."
The reason these Sitelinks are so unspecific is that you can only set Sitelinks up at the Campaign level, which means the advertisers had to select generic Sitelinks that applied not only to, say, baseball cleats, but myriad related concepts. Now that Sitelinks can be set at the Ad Group level, the Sitelinks could be more targeted to concepts like “Popular Cleats,” “Clearance Cleats,” or “Nike Cleats.” This will result in a more effective and more profitable ads.
The screen shot below shows the interface for creating a Sitelink, and how they can be automatically adjusted based on the time of day, or day of week. You can also set a mobile preference to target specific Sitelinks to mobile users.

Google's interface for managing Sitelinks.

5. Offer Extensions Now Available at the Ad Group Level

This screenshot details the offer extension interface, which allows you to highlight time-sensitive offers directly within your ads. For example, if your conversion rates on “Baseball cleats,” plummet over the weekend, you can schedule special sales for Saturday and Sunday that will automatically stop on Monday.

The offer extension interface.

Conclusion

I talk with many online retailers who spend thousands of dollars per month on AdWords, and less than two hours per month on the management of those campaigns. Enhanced Campaigns is likely only one of many major changes Google will make to AdWords this year. Retailers who do not continually optimize their campaigns — in light of the changes — will incur higher costs. In the case of Enhanced Campaigns, in particular, there is a big cost to ignoring the upgrade.

Tablet Growth Encouraging for Mobile Marketers

Looking at 2013, mobile ad network Jumptap expects tablets to make up nearly a third of mobile devices, and iOS and Android operating systems to completely overpower RIM.
In its February MobileSTAT report, Jumptap reported that in 2012, feature phones still made up 4% of the market share, while smartphones made up 78% share and tablets saw 18%. But looking to 2013, Jumptap forecasts that tablet market share will increase to 29%, with smartphones’s share dropping to 70%, and feature phones coming in at only 2% of devices.


“We think smartphones and tablets can both grow in parallel at the same time, because they perform different functions,” said Matt Duffy, VP of marketing at Jumptap, highlighting how consumers turn to tablets more at night and in lieu of their PCs. Marketers must include tablet advertising and outreach as part of their strategies, he emphasized, even as most tablet owners are more tech-savvy and already own smartphones.
“There is a lot of value with hitting a consumer with a message on their smartphone, but also sending the same message or a follow-up message on their tablet,” Duffy told AdExchanger. “There is a lot of value in at least knowing how much you’re reaching the same consumer on multiple devices.”
In the rest of the report, Jumptap also predicted that iOS and Android will account for 96% of operating system market share in 2013, leaving RIM at 2%.

Samsung continues to be the leader when it comes to Android devices, with its market share rising to 56% from 42% in 2011, and continuing to grow in 2013. Jumptap notes that advertisers hoping to make the most of mobile outreach should not only focus on both iOS and Android operating systems, but also expect that most Android users will be accessing their content via Samsung devices.