Google to further dilute exact match in AdWords will ignore word order & function words

Not just for plurals anymore, close variants will extend to include word ordering and function words in inexact match keywords.

In the good old days, “exact” meant exact. Then things got fuzzier. Now they’re about to get downright blurry.

On Friday afternoon, Google announced another change to the way exact match targeting works in AdWords. Matching for close variants — plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs and so on —  will be broadened to include variations in word order and function words in the coming months. With this change, Google may ignore word order and function words when determining whether an ad should trigger for an exact match keyword.



Google introduced close variants in 2012 as a way to capture plurals, misspellings, typos and other versions of exact match and phrase match keywords to broaden reach and coverage and save time building out keyword lists. Advertisers that wanted tighter control were able to opt out of close variant matching until 2014, when Google removed the ability to opt out of close variants for exact match and phrase match. Bing followed suit shortly the following year. The latest blurring of what exact match means is Google’s increasing trust in its machine learning and the belief that it’s now at the point where advertisers can let the algorithms take over and focus on other things. Google says early tests indicate advertisers could see up to 3 percent more exact match clicks on average while maintaining comparable click-through and conversion rates.

What the change means

There are many cases in which variations can change the meaning of a keyword. Take a recent example of [pancake mix] being matched to a search for “pancake mixer.” Those are not the same thing. However, there are many cases in which variations don’t change the meaning at all. Here are the nuts and bolts of how these changes are meant to work:

Function words

Function words are binding words phrases and sentences like the and that, conjunctions like and and but, prepositions, pronouns, quantifiers like all and some, modals like could and would and auxiliary/hedging verbs like be or might or will.  Essentially, they are words that don’t have meaning on their own. Well, hmmm, unless by will you mean a legal document.
With this change, function words may be ignored, replaced or added.

For example, the exact match keyword [restaurants cleveland ] could match to the query “restaurants in cleveland.” More examples from Google:

Word order

Notice in that last Miami cruise example, the function word changed along with the word order. Word order often doesn’t make a difference (in English), and users often don’t use natural word order when searching even though the intent is the same. Take a keyword like [teacher gift ideas]. The meaning doesn’t change with [ideas gift teachers] or [ideas teacher gift]. You’d never say either of those out loud, but the intent is clearly the same.


When word order is changed, Google says it will not add words to keywords (though it may change function words as shown in the Miami cruise example above).

Exceptions

One of the biggest concerns from advertisers will be whether Google matches queries to keywords that don’t have the same meaning. Google stresses it will not change word order or function words in exact match when it understands changes would alter the meaning of the query.

Take the case of a query like “LAX to JFK flights.” The user obviously doesn’t want to see ads for “JFK to LAX flights” or for “LAX from JFK flights.” That’s a pretty straightforward scenario for Google to recognize.

But something like [android compatible] does not mean the same thing as [compatible android]. Maybe Google will know, maybe it won’t, at least not right away.

These changes do not apply to phrase match keywords. And AdWords is still designed to prioritize matching identical keywords to identical search queries.

Google’s philosophy is: Spread a wider net, and then filter out what you don’t want, rather than build a net that might not be big enough to catch everything you want. Better to waste money on some bad keywords than to miss out on some potentially good ones.

Often this approach works. And it certainly works much more often than it did even a few years ago. It’s the rare person who misses building out endless iterations of keywords, but many will feel the pendulum is swinging too far in Google’s favor with this change. It strips more control from advertisers and puts the onus on them to say what queries they don’t want their ads showing up on rather than what they do want. There are financial implications to putting the emphasis on building out lists of negatives. Inappropriate variations are often discovered only after an advertiser has paid for wasted clicks and the variation shows up in a search query report. Precision control is being ceded to the machines.

How to manage these changes

This change means advertisers will have to be increasingly diligent about mining search query reports and thinking ahead about unintended consequences when word order matters.

There are a few things you can do to prepare for the coming changes.

1. Review existing exact match queries and determine if the loss of function words or a reordering of the words changes the meaning. Add those variations as negatives in your campaigns.
2. Review close variants in your Search Query Reports to see if other variations are currently being triggered that might be affected by these changes. Add those as negatives.
3. Starting in April, step up your mining of Search Query Reports, particularly for close variants.
4. Get ready to update your scripts. If you are using a script like the one from BrainLabs to make exact match exact, it will need to be updated. We will provide a link here when a new version is available.

[SEO Case Study] 317% ROI for Asphalt Paving Company

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important area to focus on in your marketing, and it's important to make sure your efforts are paying off. In today's article we’re sharing a case study about how we helped one of our clients generate a strong return on investment (ROI). SEO Case Study About Return On Investment (ROI) Are you wondering if SEO can really generate ROI for your business? Today I’m going to walk through an SEO case study for one of my clients that will answer this important question.

Background In early 2014 our client, an asphalt paving company, contacted us and expressed frustration that his competitors were ranking high in Google and he was nowhere to be found. He knew he was missing out on new business every year simply because prospective customers were choosing his competitors that ranked on the first page of Google. Prospective customers are searching “paving contractors”, “asphalt paving”, and “asphalt crack repair” every single day and my client was losing that business. The problem was clear. The solution was not so obvious… What We Did The first step we took was to complete what we call the SEO Tune-Up. The SEO Tune-Up includes the following: Keyword and competitor research to identify the best search opportunities Edits to core pages of the website Creation of new core pages to target additional “buying-intent” keywords Creation of new informational pages to target “research-intent” keywords Fix all technical issues like site speed, mobile optimized pages, broken links, missing schema, duplicate pages Set up and verify Google My Business profile Set up Google Analytics and Search Console to track performance In other words, we cleaned up the on-page SEO. On-page SEO is everything on your website that affects your rankings. Since you’re in full control over your on-page SEO, this is usually your biggest leverage point. Next, we switched our focus from on-page SEO over to off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is everything off of your website that affects your rankings. For example, you’ve probably already heard that citations and links on other websites can boost your search engine rankings. Those are both examples of off-page SEO factors. Since our client was focused on local customers, we focused a lot of our efforts initially on building relevant citations, or mentions of our client’s name, address and phone number online. We did this by creating accounts on all the relevant industry and geographic business directories we could find. Plus, we also launched a 2-pronged content marketing strategy: We created content on our client’s website targeting research-intent keywords with the goal of ranking in Google. We created content and posted on other people’s websites that could rank in Google and also provide a link back to our client (aka guest posts). Was all this worth it? Let’s look at the results… The Results Below is a Google Analytics report showing the website traffic, as well as the leads generated directly from SEO. A goal completion for this client is a quote request form submission on the website.

As you can see, the traffic has increased from a steady 90-100 visitors per month in 2014 to a new high of 279 in May 2016 (179% increase). More importantly, the leads from SEO increased from a high of 6 in October 2014 to a new high of 20 in April 2016 (233% increase). (Two Important Notes: 1. This is a very seasonal industry because you do not pave driveways in the winter where our client is located. That’s why there is a decline in traffic and leads between November to February each year. 2. The graph above does not include phone calls generated from SEO) OK, this sounds nice, but what’s the ROI? To get to that number let’s look at the monthly change in leads from 2014 to 2016: 30 leads from SEO in 2014 122 leads from SEO in 2015 92 more leads from SEO year over year (307% increase) Next, we need to know the average fee per sale and the lead to sale conversion rate. With a little research, you’ll find that the average fee for paving a driveway is around $5,000. It obviously depends on the size of the driveway and the complexity of the job, but on average it’s about $5,000. SEO lead to sale conversion rates is a bit harder to research. If we assume a modest 5% conversion rate, then the 92 additional leads would generate about 5 more customers, or $25,000. Lastly, we need to compare sales to the cost of the SEO work. This particular client was investing in a custom SEO package for $500/month so the ROI calculation looks like this: ($25,000 – $6,000) / $6,000 = 317% ROI. Again, it’s important to note that this calculation does not take into account the phone call leads and sales so the ROI number is a low estimate. But the ROI between 2014 to 2015 is not what’s most impressive here. If you look at the graph above you can see that 2016 outperformed 2015. That brings us to the big takeaway from this case study… SEO Is a Growing Asset When done right, SEO is a growing asset that will generate a better and better ROI each year. That’s the beauty of this marketing investment. Rather than renting ad space that disappears as soon as you stop paying the ad network, you’re building an asset that will grow over time!

Why "Negative Keywords" Are Critical to Google AdWords Success

Getting your AdWords campaigns seen by more prospects is a good thing, unless those prospects have very little chances of becoming customers.

That's where negative keywords can help.

Negative keywords instruct AdWords not to display your ads with specific search queries. They follow all the same rules of your standard keyword lists, meaning you can specify broad-, phrase- and exact-match negative keywords.
The only difference is you're filtering your audience rather than growing it.
If you're new to search advertising, you may be asking: "Don't more eyeballs on your ads eventually lead to more business on my website?"

Not always. Especially if you're showing your ads to the wrong people. Rather than get more conversions, you're likely to see a declining click-through rate and a rise in costs per click and end up paying more than you need to.

But fear not. By the end of this article, you'll understand the power of negative keywords and how to use them in your AdWords account. And more good news - you'll likely see an immediate boost in your conversion rate after implementing negative keywords.

What Exactly Are Negative Keywords?

Imagine you're launching an AdWords campaign for a hair salon. Your keyword list contains the phrase-match term "haircut" to make sure your ads are seen by folks searching for all kinds of haircut-related terms. But after a week of running ads, you realize a good portion of your clicks are from people searching for "dog haircuts," and not one of these people has visited the salon.

Clearly, this is a problem - but an easily fixable problem. Just go to your negative keyword list in AdWords and add the broad-match keyword "dog." Immediately, anyone searching for any variation of "dog haircuts" won't see your ads.

Then you can be proactive and take it a step further. Add "pet," "cat," "grooming" and other pet-related terms to your negative keyword list.  That will prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant search phrases.

How to Create Negative Keyword Lists

Building a negative keyword list is easy. You can do it at either the campaign or ad group level, and you'll end up using both options as you get more comfortable with using these keywords.

In scenarios like the "dog haircut" example above, a campaign-level negative keyword list would make more sense considering no part of the business caters to pet haircuts. If you're building campaigns for a multi-faceted business, then you may find ad-group level negative keyword lists to be more beneficial.

To create a negative keyword list, log into AdWords, click the Keywords tab and then click the Negative Keywords tab. Then simply add your negative keywords to either the "Ad group level" or "Campaign level" tables.

Benefits of Using Negative Keywords

Earlier in this article, we discussed why you need negative keywords for your campaigns to be successful. Now we'll go deeper into how negative keywords can help.

#1: Weed out shoppers looking for discount prices.

Online shoppers often search for discounts, coupons, free trials and other bargains. But what if your business doesn't offer discounts or coupons?
Bargain-hunters who click your ads are more likely to bounce if they don't find those deals.

If your business doesn't offer any discounts or coupons, you can eliminate this problem by adding "discounts," "coupons" and "free" to your campaign-level negative keyword list.

#2: Get the biggest bang from your ad budget.

Negative keywords filter out people who are most likely to click on your ads without becoming customers of your business. If you cut out those clicks, then you're instantly saving money! And if you don't trim your ad budgets, then you're essentially reinvesting that money to attract other prospects who are more likely to become customers. The result is more traffic with higher conversion rates, which means more profits without spending more money.

#3: Focus on buyer-oriented keywords.

Earlier, we mentioned how negative keywords can help prevent your ads from being shown to people who are doing research. This is important because folks who are researching goods and services are usually not ready to make purchases.

By adding keyword terms such as "compare," "what is" or "what are" to your negative keyword list, you'll immediately stop your ads from being shown to people who are most likely in research mode instead of shopper mode.

#4: Cut out non-consumers.

In addition to shoppers doing research before buying, some Web users who see your ads might not even be consumers at all. Consider again our hair salon example; in most cases, you wouldn't want your ads to be seen by unemployed hair stylists searching for "haircut jobs." Entering campaign-level negative keywords such as "jobs," "job openings," "careers," "part-time" and "internships" can keep your ads exclusive to consumers.

Conclusion

Negative keywords are often overlooked when you're just learning how to use AdWords. However, failing to use negative keywords can put a strain on your campaigns and drag down their performance, leading to frustration and unnecessary second-guessing. Always think carefully about negative keywords and use them with all of your new campaigns.

The good news is that even a few basic negative keywords can make a big difference. Just remember - success in AdWords isn't just about who sees your ads, but also who doesn't see your ads. Why waste money on clicks that don't convert? Fortunately, you don't have to.

Google’s Keyword Planner tool just became even more inaccurate

You’re probably familiar with the Keyword Planner tool, which is one of the best sources we have to spot opportunities and make the business case for an investment into paid or organic search campaigns.

One of the things it provides is guidance on the volume of searches for any given query. The numbers reported in the tool have always been somewhat vague. They are rounded up and numbers end with at least one zero. A pinch of salt has always been required when digesting the data.

It turns out that these numbers are now even more imprecise.

Manish spotted that Google has started to combine related terms, pooling them all together and reporting one (bigger) number.

No longer can you separate the data for keyword variants, such as plurals, acronyms, words with space, and words with punctuation.

As such it would be easy to get a false impression of search volumes, unless you’re aware of the change. No sudden jump in search queries, just an amalgamated number. Be warned.
Here are a couple of examples…

Bundling together anagrams and regional spellings

Lumping together plurals and phrases without spaces

The problem could be exacerbated by third party tools. Manish says:

“For those that don’t notice the change – or worse, pulling the data from tools that haven’t updated to take into account the change – this means that some advertisers and SEOs are grossly overestimating those numbers, since many tools will combine data, and there is no notification alert on the results to show that how Google calculates average monthly searches has been changed.”

So yeah, this isn’t exactly good news. In fact, I can’t think of any benefit to the end user, but Google has a history of obfuscating data, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

That said, it once again pushes the focus towards relevance and context rather than pure volume. Advertisers and content creators would do well to focus on optimising clickthrough rate and landing page performance, rather than just shotgun marketing.

Guesstimated data aside, you can use Search Console to make sense of actual performance. Map your page impressions to organic (or paid) positions and you’ll get a sense of how accurate the Keyword Planner data is for any given term.

It’s also worth remembering that there are seasonal factors at play with the reported data. Volumes shown are an approximate figure based on 12 months search data. You might get a better idea of more accurate monthly figures if you cross-reference data from with Google Trends, which will show seasonal spikes (February is a big month for flowers).

Keyword Planner replaced Google’s Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator about three years ago. Users of the old tools initially complained about missing the broad match and phrase match options. Now, they’re going to miss even more detail around keywords and data.


Proceed with caution, as ever. 

3 Steps To Find The Best SEO Keywords

I received a lot of questions about keyword research, so in today’s article, I’m going to walk through some of the steps we take to identify the best SEO keywords for any type of business.

 

Step 1. Brainstorm the Obvious Keywords

SEO keyword research is sort of like using a thesaurus. You need to start with a list of keywords, which we call a “seed” list.

 

I recommend you start by brainstorming the most obvious phrases that your prospect would search to find your product or service.

 

For example, if you are a dentist in New York, most likely, people are going to search ‘New York City dentist’ or ‘NYC dentist’. Those are what I would call the obvious keywords.

 

Once you’ve brainstormed some obvious keywords, you’ll want to plug them into Google’s Keyword Planner. This tool will give you more keyword ideas, as well as search volume.

Step 2. Sort By Search Intent

Google’s keyword tool will spit back a bunch of keyword ideas, and these keyword ideas will generally fall into 2 categories…

 

1. Keywords with purchase intent – where it’s obvious that prospects are looking to buy a product or hire a service provider.

 

2. Keywords with research intent – where the prospect is most likely just doing research, and not ready to buy.

 

In our example above, “NYC Dentist” is a classic example of a purchase intent keyword. You’d search that if you were looking to make an appointment with a dentist.

 

However, “dentistry” would be an example of a research intent keyword. If somebody is searching “dentistry,” they’re probably not ready to go to a dentist quite yet. In fact, they may not be interested in going to a dentist at all. They could be researching the field of dentistry and considering becoming a dentist.

 

Your first priority when optimizing your website for SEO should be to optimize your homepage and product/service pages for “purchase intent” keywords.

 

Note: It’s important to optimize your website for “research intent” keywords too… typically that’s where you can find some really nice “low hanging fruit” opportunities to drive traffic in the short-term. But we recommend that as Phase 2 after optimizing your core pages for “purchase intent” keywords.

Step 3. Prioritize By Search Volume

As I mentioned, Google’s Keyword Planner Tool will also show you the search volume. By “search volume,” I mean how many times that particular keyword phrase is searched in Google every month.

 

You’ll see that some keywords are only searched ten times a month, some are searched thousands of times per month, and some are actually not searched at all. Of course, you want to avoid optimizing for keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for.

 

If you start with obvious keywords, and then sort by search intent, and prioritize by search volume, you’ll be well on your way to finding the best SEO keywords in your market.

3 Steps to Pick the Best AdWords Keywords

In today’s article I provide 3 criteria for selecting the best keywords for your Google AdWords campaign.  

If you have ever conducted keyword research for a Google AdWords search campaign, then you know the process can be daunting. Go to adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner and start searching for relevant keywords for your business.  Within seconds you'll literally have hundreds of pages of keywords that Google has determined are related to your products or services.

 

That's a lot keywords to comb through!

 

In addition to the sheer volume of keyword possibilities there is another problem.  How do you know which keywords are better than others?  Google's keyword planner tool provides search volume, estimated cost per click and competition, but there is no column that grades the keyword opportunities.  Sorry, it's up to you to figure that out on your own.

 

To grade your keywords, you need to first list the criteria that make keywords better advertising opportunities.  In this article, I'll present 3 basic criteria that every keyword must meet before you add it to your AdWords campaign.

 

Criteria #1. Searched In Google

This first criteria should be obvious.  If the keywords you're targeting are not searched in Google, then you're not going to generate any leads or sales from your ad campaign.  There's no harm in adding keywords that are not searched, but you shouldn't expect to get anything from them.

OK, moving on we'll assume we're now only considering keywords that have search volume.

 

Criteria #2. Searched By Your Prospects

Next, we need to make sure the keyword is in fact searched by your ideal prospect.  For example, can you imagine situations where your prospect would turn to Google to search this particular keyword?  Or is it more likely that other people besides your ideal prospect would be searching?

This is not a perfect science and it requires you to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect.  Play devil's advocate and try to think about all the other people that might be searching for your keyword.  Also, review the current ads in Google.com for your keyword to see if those ads are targeting your prospect.  If they are, then that's a good sign.

 

Criteria #3. Searched To Make a Buying Decision

Finally, consider whether the keyword is more likely searched in order to make a buying decision or to do more research.  Your keywords can easily pass the first 2 criteria, but many will fail this last test.

Let's look an example for a chiropractor.  Consider these two keyword opportunities:

1. back pain
2. San Francisco chiropractor

Both are searched in Google. Check... Both are searched by a chiropractor's ideal prospect. Check... But one of them does not pass this 3rd criteria.  Can you guess which one?

It's "back pain."  The "back pain" keyword has no intent to make a buying decision.  It's more of a research keyword.  However, just about everyone that types in "San Francisco chiropractor" is looking to make a buying decision.  See the difference?

Again, this is not a perfect science and it requires you to put yourself in the searcher's shoes.  Think about all the different reasons why someone would search for the keyword you're considering and prioritize the keywords that are more likely searched by prospects looking to make buying decisions.  This will ensure you're targeting keywords in your AdWords campaign that are more likely to drive sales.

 

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.

Bing Ads Introduces Refined Broad Match Keyword Targeting

In an effort to help advertisers attract more click volume from the Yahoo Bing Network, Bing Ads has rolled out Broad Match keyword targeting. The company says that with refinements and ongoing updates the “Bing Ads platform is able to deliver Broad Match conversion metrics that are 85% of the percentage of Exact Match”.

The new Broad Match is designed to eliminate the need for endless keyword variations set on Exact or Phrase Match, while still maintaining quality control. Some 30 percent of daily searches on Bing are new, so Broad Match is meant to help cast a wider net to catch new, relevant search terms that may not already be in your account.  You’ll still want to keep a close eye on the search query report and add negatives as needed.
Bing Ads says its data shows that, on average, when an advertiser does not opt into Broad Match, they lose 57 percent of their total available impressions and 43 percent of clicks. One of More Effort of Bing Ads to bring more feature as same as Google Adwords

Note that Broad Match does not impact the quality scores of your Exact or Phrase match keywords.
Here’s the current overview of match type settings in Bing Ads:

Getting Started with Google AdWords: How to Determine Your Test Budget

If you’re considering launching a Google AdWords campaign, then you may be asking yourself, “How much do I need to invest to test this out?  Is $100 enough or do I need thousands?”
It’s an important question and I hear it all the time from prospective clients. Unfortunately, this question is impossible to answer without further research.  For example, we need to answer the following:

1. Which keywords will you be targeting and how much do they cost per click (CPC)?
2. What is the time frame for your test? Do you need to see results in weeks, months, or a year?
3. What is your sales process and typical sales cycle?  Do customers buy the same day they search or does it take months before a purchase is made?
4. What are your typical sales conversion rates?

Let’s go through an example and at the end you’ll know how to estimate a reasonable budget to test a Google AdWords campaign.

Find Your Target Keyword CPCs

In a Google AdWords search campaign, you pay per click.  That means you only pay Google when a prospect clicks on your ad.  If your ad shows up in Google’s results 1,000 times, but no one clicks on it, then you don’t pay a penny.  That’s why AdWords is sometimes called PPC, or pay per click advertising.
So if we’re estimating our budgets, we obviously need to know how much it’s going to cost when prospects click on our ads. And the exact amount you’ll pay depends on the keyword you’re advertising on.  For example, if you advertise on the keyword, “coffee shop,” then you’ll pay a different amount than if you advertise on “mortgage broker.”  Google estimates you’ll pay $2.90 for “coffee shop” and a whopping $13.76 for “mortgage broker.”
That’s a HUGE difference when we’re estimating budgets.
Now, you may be wondering how the heck do you find all the CPCs for keywords.  It’s actually really easy because Google provides you with the Keyword Planner Tool.  Search for your target keywords and the Keyword Planner tool will give you an estimate for how much each keyword will cost per click.  Note that these are estimates so you may pay more or less.

Testing Time Frame

It’s important to realize that you need to go into an ad campaign with a realistic time frame in mind.  As you’ll see later, the time frame will depend on your budget and it also depends on your industry.  There simply may not be enough search volume for your target keywords to get leads and sales data in 1 month.  For example, “mortgage broker” is searched 9,900 times per month in the US.
If 1% of the searchers click on your ad, then you would get 99 clicks from that particular keyword.  Is it realistic that you would get a sale from only 99 website visitors?  Probably not.  Of course, you’ll be targeting more than one keyword.  The goal here is to make sure there is enough search volume for your target keywords to achieve your goals within your time frame.  Plus, if you have a longer time frame, then you can spread out your monthly budget across multiple months.

Your Sales Cycle

This step is easy.  What is your typical sales cycle?  If it’s over 1 month, then obviously you’ll need to test for multiple months to get decent data from a test campaign.  If your customers buy within 1 day, then you know you’ll get almost instant feedback from the campaign once it starts.

Your Sales Conversion Rates

The final step before we can calculate your budget is to use your sales conversion rates.  In my example above, we estimated that we can drive about 99 prospects to our website from the keyword “mortgage broker.”  There are at least two more conversions that need to take place:

1. Prospect has to call, complete a webform, or visit your office after clicking on the ad
2. You have to close the sale

Let’s say your goal is to get the prospect to complete a webform to schedule an appointment.  A reasonable conversion rate for lead generation like this might be 5%.  So out of the 99 visits, about 5 will schedule an appointment.  I’ll assume 100% will show up for the appointment, which is not realistic, but makes this example easier. :)
Next, is your appointment to client close ratio.  Let’s make the math easy here and say you’re sales conversion rate is 20% (and the sales cycle is only a few days) so you would generate 1 new client.

Estimate Your Test Budget

Alright, now it’s time to put all this information together to estimate your test budget.  We already estimated we can generate 1 new client from 100 clicks on a targeted keyword.  Plus, we know our example keyword costs $13.76 per click, so it’s going to cost about $1,376 to generate one sale.
That means we need at least $1,376 for our initial test to get a sale within about a month, based on the CPC, search volume and sales cycle.  So if you only have $100/month to test, then it’s going to take about a year to test just one keyword.  It’s possible you’ll get a sale more quickly, but it’s also possible it will take longer than estimated to get that first sale.  In this example, I would recommend a budget of at least $2,000 to give this one keyword a fair shot.
As you can see, there are a lot of variables that go into estimating your AdWords test budget.  Play around with the Google Keyword Planner to find your target keywords’ CPCs and search volume.  Then run the numbers based on your sales cycle and conversion rates.

Or, contact me and I’ll do it for you! :)

Before You Quit Pay-Per-Click, Follow These PPC Tips

The thought of advertising your small business is both exciting and unnerving.  Many business owners are proactive when it comes to marketing their own business, using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for instant results. When business owners try to handle their own PPC ,  they can spend  hundreds or even thousands of dollars on pay-per-click advertising  only to see little return on their investment.
Before you give up on PPC, consider the common mistakes that business owners make when managing their own advertising campaigns:

1. Having Unrealistic Expectations
2. Not Checking the Terms They are Actually Paying For
3. Not Adding Negative Keywords
4. Creating Ads Without Keyword Relevant Landing Pages

Having Unrealistic Expectations

Small business owners need to be broken out of the traditional advertising mindset.  For years, small business owners advertised on printed media, radio, and television. They are used to seeing and hearing their own ad constantly.  With  PPC advertising,  your ad will not be up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Often, business owners will set up a PPC campaign, search their keyword, and not find their ad. When this happens, their first thought is, “Where is my ad? This is not working!” PPC is a lot different than traditional advertising.  You pay for performance.  
There are a few reasons why you might not be seeing your ad:

1. Your ad  might have already been clicked on a few times today. Once you reach your daily budget, your ads will stop running for the rest of that day.
2. You may be targeting too many keywords or not the right keywords.  In general, the more specific the keyword, the better the results. See my post on longtail keywords.
3. Your daily budget may be too small. If your spending less than $10 a day, your budget might not be enough to provide meaningful results.

Not Checking the Keyword Details (Query String Report)

When I have talked to small business owners that manage their own PPC, I was surprised to learn how few people actually use this. The keyword details are the actual search terms that you paid for. You can also think of this as keywords driving traffic.  Lots of valuable information can be found in this report. You can quickly see if you are wasting money or may see opportunities for new keywords. Hands down, this is my #1 PPC tip.
Here is how you can see the query string report:

Click on the keywords tab.

Select all keywords to see every search term that you paid for.

Click on view keyword details.

See which search terms are actually driving traffic. Notice that this list doesn’t exactly match your keyword list. Look for keywords that will never result in new business and add them as a negative keyword.

When you look through this report, you should ask yourself one question- could this search term result in business?
For example,  I was recently looking at a PPC campaign for a maid service company. One of their targeted keywords was “housekeeping.” I looked at the query string report and I saw that she had a lot of traffic coming from people searching for “housekeeping jobs.” The business owner was paying for this traffic and didn’t even know it. I also found something rather amusing.  One of the search terms was “arnold schwarzenegger housekeeper”. I am not sure why a person searching for this ended up clicking on an add for maid service; perhaps it was an accident. Anyways, after I checked the query string report, I added 71 negative keywords to this campaign. One was “jobs” and the other was “arnold schwarzenegger”. with the addition of negative keywords, the business owner does not have to worry about paying for these terms that will won’t result in a sale.

Not Adding Negative Keywords Every Month

This is somewhat repetitive to the step above, but it is so important I wanted to break it out into its own section.  Negative keywords are terms that you don’t want to advertise for.  This is almost as important as choosing the words you do want to advertise for.
Let me illustrate with an example. If you own a carpet cleaning service, you might have “carpet cleaning” and “cleaning service” as keywords. Without negative keywords, someone searching for “window cleaning service” might see your ad and call you to find out that you don’t offer window cleaning.  Not only is this annoying for both the customer and the business owner, it also eats up your PPC budget.
Many small business owners running their own PPC campaigns don’t create a negative keyword list.  PPC platforms like Adwords and adCenter are designed for anyone looking to get started ASAP. There are few requirements in the actual interface. You need a budget, some keywords, and an ad with a landing page.  Because negative keywords are not required, most small business owners don’t set them up. Adding negative keywords will make your campaign much more effective by spending your budget only on keywords that will drive  new business.

Creating Ads Without Keyword Relevant Landing Pages

One of the biggest mistakes is not having the actual keyword you are targeting on your landing page. For example, say you are an HVAC company. You have a home page that talks about your company with some marketing language about “why choose us.”  You want to advertise your business when people search for “Water Heater Repair In Houston,” but no where on your home page do you have those keywords in that order. This is like shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to get results for this keyword, this is how you should up your campaign:

1. Sign into Adwords and create a campaign. Set your daily budget and target your ads to be shown in Houston.
2. Create an ad group called water heater repair.
3. Add keywords specifically about water heater repair (water heater service, water heater not working, broken water heater, etc.)
4. Add negative keywords related to this service (jobs, etc)
5. Create ads specifically about water heater repair.
6. Create a landing page specifically about water heater repair using the keywords from step 3.

Follow the above tips to get the most out of  your PPC, increase conversions, and drive potential customers to your website. You’ll enjoy the boost to your bottom line that a properly executed PPC campaign can create!

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 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.