Tag Archives: Search Advertising

PPC Ad Group Segmentation, How Deep Should You Go?

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Developing keyword lists and building out paid search campaigns can be a very large and a very fun project.  I believe there is some debate among paid search managers as to when you should be adding new ad groups and how many ad groups are appropriate based on the size of your keyword list.  There is really no clear cut answer as to when it is appropriate to further segment your ad groups.  Like most things in this industry, it depends.  The further you can break your ad groups down the better your campaign performance can be.  It takes more work, but it pays off in the end.  You need to be able to analyze your keyword list to determine how many different groups of keywords you’re working with.  Also think about the potential of using different ad copy to speak to each of these different searchers.  Do these different groups of keywords show different user intent?  Are these searchers asking a question, or are they looking for a specific product or service?  Answering these questions will help you determine when you need to utilize some different ad copy to really speak to searchers in a different way.

Rules Of Thumb To Help

There are a few different guidelines that you can use to help determine when you should be making a new ad group or just adding a few different keywords to an established ad group:

  • Use a 2 root words guide.
  • Try to not have more than 20-25 keywords in a single ad group.
  • Different types of keywords that show different intent.

To help explain more about some of these guidelines I’ll use a few different examples.  Let’s say you’re making a campaign to advertise your ppc management services.  You may have a list of terms that include: ppc management, ppc management company, ppc management services, search marketing management, search marketing manager, google adwords management, google adwords management services, etc.  Your ad group list should at least include 3 different ad groups with this small list:

  • ppc management
  • search marketing management
  • google adwords management

When you’re using more than 20-25+ keywords in an ad group you may have a specific reason you need that many keywords, but for most ad groups this seems like there could be further segmentation.  Maybe you’re taking over a campaign for someone, acquired a new client or maybe it’s just time to re-review your ad group structure.  Whatever reason it is I believe your entire campaign could benefit from this exercise.  If there are more than 25 keywords in a single ad group it’s hard to believe that all those different searchers should be seeing the same set of ads, which is why it might be time to build some new ad groups and write some new ads.

There are a lot of ways that people search the internet to find an infinite amount of different things.  This also means that we cannot think of all these searchers as the same.  Some searchers are just looking for information, while others are looking for that product that your site sells.  Professionals in search marketing have tried to group keyword searches into 3 different groups.

  • Informational
  • Navigational
  • Transactional

google adwords ppc ad group segmentation

This is a good way to think about your keyword and where these people are within your sales funnel, or are they in your sales funnel at all?  Based on the intention of the searcher you should have different ad groups with terms that have totally different ad copy which speak to that searcher on an individual level.  If it’s an informational keyword then your ad needs to answer the question or promise more insight into what problem they’re looking to solve.  If the keyword is navigational then your ad needs to direct that searcher to their destination.  Lastly, if the search is transactional then your ad should grab their attention and offer them the product or service that you’re selling and close the deal.

Whether you’re a seasoned PPC manager or just starting out this exercise of segmenting or adding to your ad group list is a great optimization technique.  Don’t get caught up in adding keywords over time to your existing ad groups to gain traffic and exposure be left with a small number of ad groups that all have hundreds of keywords in them.  Your campaigns and business are going to suffer.  Take the extra time to do it right.

Website Landing Page Optimization Based on Traffic Source

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Just reading through a Marketing Sherpa report on Landing Page Optimization and I thought I would share a few thoughts. They typically look at it from three types of landing pages; E-Commerce, Incentivized Leads, and Direct Lead Generation. These are, after all, the reasons you are out there with internet marketing campaigns – to drive leads and sales.

With the tools available (Google Analytics is perfect and FREE), you should spend some time figuring out who converts the best on your site from what medium of advertising. You also need to look at assigning a lead “quality score” in order to balance quantity and quality. Paid media, customers, e-mail blasts, social media referrals, and general organic traffic all do different things when they get to your website and you should be looking at the data to tell you what you need to do based on the source.

Which takes me to some work we did a few months ago for a big automaker here in Michigan. They created a comparison site for their brand site and wanted to know how it was working.  We helped them understand all the ways they could measure their traffic patterns and usage so they could make changes to improve performance based on EACH way someone got to that site – paid, social, Brand site, mobile, etc. for the next model year. This is extremely important to look at in order to make sure you are maximizing your opportunity with each and every visitor to your site based on how they get to you and what they do once there.

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Google Adwords Extends Ad Titles To Test And Improve CTR

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Google is always making changes and testing the way they display results and ads. We all know about the change from a while back when they stopped calling ads “Sponsored Results” and starting call them “Ads”. This made a big impact, even though it was just a simple change. Well they’re at it again and this time they are testing extending the Ad Title’s of text ads. What they are doing is taking the first line of the ad copy and appending it to the title. This has a variety of things to take into account with this change:

  • Ad Titles are the clickable area of an ad, and extending it gives users a larger area to click and make the text appear as a hyperlink.
  • It will increase CTR and drive more traffic through paid search.
  • As PPC managers we will need to alter the way we write ad copy taking into account the mix of ad titles and ad copy.

To see Google’s post about this topic you can visit the Google Adwords Blog where they describe how they rolled this out and how your ad needs to be formatted to receive this change. You’ll need to end your line 1 ad copy with a form of punctuation. A period or question mark will need to be used to imply your ad has actual sentence structure. The example that the Adwords blog used to illustrate the difference in ads can be seen here.

The implication of this could be huge from a CTR stand point and the volume of traffic that can be driven to your site through paid search. We like when changes like this are made because when you know how to manage and optimize campaigns we can maximize results for our clients. If you’re not actively managing your Adwords campaign then you’ll miss the boat when big changes like this can affect results on a large scale. This is a good reason to have a professional manager of your campaigns that will stay up to date for you. The scarier thing may be that your competitors could be using this to their advantage, which will give them the better CTR and overtake your ads position with a higher quality score. You may be left in the dust.If you have seen this in your own campaigns and have noticed the differences in performance leave a comment and tell us how this has affected your results and strategy. If you haven’t made adjustments that take this into account… go make them now and measure the results for yourself.

As we begin 2011, thanks to everyone…

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There are several things when you run a small services company that come into play. Good staff, good clients, and always a little luck. As a marketing firm, with heavy emphasis in the web marketing, search optimization, and online media fields that are highly competitive, you have to always be on the top of your game. For example, there is typically more than change per day (550+ in 2009) to how Google ranks sites, not to mention Bing and other factors. This “whole Internet thing” takes a lot more attention by the qualified people to do it and it will help maximize results because web is open 24/7. You also need to make sure you are not taking short cuts and you are building for long term as much as short term because long term will get you further for the money over time.

You also need to be able to create and implement marketing and web strategy you can measure and helps people establish and get to their goals. If you are not doing these and marketing effectively, then you are not maximizing your budget and return on investment. It isn’t about showing some results and saying “look at what we’ve done”. We find it extremely easy (with about 80% of our prospects) to have the ability to increase their marketing response by 10% or web hits by 33% just through implementing best practices and optimization of all media, but you have to look deeper than that. It’s more about using what we learned making those initial improvements and what we are going to do to get you to the next level of results. At some point, you will reach diminishing returns, but knowing when you shouldn’t spend the money to try for it is crucial to maximizing each and every piece of your marketing matrix and that is where we shine.

If you look at all the pieces of marketing as illustrated by these two graphics, one will see that the interactive or digital marketing picture alone has the same amount of moving parts as an entire strategy used to just 12-15 years ago. That in itself makes once have to pay attention to it to keep your business moving forward.

What we do is help get and keep businesses moving forward through building communities with their audiences and making sure their interactions with their customers and prospects gives them the best chance for success. I wanted to take a moment as we begin a new year to thank my wonderful staff for all their hard work and dedication, all of our great clients for believing in what we were telling them and trusting in our execution (even when they didn’t fully understand it) and just say that Bevelwise is nothing without both of you. Here’s to a great 2010 and hopefully an even better 2011.

Seach Engine Strategies 2010 In Chicago

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This is Steve Wellman @ Bevelwise coming to you just after Search Engine Strategies 2010 in Chicago. What a great event this has been. There are tons of industry experts in town for the event speaking and sitting on panels for seminars. I have had the privilege of attending as many of these seminars as possible and am just soaking up as much as I can. The conference has offered a ton of information on a range of topics. Anything from local search optimization tips all the way to organic and PPC search marketing tips. I really enjoyed Eli Goodman’s take on Competitive Research for SEO. He gave a number of good strategies to utilize all of your competitors information on the web, and how we as SEOs can leverage that to our advantage.

We have even gotten to hear some viewpoints straight from Google, and had a keynote from Maile Ohye, a Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google. Maile went over a lot of new updates and functionality they are building into the Webmaster Tools. She even let us know that internally their team has a “Webmaster Happiness Rating” they monitor with the forum support team to let them know generally how happy webmasters are with them around the net. I’m surely going to remember that next time I’m going back and forth on their Webmaster’s Forum.

We here at Bevelwise tried to attend as much as possible and wanted to get as much information as we could to help serve all our clients better. Here is a list of the seminars that we thought would help our clients the best and would provide us with the highest level of material.

  • Advanced Keywords Research – Looking at the latest and best techniques and tools used in advanced keyword research and helping discover the best possibilities for our marketing and optimization efforts.
  • Ads In A Quality Score World – When we look at pay per click marketing we are always looking to improve, optimize and expand our campaigns. Knowing how quality score works and writing unique, relevant and great ad copy will help us improve campaigns and get lower cost per clicks than our competitors.
  • Advanced Paid Search Tactics – This seminar shed light into techniques that the best of the best in the industry use to optimize their pay per click campaigns.
  • B2B Search Marketing Tips – We all know that depending on the type of marketing tactics we use depends on the audience we are trying to attract. In this B2B series SES looked at the differences and challenges specifically associated with B2B markets.
  • Local 2.0: The Evolution of Local Search – Depending on your business we are always trying to leverage local opportunities where applicable, and search is no exception. We looked at where local search has come from, and where it will be heading in the future.
  • Competitive Research – It doesn’t matter who you are or what type of website you have. You probably at least have a competitor or 2, and knowing that everyone wants to gain some insight into their competitors and what works for them. Dissecting a competitors SEO strategy can be a very tactful way to figure out what has worked for them, and to also find possible holes in their strategy.
  • Making The Jump From Search to Display – Yep… all of you thought that display advertising was a dying breed, but there are some revolutionary things that display advertisers are doing to get a new fresh perspective on their advertising channel. Well you can guess who they are trying to attract… the search marketers.
  • Stretching Your Marketing Dollars: The Upside of Search – Ok well you don’t have to convince me that when your marketing dollars are tight that the best avenue to pursue is search. What I am concerned with is learning new and revolutionary ways to further stretch things as people continue coming to me looking for ways to improve their sales and leads, while at the same time lowering their budgets.
If you have any questions or want more in-depth information about these subjects you can email me at swellman@bevelwise.com and I will answer any questions.
I plan on trying to write more in-depth posts about these subjects to a further extent in the near future.

5 New Features Google Analytics Offers In The New Beta AdWords Stat Tool

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A couple of us Internet Marketers here at Bevelwise were just talking about this a few weeks ago. I had even provided this as feedback to a Google survey a few months ago that I would like to see, specifically goal tracking day parting on campaigns. I feel like those Windows 7 ads – “I’m an Adwords Certified Professional and day parting of conversions was my idea”. Google has beta released the new stat tool for AdWords data in their Analytics package. This adds a ton of features and ways that we can look at Pay-Per-Click traffic and how it is interacting with websites. If you’ve never checked this section of Google Analytics out before then go under “Traffic Sources -> Adwords” you will see a wide range of new options under that.

I thought I would give a little more insight about about some of the new features I’ve enjoyed checking out this morning and point out my top 5

  • The new Adwords Overview looks at your CTR and Bounce Rate metric side by side and line graphs it for you very nicely by default.
  • You can now see your goals/conversions broken down by day-parting. This is something we’ve not been able to see until now, and lets you see exactly what time of the day is bringing you the best conversion rates.
  • The layout of your Destination URL’s are easier to get to now, and you can see the statistics breakdown for how each destination url on your website is performing. This helps even further when we are looking at conversion rate optimization
  • You can see your “Keyword Positions” performance, which lets you pick a keyword anywhere in your account and see how many times it is clicked when it is served in the first position, second, third, etc.
  • You can see statistics breakdown for each match type you use. This means that you can see the bounce rate if you want for all your broad match types, and compare that to your phrase and exact types to see what is bringing in the most qualified traffic.
As you can see this a big addition to their already great Analytics package. There are so many ways to apply this to further improve Google Adwords advertising, and websites in general when we are looking at conversion rate optimization.

If you don’t already have a company that helps you manage your search engine marketing or website analytics Bevelwise is a SEM firm that is utilizing these strategies and all of the most current techniques to drive our client’s business and have successful web strategy. Staying up to date with these great additions and changes is more than a full time job for us, it’s our passion – which makes us good and what we do.

Local Search and the Multi-Platform Approach

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I was just reading this article from Search Engine Land about the topic above. While their “case study” method left a bit to be desired (why would you ever go from your own Facebook page to the yellow pages and put them in front of ALL of the competition make absolutely NO SENSE!), you do need to have multi-platform strategy to effectively keep your presense in a local marketplace.

You do need the local search methods, the directories, and your web content all to help you maintain your presence and potentially “own” the local listing, I just don’t see yellow pages being the answer. Social media would be more effective than that. I cannot tell you the last time I personally looked in a phone book. I also don’t go to online yellow pages unless there is something specific that I am not finding through Google/Bing/Yahoo. You can tell the writer definitely came from the Yellow Pages world.

As these mediums, try to revamp to become more relevant in an Internet driven world, there could be some value here, as web strategy is the “sum of all parts”. Local Search is something that needs a trained professional to help you with in order to maximize effectiveness and ensure you are getting your ROI. If you are interested, find someone (like Bevelwise) who understands it, can explain it, and has no reason to be bias to any one media – only to produce the results you desire.

Emotional Marketing Messaging vs. Facts Based Rational Messaging

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I was just re-reading an Article from earlier this year in Advertising Age that talked about why emotional marketing messages beat the rational ones. They looked at 880 case studies, covering two recessions to see if there was any difference between the “good and bad times”. What was determined was emotional advertising was twice as likely to generate profit gains than the rational ones, with the campaigns that use both, splitting the difference right in between.

The biggest difference was the emotional marketing reduced price sensitivity, which helped companies to be able to hold more firm on their pricing (with a better economy, it would allow you to probably charge a premium). Emotional advertising allows one to create a sense of differentiation for your brand and helps it appear to be worth “more” to the customer. However, a person that would respond to more data driven advertising or rational messaging, is typically more analytical so it is expected that they are more price sensitive because they would be one that “does their homework” first.

Balancing this in the Internet age takes some effort because of how Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Websites, and everything can spread more quickly – especially through industry trade channels. If you combine that with the fact that 80%+ people research what they want to buy online (especially if it is not a standard consumable good) then you have to make sure your message reaches across all mediums.

If you ask most business owners, “Would you like to be able to keep 1% more through your price or increase your volume 1%?”, holding that price would be more to the bottom line that the equivalent increase in sales volume. Your marketing needs to help you achieve that.

Success in Local Business SEO

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1.Non-Business Name Searches: It’s great if people searching the internet are discovering your website without typing in the name of your business. Probably most of these visitors were previously unaware of your business. This signifies that your website is ranking well for phrase that describe its location and the type of products or services.

2. Specific Service or Product Searches: If your company offers a exclusive product or service you will definitely want to be found for it. These keywords will point to your website because you have a search engine friendly website well optimized even for its more unique services.

3. Searches by Zip, Street, & City: An important component of Local Business SEO if having your address in the footer or on every page of your website. Your company can even gather online traffic for searches by multiple zip codes across your region. This is also a result of having a well optimized map listing. For example, in your Google Local Business Listing, make use of targeted keyword phrases in your list of services or products.

4. Synonyms for Products or Services: If your website is well optimized, it will be able to draw traffic from multiple keywords describing its services. Optimize for multiple phrases to describe your business’s services and products on pages within your website.

Budget Adwords wisely by using Google Analytics

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Use Google Analytics to optimize your Adwords Pay-Per-Click spending by monitoring your conversion rate, bounce rate, and ROI.

First, link your Adwords to Analytics. Tip, do it from your login account (same admin on both), not a My-Client-Account MCC. Make sure your “cost data” is applied to the correct adwords account number.

Once your accounts are linked, apply conversion tracking/goals. Do this even if you don’t have e-commerce. A goal could be a sign-up, contact request, newsletter request, purchase, key page view, etc.

Now, login to Analytics and analyze you data! Find your adwords data by going to Traffic Sources –> Adwords.

  • Check the bounce rate. Ideally, a lower percentage is better…especially because you are paying for these keywords. Bounce rate is a visit with only one page view on your site, then they “bounce off” aka leaves your site. If the bounce rate is high, the landing page may be wrong.
  • Check average time on site. Usually longer time is better. You may want to improve the look of landing pages with low time on site because it may mean that the searcher immediately doesn’t like what they see. Or maybe they can’t easily navigate around your site.
  • Find out what time of day you are getting highest amount of conversions. This can help enable “Day parting” if you would like to lower your budget (or increase impressions for times when people are more likely to buy.

Expand on keywords with high conversion rates. Bid aggressively on keywords that are giving you a good return-on-investment (ROI). Ditch the keywords that aren’t converting!

Please contact Bevelwise if you need someone to manage or straighten out all of this data!