The Big (Adwords) Questions in Life

I recently spent time with our sales folks in our UK office. (I have to digress just for a second and say that traveling business class for the first time was buck!) There were a lot of presentations about lead intelligence, the status of our conversion rates, etc. However, the most intriguing questions to them were pretty much the same ones our sales folks in the US asked.

1. Why doesn't our ads show up in Google when I do a search?
2. If I do a search in the UK, do the results show up the same as if I searched in the States?

If you're on the hook for Adwords, you probably hear these two questions raised all the time. It should be one that is easily answered, but let's give it some more color.

For question #1, the most common symptom is that you run out of budget. Each campaign is set to a daily budget. Within the campaign are ad groups which contain one or more ads (the results you see), and ad groups are associated to keywords that trigger the ad to show. Structurally:

Campaign Name
   Ad Group 1
       Ad 1
          Keywords for Ad 1
       Ad 2
          Keywords for Ad 2

To diagnose, look into the Settings for the Campaign and see what the daily budget amount is set to. Also, check to see if the ads are running at all times meaning a 24 hour period. If so, it might be best to cut down on the times where your ad is not performing well to maximize the most efficient use of budget and conversions. We call this day-parting. It's also important to see if the ads are set to run evenly or accelerated. Accelerated would run through impressions and clicks fairly quickly as well and blow the budget.

Within the campaign look for keywords that are sucking you dry...i.e lots of expensive clicks but low conversions. See if it makes sense to find ways to cut down on spend for these to save on the budget as a whole.

For question #2, the short answer is it depends. It depends on whether or not the country in question is targeted for the campaign. We call this geo-targeting. It's helpful to check the Google Preview Tool to run both the search term on the domain in question.

 

Compete.com With the Best

Imagine this very common scenario. You have spent hours pouring over your analytics data slicing and dicing the images, trend lines, segments, referrals, etc. A few questions about what page visits mean or how unique visitors are trending and if things are growing in the right direction. Then this question comes up which you might not have thought about and usually from someone in a higher pay grade.


How do these metrics compare to our competitors?

Of course, it's an obviously simple question, but not one that is easy to answer. You don't have access to your competitor's analytics information, only yours. I'm glad to see that there are tools that try to answer some of the competitor questions. I just signed up with compete.com and paid for the pro version hoping it'll give more than just directional data. There are others such as comscore and hitwise. Compete seems to have the easiest UI to use.

In the sample screenshot of Facebook against LinkedIn you can see some overall trends and stats over a 2 year period. If I drill down deeper, there are some better details for optimized keywords that bring traffic to the site, etc. It seems to be very useful in benchmarking some trends against competition, but again just directional data. I would look at the percentage more than the actual numbers. Some of the segmentation data in terms of the age, income, gender data is just ok.

The biggest shocker is that the data under reports statistics so it won't match any of the web analytics data. Their unique visitor count is based on a very "sophisticated" measurement on a sample of the US internet population. Tracking is not cookie based but by audience sampling and reminds me of the Nielson ratings. (Yes, US internet users.)

Broad Match Modifier Makes Adwords Easier

I've been running AdWords campaigns for a few years and when the concept of using broad match modifier and this chart was rolled out globally, I almost cried.  I remember the sense of pure joy with an adrenaline rush only geeks who love this stuff can get.

For the first time in a long time, all of this finally made sense. This scheme makes it possible to reduce thousands of keywords within ad groups into a few without sacrificing quality score. It gives the best possible variations of usage without wasting money on broad terms that tend not to lead to quality conversions.

When interviewing firms or Adwords consultants, I always ask how they plan to structure campaigns and ad groups. The answers reveal a lot.

First, if anyone is asked to be paid on a percentage of the budget managed, then you automatically lose. Those goals are opposites. You want to spend less but get more. They want to spend more to get more.

Second, it never made any sense to take a campaign and add tens of ad groups within the campaign. After all, you only get to set the budget at the campaign level. So, if you have 10 dollars for a campaign and 5 ad groups, you can allocate a certain amount per ad group. If someone suggest building out more ad groups within the campaign, you just broke up the spend into more ad groups and having to spend for all the keywords. Now, you'll have to add more money for the campaign, and ding, ding...they make their money on the size of the account.

Use the modified broad match. It'll be your best friend and allow you to manage many more campaigns without splitting all your dollars across the plethora of keyword match options. Since it is available globally, I've used this successfully across all geographies.

AdWords Broad Match Keyword Targeting

SEO and Search History Infographic

This infographic helps tell a very concise story up to the early part of 2011 and a nice way to present the information. I still run across many folks who still believe that having the right meta tags will get you ranking on the first page. I've referred to this many times to explain the evolution from the late 1990's (when I first started learning about optimization) to how much this has changed.

Over time, I expect that domain-level link authority becomes more dominant in the share to search. This carries over from the initial page rank days when link juice was passed between different websites. This is still a key signal, but more and more authority = credibility and credible links are worth much more thank pure linking.

The only error I found in that pie chart at the end was repeating Page-level, Keyword Usage twice. Not sure if that was intended.

Source: The Evolution of Making Page 1 [INFOGRAPHIC]

The journey of a million pixels...

For me, it all started in the late 1990's. At the time, I was working at United Parcel Service (UPS) in the preload (graveyard shift). The career path was set as I rose through the ranks and more opportunities opened up. However, all around these "start-ups" were springing up.

At the time, I thought it was crazy for anyone to get involved in these companies. Some of the business ideas seemed outright absurd. However, I eventually caught the bug and decided take a chance. I remember the conversation with HR when I resigned. It was something I wouldn't forget and it went something like this. If I stay put, in 20 years, I would retire early. In the meantime, I would continue to do well (provided that I followed the path that mgmt wanted).

A voice inside shouted "20 years...they already thought about 20 years?" I left to see what the next year might look like and in my first startup experience typed in "beginning HTML" and web monkey was the first search result. The journey started with my first piece of code for a web page with "hello world."