Entries Tagged as adwords

Last week Three Deep’s Paid Search Team attended the Advanced Adwords Seminar in Minneapolis. Brandon, Jarad and I joined search marketing professionals from around the Twin Cities as seminar leader, Brad Geddes, led discussions around a variety of advanced AdWords topics such as:

• Keyword research
• Creating compelling ad copy
• Best practices for landing pages
• Increasing PPC traffic through dynamic keyword insertion
• Increasing quality score
• Conversion optimization
• Google analytics reporting

Day 1: Advanced Account Optimization

The first day we focused on best practices, tips, and techniques for improving an account’s overall performance.

Brad Geddes welcoming us to the seminar and discussing the day’s topics

Key takeaways from the first day included:

• Don’t perform long-tail keyword research until you know the specific keywords that convert. First, find the keywords that convert, then increase your keyword list by building around those keyword converting themes.
• Depending on which phase of the buying cycle the searcher is in, ad copy should emphasize features and or benefits.
  • Awareness Stage – Talk about benefits
  • Interest Stage – Talk about benefits
  • Learning Stage – Talk about features & benefits
  • Shopping Stage – Talk about features
  • Buying Stage – Talk about benefits
• Studies have shown that people look at the different parts of an ad in this order:
  1. Headline
  2. Display URL
  3. Line 1
  4. Line 2
• CTR is the #1 criteria for increasing quality score.
• Only exact match keywords are used to determine quality score.
• Keyword stuffing a landing page will not necessarily help to increase your quality score.
• Ad Group quality score only exists for display network, not on the search network.

Day 2: Advanced Conversion Optimization

The second day we focused on increasing conversions and profits in an account through advanced conversion optimization. Key takeaways from this day include:

• To determine a visitor’s lifetime value, try running a campaign that has a short term negative ROI, but a positive lifetime ROI.
• Test. Test. Test. You can test everything from search conversion rates vs. content conversion rates to conversion rate vs. total sale amount to number of page views by ad copy.
• Examining the search query report is one of the best ways to discover keywords that you’re missing out on.
• It’s important to leverage the power of Google analytics to learn ways to improve your campaign. Google analytics can reveal information such as: ROI by keyword, visitor loyalty, conversions by source, buyer geo-location, and conversion path optimization.
• It is possible to receive traffic that you did not pay for. You don’t necessarily pay for every click to your website.
• When looking to optimize a campaign, keep your eyes open for amount spent on a keyword in a day, amount spent on an ad group in a day, conversion rates by keyword, conversion rates by ad group, time spent on website, and pageviews per visitor.

After two full days of Google Adwords interactive learning and training, Jarad, Brandon and I walked away both eager and excited to implement news ideas, and reinforce some old basics into the paid search accounts we manage at Three Deep. From performing keyword research to writing ad copy to advanced conversion techniques, Brad Geddes had very useful insight and tips on everything Adwords.

Learn more about the Adwords Advanced Seminars and Brad Geddes here:

- Adwords Advanced Seminars
- Brad Geddes’s Blog

In Why Most Local Search Resellers Fail Their SMB Clients, I reacted to a recent study that revealed 90% of SMB’s quit their search marketing programs after 6 months.  It turns out that the reason why people quit these programs is because they do absolutely nothing to help the company generate new business!

700 clicks per month for $1500 — Where do I sign up????

Caveat Emptor: Clicks don’t mean a thing!  They  aren’t phone calls, don’t generate sales, or pay the rent.  Most importantly, if these clicks are “bad clicks” — meaning coming from people not actually looking for your particular service — your ROI won’t justify the expense.  Bad clicks waste your company’s time, and cost you potential revenue by throwing off your signal to noise ratio.  If you become accustomed to only seeing bad clicks/leads, then you may become jaded toward the good ones.

What do I mean by “bad clicks“?  Here’s a real world example:

Continue Reading Local Search for Small Business – Part 2 – Clicks vs. Leads →

In addition to reverse-engineering Google’s Local Search algorithm, we Three Deepers are always looking for more venues for expanding our reach for our local business clients, especially with Adwords.  I have been particularly intrigued of late by Google’s iPhone search application and how it pertains to local search.

If you haven’t read about it yet, the basic premise is that you open the iPhone app, hold it up to your mouth and say your search term.  Google recognizes what you say and automatically ties what you say to your geographic location (using either triangulation or GPS) and then returns search results based on where you are located.

While evaluating this application, I noticed that there were no advertisements on the search app results, or the Google search results on my phone.  Not having ads on the results pages was great for advertisers with strong organic search rankings (and especially those who had top 3 listing in the onebox), but it was a negative for PPC advertisers who wanted to push their way up to the top of the results.  I knew it was only a matter of time before Google would start allowing advertisers to place AdWords ads on these results pages (remember, it’s AdWords revenue that made the iPhone app FREE to users in the first place).

Continue Reading AdWords on Your Mobile Phone (Google’s G1/Android and the iPhone) →

Google has consolidated several awesome new tracking features into a single view in AdWords over the last week (some features have been there a while, but are now receiving more exposure due to a recent interface update) and we at Three Deep are in the process of putting several of these into action. The first thing that we will talk about today is the call tracking feature that they have recently added.

Ever since Google acquired Grand Central in 2007, I knew it was only a matter of time before they would start adding call tracking into AdWords.  For good reason, as phone calls to local or 1-800 numbers on a landing page can account for a large percentage of leads generated from a PPC landing page.¬† In fact, for some of our clients, phone calls have outnumbered free estimate request forms at a 2 to 1 clip.  Even for those clients where request forms still dominate leads, adding a unique tracking number to a landing page has allowed us to truly track the number of leads that we generate for clients.

Continue Reading Google AdWords New Features – Call Tracking →