Were you excited when Google AdWords released Conversion Optimizer only to be disappointed when you found out your campaigns did not meet the minimum number of conversions per month?  Well, you’re in luck.

Google has announced that your campaigns now only need to have received 50 conversions in the past month to be eligible to use Conversion Optimizer.  This will allow many additional advertisers to use the service who previously were not allowed to use it because their campaigns did not have enough volume.

What can Conversion Optimizer do for you?  It can save you time while increasing your return on advertising spend.  It can save you time by freeing you from constantly adjusting CPC bids based on how your keywords are performing. 

Instead, Conversion Optimizer will automatically adjust bids based on factors such as where the searcher is located, the keyword’s broad match query, the conversion rates in search, and the content network.  This in turn will help you meet your goals for PPC and hopefully, begin to increase your return on advertising spend.

So, if you had previously wanted to try Converion Optimizer, but were not eligible or think it could help benefit your camapigns…then, checkout how to setup Conversion Optimizer.

This started out as a very different post.  The plan was to just explain all of the reasons why using a tool that automates your pay-per-click decisions and changes is a very bad idea.  The plan was to explain using examples of nightmares, horror stories, as well as serious debates we had about the subject at ClickTracks.  That was the plan.  But, then the plan changed.

Recently, I moved to the DC area and spend a good bit of time not knowing how to get where I need to go.  Obviously, the logical solution was a GPS.  So, for the past weeks, I’ve been relying pretty heavily on my GPS…until this past weekend. 

My trip into DC went perfectly (although I will say that I always tend to second guess the routes chosen, knowing that there must be a faster, more efficient way).  After spending the day with my sister, I returned to the parking garage, fired up the GPS and headed home.  Or so I thought.

Navigating my way out of the parking garage, I was prompted with a question to which I responded ‘yes’ or ‘continue’ like I always did.  Or so I thought.

Apparently, the question is different IF you happen to be in a parking garage or anywhere else where the GPS loses the satellite.  The question (if one were to read it) has to do with the GPS going into simulation mode.  And, granted I probably should have read the manual.  But, the best that I can figure is that in simulation mode the GPS serves up the directions in reverse (from where you came from) to help you to ‘Go Home’ using the assumption that a) you know where you are and b) you follow the directions.  Neither of which – for me - happened.

But, the GPS happily continues to provide directions and locations for as long as the car is on.  I know this because as I was getting deeper and deeper into an area I know that I had not passed on the way into DC, I had this sort of false sense of confidence that I was somehow heading in the right direction because the GPS never said ‘Recalculating’ (as it does often when I miss a turn or don’t follow directions).

Then, that gut instinct took over and I realized I was incredibly lost.  You see my point about autopilot.

Of course, there was one more realization that also changed the point of this post.  As I sat on the Metro today, returning from a client meeting (sure, someday, I will trust the GPS again, but not now),  I started thinking about the evolution of pay-per-click:

Its Beginnings – Overture’s pure auction based pay-per-position model
Enter Google – A little smarter auction (bids teamed with history and performance)
Enter the Quality Score – Wow, even better now relevance factors in to what you pay for a click
Evolve the Quality Score – Landing pages, geography, and more stringent relevance considerations

And, I realized that Google doesn’t have AdWords on autopilot.  I imagine that there are teams of engineers, user experience experts, and business analysts who continually monitor AdWords performance – both for the users and for the massive revenue stream that it is.  And, continue to improve and evolve AdWords.

The premise that any technology can completely remove the human brain from having input is completely dangerous.  If Google is not willing to take this risk on something so key to its business model, maybe you should think twice about taking the risk with such a huge portion of your marketing budget.

Over the past few years working with many clients to understand how effective their pay-per-click campaigns are (and often figure out how to get them to perform better), I have compiled my top 10 list of ways that many marketers blow their budgets on PPC.

1. Ignoring Match Type Options – When you just purchase key phrases, without applying any match type, you inherit the ‘broad match’ settings which means that your ad shows up on the results page when any of the words in the phrase are searched on.

This has the two-pronged negative effect of either driving unqualified clicks or driving down your CTR which in turn drives up your CPC.

2. Ignoring Landing Pages – Many marketers feel that creating custom landing pages is just too much work.  Instead they send all pay-per-click traffic to their home page.  This is tremendously frustrating to those visitors who arrive at your site after just searching on specific words on the search engine.  They now have to begin their search again to find what they are looking for on your site.  You will see that many leave your site immediately, unwilling to search again.

3. Not Implementing Conversion Tracking Code – I am still amazed at the amount of companies who just won’t add conversion tracking code to their thank you page (the code provided by the search engines or provided by your analytics package).  Without this information, you can pretty much guarantee that you are throwing away a large percentage of your pay-per-click budget.

4. Bidding Too Little for Keywords – This may sound strange, but if you don’t pay enough for a keyword you will find yourself at best ‘beneath the fold’ (which is disappointing because many people don’t ever scroll down) or worse, on page 2 or 20 of the results.  This is just one more way of driving up your cost per click by driving down your CTR.

5. Using the ‘Set it and Forget it’ Mentality – This may be my biggest pet peeve.  Managing successful pay-per-click campaigns is not a one-time task.
Effective marketers pay attention (analyze, modify and improve) campaigns often.  Campaigns that are dormant, throw money away uselessly by continuing to spend money on keywords or ads that don’t work and don’t optimize spending on what works best.

6. Ignoring Negative Keywords – Unless your offering is free, thinking about applying negative keywords to your campaign is probably a good idea.

I could be wrong, but the last time I checked Omniture was not a free analytic solution.

7. Ignoring Ad Scheduling – Although it takes a little more work to analyze your campaigns and determine when the conversions are happening, it is well worth it.  Armed with the knowledge that your conversions take place Monday – Wednesday between 9 am – 4pm, allows you to modify your campaign so you spend more of your budget when the traffic that you want to attract is online (and pay less for traffic that does not convert).

8. Not Breaking Out Content Targeted Traffic – Okay, I was wrong earlier, this is actually my biggest pet peeve.  Unless you create a separate campaign with separate, unique destination URLs for the Content Targeted traffic, it is very difficult (even impossible depending on what analytics package you are using)
to differentiate the search/search network traffic from the content targeted traffic.  And, even though you can pay less for the content targeted traffic without breaking it out into its own campaign, you still should take the time to break it out into its own campaign.  Because, what you may find is that the traffic may not be as qualified in terms of conversions (sales), but it may generate good leads that just need additional remarketing to eventually convert.  (And, you may find data that leads you to create specific Site Targeted campaigns that really perform great).

9. Ignoring Click-Fraud or Invalid Clicks – I know that researching to determine click fraud can be time consuming, and arguing with the search engines can be frustrating and potentially even a dead-end.  I am not saying that you should spend all of your time or focus on this, but I do think it is worth paying a
little attention.  ClicKTracks has a great Click Fraud report.  But, you must know when it is potentially click fraud versus just a poorly performing ad.

10. Ignoring the Quality Score – The quality score is definitely a moving target and it recently has changed again.  But, if you understand your quality scores by simply improving your ad or your landing page (or weeding out non-performing keywords), you can dramatically lower your cost per click.  And, if you do this across the board for all of your OK or Poor quality keywords, the savings can make a huge difference.

There are few places where I feel more stupid than in an auto parts store.  Because…when I am in an auto parts store that means that there is something that is VERY basic in my car that needs fixing.

I hate knowing that everyone in the store knows more about everything in the store than me.  And I hate not having any idea of how much things should cost.

As I stood at the counter of the NAPA auto parts store this morning, trying to figure out how to purchase a gas cap to replace the one I lost, it occurred to me that many people feel the same way about finding a digital agency as I do about buying auto parts.

SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Analytics are topics that are rich with jargon and self-proclaimed experts who want you to think that there is no way that ordinary people could be successful and that the only way to be successful is to hire someone to do all the work (e.g. outsource it to them).

After many years in the working in the industry, from traditional agencies, to consultancies, to an analytics provider, I know this is not the case.  So, just like a good auto part store will help you find the tools you need, take the intimidation out of a foreign situation, and explain what you need in plain English – so should a good digital agency.

So, if you need a gas cap, I can’t recommend NAPA auto parts highly enough.  Not only did the gas cap cost less than $7 (which I assume is a good price), but the salesperson did not even make fun of me when I asked the difference between the locking and the regular gas cap.  He kindly explained to me that, ‘Well, the locking gas cap….locks.’

If you need a good digital agency, contact us – we can explain to you how your current campaigns are doing and train you on how to do better.

I had a great day at work today.  Not something many folks can say on a Monday.  But, I did.  I had a great conversation with a client about this topic today. A smart conversation with smart people.  And, at the end of the conversation, we were much happier about setting realistic goals.

I’ve mentioned before that Unique Visitors are not ‘everything’ after reading Jakob Nielsen’s article Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click (where he argues that the focus on the metric of ‘Unique Visitors must die’).

The reasons that Unique Visitors is not a metric to base goals on are:

Tendency to be inaccurate
Some log file analyzers use IP address or IP address teamed with user agent to count a unique visitor. This over-counts when visitors return from a dial-up connection (new IP address) and under-counts when accessing a site from the same network (same IP address for many people).

Cookie Issues

We’ve all heard the debate of how often people do or don’t delete their cookies.  This definitely impacts the validity of the unique visitor count.  Worse than this, however, is when a site uses a persistent cookie to define a unique visitor, yet only sets a cookie on the homepage (believe me, this happens a lot).

The fire hose issue
Unless you have a fire hose filled with money to continually pour into pay-per-click and other online advertising – the odds of month over month significantly growing the number of unique visitors is extraordinarily slim.

But here’s the kicker…
Increasing your unique visitor count is actually counterproductive.  By wanting to only grow the number of unique visitors, you are attracting useless traffic to your site.  If these unique visitors don’t return, you essentially are paying – one way or another (pay-per-click, time spent optimizing your site, time spent creating content for your site) – for visitors who will never engage with your Web site nor start a conversation with your company, never encourage their friends to see your site, or purchase your products.

With Barack Obama and John McCain now in full battle mode, I thought it would appropriate to take a look at some online metrics and make some comparisons to how each is using the internet to help their campaign. In the lead up to the election, I will post my findings and observations.

Some topic areas that I will likely include are:

• Search volume relating to each candidate in key “battle ground” states
• How they are using search
• Analysis of their Websites
• Analysis of their involvement with social media
• Other areas that seem appropriate as we move close to the election

One quick observation is how they have each reacted to hurricane Gustav. The republican convention scaled back the schedule of events and speakers on the day the hurricane hit. Instead, they focused on its potential impact and the states that could be affected. McCain’s team also made sure to give it prominent placement on their homepage and highlight speeches that were given by Cindy McCain and Laura Bush.

Not to be outdone, the Obama team has put up a splash page that has temporarily replaced their homepage. It calls for individuals to make a donation to those affected by Gustav.

So, even in times of tragedy the candidates are jockeying to show American citizens that they are in tune with the needs of those that have been affected and are working to help provide relief. And, this is just the beginning of what is sure to be a nasty battle in the coming months.

Google has announced the upcoming release of new quality score “improvements” to the AdWords system. There are three key aspects that will effect PPC advertisers…

The Quality Score will now be calculated in real time. This seems to mean that if your ad is performing particularly well in a given day, it will it be given a higher quality score resulting in better placement. This should be very interesting to see how it will effect current campaigns and what adjustments will need to be made.

Keywords will no longer be “inactive for search.” In the past, if a keyword was not performing well, you would be forced to increase your bids. But, this will no longer be the case. Now, they will always be active. But, since they have a poor quality score, they likely will not generate much traffic.

I would be very cautious with this, however, as there is the chance that you will begin to receive a spike in traffic from these types of keywords. Make sure you check to see what keywords are in your ad groups that are “inactive” and make sure you want them to be active or else it’s better to delete or pause them.

“Minimum bid” is being replaced with “first page bid.” The minimum bid is no longer going to be necessary and so instead, it is being replaced with first page bid, which allows you to see how much you need to bid in order for your ads to be shown on the first page.

Of course, all these changes are being made for two reasons. One, they intend to push ads that perform well towards the top of the rankings, resulting in more relevant ads for searchers. Secondly, it’s intended to make Google more money.

That is, at the end of the day, the main reason why they make change. But, in order for Google to make more money, they need to keep advertisers shelling out money. And to do that, they need to stay ahead of Yahoo and Microsoft by providing advertisers with the most advanced paid search platform – that when managed correctly – delivers a great return on their advertising dollars.

Click Fraud has been a serious concern for careful marketers for a long time now. But, Click Fraud also has become a scape-goat for some poorly performing campaign symptoms caused by laziness or lack of knowledge:

1 – High bounce rate/low average time on site
Most often, you will find this is the case when you have a descriptive ad that takes the visitor to a generic or a content-mismatch page (for example an online jewelry store with an ad about a silver bracelet that links to their home page describing gold jewelry).

2 – Low conversion rate
There are many causes for a low conversion rate – ranging from a user un-friendly checkout process to a bug on your site. Or, your ad may produce traffic that is just not interested in your product (if your ads imply that you are the lowest price online shoe site and you are clearly not).

3 – Traffic from same IP address (with a caveat)
If you find that you are getting a lot traffic to your site from your PPC from the same IP address, go to www.dnsstuff.com and use the WHOIS lookup. Many IP addresses resolve back to the ISP (like Earthlink or AOL).

4 – Expensive CTR (Your initial Max CPC gets you no traffic even though there is a lot of inventory)
This is a common occurrence when you initially get started in PPC. Your CPC is based on not just what you are willing to spend in relation to what your competitors are, but also your quality score, and importantly your CTR history. So, if you are launching your first campaign, expect to bid high until you can get a history of good CTR

5 – Traffic from non-Google sites, even though you have opted out of the Content Network
Opting out of the Content Network does not guarantee that all of your traffic will be a result of Google searches. Not only might your ad still show up in Gmail, Google Maps, or other Google sites - and unless you have manually opted out of the Search Partner option – you will still see results from sites like Ask.com, AOL, and many, many, many other smaller search sites that are Google’s search partners

More common symptoms of Click Fraud generally result around a big change in campaign performance. Some examples below are:

Spike in traffic from a campaign with no spike in spend or logic/seasonality-cause

Drop in traffic from a campaign with no spike in spend or logic/seasonality-cause

Change in ad performance – if your campaign has been running for a time with a high CTR and a high conversion rate, and all of a sudden the performance drops. First check to make sure there is not a problem with your site. If nothing has broken on your site, start the deeper dive.

Traffic from same IP – when the results of the WHOIS lookup shows that the IP resolves to competitor or other non-ISP traffic

No one wants to waste their PPC budget on bad clicks, but before you go to the search engines with the accusation of Click Fraud, make sure that you’ve done your due diligence to eliminate the symptoms caused by a poorly performing or expensive ad.

As we all know, Google dominates search and continues to increase its share of searches.  The latest Nielson Online data has Google garnering 60.2% of searches and 16% year over year growth.  That translates into a significant amount of additional revenue for Google’s already deep pockets. 

In order to continue to increase their revenue from search, they will either have to increase their revenue per search or continue to steal market share away from their competitors…or both.  Are they really going to continue to increase their search share and eventually end up with a 70%…80%…or even a higher share?  Maybe, but Google is not dumb and knows that they’ll need additional sources of revenue in the future.

That is why they are constantly putting out their feelers to determine new sources of revenue, which critics often refer to as a waste of money.  I’d generally disagree with that assessment, especially since they are in a position now to have the luxury to experiment. 

One area that Google seems to be experimenting in is the Google content network in AdWords.  They are constantly releasing new features that make it more transparent and give advertisers greater control over where their ads are shown and who sees them.

A couple weeks ago, they announced the set of enhancements to the Google content network.  These latest enhancements, that will be rolled out in the coming months, are a result of the DoubleClick purchase.  The four improvements are:

Frequency Capping – Limit the number of times a user sees your ad on the content network.

Frequency Reporting – Find out how many people see your ads on the content network and on average how many times they are seeing them.

Improved Ads Quality – I’m not exactly sure what this feature is, but it sounds like Google is saying they will be able to use the additional data to improve the quality of the ads that are shown on the content network.

View-Through Conversions – Find out how many visitors came to their site after viewing one of their ads on the content network.

These enhancements will give advertisers more control over who sees their ads and give them additional metrics they can use to optimize the content network.  They will first have to hope that advertisers - who had given up on the content network because of how poor much of the traffic can often be - are willing to use the new features and begin to allocate some of their budget to the content network.

If they do utilize the content network and Google is able to drive high quality traffic from the content network, then Google could begin to significantly increase their revenue from the content network.  It will be a slow process and only time will tell if these and other enhancements really do improve revenue for Google and its advertisers.

Yesterday, Google launched a new services called Insights for Search.   It builds off of Google Trends, but allows you to dig deeper into the search query data to compare search patterns by location, categories, and time frames.   

The tool works by first having you select how you want to compare the data.  The options you have are by Search Terms, Locations, or Time Ranges.  You can then filter the results by the two selections that you did not choose as well as by specific categories.  This allows marketers to get very granular data - specific to who their target audience is and where they are located. 

The tool also shows you search phrases that are currently seeing a spike in search phrases -  that ultimately, relate to the search phrases your currently researching.  This will help PPC managers find new keywords that they can potentially capitalize on before other marketers begin to bid up the costs.    

Overall, it seems like an interesting tool that will provide excellent data that can be used by marketers to bolster their search campaigns and better understand searcher behavior.