Bid Management Tools

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a deep dive into tactical campaign management strategies. As such, I wanted to focus on some low level tips today that will directly impact your campaigns. Specifically, I’m going to focus on Google AdWords match types and how you can leverage broad, phrase, and exact match to their fullest potential.

Tip 1: Always Start With Exact Match For Added Control

If you watched my recent PPC Ian video about launching new AdWords accounts, you already have a preview of my first tip today. It’s really simple: Always start with exact match, period. Exact match gives you the most control out of all match types. Exact match has the highest revenue per visitor out of all match types. Exact match is straight-forward and simple.

After starting out with exact match, you’ll have a great understanding of which keywords work and which don’t. In the cases where the keywords don’t work, you will have minimized your losses because you started with the most controlled match type. Now, it’s time to expand to phrase and later broad. As an ideal structure, I always like to see the largest number of keywords on exact, fewer on phrase, and even fewer on broad. Also, I’m a huge fan of separating the different match types into separate adgroups. Sure, this creates more adgroups, but you’ll see later that it offers even greater control for a niche strategy leveraging negative words.

While this tip may seem very basic, it’s amazing how rarely it is followed. Time and time again, I have experienced AdWords accounts over-weighted in broad match. Oftentimes, accounts are exclusively focused on broad match with very few exact match keywords. I can’t underscore it enough: The healthiest AdWords accounts are over-weighted on exact match.

Tip 2: Leverage Broad Match For Keyword Generation

I really like tip 2 because it ties into tip 1 very nicely. Once you have established your baseline of exact match keywords, it’s time to start experimenting with phrase and broad. I especially like deploying phrase and broad match variations of my top tier exact match keywords. Not only do they offer great volume expansion opportunities, but they also offer amazing keyword generation opportunities! You heard that right: I leverage phrase and broad match to generate more exact match keywords. The beauty of this tip is it keeps feeding back into tip 1 (over-weighting in exact match). As my phrase and broad match variations start generating some serious traffic, I’ll run a search query report. Those search queries that drove conversions (and are missing from my exact match keyword set) are immediately deployed as brand new exact match keywords. Why deploy them on exact? Simple: Exact match offers the greatest control in terms of traffic quality and also bidding.

Of course, it’s very important to not go overboard here. Search engine accounts need to remain manageable so it’s a judgment call whether to let phrase and broad match take care of a certain query or to deploy the query as a new exact match keyword in your account. If a query has driven a conversion, it’s important to deploy it in my opinion.

Another important point: 20 to 25 percent of Google queries are new. Because of this very fact, it’s important to have good phrase and broad match coverage. Moreover, it’s important to go far enough down the tail on phrase and broad match to help the algorithm match to all of these possible new queries. My point: Remember to keep things balanced and invest time building out phrase and broad match as well so you definitely capture those 20 to 25 percent of new, unique queries.

Tip 3: Leverage Negative Match Types To Improve Bidding Accuracy

I’d like to close out with my most advanced match type strategy. Remember under tip 1 when I said that I like to separate the different match types into different adgroups? That all comes to play with my final strategy of creating added bidding efficiencies with savvy match type execution. It’s really simple: Once I’ve separated the three match types into different adgroups, I like to leverage negative match types so the phrase and broad match versions get none of the exact match traffic and the broad match version gets none of the phrase match traffic.

Let me explain this through an example. Let’s say we deploy three keywords in three separate adgroups: [mortgage], “mortgage”, and mortgage. Let’s say we have no negative words. Let’s even say that the exact match version is bid the highest, the phrase match in the middle, and the broad match the lowest. (Side note: This should usually be the strategy.) No matter what, the phrase and broad match variations will always get some amount of exact match traffic. Moreover, the broad version will get some amount of phrase match traffic. If the user types in the exact match [mortgage], it will sometimes get mapped to “mortgage” or mortgage. Why? Google likes to test.

We know that exact match offers the best quality traffic. Pay per click is all about optimization. Now, if some of that really high quality traffic is getting attributed to the other match types, we are probably over-valuing phrase and broad and under-valuing exact. What’s my solution? Easy: I’ll add [mortgage] as a negative keyword to both the phrase and broad adgroups. I’ll add “mortgage” as a negative to the broad adgroup. That way, my traffic is always perfectly segmented by match type and I’ll bid as effectively as possible. Another option: Place your exact, phrase, and broad keywords in separate campaigns. That way, you can also use campaign level negatives if you’re not fond of adgroup level negatives. Personally, I like to place negatives on the campaign level that are just plain bad keywords. I like to place negatives under this strategy on the adgroup level. These are two unique types of negative keyword strategies and it’s easier to keep them straight if I have them stored in different places.

Remember, good data is the foundation of a solid biding strategy. Leverage this structure and match type trick to your advantage and you’ll run circles around the competition!

source: http://www.ppcian.com/ppc-match-type-strategies/

I was lucky enough to be in the beta of modified broad match and have been using this match type for a couple months now to great success. Google lifted the veil of secrecy today about the new match type and let me know that I can now blog about it.

Broad match increases reach. Phrase match increases relevancy. The new modified broad match gives you the flexibility of broad match with the control of phrase match.

Broad match is useful because: “20% of the queries Google receives each day are ones we haven’t seen in at least 90 days, if at all?” – source.

While the fact that so many queries are unique often led people to using broad match – the returns often aren’t there. This new match type gives you some control over how a broad matched word can be matched.

To use this match type, go to your account and add a + (plus) symbol in front of one or more words in your keyword phrase. Then, the word/s with the +sign must either be in the query or a close variant must be in the query. A close variant is a misspelling (flor instead of floor), plural (flowers instead of flower), or stemmed version (running instead of run).

The use of the new modified broad match will help expand your possible matches while still keeping those same matches under control. Broad match and negative keywords do work well  together, and this new match type will open up some new possibilities for broad and negative match combinations. Just remember that these new matches will still not convert higher than your exact match keywords.

If you wish to try this out, I’d suggest picking a few select ad groups where you are having problems gaining the exposure you desire, and then following these steps:

• Create a new ad group using those same keywords with the new plus modifiers
• If the old ad group has all broad match, then set a higher CPC for these new match types
• If the old ad group has all exact and phrase match, then set a lower CPC for these new match types
• Let the ad group run and collect some data
• Run the search query report examining these two ad groups and their variations
• Set appropriate bids based upon conversions

The reason to create a new ad group in this example is that you can only see search query data at the ad group level. While you can see the match type; you cannot see the keyword and match type combination that triggered a query. Over time, you might get rid of one of these ad groups and combine the keywords back into a single ad group. However, this is a new match type and there are bound to be some odd combinations that you will be shown for.

When trying out a brand new function with AdWords, it can be useful to look at the new features in isolation from other variables.

How to Optimize a Single Web Page For Over 15 Keywords and Get Ranked On All of Them

They say it can’t be done.

I’m told it’s impossible.

Ridiculous!

Scandalous!

In SEO school* we are taught that you can’t optimize a single web page for more than two or maybe three keywords at a time. Many say you can’t truly be effective optimizing for more than one. It just doesn’t work!

But what if there was a way that it could work? What if you could successfully optimize a single web page for 15 or more keyword phrases at a time and get rankings for all of them? What would that kind of information be worth to you?

Send your paypal donation to ppw@polepositionweb.com and I’ll share this secret.

Every Page Has a Core Keyword

Each page of your site should have a very particular focus. In most cases that can be summarized in two or three words. These would be your core terms.

What’s your page about?

The start of the keyword research process is uncovering all the core terms that fit your site and your audience, then mapping each core term to a specific page of your site.

For the one-keyword-only enthusiasts… this is your one keyword.

Every Core Term has Qualifier

Once you’ve got all your core terms established you can now do some more in-depth keyword research to find the qualifiers that go along with each core term.

Your qualifiers may be:

This is just a fraction of the qualifiers that you can find for any one core term. Your keyword

Finding new keywords usually involves examining some of your existing top performing keywords in all of the available tools and reports to find variations that you can use to increase the traffic your PPC ads generate.

Conducting keyword research in this manner usually leads to choosing keywords that already have multitudes of advertisers. One of your goals in conducting keyword research should be to find entirely new themes of keywords-many of which will have little or no competition. Some of these themes will convert, while others will not, but this is a very low-risk strategy for expanding the scope of your paid search campaign.

These mystical keywords do exist. Keywords that convert and yet have little to no competition. You will know you have struck gold when you find themes that have little competition, low CPCs, and that convert as well or higher than your existing keywords.

Before discussing how to find these new themes lets examine four common keyword types:

• Explicit keywords: Directly describe a product
• Problems keywords: Describes the conditions a product solves
• Symptoms keywords: Describes a problem
• Product names and part numbers: An actual product name and/or part number

Here are examples of these keyword types:

This breakdown can be a useful way of organizing keywords into ad groups as it does represent different types of searchers. Some people think more in terms of products; others in terms of solutions. Having ad copy that speaks to the way the searcher is looking for your products can be very useful.

If you look closely at these keywords, they can tell you stories. For example, if your computer is so slow that you are having problems running excel, one of the solutions could be to install more laptop memory, and your particular laptop requires part number 1bg pc2-5300 DDR2 memory.

A pipe broke in your basement, causing it to flood, and now you need a plumber in Boston to come fix the problem and the part number he needs to replace your broken pipe is a p-1-1011 3/4.

It’s easy to see these stories after you have conducted keyword research. However, instead of creating stories after doing keyword research, you could also create these scenarios and use them to find new keywords.

Lets assume that you sell laptop memory. You look up “excel slow” on the Google keyword tool and find it has 12,100 searches a month. You then do a search and realize there are absolutely no ads showing for this keyword. A little digging gives you a dozen variations of “excel slow” that lead to about fifty thousand impressions a month.

You add those keywords into your account and decide to gather some data. It turns out that their conversion rates are lower than keywords such as “buy laptop memory,” but the CPCs are so low, the keywords are profitable. Now, you can expand that theme to other office products such as “Outlook slow,” “Word slow,” etc and you can easily add another few hundreds thousand monthly impressions for your keywords.

In fact, as of the day this article was written none of the keyword searches for slow and any Microsoft Office product displayed a single ad on Google. Of course, this does not mean these words would convert. It just shows there are problem and solving keyword types that are under-monetized and worth testing to see if you can get conversions on these keywords.

Next time you want to find new keywords, don’t start with a keyword tool. Think about your products, and ask these questions:

• What problems can you solve?
• What creative solutions can you come up with?
• What symptoms appear to a consumer that your product will fix for them?

Write a few simple stories. They do not have to be long. They only need to contain a problem, symptom, explicit solution and product keyword. Now do keyword research using these stories to see if you can find entirely new customers to reach.

Often this research has already been done by your product department. If your product department creates use-case scenarios for your services and products in the design phase or before taking them to market ask to see the use-cases. Reading these scenarios may open up entirely new avenues for marketing your products.

Keyword tools are useful for expanding what you have found. They definitely have a place in every marketers toolkit.

However, creating use-case scenarios by writing short stories for your products can lead you in entirely new directions for finding golden keywords.

Conducting keyword research in this manner usually leads to choosing keywords that already have multitudes of advertisers. One of your goals in conducting keyword research should be to find entirely new themes of keywords – many of which will have little or no competition. Some of these themes may not convert, and others will.

You will know you have struck gold when you find themes that have little competition, low CPCs, and convert as well or higher than your existing keywords.

These mystical keywords do exist. Keywords that convert and yet have little to no competition.

Before we cover the methodology used to find these new themes; let us examine four common keyword types:

Explicit keywords: Directly describe the product.

Problems keywords: Describes the conditions the product solves

Symptoms keywords: Describes the problem

Product names and part numbers: The actual product names and/or part numbers.

Here are examples of these keyword types:

This breakdown can be a useful way of organizing keywords into ad groups as it does represent different types of searchers. Some people think more in terms of products, and others in terms of solutions. Having ad copy that speaks to the way the searcher is looking for your products can be very useful. However, for the purposes of finding new keywords – we will leave that discussion for another day.

If you look closely at these keywords, they can tell you stories. For example, if your computer is so slow that you are having problems running excel, one of the solutions could be to install more laptop memory, and your particular laptop takes 1bg pc2-5300 DDR2 memory.

A pipe broke in your basement, causing it to flood, and now you need a plumber in Boston to come fix the problem and the part number he needs to replace your broken pipe is a p-1-1011 3/4.

It’s easy to see these stories after you have conducted keyword research. However, instead of creating stories after you have conducted keywords research, you could also create these scenarios and use those scenarios to find new keywords.

Let us assume that you sell laptop memory. You look up ‘Excel slow’ as a keyword and find it has 12,100 searches a month according to the Google keyword tool. You then do a search and realize there are absolutely no ads showing for this keyword. A little digging gives you a dozen variations of ‘Excel slow’ that lead to about fifty thousand impressions a month.

You add those keywords into your account and decide to gather some data. It turns out that their conversion rates are lower than keywords such as ‘buy laptop memory’, but the CPCs are so low, the keywords are profitable. Now, you can expand that theme to other office products such as ‘Outlook slow’, ‘Word slow’, etc and you can easily add another few hundreds thousand monthly impressions for your keywords.

In fact, as of the day this article was written – none of the keyword searches for slow and any Microsoft Office product displayed a single ad. Of course, this does not mean these words would convert. It just shows there are problem and solving keyword types that are under monetized and worth testing to see if you can receive conversions on these keywords.

Next time you want to find new keywords, do not start with a keyword tool. Think about your products.

• What problems can you solve?
• What creative solutions can you come up with?
• What symptoms appear to a consumer that your product will fix for them?

Write a few simple stories. They do not have to be long. They only need to contain a problem, symptom, explicit, and product keyword. Now do keyword research from these stories to see if you can find entirely new customer bases to reach.

Often this research has already been done by your product department. If your product department creates use case scenarios for your services and products while building your products, or before taking them to market; ask to see their use cases. Reading these scenarios may open up entirely new avenues to marketing your products.

Keyword tools are useful for expanding what you have found. They definitely have a place in every marketers toolkit.

However, creating use case scenarios by writing short stories for your products can lead you in entirely new directions for finding golden keywords.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/strike-keyword-gold-by-writing-a-simple-story-38882

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”

This famous opening line from A Tale of Two Cities accurately describes the life of two keywords that reside in two very different countries (paid search campaigns). These two keywords were identical twins separated at birth. One keyword moved to Country A, which followed the law of last click attribution. The other keyword moved to Country B, where they followed the law of attribution management.

“It was the spring of hope” for the keyword that moved to Country B; “It was the winter of despair” for the keyword that moved to Country A.

Let’s now examine why these two identical keywords live such very different lives. Each of these keywords are classified as general terms, such as “toys,” “furniture,” “office supplies,” “laptop” or “shoes.” Thousands of searches are done each day for each one of them, and very often, more refined searches, such as “outdoor toys,” “leather sofa,” “automatic stapler,” “MacBook Pro” or “black high heeled shoes,” will follow them. Like all general terms, they most often occur at the top of the conversion funnel, which we would classify as “introducers,” meaning they’re often the first step of a purchase path. We can also classify some terms “influencers”—the middle step(s) in the path, or as “closers”—the last step in the path or conversion funnel.

On the surface, each of these keywords has a very similar life, in terms of search volume, click cost, and where they appear in the purchase path. However, how they are valued by their countries is where they differ greatly. To highlight this, let’s look at some metrics for these keywords over the last 500 clicks:

As the chart shows, these keywords performed exactly the same. They each contributed 35 times in purchase paths (introducers + influencers + closers = total contributions by that keyword). When each keyword is valued solely on its ability to close, they too are exactly the same ($100 last click profit). However, in Country B, the land of attribution, they don’t just see value in a keyword’s ability to close, but also in the keyword’s ability to introduce and influence people to buy. Therefore, when Country B determines the value of a keyword, they also include the number of times it was an introducer and influencer into their value calculation. This is what is known as attribution management, the process of properly identifying and valuing the chain of marketing initiatives and advertisements that lead to a sale or conversion.

These countries both have the same goal established for every keyword in their country. In order for a keyword to be allowed to continue to live, it needs to achieve a $.20 profit per click. Based on the charts above, keyword A is currently generating $.20 of profit per click, and keyword B is generating $.50 of profit per click. Based on the established goal, each of these keywords should be allowed to continue to live today.

Each of these countries also calculates the maximum bid price they can afford (assuming its conversion rate remains constant) to pay per keyword while still achieving the $.20 profit per click. In keyword A’s case, they are currently at the maximum bid, which is $.10 per click, whereas keyword B could have a bid price of up to $.30 per click to still achieve the goal of $.20 profit per click (500 clicks x $.30 cost per click = $150 ad spend, producing $100 of profit. $100 profit divided by 500 clicks = the goal of $.20 profit per click).

These two countries share another similarity in that they apply more financial resources (ad budget) to keywords that are performing above the goal of $.20 profit per click. By applying more financial resources and increasing the max bid, they are able to get more clicks on that keyword, which in turn yields more profit for that country. Under this system, general terms in country B can often be among the top performing keywords in that country, but in country A, these general keywords may be stuck at a lower bid or even paused (killed).

As you can now clearly see, the lives of two identical keywords are incredibly different simply based on how their performance is valued. Keyword A is close to being killed, whereas keyword B is regarded as a hero, performing far better than expected. In the world of online marketing, if you are still using last-click laws to value your marketing, you have likely killed a lot of innocent keywords and rewarded other keywords that are not truly deserving of that honor.

In Country B, which has far more progressive laws for the valuing of keywords, they are able to identify the real value of a keyword by looking beyond just its ability to close. As a result country B can then move on to more sophisticated attribution models, like implementing law that excludes giving credit to branded terms that occur at the end of a purchase path, as they deem branded terms at the end of a path are only used for navigational purposes rather than contributing to a conversion.

In this tale of two keywords, Keyword B will experience “the best of times in the age of wisdom,” while Keyword A will live in “the worst of times in the age of foolishness.”

How to structure a proper attribution model

So, how can you make sure that your marketing campaigns experience “the best of times in the age of wisdom”? To start, here’s a low cost process that you can go through to see the impact of attribution:

1. Determine the average number of visits per conversion on your website. You can get this information from any web analytics tool, including Google Analytics, which is free. If the average number of visits per conversion is much greater than one, then you know your average customer is requiring more than one visit to your site to convert. If you’re using last click attribution, you are giving too much credit to the last click and no credit to the influencers and introducers that are also integral to the conversion.
2. Bucket your keywords into the following 3 categories: introducers, influencers and closers (do this for your paused keywords as well). This exercise is going to require some educated guesses, unless you have a technology that does this for you. An introducer would be the most general terms that describe your business, like “toys,” “shoes,” etc. Closers are brand terms, model numbers and exact product names. Anything that is not classified as an introducer or closer can be put in the influencer bucket.
3. Count the number of introducers, influencers and closers you currently have in your active campaigns. Are you heavily favoring your closers and ignoring many introducers and influencers?
4. Count the number of introducers, influencers and closers you currently have in your paused campaigns. Are you finding that the majority of these paused keywords fall under the introducer and influencer categories and very few are closers?
5. Run a report that shows the number of times these closing keywords have converted each month over the last year, in order to establish a baseline.
6. Of introducers and influencers that you have paused, select a large enough sample size that generates significant traffic and truly describes the business you are in, and turn them back on. For example, if you’re selling baby furniture and you have the keyword “baby furniture” paused, turn it back on.
7. You’re going to have to measure the impact that these introducers and influencers have. First, count the number of conversions they currently receive under last click (just because a keyword is typically an introducer or influencer doesn’t mean it will not act like a closer some times), and more importantly, ask whether the keywords defined as closers now have more conversions, especially your branded terms, compared to the baseline report you created in step 5?
8. While you’re studying the numbers above, you will likely recognize two things that could concern you:
   • Your overall conversion rate has decreased
   • Your cost per acquisition has increased.

   This is to be expected. Why? As you invest in introducers and influencers and only measure by last click, your introducers and influencers will appear to not contribute to conversion rate. Because you are buying more advertising, you may find that your overall CPA does rise, but that is not always the case.

9. Ask yourself this question: Is increasing conversion rate and lowering CPA the reason why you’re in business? No. The reason you’re in business is to generate profit. It may seem counterintuitive, but overall profit can increase even while conversion rate decreases and CPA increases. So, the real metric to look at is total revenue. How much of an increase in revenue did you receive by adding introducers and influencers back into your campaign versus not having them at all? If you see a healthy rise in revenue, then you can likely conclude that having introducers and influencers in your campaign has been successful.

Follow these steps and you’ll likely discover why more and more marketers are developing more sophisticated attribution models for their paid search campaigns, rather than simply crediting the last click in the conversion funnel.

source: http://searchengineland.com/valuing-keywords-based-on-their-role-in-conversion-37364