I posted about a week ago that Google’s call extension whereby every time an advert appears, it is assigned a dynamic, traceable telephone number, would go a long way to helping businesses where conversions take place offline monitor the effectiveness of their AdWords efforts. However, on further investigation, the extension has pretty limited value. The reason for this is that when enabled, a dynamic number shows in the advert and if someone calls this number, it is routed through Google and so can be tracked. However, pretty much everyone will click on the ad as opposed to just calling the number listed in it. For those who do click on the ad’ and subsequently visit the contact page, they see the same number as everybody else. I had expected that there would be some means of feeding the dynamic number through to the website contact page thereby ensuring that the tracking ability is not lost for those who click on the ad’ but this is not the case. I am guessing that it is not beyond Google’s capability to offer this functionality and if they did, then this would be a powerful tool. In its current form where conversions can only be tracked for those who don’t click on the ad’ it has pretty limited use.

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Our PPC guys called me yesterday asking if I could help as they were having difficulty using custom geo-targeting for a new campaign we were setting up. On investigating, every time we tried to set a custom geo-target for a new campaign, we got an error message. We thought maybe a temporary error but when it persisted, we did a little digging and found out that from end of this year, custom geo targeting will include only a radius around a point but not a polygon custom shape. All campaigns currently set up using the polygon method will be migrated to the nearest city or town from early 2012. This is a pain and it is hard to know why Google did this as clearly it provides a poorer user experience. The best way to achieve the same effect is to use multiple overlapping cirles to target your desired area but this is time consuming and less accurate than the polygon method.
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Anyone who manages Adwords accounts knows the ongoing conflict between having keyword match types loose enough to ensure no valuable impressions and clicks are missed and having them tight enough to ensure that traffic is relevant and targeted. Putting everything in phrases or exact protects the advertiser against irrelevant clicks but means that many valuable impressions are missed. However, put everything in broad and you may as well write a blank cheque and post it to Sergey Brin with a note saying “Hey Sergey, go nuts!” And go nuts they will! Once we put “carpet cleaning” as a broad match term in an account only to see us pay for a click when someone searched for “is it possible to dry clean at home?” It seems by “broad match” they mean “we don’t give a damn if it’s relevant or not, we’ll show your ad’ anyway” match! So, companies like DPFOC have resorted to leaving phrases in broad match but then adding countless negatives to protect against irrelevant clicks. This is a cumbersome and seemingly never ending process. For example, a client that we have that deals in water damaged property wanted “water damage” in broad match with the result that at this point we have had to add pretty much every make or car and electronic device as a negative to avoid irrelevant clicks. “I Pod, i pad, blackberry, mac, pc, computer, tv, television” and on and on and on!!

However, the broad match modifier changes all this. This match type sits in between the too loose broad match and the too restrictive phrase match perfectly. By including the + symbol in front of a word in a broad match term, this instructs Google to show the ad’ only if this word or a very closely related word is present. So to take the above examples, we could add “+water +damage +property” as a broad match term. This would cover everything from “property damaged by water”  to “water damage at my properties” but not appear for “water damage iphone” as the word property or no closely related term is present.

The broad match modifier essentially is the only match type required. It’s loose enough to cover all relevant searches and tight enough to weed out the crap.

Sometimes a need arises to have multiple Adwords accounts sending traffic to a single website. For example, we have a client with many franchisees. Each franchisee has their own landing page on the main website. The reason we did it this way was because it helps create a large website with lots of links and so rankings are doing well. However, the dilemma here is that Adwords and Analytics accounts can only be linked on a one to one relationship. In other words the cost data from multiple Adwords accounts cannot be imported into the Analytics account for a single website. Before anyone suggests it, yes we did try setting up separate profiles in Analytics but no joy. The only solution that we can think of is to create a separate Analytics account for each franchisee and linking their PPC accounts to this. The difficulty this creates is that we are adding over 30 Analytics codes to each page on the site which we fear will hurt download speed. Interestingly, this means that when one franchisee logs in, he sees the traffic in its entirety to the website with the paid traffic from other franchisees showing as “not set.” Apart from adding all the code to each page, this is a tidy solution. Obviously life would be far easier if each franchisee had his own site but then our link building would be divided up amongst a lot of sites and so our efforts would be diluted. No right answer here but we think what we’re doing represents the best approach.

I regularly hear people saying to me that “Adwords doesn’t work.” I find this strange. Adwords is very simple in its concept in that it allows vendors put their advert in front of buyers at the precise moment that they are researching a purchase. So, if you sell 3 bedroomed apartments in London, you can specify that your advert should only appear when users search for “3 bed apartment London.” Further, your ad-text can reference how great your 3 bed apartments are and your landing page can be that page on your site that promotes your 3 bed offering. This is a level of precision simply unparalleled by any other form of advertising (apart from SEO of course!!). So, why do I hear people saying that Adwords doesn’t work? The harsh reality is that it doesn’t work for most because they don’t use it properly. The medium is fine, the user is not! Here are a list of common problems we come accross.

Un-targeted Clicks:

Far too often, we see clients who busily create lengthy, exhaustive lists of phrases for fear of missing some valuable impressions and clicks. That’s fine but use broad match restrictively, with diligence and in my opinion not at all. For example, we had a client who added “property dry out” as a broad match phrase thinking his ad’ would appear if someone searched for this. No one told him that Google would also show his ad’ for terms it deemed related. Here’s a few phrases that Google considers to be related to “property dry out” and for which our client paid for when people clicked on his ad’ after searching for these:

How to dry clean at home

How to dry out an iphone

how to dry my laptop

dry out pimples

the list goes on!!!

However, our client had no idea he was paying for such loose clicks as he, like most clients, was monitoring, the “keywords” section of his account all the while scratching his head as to why inquiries were so low despite so many clicks! Let’s face it, none of the above were ever going to convert. To see what terms were actually searched for, go to the keywords tab, then “see search terms” and then “all” as below. This is by far and away the most important place in your Adwords account.

To ensure that you only pay for relevant clicks, use phrase / exact match and add negatives also. Jobs, recruitment, vacancies, opportunities, positions, internships are good negatives to weed out job hunters for example.

Crap Websites:

Once the above is sorted, some are still left scratching their heads “all of clicks are perfect but still not that many inquiries!!” Sometimes, we have to diplomatically advise “eh, your website’s crap!” If your website is no good, then you can get as much targeted traffic as you like; it won’t convert! See our conversion optimization guide at the resources section of our website.

Low Quality Scores:

The higher your quality score, the less you pay for clicks from a certain phrase in a given position all else being equal. So, a high quality score can cut your CPA drastically. To preserve it, set up targeted adgroups with targeted ad text and targeted landing pages. Also, ensure CTR doesn’t fall below 1% and keep higher where possible.

Heard it all before? Well then well done to you! I agree Adwords is not rocket science but that being so, why do so many people waste so much money on it!

While we focus on providing a world class SEO service and tend not to do much Adwords consultancy, we still help out many of our clients with their Adwords spend. To that end, adding campaign wide negative key-phrases is something that is required again and again. Amazingly, this functionality is not available within the Adwords interface. However, if you download the Adwords Editor, you can quickly add key-phrases across as many campaigns as you wish with the click of a button. The Adwords Editor is a fantastic tool but my question is that if the functionality is worth having, which clearly it is, why not include it for all in the online interface and not just in the editor!!

Anyone who has managed a Google Adwords (sponsored links) campaign will know that the higher your quality score, the lower your cost per click. Accordingly, it makes sense to work hard to play by Google’s rules to get as many clicks as possible for a given budget.

Having tight adgroups with small numbers of key-phrases, well written ad-text and targeted landing pages are all crucial and done as standard by any conscientious Adwords manager. However, doing the above is not enough. Even with the above tidy structure, it is not uncommon to see very low quality scores. The only remaining factor is CTR – low CTRs drag down quality score over time. So, even though Google won’t say it directly, placing your ad’ anywhere other than in the top three results is counterproductive as no matter how well written your ad’ text is and how targeted your key-phrases are, if your ad shows on the right of the page, it will have a low CTR and drag down quality scores for the entire campaign. The reality is that you need to pay to be in the top three or pause the key-phrase. So, identify your best performing key-phrases, pay to have them in the top three and so get good CTRs and good quality scores.

It does beg the question though if running an ad’ in anywhere other than top three positions is damaging to a campaign, why have the other ad’s there at all?

Very often clients ask us to add some negative keywords / phrases to their account and want to apply these to all campaigns in the account. If the list of negative keywords / phrases is long and there are several campaigns, this is a very time consuming task when using Google Adwords online interface. Every negative needs to be individually added to each campaign.

However, if you download Adwords Editor http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/ to your desktop, performing the exact same task takes literally a few seconds. For small accounts, the online interface is easy to use but for larger campaigns it can be a bit slow and cumbersome. Another example would be if you wanted to edit the destination URL for all ads in an adgroup, this would need to be done individually for each ad’. However, in editor, bulk actions can be performed. There are many, many other ways that managing your Adwords account in Editor as opposed to the online interface saves time and so for those with large campaigns, downloading and using this free tool is a must.

If you would like one of our Google Adwords Qualified Professionals to visit your premises anywhere in the UK to analyse your Adwords campaign, just give us call or drop us an e-mail and we’ll be delighted to meet you – we’ll even give you £75 FREE Adwords credit just for meeting us!!

SEO India