There has certainly been no lack of words written about Google’s announcement last week that the ability to rotate ads evenly, indefinitely, is going away. But what the hell, I need to add in my two cents anyway. This is a ridiculously bad change that came without asking the PPC community for feedback, and there deserves to be a backlash.

In case you missed this week’s top story, Google has announced that starting this week, the “rotate” setting in text ads will rotate your ads evenly for 30 days, then optimize each ad for clicks. This is a huge departure from PPC best practices, since you need to rotate your ads evenly to get a valid statistical test. With most accounts, it’s going to take a lot longer than 30 days of even rotation to get enough traffic to make sure you have a valid result.

This change sucks because it eliminates any possibility of long-term manual ad testing. I’ve worked in PPC accounts with daily budgets from $50/day to $50,000/day over the last four years, and I’ve only seen a valid ad split test in 30 days happen a handful of times. When you’re properly segmenting your ad groups into segments of sufficient granularity, it takes some time to see results. With this update, Google has said that they really don’t care about PPC specialists managing accounts for better results – they would much rather just take your money via amping up your click-through rate without considering the fact that most advertisers are optimizing for conversions, not clicks.

This is different than your run-of-the mill bitching about SEO. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land recently wrote an excellent article about the recent Penguin algorithm updates titled Google Doesn’t Owe You A Living, So Don’t Depend On It. And he’s absolutely right, at least in the SEO world. But this isn’t SEO. This is paid search, which is the big cash cow that allows Google to pursue all those other neat projects that lose a hell of a lot of money for them. If you do PPC, Google does owe you a living, and they should act like it. PPC advertisers are their customers, and to make a huge, impactful change like this without at least consulting some experts in the field is inexcusable.

There’s no telling if this change will be rolled back. But if you want your voice to be heard about this, I recommend that you sign the Google Ad Rotation petition. Maybe if we get enough people talking about this, Google might actually listen to their customers.

Path reports are helpful because they indicate how many search queries and ad impressions a user took to complete a conversion. They also detail each campaign, ad group, or keyword along the way so that you can see how your account elements interact. This is useful for identifying the search funnels that your users go through, so you can better understand their research process. You can use this information to build out your campaigns to reach users earlier in the research process, or stop yourself from pausing campaign elements that drive conversions further on down the line.

Now without further ado, let’s get on to the reports:

Top Paths

This report allows you to view paths that users took to complete a conversion. You can break down this information by Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, or Query:

Breaking this report down by campaign can illustrate how often users switch between your broad categories (for example, if they go from searching in a product campaign to one of your brand name campaigns). The Ad Group Path dimension gives you the same information at the ad group level. The keyword and query dimensions is where it gets really interesting. Here, you can see the actual keyword click paths that a visitor used on either the keywords you were bidding on, or the actual queries they used to trigger your ads.

If you click on the “Other” option, you’ll see a few more advanced dimensions:

The Impression Paths dimensions allows you to see similar path data, only this is for users who saw your ad multiple times but didn’t necessarily click on each one. The Transition paths reports condense repeated keyword searches, so you’ll only see data on people who switched from one campaign, ad group, or keyword to another. This helps reduce the noise of data in the reports – a lot of the time you’ll see a path that’s just 2-4 instances of the same keyword repeated. That’s not all that useful if you want to get a handle on how your users are researching your products.

You should also take note of the filtering options at the top right of the chart:

Using these options, you can filter your data to view exactly what you’re looking for. You can limit your data to paths of a certain number of steps or more, view data for a specific type of conversion, expand your history window to 30, 60, or 90 days, and choose to only show complete conversion paths. All of these settings are useful for reducing the noise in your report and getting down to what really matters.

Time Lag

For many accounts, a click doesn’t immediately lead to a conversion. Users quite often delay their purchase decision, choosing to do more research or consult with someone else before they actually complete a transaction. This report helps you visualize how long it takes for your users to make those conversions.

On the Time Lag report, you get metrics on how many days (on average) it takes for a user to complete a conversion. You can choose your starting point as the first impression, first click, or last click:

Not only do you get the total conversions for each time segment, but you also get how much of a percentage of the total is represented in each segment of days to conversion.

Path Length

This final report gives you a more quantitative data set regarding the number of clicks or impressions it takes to convert. This report aggregates your entire account’s data, so it’s not all that useful for quantifying user paths at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level. However, it does give you an idea of the macro trends in your account so you can get an idea of the average amount of searches it takes for you to close on a user.

With this report, you can look at total clicks or impressions per conversion. This has a similar breakdown to the Time Lag report, telling you the total and the percentage of conversions at each level of clicks or impressions.

That just about covers it for the Search Funnel reporting. These are highly useful and highly under-utilized reports that can really aid in analysis. If you’re a little more advanced in the PPC game, I highly recommend that you look in to how these reports might work for your account. You can see some significant returns in your account performance with the knowledge you gain from analyzing your search funnels.

First click and last click reports are important because they allow you to find out the first and last steps users are taking when they enter your search funnel. It’s just as important to know where they began as where they end. If you pause keywords that get a lot of first-click conversions but not a lot of last-clicks, you’ll reduce awareness of your company and you could lose a lot of conversions as a result. Conversions are measured as “last click” by default, so it’s important to run first-click conversion reports every once in a while to get a fuller picture of your conversion events.

To see your first-click conversion info, go to the “First Click Analysis” link in your Search Funnels report menu:

On this report, you can do many of the same viewing options as the other search funnel reports: change the date range, look at a line or plot graph, or compare metrics. You can also filter down your data to first clicked campaign, ad group, or keyword. These reports will tell you which of your account elements are the introduction to your company: the ones that bring that crucial first impression to your website.

The Last Click Analysis report doesn’t offer all that much in addition to your regular conversion reports. After all, conversions are last-click by default, so you’ll probably be looking at the same data that’s in your regular reporting. But this report works well in tandem with the first-click analysis to give you a complete view of the search funnel. Run both reports at once with identical settings to see how your account elements are interacting.

That wraps up this week. Next week, we’ll finish up the series with the final three reports: Top Paths, Time Lag, and Path Length.

An “assist” is when a click or impression is part of a user’s search funnel, but it’s not the last click that leads them to a conversion. Here’s an example. Let’s say that a user searches for “signs” and sees your ad. Then, they do another search for “yard signs” and click your ad and bounce from your landing page. Two days later, they return to your site by searching for “political yard signs,” clicking an ad, and completing a conversion. In this scenario, “signs” would get an assist impression, “yard signs” would get an assist click and an assist impression, and “political yard signs” would get the conversion. Knowing which keywords provide assists is important because it can give you insight into which keywords are causing users to enter your search funnel, even if they don’t directly drive conversions. If you pause keywords that drive a lot of assists, you may be losing potentially valuable customers.

There are two reports that you can look at to get information on assists: Assist Clicks and Impressions and Assisted Conversions.

Assist Clicks and Impressions

On this report, you can get stats on the total number of assist clicks, the ratio of assist clicks to last clicks, the total amount of assist impressions, and the ratio of assist impressions to last clicks:

These stats are helpful in determining how much assist clicks contribute to your overall conversions. Accounts with longer search funnels will tend to have more assist clicks. If you see that your account gets a particularly large amount of assists, you’d better think twice and check this report before you pause any keywords.

To double check keywords before pausing them, change the primary dimension on this report to “keywords.” You’ll get a list of keywords that you can then filter by last clicks, assist clicks, assist clicks/last clicks, assist impressions, and assist impressions/last clicks. Use these filters to identify which keywords are contributing significantly to your search funnel, even if they don’t drive conversions.

Assisted Conversions

This next report lets you look on the flip side of the assist equation and see the actual conversions driven by the traffic assists. There are two sections to this report: click-assisted conversions and impression-assisted conversions:

The click-assisted conversions report is similar in structure to the other assist reports, but the stats you’re looking at here are last click conversions, last click conversion value (if you have code that assigns value to your conversion events), click-assisted conversions, click-assisted conversion value, and the ratio of click-assisted conversions to last click conversions. The impressions-assisted conversions report has similar stats: last-click conversions, last click conversion value, impression-assisted conversions, impression-assisted conversion value, and the ratio of impression-assisted conversions to last click conversions.

You can break down information in each report by campaign, ad group, or keyword. These reports can help you identify which campaigns are dependent on assists for their conversion value. This can also help you find the true impact of your display advertising by finding which display ads are assisting with conversions. If a person sees an ad on the display network, they may not be inclined to click on that ad, but they will become aware of your brand and they might make a conversion as a result of this awareness. Assist reports can often be a better way to justify your display advertising rather than getting conversion stats for only the display campaign.

That covers the assist reports. Be sure to check back next week when we’ll go over first click and last click analysis.

Part 1: Overview
Part 2: Assists
Part 3: First/Last Click Analysis
Part 4: Paths

Now, let’s get started by showing you how to access these reports. First, go to your “Tools and Analysis” tab and select “Conversions”:

If you have multiple conversion events set up, then you’ll see stats for them on this page. But that’s not what we’re looking for right now. Look for a link titled “Search Funnels” on the left navigation bar and click it:

This will take you to a page with a lot of useful search funnel conversion reports:

In this post, we’ll go over the Overview and Top Conversions reports. The rest of the reports will be covered in following weeks.

Overview

This report will give you a general overview of your total conversions, and how they fit into your search funnel metrics. You’ll get a nice chart to illustrate daily trends, a few important metrics to look at (total conversions, days to conversion, ad clicks per conversion, and ad impressions per conversion) and a breakdown of conversions by type.

Like most other reports in AdWords, you can change your stats on the chart, compare two metrics on your chart, or change the data range. But don’t forget some of the other options in the upper right corner:

The “All Conversions” drop-down allows you to filter down to individual conversion events if you have multiple custom conversions set up. For example, if you have two conversion events (a purchase and a newsletter signup conversion) set up, then you can look at only one of those conversions on the report. Very helpful if you’re trying to get stats for only one type of goal.

On the “History Window” option, you can choose to look at 30, 60, or 90 day paths. This could be helpful if your lag time between initial visit and complete conversion is longer than usual. This is common with a lot of industries with a high price tag or a long decision process.

The last option is “Complete Paths.” Selecting this checkbox will filter out conversions from paths affected by a user’s cookie deletion. You might see fewer conversions, but you’ll see more accurate conversion paths.

Top Conversions

This report has much of the same information as the Overview, but there are a few more options to help you analyze each individual conversion event. Notice that there’s a new button at the top right of your chart:

The left side of the button toggles regular chart display. The right half takes you to an interesting visualization. You can play animations that display your total conversion or total conversion value over time. You can display it by moving dots:

Or as a bar graph:

Press the “play” button below the graph to start the visualization.

This report depends entirely on the multiple conversion events you customize, so it’s hard to give specific advice. Each conversion setup is going to have a different use for it, so play around with the report to see what makes sense for you.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned next week, when we’ll cover assist reports.

But after reading exactly what the changes are, I felt a little…underwhelmed. Rather than recapping each change (Search Engine Land does a great job of that), I’ll provide my expert opinion regarding what each of these changes mean for those of us who do PPC for a living.

Broad Match Modifier

Yet another example where Microsoft is playing catch-up with a Google feature that’s ancient history. Still, modified broad match is a lot better than regular broad match, so this is a plus. However, there wouldn’t be a need for a broad match modifier if the search engines could do a better job of matching broad queries to relevant ads.

AdCenter Express

I’ve already written about how AdWords Express is a bad idea. And it sounds like AdCenter Express isn’t any better. Please, small business owners, don’t take shortcuts with PPC. Either learn how to do it right, or don’t do it at all. If you do a half-hearted effort at a PPC account (like through these “express” offerings), you’re going to get a half-hearted result.

Rich Ads

Interesting developments, but I’m still wary. I’ve done my own testing of rich ad formats in AdWords, and results have always been a little disappointing no matter what shiny new beta Google is pushing at the moment. And with Google Maps, Google Offers, star ratings, product feeds, and YouTube, Google has a whole host of in-house products that actually provide good value. Microsoft, on the other hand, is going to have to rely on partnerships with third parties to provide valuable extensions for rich ads. I’m a little skeptical that they can pull this off.

Dynamic Location Extensions/Sitelinks

Now these ad extensions I can get behind. Both provide value in terms of usability. But again, this is another instance where Microsoft is just catching up to Google, not truly innovating.

Improved Quality Score Data

You’ll soon be able to get quality score data for various match types and for mobile targeting. That’s useful, I guess. But I think that too many people chase quality score as a metric to optimize. Remember, quality score is the canary in the coal mine. It can help you diagnose a problem, but a coal miner’s job is to dig for coal, not keep a canary alive.

AdCenter Desktop For Mac

I’m not a Mac user (partly due to the fact that not all of my PPC tools are Mac-compatible), but I have to admit that it surprised me that there was still no AdCenter desktop tool for Apple users. Seriously, Microsoft. I know you have a grudge with your competitor and all, but have you seen what your advertisers are using to create PPC accounts? Apple may still only have a fraction of the laptop market share, but every time I go to a conference with my peers I feel like I’m in the minority as a PC user.

So my final verdict is that I give this round of improvements a resounding “meh.” The problem is that Microsoft is not an innovator in the PPC space. They constantly play catch up with Google, and often lag far behind in essential features. But I only say this because I truly want AdCenter to be better. Despite my griping, they really do offer a good product, and I think that it’s important that Google has a serious competitor in pay per click to keep them honest.

So how were they able to achieve this spectacular feat of jerkitude? It turns out that while Google offers some protections for trademarks in AdWords ads, their system isn’t entirely flawless. There’s a shady workaround that ProFlowers used, and that I’m going to show you in this post.

First off, let’s talk a little about how trademark usage works in AdWords and AdCenter. Both networks allow you to bid on keywords related to a competitor’s trademark. But text ads are a different story. In Google, trademark owners can file a request to Google to disallow the use of their trademarks in ads. Once this is approved, any advertiser who tries to use that trademark in ads might find those ads disapproved instantly once they’re submitted, or held “under review” indefinitely. AdCenter is a little more lenient with trademark use in ads. Here are their guidelines, taken from Microsoft’s Intellectual Property Guidelines page:

Please note that Microsoft allows the fair use of trademarks in ad text, such as:

Use of a trademark by a reseller of authentic goods or services
Informational websites about goods or services represented by the trademark, such as product reviews
Ordinary dictionary use of a term
Comparative advertising, when supported by independent research

Google’s intellectual property guidelines can be found here. Also note that these rules apply to legally-registered trademarks only. Just because you have an established business name doesn’t necessarily mean that trademark rules apply.

Now that you know the rules, let’s talk about how to break them. If you’re not able to directly insert a competitor’s trademark in your ad, you can often get away with it via the magic of dynamic keyword insertion (DKI). In the ProFlowers example, they most likely had an ad group full of local florist names, and used this dynamic ad:

Title: {KeyWord: ProFlowers} $19.99
Description Line 1: Sold Out For Valentine’s Day
Description Line 2: Order For Wednesday and Beyond
Display URL: www.proflowers.com/local

Note the DKI formula in the title. If a user typed in the name of a local florist that was on ProFlowers’ keyword list, then the bidded keyword would show up in that space. In this example, the disgruntled florist typed in “Chez Bloom” and was horrified to find out that Google stated that they were sold out. Since it’s okay to use competitor names as keywords and it’s okay to use DKI, you can often get past the trademark filters that automatically block you when you try to put in a competitor’s name outright.

Is this against the rules? Technically, no. Is it shady as hell? Oh yes. This is a nifty trick, but it won’t necessarily allow you to bury your competitors with your PPC might. Whenever you bid on a competitor name, you’re very likely to get a low quality score (which means lower placement and a higher CPC) because Google doesn’t think your site is relevant to your competitor’s name. And rightly so! Plus, the people who are typing in a competitor’s brand name are more than likely set on buying from that competitor, so it’s going to be an uphill battle to sway them to your side. But, this is just another strategy to add to your PPC arsenal if you’re feeling particularly nasty.

So what exactly is a good CTR? My personal rule of thumb is 2% for a search network campaign, and 0.2% for a display network campaign. Of course, these optimal CTRs will vary depending on your product categories, keyword selection, match types, and many other factors. If you’re slightly below 2% in a category that has low customer engagement, don’t sweat it. But if you’re managing a 10+% CTR in a niche category, don’t take all the credit for yourself either.

If you’re not satisfied with your current CTR, here are a few things you can do:

Remove high-impression/low-click keywords

Sometimes a keyword that you think is relevant to your product turns out to be not so relevant at all. We all make bad guesses from time to time, so that’s what PPC stats are for. If you see a specific keyword is getting thousands of impressions but hardly any clicks, you may need to pause it so that it doesn’t bring down the CTR for the rest of your ad group and campaign. If the keyword had such a low CTR in the first place, then it probably wasn’t a very valuable keyword for you in the first place.

Add some negative keywords

If you use phrase or broad match types for your keywords, you’re bound to attract some irrelevant traffic. Run a search query report and look for any queries that don’t match something that you offer. You can add these queries (or just the word in the query that doesn’t match what you do) to filter our all those junk impressions that are driving down your CTR.

Revise your text ads

Making text ads is really more of an art than a science. No one ever gets it right the first time, but a lot of people persist in leaving their first ad up indefinitely. If your CTR sucks, take another look at your text ads. If your ad is too generic, not descriptive enough, or just plain unappealing, users won’t click on it. That could be your trouble right there.

Any one of these three options is going to take some effort, so why should you bother? There are two good reasons. First, increasing your CTR is going to help you increase your traffic (and potential customers) without you having to increase your bids or add new keywords to your account. So that could save you some work in either of those areas. And secondly, historical CTR is a major factor in Google’s Quality Score calculation. Better quality scores equal a lower required bid for a higher position. So, better CTR = better quality score = lower bids = better return on ad spend. It all starts with CTR, so it’s worth your while to take some time to fix it.

Let me answer that with a little of my own experience with Google AdWords certification and Microsoft AdCenter certification. Back when I started my career, the agency I was working at sponsored our AdWords certification. I took the test (and passed!) but qualification requirements have changed since then and I never bothered with renewing the certification. I certainly helped me get the next job I had after the agency, but since then I’ve been sought out due to my LinkedIn resume and my blogging efforts.

My Microsoft AdCenter certification story is much shorter. Late last year, Microsoft started offering free accreditation for their AdCenter certification. They said it was a limited time offer, so I took the test on a whim and passed with flying colors. They’re still offering this free, “limited time” offer (although I’m not sure just how limited this time is if it’s been going on for months now). Although I’m a little skeptical about the true scarcity of this offer, I do encourage people to go ahead and get the certification. It’s free, and should only take about two to three hours of your time.

So do I think it’s worth it? Absolutely. Will it help you get a PPC job? Maybe. As a hiring manager, I would definitely like to see a AdWords or AdCenter certification on a resume. But it’s not everything. I’m much more impressed by hands-on PPC experience or an interesting, complex online marketing project someone has worked on. But if you’re just starting out in your career and don’t have experience yet, I think that $50 and an investment of your time is a small price to pay for this strong indicator of online marketing competence. I wouldn’t hire someone on a PPC certification alone, but it would certainly give you an advantage versus someone at the same experience level who lacked the certification.

Taking either test only requires a few hours of studying some free materials. AdCenter certification is free for now, and the AdWords certification only costs $100 ($50 per exam, and you have to pass two). That’s far less than the certification costs of most other specialized professions. Online marketing is a growing field, and there’s certainly a lack of talent in it. I encourage anyone with an interest in marketing to go the online route if you want to have some job stability. Passing your certification exams is the first step.

Here’s a neat little trick I learned to use organic search query data to prospect for profitable PPC keywords. To do this, you’ll need an analytics platform that tracks revenue data by keyword (for this example, I’m using Google Analytics) and the Google Keyword Tool.

First, you’ll need to pull up your organic keyword performance. In Google Analytics, you can see this by selecting Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic from your navigation:

Once you’re here, choose a nice, long period of time to look at (12 months or so should be good) and click over to the “Ecommerce” tab:

Now, you should have several columns of data for your analysis: Visits, Revenue, Transactions, Average Value, Ecommerce Conversion Rate, and Per Visit Value. Export all of these into a CSV and open it up in your favorite spreadsheet program. Go ahead and delete any rows of keywords that have no revenue associated with them – they’re not important for our purposes.

Once you have a list of organic keywords that have generated revenue, move on over to the Google Keyword Tool. Copy all the keywords, enter them in the keyword tool, and run a report. Make sure you have the columns “Local Monthly Searches” and “Approximate CPC” active. Also, you should run the analysis for Exact match type only to ensure the most accurate data.

After the report finishes, you should have each of the keywords in your analytics export associated with an exact match search volume and an estimated CPC. Create three new columns in your original spreadsheet: two to hold this new data and one to add a formula to. Paste in the search volume and CPC data, making sure that each figure is associated with the right keyword. Next, add this formula to each cell in the third column:

=X1-Y1

Where X1 = the value in the “Per Visit Value” column and Y1 = the value in the “Approximate CPC” column. Your final result should look something like this:

Once you have copied down this formula to all keyword rows, you’ll start to see some patterns emerge. Some of these calculated values will be positive, and some will be negative. Since the per visit value number equals your number of visits divided by your revenue, it should give you a rough idea of how much each visit is worth. And since a PPC click is just another visit, it stands to reason that each of those should be just as valuable as an organic click. By subtracting the cost of a PPC visit from the total visit value, we get the difference between them. If you get a positive value, you stand to make more money than the cost of the click with each new visit. If you get a negative value, you might end up losing money.

This is a rather crude calculation, but is a good estimate on whether or not a PPC keyword has the potential to be profitable. At the very least, it’s a quick sanity check before you go ahead and add a lot of new keywords to an account. Using this analysis, you can filter down your organic keywords to only ones that a) have revenue and b) will generate more revenue per visit than the average CPC. Once you have that, you can review your keyword list to see which ones are not currently in your PPC campaigns and add them to your account.