PPC Without Pity

In the highly competitive world of PPC, sometimes it’s necessary to think outside of the box to keep ahead of other advertisers in your vertical. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to a secret weapon in the world of keyword research: the Google Wonder Wheel.

There’s no lack of good (and free) keyword tools out there. To get a basic list of keywords, you can try the Google External Keyword Tool, WordStream’s keyword tool, or Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. But, as reliable as these tools are, they do have an upper limit on the keyword suggestions you can get. Eventually, you’ll reach the point of diminishing returns and will only find keywords that you’re already bidding on, or ones that just are not relevant to your business.

This is when you’ll have to bring out the big guns. Here’s what you need to do:

First, go to www.google.com. Enter one of your most profitable or popular keywords into the search box and execute a Google search. In this example, we’ll use “web design training.”

On the left side navigation of the search results page, click on the “Wonder Wheel” link:

On the next page, you’ll find the infamous “Wonder Wheel”:

Now, the fun begins. You’ll probably get some pretty good suggestions for relevant keywords off of the first wonder wheel, but you can dig even deeper by clicking on any individual keyword. This will spawn a brand new wonder wheel, with even more suggestions related to the keyword you clicked on. Even better, you have a dynamic list of top search results to the right of the wonder wheel to help you determine the user intent behind the query, and whether or not the suggested keyword is a good fit for your advertising campaigns.

This is a great method to both expand your current campaigns and ad groups, or come up with new ideas for areas you haven’t covered. There’s really no limit to how many new keywords you can discover with this – each new keyword you add creates potential for new suggestions. If you see some success after a few test runs, you should definitely add this method to your regular keyword research.

Now here’s something interesting. Google just released a beta test in the UK and Canada for a new AdWords keyword match type: modified broad match keywords. These new keywords work kind of like broad match, but allow you to demand greater specificity in relevance matches by adding the “+” modifier in front of keywords that must appear in the user’s search query. For example, if you were flexible with what keywords you wanted to trigger your ads, but you were absolutely sure that you only wanted search queries that contained the exact word “cruise,” you could add modified broad match keywords like “discount +cruise,” “bahamas +cruise,” or “+cruise vacations.” In this scenario, your ads would show if someone typed in the query “caribbean cruise,” but they would not show if the same user typed in “discount vacations.”

This new functionality bridges the gap between broad match and phrase match, allowing greater granularity in your targeting options. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of broad match unless you’re willing to waste some money. In real life, searchers type in all sorts of crazy queries that Google matches to your ads. This is good if you want to get some real-world keyword research, but bad if you want to keep your cost per conversion down. Google is undoubtedly good at search, but I’m very unimpressed by their ability to match broad match queries to relevant broad match keywords. If you don’t believe me, check a long-term search query report for some broad match keywords and try to figure out what percentage of those queries have nothing to do with your product offering. Unless you’ve been really good about keeping up with your negative keyword list, chances are you’ll be looking at a lot of junk traffic.

The new modified broad match keywords present an alternative to the regular broad match/large negative keyword list combo. Now, you can get the benefit of catching misspellings, plurals, and long-tail terms you hadn’t thought of in your search net, while still keeping some semblance of quality control with the modified “+” keyword. Sure, it’s not going to fix the problem entirely, but it could save you from some common pitfalls of the other match types. You won’t miss out on too much traffic like you would with a phrase match, and you won’t drive quite as much junk traffic, as you might experience with a standard broad match.

I’d love to give this new trick a spin, but alas, I’m American. I suppose that I have to miss out on the fun for now. If you’re a United Kingdom or Canadian AdWords advertiser, I’d love to hear about your experiences with the new match type. Let’s hear about it in the comments.

If your company is large enough and popular enough, your company name and trademark may suddenly become valuable pay per click search terms not only for yourself, but for your competitors as well. In some cases, your competitors may find that by bidding on keywords related to your company they can reach out to customers who originally intended to purchase from you. Obviously, this is a situation most of us would like to avoid. Unfortunately, most PPC companies do not explicitly ban the use of trademarked terms in PPC keyword lists. And why should they? The more keywords they make available for bidding, the more money they make. If you are having an issue with competitor use of your branded terms, you will need to resolve the issue yourself.

If you see your competitors running pay per click ads with your branded terms, the first step you should take is to contact the advertiser directly. That way, you can ensure that your key terms are removed from all advertising campaigns instead of just one PPC account. Be firm, but polite. There is no need to threaten legal action, but you should be clear that if they do not comply to your request you will register a complaint with the PPC advertising services, and their account will be affected. If your request is acknowledged, you may be able to resolve the issue quickly and easily with no need for intervention by the search engines.

However, if the offending competitor chooses to not take down the ads that are in violation, you may need to lodge a trademark complaint with the search engines. While it is not against the rules to bid on a competitor’s trademarked keywords, there are some restrictions on using trademarked terms in text ads. Be aware of this before you lodge a complaint. You can’t stop a competitor from running ads when users search for your branded or trademarked terms, but you might be able to prevent those competitors from using the terms in their text ads.

If you see some text ads running with your branded terms (and reaching out to the advertiser directly doesn’t help), you may need to issue a trademark complaint. This is about as effective as lodging a complaint with any other major company (that is, it’s kind of a crapshoot), but it may be worth your time if you really think that it is negatively affecting your business.

To lodge a trademark complaint with Google, first read their trademark policy here. If you still think that the advertiser is violating Google’s terms, you can send them a complaint by filling out their Trademark Complaint Form. If your complaint is valid, then your brand terms will be added to Google’s blacklisted terms, and future ads containing the keywords will be rejected through Google’s automated editorial process.

For trademark complaints about Yahoo ads, read their editorial guidelines here. If you would like to report a violation, you can send an email to trademarkconcern-ysm@yahoo-inc.com. Be sure to include the following information in your email:

1. The search term(s) that caused the ad in question to appear.
2. The trademark on which your claim is based.
3. The registration number of the trademark you own (if it is registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office).
4. Evidence of consumer confusion arising from the offending ad.
5. A copy of any communication you have had with the offending advertiser about the matter.

If you have a complaint about an ad on Bing or another Microsoft network property, you can read their guidelines on intellectual property at this link. To lodge a complaint, you can fill out their trademark complaint form.

Keep in mind that all search engines explicitly state in their terms of service that they are not responsible for mediating trademark disputes. However, if you have a compelling case and the offending advertiser is clearly in the wrong, the search engines can be a great help in standing up for your intellectual property rights. Just be civil, communicate with the advertiser directly first, and use complaint forms as a last resort. As long as you remain respectful in your request, you’ll find that protecting your brand in the PPC marketplace is simple and effective.

To be an effective PPC marketer, it helps to have a lot of tools in your arsenal. Choosing good keywords takes a lot of background research, and it’s always great to have plenty of options for keyword tools. This week, WordStream released two new keyword tools to help PPC managers find new keywords and organize them into effective groupings.

The first tool is the WordStream Keyword Niche Finder. This tool allows you to generate a list of suggested keywords and niches to target after you enter a root keyword. Here’s an example using the root keyword “ppc marketing”:

The Keyword Niche finder not only shows you the relative popularity of related keywords (indicated by the blue bar graph), it sorts the keywords generated into related groups. In this case, we get some groups like “ppc marketing >> internet,” “ppc marketing >> search engine web,” and “ppc marketing >> online.” You can then use these niche groupings to build out campaigns and ad groups. This saves a lot of time in the campaign generation process. Using this tool, you automatically get like terms grouped together, and you can determine which keywords are going to be high traffic generators and which ones are more likely to be long-tail keywords.

The second tool WordStream released this week is the Keyword Grouper. With this tool, you can take an existing list of PPC keywords and automatically segment them into relevant groups. This is really handy if you just generated a huge list of keywords from another tool like WordTracker or the Google Keyword Tool. Just export a text file of the keywords you want, cut and paste them into the WordStream Keyword Grouper, and everything gets grouped instantly! This is a great organizational tool, and a must-have for anyone who deals with large amounts of keywords on a daily basis.

These two new tools join the ranks of the excellent Free Keyword Tool by WordStream. This older tool can get you some really helpful suggestions if you’re just starting out a new campaign and need some new keyword ideas. It works great in tandem with other keyword tools in your arsenal. For best results, use multiple keyword tools in your research to get the maximum amount of useful keywords for your efforts.

WordStream also offers a host of paid PPC and SEO management solutions if you’re looking for more robust management and research programs. Check them out at http://www.WordStream.com

Making effective PPC keyword bids is part art, and part science. It can be a daunting task deciding what your keyword bids should be, especially since there’s quite a bit of money on the line. If you bid too low, you risk your ads never showing on the first page results, and having only a mere trickle of traffic coming to your site. If you bid too high, you can get top keyword positions, but the expense could be so great that your return on ad spend can dip into the negatives.

In order to make an effective keyword bid, you need to start with a baseline figure of your target cost per acquisition (CPA). Figure out what the absolute maximum is that you can pay for a lead, sale, or conversion and still make a profit. Then, dip into historical data to know what kind of conversion rate you can expect to get on that particular keyword (for new keywords, you’ll just have to make your best guess). Finally, to determine the maximum amount you should bid, you need to multiply your target CPA times your expected conversion rate.

So here’s the formula:

Target CPA x Expected Conversion Rate = Max PPC bid

Here’s an example. Let’s say my target CPA for selling widgets is $50. Based on my historical PPC data, I can see that my conversion rate for widget keywords is around 5%. So I would multiply $50 times 5% to find that the maximum amount I should bid on widget keywords is $2.50.

Of course, just because you bid $2.50 on a PPC keyword doesn’t mean that you’re going to be paying exactly $2.50 for every click. That gives you a little wiggle room (and profit!) to work with.

In some cases, you may find that your max CPC bid isn’t enough to get you on the first page, either due to CPA restrictions, intensely competitive verticals, or poor quality scores. In this case, you should probably just let go of these keywords and pick some other ones that might be a little less competitive and a little more profitable for you. By using this handy PPC bid formula, you can make sure that your campaign expenses stay on track, and that you’re getting a good ROI for all of your active PPC keywords.

If you’re in love with search query reports as much as I am, I’ve got some good news for you. As part of their Fall 2009 upgrade, MSN has (finally) added search query report functionality to their pay per click advertising platform. Sure, you’ve probably been using something like a detailed search query report in Google Analytics to get this information, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to get the data straight from the source.

Running the report is super easy. Just go to to your “Reports” tab in MSN AdCenter and create a new report. Under the “Report:” drop-down, you’ll see a new option for “Search Query Performance.” Choose this option, and customize the rest of your report as necessary. Once you run it, you’ll get data on the exact search queries your MSN users are typing in when they see your PPC ads. You can then use this data to pick out negative keywords to filter out bad traffic, as well as get some insights into some keywords you might not be using already. I find that search query reports are a great way to get insight into your target customer’s heads with minimal effort on your part. This is especially important in a search engine like MSN/Bing, where it’s tough to get a lot of traffic, since Google and Yahoo tend to monopolize the search engine audience. You can leverage your search query report data to figure out new keywords that will effectively drive more traffic to your landing pages.

I know MSN is a little late to the game on this, but I give them points for trying. Yahoo still hides their search query reports behind the wall of their account reps, so you can’t even get this information without a huge hassle from them. Now if only MSN would freely offer up search query data within the campaign screens like Google does, we might start to see MSN competing on equal terms with the big boys.

When managing a pay per click advertising account, it helps to have a lot of software tools to help you manage your account, discover new keywords, track success, and perform split-tests for you. There are a lot of people out there who would love to sell you an expensive software package to accomplish these tasks. But, in my experience, everything you need to do in a PPC account can be accomplished through free tools that are easily available online. Read on for my choices of the six best free PPC tools:

6. Google Insights For Search – This tool gives you access to the vast amount of data that Google has collected on keyword searches and internet traffic trends. Simply type in the search terms you want to learn more about, select the time frame and geographic area you want to analyze, and you can view trends and relative popularity of any search term that has enough search volume to matter. This is great for discovering how popular your PPC keywords could be, as well as getting a look at likely seasonal trends before they happen.

5. MSN AdCenter Desktop – MSN AdCenter usually has the lowest traffic of the big three PPC providers, but this will soon change once Yahoo’s web properties switch to Bing search. If you’re doing PPC on either Yahoo or Bing right now, you’d better learn MSN’s tools now before your traffic increases drastically. Fortunately, MSN has recently released a desktop editor for their MSN platform, although it is still in beta. If your account meets the right requirements, you could be eligible to download it – see the above link for the steps you need to take. This desktop editor can help you make mass changes to your MSN AdCenter account, like adding multiple keywords, creating text ads in bulk, or other mass campaign/ad group changes. It certainly makes managing an MSN account a lot faster, since you don’t have to wait for multiple pages to load and re-load like in the web interface.

4. SEO Book Keyword Tool – There are lots of good keyword tools out there on the web, most of which are provided by the search engines themselves. But who wants to go back and forth between multiple keyword tools to make a single keyword list? SEO Book has a really awesome aggregator that pulls keyword data from multiple keyword tools like Google, Yahoo, and WordTracker. It’s one-stop shopping for all your keyword research needs. This tool does require that you have an SEO Book account, but registration is free. You also get access to a lot of other SEO Book resources, so it’s a pretty good deal.

3. Google Website Optimizer – Have you heard about how awesome split-testing and multivariate testing are, but the thought of doing all those statistics makes your head spin? Well, you’re in luck. With Google’s Website Optimizer tool, all you need to do is create a few variant pages, cut and paste some javascript code snippets, and the tool does the rest. It even crunches the numbers at the end to tell you conclusively which of your variant pages performed the best. And, with it’s multivariate testing feature, you can choose a set of elements (buttons, images, blocks of text, etc.), and the tool will automatically mix them up in different combinations to see which is the most effective. Split testing your landing pages couldn’t be easier.

2. Google AdWords Editor – After managing accounts with AdWords Editor, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. In fact, I hardly ever use Google’s web interface to work with PPC accounts anymore. This desktop application lets you download your account info, make whatever changes you need, then upload the changes to the web interface. It’s easy to copy and paste any element, from campaigns down to keywords. You can even select multiple keywords and change bids by percentage or dollar amount. I could do a dozen posts about all the features that it has, so it’s probably better to just read Google’s own documentation about this product. And, of course, it’s 100% free. Probably one of the best bargains on this list, considering the wide range of functionality it has.

1. Google Analytics – If you’re going to run a PPC account effectively, you must have a reliable web analytics system in place. Period. You need to be able to keep track of your web traffic, monitor how your organic and paid site traffic is interacting, and look at what keywords people are using to find your site. Google Analytics does all of this for free, and is incredibly easy to implement – just cut and paste a javascript snippet on to every page of your site, and you’re done. What’s more, there are infinite filters and segmentation formulas to allow you to customize your data. You can even set up alerts to let you know when key metrics are rising or falling. With all of this functionality, you’d probably expect to pay a hefty monthly fee for the privilege. But, unlike a lot of similar web analytics packages, this one is 100% free.

Got any more great free PPC tools? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

A common mistake that a lot of pay per click rookies make is loading up their accounts with hundreds of useless negative keywords. I’m all for the judicious use of negative keywords, since they help filter out traffic that won’t ever convert for you, and help you keep your cost per conversion in check. However, if you follow automated suggestions to bulk add a lot of negative keywords, you could be excluding traffic that could potentially offer some positive results.

When first-timers set up a new PPC account, a lot of them just follow the automated instructions since PPC can be really intimidating if you’re new to it. Tools like the Google Keyword Tool can give you suggestions for negative keywords, but it can’t tell you what negative keywords your specific account needs. What’s worse, they “conveniently” offer an option to bulk-add a ton of negative keywords, which are probably only tangentially related to your search terms (if that) and would probably never show up in a search query report. Why Google would try to make you get less search traffic, I’ll never know. Usually their automated suggestions for account improvement involve giving more money to Google…

But I digress. If you bulk-add keywords like this, you’re going to end up with a long, convoluted list of negative keywords like “porn,” “world of warcraft,” or “butt.” Having a lot of unrelated terms in your negative keyword list can create a lot of noise that distracts you from the really important negatives you have. If you’re going to get serious about excluding traffic you don’t want, you need to look at what keywords are actually driving traffic but not converting – wasting your PPC money. The only way to do this is to analyze your search queries by running a search query report. Look for keywords that are getting a lot of clicks, but aren’t converting. Then, add these keywords to your negatives list. It’s as simple as that. Don’t let some automated system push you around. You really need to do the analysis, and find which keywords are affecting you specifically, since everyone’s PPC situation is unique.

As of this writing, neither Yahoo or Bing has a comparable search query tool to Google. However, it’s not a major leap of faith to assume that the same bad keywords are being bad across every search engines. Feel free to add the negative keywords you find in your Google reports to your other PPC accounts. Keep an eye on your conversions and CPC. If your conversions stayed the same or got better and your CPC went down, then you did good. If your CPC stays the same or goes up, and your conversions drop, then go easy on the negative keywords to get back some of that converting traffic.

So you’ve done your keyword research, and you think you have a pretty good, relevant set to run with. But you still have a few choices to make. For starters, what type of keyword match type should you use? Here’s a breakdown of all the PPC keyword match types, and the kinds of situations they are useful for:

• Broad Match: The default match type for the search engines, and for good reason: they generate a lot of clicks, which means a lot of money for the search engines. Having keywords set at broad match means that the search engines will make a rough approximation of what they think is relevant to your chosen keyword. And they will probably make a very liberal interpretation of what is relevant. I’ve pored through search query reports and seen broad match furniture keywords show ads under a search query for housewife porno. Do you really want your ads showing up for everything? Stay away from broad match if you’re on a tight budget and can’t afford any extra wasted clicks.
  
  Broad match does have it’s uses, though. If you’ve got a large enough budget and can afford to waste a little of it in the name of research, broad match can be a fantastic keyword research tool. Since it picks up everything, including those super-obscure long tail keywords that you probably wouldn’t think of targeting, you can run a set of broad match keywords for 30 days or so and then analyze your search query reports to see what you missed in your initial keyword set. Then, you can add those missed keywords in, change everything to a more specific match type, and run a more efficient campaign.




• Phrase Match: Phrase match is a good middle-of-the-road solution to the match type problem. Under phrase match, a user’s search query must match the keywords you specified (including word order), although your ads will also show if they add more keywords before or after the keyword(s) you specified. For example, if you were bidding on “pizza delivery,” your users would see your ads if they typed in “pizza delivery in austin,” but they wouldn’t see your ad if they typed in “delivery pizza” or “pizza fast delivery.”
  
  Phrase match is good because it filters out a lot of that weird, marginally-relevant traffic that broad match brings in, but it still allows you some leeway to overlook some terms that a user could type in. It’s a good idea to start out new campaigns with phrase match, and then switch later to either broad or exact match if you decide that you need more or less traffic to your site.




• Exact Match: If you’re having a lot of trouble with unqualified traffic, exact match is the way to go. Keywords set to exact match will show ads when the user types in a search query that matches your keyword, and nothing more. You’re going to block out a lot of traffic with this setup, but if you see a lot of junk traffic coming through in your search query reports, sometimes you need to take drastic measures to keep your cost down.




• Negative Matches If you see a few troublesome search queries in your reports, but don’t want to take a measure as drastic as setting everything to exact match, then some creative use of negative keywords may be in order. Negative keywords prevent ads from showing whenever a search query contains a keyword listed in your negatives. You can also set negative keyword match types for more precise targeting – negative match types have the same effect as the ones mentioned above.

Yahoo Search Marketing has some special match types, since they don’t use the broad/phrase/exact standard that Google and MSN adhere to. Here are the Yahoo match types:

• Standard: Standard match functions almost like the aforementioned exact match type, but allows for plurals. For example, if you were bidding on the keyword “lamp,” a user that typed in “lamps” would not see your ad under the exact match type, but would see it under the “standard” match type.




• Advanced: Advanced match type works like the broad match type. Your ads will show if a user misspells their search query or appends additional words before, after, or in between the keyword phrase you’re bidding on.

As with any pay per click marketing strategy, it’s important to test out different match types to see which one works best for each campaign. These instructions should give you a good starting point, but don’t forget to analyze those search query reports to make sure your keywords are driving the kind of quality traffic you need.

What keyword positions work the best in a PPC campaign? It’s a pretty common question, but there’s no straightforward answer. Like a lot of other factors in pay per click advertising, you need to do your research and check your web analytics numbers to see what works best for you.

If you have Google Analytics installed and linked to your AdWords account, it’s easy to get information on what keyword positions are working for you. Just follow these steps:

Getting to the Keyword Positions report in Google Analytics

1. Select your “Traffic Sources” menu on your left sidebar.
2. Open the “AdWords” drop-down menu.
3. Select the option “Keyword Positions.”

And you’re done! This report will give you traffic metrics (total clicks, impressions, CTR, etc.) for your AdWords keywords at the listed positions. If you have goal conversions set up (and you should), then you can even get information on what positions your keywords convert best at.

Once you get an idea of the positions that get you a good conversion and cost-per-conversion rate, then you can start making bid adjustments to make sure you hit those positions more often. This is yet another example of how accurate web analytics setups can really improve your ROI for pay per click marketing campaigns.