PPC Without Pity

When creating a new PPC campaign or ad group, there’s an important choice to make with your text ads. Should you set text ads to rotate evenly, or optimize their distribution according to what the search engine thinks is best? Before you choose, you should think about how each distribution is calculated, and how it will affect your data collection for optimization purposes.

First off, you should always be running two to three text ads per ad group. That way, you can test different value propositions in your ads to see which one works best. After a month or two goes by, you can then compare the total conversions, conversion rate, and click-through rates of your ads to find the top performer. If your ad groups tend to get a lot of traffic, run three ads to test multiple factors at once. If your ad groups are low-traffic niche groups, you may need to run only two ads at a time to ensure you collect enough data for a reliable sample.

Choosing rotated or optimized ads will also affect your data collection. Rotating ads is pretty straightforward – each ad gets equal exposure. Optimized ad serving is where it gets a little trickier. By setting your ads to optimized serving, you allow the search engines to choose which ad gets the most exposure, since they will choose the “best” ad after a certain amount of data is gathered, then allow that ad to run the majority of the time.

This may sound good on the surface, but you also need to keep in mind that the search engines will choose the “best” ad based on their own criteria. This probably means that they will choose the ad with the highest click-through rate, since more clicks equals more money for Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. This may not be in your best interest. The ad with the highest CTR may also have the lowest conversion rate. You could be racking up click costs without seeing conversion results if you trust search engines to “optimize” your ad distribution.

Of course, this is not always the case. Sometimes optimization is on the mark, and you can have a decent performing ad group without the hassle of constantly rotating ads yourself. For advertisers that just want a “set it and forget it” solution, you’ll probably be okay with optimized ad serving. But, if you are a serious PPC marketer, you will need to run evenly-rotated ads for two reasons. First, having even rotation ensures that you will have a valid statistical sample at the end of your text ad experiment, since all ads in the group will have an equal chance to succeed. And second, choosing not to rely on the search engines lets you choose your own success metric. If you want to optimize for conversion rate, you can do that. If you want to optimize for CTR, that’s okay too. You don’t have to rely on a third party to tell you what your “best” ad is, since you will have a much better idea of what is successful for your own business.

Most of the time, I choose to set my new ad groups to rotate evenly. But then again, I’m a huge PPC geek who loves to split-test things. Think carefully about what optimizing or rotating your text ads means for your business before you make a commitment. Don’t blindly rely on a search engine to automatically do your PPC campaign optimization for you.

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.

One of the most vexing issues in pay per click marketing is the problem of user intent. Sure, you can pick a lot of great keywords, but what happens when someone types in an ambiguous search term, or one that has multiple meanings depending on the context? For example, someone who types “medical coding” into their search box could be looking for a medical coding job, a book on medical coding, or a medical coding training program. Under current search engine restrictions, it’s impossible for marketers to figure out exactly what each searcher is looking for without poring through volumes of analytical data.

This week, Google announced a new feature that just might have a shot at figuring out the user intent problem. It’s called AdWords Comparison Ads, and it’s currently only rolled out to a few select advertisers in the mortgage industry. Here’s how it works: someone types in a pretty generic term like “mortgage.” When AdWords ads are served up for the search query, Google shows some radio buttons next to the ads (in the example they provide, it’s a choice between “buy a home” and “refinance”). This allows users to clarify exactly what they want. If the user selects an option, they are taken to a new page that allows them to compare mortgage rates according to their selection.

It’s a pretty neat idea, and I’m interested to see how it turns out. I’m a bit wary of the fact that it relies on voluntary data, adding more work to a search query on the user side. I guess I’m just cynical enough to think that people will be too lazy to click an extra button on a Google search. If Google sees some success with this pilot program, they plan on rolling it out to other industries. Now that’s where it would really get interesting…

There’s no question that pay-per-click advertising can do great things for local businesses. With smart, region-specific keywords and text ads and the ability to geotarget specific areas for ad distribution, local businesses can create a low-expense, high-result campaign by cherry-picking exactly the kinds of customers they want to target. Until recently, the only additional boost you got from putting in all of this hyper-local work was a simple extra line of ad text that displayed your city or state. But now Google has kicked it up a notch and added new functionality that allows local advertisers even more of an advantage. By linking your local business account to your AdWords account, you can activate location extensions in your ads. These extensions display your business address in your ads, giving you more ad real estate (for free) and showing your local customers exactly where to find you.

Before you take advantage of Google’s integration of local business listings into PPC accounts, you should create a local business listings account. Fortunately, this is pretty easy, and comes with the added benefit of giving you free listings on Google Maps. Every local business should do this, if only for the SEO benefit that it provides. It’s simple to start an account – just go to http://www.google.com/local/add/, click on “Add A New Business,” and follow the instructions. If you have multiple locations, you can even upload a data file to save you some repetitive data entry work.

Once you have a local business listing account, you’ll be ready to link it to your AdWords account and activate location extensions in your ads. Just follow these steps to get going:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Go to the campaign you want to edit.
3. Click on the “Settings” tab.
4. Under “Audience > Locations” you’ll see an option to “Show relevant addresses with your ads.” Select this, and you’ll be prompted to enter your local business center account name and password or manually enter an address. Linking the campaign to your local business center account will save you a lot of work in the long run, but if you’re only going to use this for a few ads you can just manually enter the addresses.
5. Click save, and you’re done!

Google has even added functionality to their reporting so that you can view statistics on your location extensions. When you run an ad group report, look for these options under “Add or Remove Columns:”

Location Extensions Reporting Options

Now, you can not only provide location-specific information to your text ads, but you can also get statistics on how your users are interacting with this information. Neat!

Usability tweaks are afoot at Google! This week, TechCrunch reported that Google PPC ads are now showing further to the left in the side column instead than usual. What’s their angle here? At first glance, I would guess that they want to bunch the PPC ads closer to the organic results to present a more integrated format for search results. Since your average Google searcher may not be aware of the difference between organic and paid search results, I’m guessing that Google made this change to pump up click-through rates and get a little extra cash in this recession of ours.

I’d be really interested to see what kind of user research and analytics went into this decision. We all know how intensely methodical Google is about making changes to their interfaces, so they probably had a really good reason to do this. What that reason is is anybody’s guess, though.

There seems to be a lot of dispute in the PPC community about how many text ads per ad group are optimal for split-testing. I’ve heard estimates anywhere from two to five ads. However, a lot of people don’t take into account the individual needs of their campaigns when selecting how many text ads they should test.

Personally, I’ve always been a fan of the three ad per ad group model. That way, you can rotate your ads evenly, and try out three different calls-to-action, value propositions, or other factors (dynamic keyword insertion, altered display URLs, etc.), and start collecting stats on which strategy works best. Three ads is a pretty good starting point for most accounts, but it doesn’t work every time.

What if you’re dealing with a campaign with a narrowly focused geotarget (i.e. one metro area), or a set of keywords that are highly specialized and don’t draw a lot of traffic? What if you’re dealing with both of these at the same time? You could be waiting for years before you get a significant enough set of data to determine which ad strategy works best. If you’ve been testing ads for several months and only getting a handful of clicks, it may be best to reduce your ad rotation to two per group just so that you can get significant comparisons sometime in your lifetime. The more ads you run per group, the less data you will get for each ad. It might not be a problem for a popular e-commerce product with hundreds of clicks per day, but if you’re dealing with a more specialized audience, two ads may be a better way to go.

Here’s a neat little trick I’ve used to get a slight edge over ad competitors.

If you use granular geotargeting settings in Google or Yahoo (i.e. targeting to the state, metro area, or city level), the search engines append an extra line of ad text to every text ad to indicate the area you’re targeting. Here’s an example:

Note the addition of “Texas” as the last line of ad text. It works in Yahoo, too:

So what does this mean for advertising? Keep in mind that just because you aren’t in a physical location, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use geotargeting to make it appear that you’re a local vendor. People may be more likely to click on your ad if they think you’re a local. Also, any time you can get some additional factor in your ads that distinguishes you from the other results, it will generally get more eyeballs on your ad instead of the others.

A simple solution is to take off the default “United States” setting for your geotargeting, and target all 50 states at the state level. That way, you get nationwide coverage, but you also get that neat little line of geographic ad text on all of your ads.

Using dynamic keyword insertion in text ads is one of my favorite ways to boost a sagging click-through rate in an ad campaign. However, there is a fine art to using effective dynamic insertion to avoid awkward text ad phrasing that could actually hurt your performance.

First, let’s go over the basics. Here’s how dynamic keyword insertion works: you enter a specific formula into your text ads, and then whatever search query the user entered gets substituted for the formula in the text ad. The formula looks like this:

{KeyWord:Default Keywords}

And here’s how it would look in a draft text ad:

{KeyWord:Default Keywords}
Crazy Eddie has the best deals
on stuff! Buy, buy, buy!
www.CrazyEddie.com

In this case, everything between the brackets will be substituted by the user’s search term. So let’s say that I do a search for “discount widgets.” Here’s how the above ad would look to the user:

Discount Widgets
Crazy Eddie has the best deals
on stuff! Buy, buy, buy!
www.CrazyEddie.com

Notice the bold keywords? Besides adding highly relevant keyword to your text ads, dynamic keyword insertion has an added bonus. Any search terms a user enters are automatically bolded in PPC text ads. This adds another way for your text ads to stand out from your competition. Pretty neat, huh?

You may be wondering about the text after the colon (“Default Keywords”) in my example above. Here’s where the drawbacks of dynamic insertion come in. If a user’s search term exceeds the character limit imposed by the search engine (25 characters for headlines in Google, 40 characters for headlines in Yahoo), then you need to have a shorter, “default” keyword to take the place of the too-long query. Let’s say that I did a search for “discount widgets within 20 miles of Austin Texas.” Obviously, that’s going to be too long to cram into the headline. In this case, the search engine would show the title as “Default Keywords.” You can add whatever defaults you want after the colon, as long as they abide by the appropriate character limit. I recommend choosing relatively generic keywords that could easily apply to any relevant search term in the ad group.

One more thing about dynamic formula technique. The way you capitalize the word “keyword” in your formula affects how the inserted search term appears in your ad. Here’s the breakdown:

{keyword} search term
{Keyword} Search term
{KeyWord} Search Term
{KEYWord}* SEARCH Term
{KeyWORD}* Search TERM
{KEYWORD}* SEARCH TERM

*using excessive capitalization in your text ads could get your ads disapproved by the search engines. No one likes to be yelled at on the internet.

So what’s the benefit to all of this trouble? Using dynamic keyword insertion offers two perks to your text ads. First, you get to automatically use ad text that is highly relevant to your user’s search term. Second, this highly relevant text will be bolded in your ads, providing another eye-catching element to your ads. In my personal experience, ads using dynamic keyword insertion tend to provide a better click-through rate than identical ads without the dynamic text. This can give a flagging ad group a boost if you’re not getting enough clicks on your ads.

Dynamic keyword insertion doesn’t automatically fix things, though. You need to make sure that all of your keywords in your associated ad group would sound right inserted in the dynamic formula. After all, these are the keywords that your users will be searching for to see the ads. It helps to do a quick read-through of your keyword list before implementing a dynamic keyword insertion ad to make sure things are going to work out. It will save you some embarrassment (and keep you from losing potential customers!) in the long run.

Bonus Pro Tip: you can also use dynamic keyword insertion formulas within your ad description lines, but this can get a little tricky since you want to devote as much space as possible to the benefits of your service and other useful information. I generally only use dynamic keyword insertion for headlines, but have seen success in the few cases where I used it in the ad body as well.