Import Google Analytics Goal Data into Adwords

Google now allows you to import your Google Analytics goals into your Adwords account.

The benefits you get for your Adwords account include:

  • You can correlate your Google Analytics data (e.g. goals, transactions and pageviews) with your Adwords ad clicks.
  • With both Google Analytics data (goals and transactions) and Adwords Conversion Tracking data available for consideration, Adwords Conversion Optimizer will be able to automate your keyword bidding more accurately.

You will not have to separately tag your Adwords destination URLs, but only have to ensure automatic Adwords URL tagging is enabled. The only prerequisite is that you will have to opt into one of the two data sharing options:

  • Share your Google Analytics data with Google products only (recommended)
  • Share your Google Analytics data anonymously with Google and the benchmarking service

To import your Google Analytics goals into your Adwords account:

  • Link your Google Analytics account to your Adwords account, if you have not yet done so
  • Ensure you have previously set up a goal in one of your Google Analytics profiles
  • Select one of the two data sharing options within your Google Analytics account
  • Click the “Link your Analytics goals and transactions” link in Adwords account

Prior linking to your Adwords account, your Google Analytics account is subject to a limit of up to 5 million pageviews per month. By linking your Google Analytics account to your active Adwords account, the pageview limit will be completely removed.

Note that Google Analytics and Adwords record conversions differently, so you tend to see discrepancies.

  • Clicks vs. Visits: Adwords conversions (1-per-click) are usually lower than Google Analytics conversions per visit
  • Invalid clicks can be filtered out by Adwords but not by Google Analytics
  • Cookie expiration: Adwords cookies are set to expire 30 days after the ad click, while Google Analytics cookies by default are only expires in 6 months
  • Data processing delays between Adwords and Google Analytics that cause mis-matched statistics

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Posted on June 29, 2009
Filed Under Google Analytics | 1 Comment

Adwords Broad Match Keyword Strategies

Using broad match keywords in your Google Adwords account allows your ads to be shown to a vast number of user search queries and is the easiest way to maximize click volume. The downside is that you may have been over-spending on some irrelevant search queries that could never convert.

Understand How Broad Match Works

If your ad group contains the keyword ‘tennis shoes’, your ad will appear for Google’s user search queries that contain either or both words (’tennis’ and ’shoes’) in any order, and that is of singular or plural forms, synonyms, and other variations including:

  • Tennis
  • Shoes
  • Buy Tennis Shoes
  • Tennis Shoe Photos
  • Running Shoes
  • Tennis Sneakers

Install Adwords Conversion Tracking

Activate Google Adwords Converstion Tracking, and insert the Javascript codes onto the “thank you” or “purchased confirmation” page on your website.

Start your campaigns and collect the conversion data alongside all the other Adwords data.

Review Search Query Performance Report

If you have the Conversion Tracking correctly installed, your conversion data will be shown in most of the Adwords built-in reports. Run the Search Query Performance Report on a regular basis.

Identify the search queries that have triggered your broad match keywords but have made no conversions. Review the group of keywords and decide if they should be added to your ad groups or campaigns as negative keywords.

Identify the search queries that have triggered your broad match keywords and have made conversions. Add these keywords to new ad groups or new campaigns as exact match keywords.

The non-converting clicks to your broad match keywords will gradually decrease.

Problems with Expanded Broad Match Keywords

Google’s broad match qualifies as Expanded Broad Match as it allows your ads to appear on extremely vast number of related user search queries and sometimes even on many unrelated search queries. The unrelated search queries are mostly some synonyms that are not entirely applicable to your business which reduce your keyword CTR and increase your non-converting clicks.

Google’s matching algorithm combines the search queries from two successive searches when serving up ads. When a Google visitor makes a search and then uses the search box on the first search’s results page again, the first query and the second query are both used to determine what ad to display.

To get the spending under control, Clix Marketing replaced all broad match keywords with the two phrase match variations of two-word-keywords.

To provide transparency, Google updated the Search Query Performance Report by identifying session-based broad match under the “Search Query Match Type” column. SEOptimise tested and revealed that session-based broad match keywords have lower conversion rates than broad match keywords.

If you still have big problems controlling your ROI because of receiving way to many non-converting clicks, you should discard the majority of your broad match keywords and only use phrase match and exact match keywords.

What Google Should Do

Google should allow all Adwords advertisers to either:

  • Add Expanded Broad Match as a new match type
  • Allow the ability to exclude from appearing on Expanded Broad Match search queries

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Posted on June 27, 2009
Filed Under Adwords | 1 Comment

Inhouse SEO Tips

Your SEO team is to do in-house SEO for a large organization’s website. Often the major obstacles are not the technical issues, but the company’s culture and bureaucracy. Successful SEO requires buy-in at the corporate level where your SEO team will influence and educate the people and together you will have to find the mutual business goals.

Buy-in from Executives

Before In-house SEO can be started, the entire management team (of executives) must be convinced, involved and in agreement. The corporate executives are the people who make strategic decisions on company directions and can authorize your SEO team the use of company resources.

  • Analyze the SEO performance of the major competitor websites via Hitwise or ComScore
  • Present the data to the management team and explain how the SEO work will benefit the company’s long term growth
  • Work out the return on investment (ROI) of your SEO proposal
  • Define the workload and the roadmap for achieving your goals
  • Track your progress, measure the SEO results (via web analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Omniture) and report regularly to the executives

Site Ownerships

The corporate web site may be divided into multiple sections in which each team has ownership and management responsibility of a particular section. For example, each team probably manages the daily operations of one of the following sections:

  • Homepage
  • Product categories and sub-categories
  • New product section
  • Product pages
  • Purchase / conversion Flow
  • Community, forum and customer-review sections

The operational managers of the different website sections are the decision makers who ensure the work gets done across the resources they have on hand. These teams decide what content goes on to their own sections and they may have their own content creators and copy writers.

At this level, your SEO team’s job is not only to implement the SEO strategies you have set out, but is to also influence and educate the “site owners”. You will have to find the common goals among your team and each site owner team, and start working towards the goals with the support and resources of the site owner teams.

SEO is not all about ranking in the SERP, so along the line you will have to optimize your conversion flow via web page A/B testing tools such as Google Website Optimizer.

Web Development and Design Resources

The IT department often is where the design and web development resources are, and can be one of the opponents to the SEO team. Even though you may already have executives’ permissions in using resources, you will still have to reserve your web development and design resources in advance.

SEO Best Practices

As Google’s search market share has grown rapidly in the last couple of years, it would make sense to optimize your web site for Google’s ranking algorithm. For the good SEO performance to last, everyone will need to follow a set of search engine optimization standards. Your SEO team must create a best practice guide such as Google SEO for Beginners in which people within the corporation will refer to and follow.

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Posted on June 20, 2009
Filed Under SEO | Leave a Comment

Google Shows Ads Below Organic Search Results

Google has started to show ads beneath the search engine results pages as well as the usual spots (above organic search results and at the right side). The ads below the organic search results can be found on Google.cn.

    Google ads above organic search results

Google repeats showing the first two sponsored ads again below the organic search results, in which the first two ads will require Google Adwords Quality Score high enough to rank above the organic search results. The third sponsored ad above the SERP does not seem to be eligible for an additional spot at the bottom.

    Google ads below organic search results

For Google, the introduction of the bottom ads is another new way to further monetize from Adwords.

For Adwords advertisers, having 2 identical ads showed above and below the organic search results at the same time does not count as 2 impressions. With this new change, your trademark keywords on Adwords are most likely to be showed twice (above and below).

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Posted on June 16, 2009
Filed Under Adwords | 2 Comments

Have Your Adwords Trademark Keyword Conversions Dropped?

As a trademark owner, if you used to heavily rely on your trademark keywords on Adwords for conversions, the recent changes may already have negatively affected your Adwords campaign performance:

  • US trademark policy on ad text
  • Google Suggest

The Adwords US ad text trademark policy change has created some short window of opportunities for non-trademark owners who are in the search affiliate space. With all the non-trademark owners are now eligible to include trademark keywords in their Adwords ad texts. These ads are now more competitive in terms of click through rates, which means the clicks used to land on the trademark owners’ ads would have been decreased. The favorable condition to the non-trademark owners would have also caused them to bid more aggressively and drive up cost-per-click on trademark keywords.

The best defense for the trademark owners now is to rely on the continuous improvements of Google Adwords Quality Score.

The launch of the Google suggest Adwords ads makes it easier for users to find what they want with a single click.

Besides showing your Adwords ad in as the last item Google Suggest, Google also includes a direct link of the top organic search result as the first item in the “search suggest” list. The downside for PPC is that users who previously used to click on one of the top PPC ads will now click on the direct link of the top organic search result. Your benefit is that instead of paying for those Adwords clicks, now you are getting the traffic for free (via SEO).

    Direct Link on Google Suggest

Some of you may already have spotted this shift of traffic through your Google SEO and Adwords reports.

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Posted on June 4, 2009
Filed Under Adwords | 2 Comments

Microsoft Launches New Search Engine Bing

Microsoft is to officially launch a new search engine Bing on 3 June. Bing is Microsoft’s decision engine which was developed under code name “kuma”.

    Bing.com Beta in China

A new breed of search engine has arrived, a search engine that does more than point you to a set of links. We’ve built a “decision engine” and it’s called Bing. Internet search has become the No. 1 avenue for finding information and getting things done. But with more than 200 million Web sites online (and counting), most search engines are ill-equipped for the task. Not Bing.

Bing provides direct access to the information you’re looking for. Bing organizes search results so you can quickly and easily locate the content that matters most. And Bing helps you harness that information through exclusive tools specific to your key tasks, leading to more-informed decisions. Put simply, Bing is a first-of-its-kind decision engine.

The idea behind Bing is to help overcoming search overload and allow quickly making informed choices. Features of Bing include:

  • Homepage
  • Autosuggest
  • Best Match
  • Deep Links
  • Quick Previews
  • Instant Answers
  • XRank

With navigation, Bing provides the organized search expertise:

  • Categorized Search and Web Groups
  • Quick Tabs
  • Related Searches
  • Session History
  • Enhanced Video Experience

Bing also simplifies your tasks under different verticals:

  • Bing Shopping
  • Bing Local
  • Bing Travel
  • Bing Health
  • Bing for Mobile
  • Bing Toolbars

Find out more about Bing through the product guide on the Discover Bing site.

    Bing.com China search results

Switching from Live.com to Bing.com, it would be interesting to see how all the new features of Bing will affect user behavior on Adcenter’s PPC sponsored links.

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Posted on May 29, 2009
Filed Under MSN | 6 Comments

Small Business Website Tips

Before building a website for your small business, you will need to come up with a solid plan that includes the following items:

  • Niche Market
  • Business Model
  • Domain Name and Web Hosting
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Architecture and Usability
  • Keyword Research and Content Development
  • Web Analytics
  • Marketing
  • Venture Capitals
  • Persistence

Niche Market

You want to pick your niche market and ensure:

  • You will have a head-start to your competitors by being the first company to launch a site in this niche market
  • You will still be passionate about the niche in the next 5 to 10 years

With this niche market, you need to clearly define who your target audiences (or potential customers) are.

Business Model

You want to figure out the core values that your small business website will provide to your users and customers. Your site should offer a solution to a problem of your users, by providing a product or a service. Your end goal is to monetize from your website, so you will have to sell the product or service.

With your service or product, you may want to provide a time-limited free trial, or a free membership with limited features. You want to give your users options to upgrade the service to paid memberships.

If at some point it is appropriate, you should also consider increase revenues by offer advertisers to place ads on your site. Unless you are negotiating with each individual advertiser, it will be easier to sign up as publishers on some reputable ad networks. Based on your site’s content, Google Adsense and Google Affiliate Network can target highly relevant ads to your website. Commission Junction is an ad network that offers the largest variety of advertiser offers.

Domain Name and Web Hosting

Your site’s domain name essentially represents your online business’s brand. When choosing your domain name, consider the name’s brand-ability for your audience, and rank-ability and link-ability for search engines. This leaves you two options:

  • Keyword-rich domain names
  • Brand-able domain names

A keyword-rich domain name allows you to incorporate generic keyword into your domain name. As Google values a keyword within the domain name for ranking purpose, your generic keyword should rank well in the SERP. The disadvantage is that many keyword-rich domain names are too generic which contributes little value to branding.

Good examples of keyword-rich domain names are SearchMarketing.com, SearchEngineStrategies.com, WebMasterWorld.com, SEOBook.com, WebTrends.com, and Hotels.com.

A brand-able domain name is the first essential step to build your brand which gives your site a point of distinction and your users an identity that is memorable. People take your website more seriously and are more likely to link to your site. The downside is that your site may not rank well on generic keywords that describe your products or services.

Good examples of brand-able domain names are Amazon.com, eBay.com, Yahoo.com, Alibaba.com, Digg.com, Ning.com.

At this stage, incorporate your SEO geotargeting strategies and choose a reliable web hosting solution such as Blue Host to ensure your site’s 100% up-time.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Architecture and Usability

When starting small, you will have some advantages over the established big websites in search engine optimization. SEO consists of both on-page and off-page optimization techniques.

With on-page SEO, find the best practices from Google SEO for Beginners. Google SEO Starter Guide demonstrates Google’s perspectives for optimizing your website.

With off-page SEO, it is all about natural link building and link baits. Google is strongly against the deliberate link building via paid links or paid posts.

Site architecture (or internal site structure) is about incorporating the correct internal link architecture with URL structure and page naming convention allows your site the solid foundation for future expansion.

SEO is usability. By creating good website navigations (main menu and breadcrumbs), you can reduce your site visitors’ bounce rates. You must also optimize the conversion rates by implementing professional design, proper wording, video instructions, and customer reviews.

Keyword Research and Content Development

You must discover the keywords that your potential users or customers actually use when they are searching for your products or services. Create your keyword list using the SEM keyword research tools.

Start by creating the basic content for your website, with both your users and SEO in mind:

With more and more content being created each day, duplicate content issues will eventually arise. Google has explanations about the duplicate content penalty and has also come up with a method for webmasters to tackle canonical URLs.

Web Analytics

Having a business model for monetization, you will then need to measure how your users are using your site and track the ROI.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool for this purpose.

Marketing

Besides search engine traffic, your website also requires other sources of traffic.

  • If you SEO strategy has been set up correctly, it will be easy to advertise on Google Adwords and track your ROI
  • Consider creating your profiles or pages within and market your site through social marketing sites
  • Recruit evangelists or industry experts to promote your services or products, so that other evangelists who are interested will follow
  • Advertise on local newspapers to improve your brand awareness

Venture Capitals

Unless you are keeping your business small, once your site’s audience grows bigger and bigger you will need more venture capital funds.

Persistence

You can’t expect your business to be success overnight, so your never-say-die attitude counts a lot!

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Posted on May 28, 2009
Filed Under Internet Marketing | 1 Comment

Google Suggest Adwords Ads

Google recently added four more features to Google Suggest:

  • Suggestions on the results page
  • Personalized suggestions
  • Navigational suggestions
  • Sponsored links in suggestions

The fourth feature (Sponsored links in Google Suggest) will definitely have some effects on your overall Adwords traffic and CTR. When this new feature is fully out of beta, your position one Adwords ads will start showing up in Google Suggest.

    Adwords ads in Google Suggest

The first version of Google Suggest was officially launched in last August to:

  • Help formulate queries
  • Reduce spelling errors
  • Saves keystrokes

SEO Book has some free search engine optimization tips on Google Suggest (including both short and long term influence on Google users’ search behavior).

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Posted on May 26, 2009
Filed Under Adwords | Leave a Comment

Google Adwords Quality Score for Beginners

Google’s pay-per-click advertising system Adwords determines ad ranks by applying advertisers’ keyword bids (cost-per-click) and by evaluating quality. To master Adwords, you will need to first understand Google’s Quality Score algorithm.

Google’s Official Guides on Adwords Quality Score

Adwords Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword is eligible to trigger an ad and the Quality Score algorithm varies on whether it is affecting ads on Google and the Search Network or ads on the Content Network:

Improving your keywords’ Quality Score is the best way to get your ads to appear above Google’s organic search results:

Quality Score is calculated for contextually-targeted and placement-targeted ads:

Landing page quality and landing page load time both contribute towards the calculation of Adwords Quality Score:

Click through rate (CTR) is one of the most important factors in determining your keywords’ Quality Score, but you still should not forget other factors:

Tips from Other Adwords Experts on Quality Score

Major Quality Score updates (via the Inside Adwords Blog)

  • A New Addition to the Quality Score: (December 2005) Landing page quality was first incorporated into Adwords Quality Score for Google’s Search Network in which low quality landing page will cause an increase in your minimum bids of your keywords.
  • Landing Page Quality Update: (November 2006) Google extended landing page quality to Google’s Content Network.
  • Quality Score Updates: (February 2007) Google would set a lower Minimum Bid to keywords with limited historical data and improve the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads.
  • Landing Page Load Time Now Affects Keywords’ Quality Scores: (June 2008) The landing page load time of your site would start to affect Adwords Quality Score.
  • Quality Score Improvements to Go Live in Coming Days: (September 2008) Adwords Quality Score would be re-calculated at the time of each search query, The “Inactive for Search” keyword status would be phased out and your keywords’ Minimum Bids would be replaced by First Page Bids.
  • Improvements to Ads Quality: (October 2008) Google announced an improvement to normalize CTR regarding different ad positions and a formula update to promote an ad from the right side of the page to the top spot above organic search results.

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Posted on May 18, 2009
Filed Under Adwords | 5 Comments

Adwords US Ad Text Trademark Policy Change

As a trademark owner, using your trademark keywords on Adwords and ensuring your ad texts receive professional PPC copywriting have become increasingly important. The recent update to the ad text trademark policy in the US will allow all advertisers to use trademark in their ad copy.

In the US, Google allows the use of trademarks in ad texts as long as your websites satisfy one of the following criteria:

  • Resale of the trademarked goods or services
  • Sale of components, replacement parts or compatible products corresponding to a trademark
  • Informational sites

This ad text trademark policy update will be effective as of 15 June.

Before the policy update, non-trademark owners were not allowed to include trademark in their ad copy. However, Google has always been insisting one of the best practices is to include your keyword in your ad text.

Include one of your keywords in your ad text
Find the best performing keyword in your ad group and include it in your ad text, especially in the title. Whenever a user types that keyword and sees your ad, the keyword phrase will appear in bold font within your ad on Google. This helps draw the user’s attention to your ad and shows users that your ad relates to their search.

Part of your ad text will appear in bold whenever it matches or nearly matches a user’s search query.

The new policy will allow non-trademark owners to include trademark in their ad copy and compete with trademark owners’ ads on a more level ground.

Google already allows the use of trademark as keywords for most of the countries.

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Posted on May 15, 2009
Filed Under Adwords | 3 Comments

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