An aspect that often confuses those new to PPC – and many of those not so new -is Google’s quality score.

The quality score is a test of your keywords worthiness. The quality score is used on all your keywords, and is used by Google as a test of your campaigns relevance. The more relevant your campaign is – some would say “relevant to Google’s bank balance” – the more likely you’ll appear in prime position on Adwords.

It’s reasonable to think Google would want the highest bidder to appear at the top, but Google actually makes less money this way. What Google wants is to display the ad that both has a sufficiently high bid and gets clicked most often by searchers. Google is asking users “is this ad relevant to you?” In this respect, the quality score can be your friend, as you can get higher ad placement using lower bids than your competition, by being more relevant.

So it really pays to have a high quality score.

What makes up the Quality Score?

The key metric is relevance, combined with your bid price. Are you bidding enough, is your ad exactly what the searcher is looking for, and can you prove that fact over and over again?

Google lists the following factors:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, explains quality score in this introduction video

In practice, focus on your click-thru rate over time, on elements such as your keywords, groups, and campaigns. Click-thru rate, or CTR, is still the heavy hitter (it is the big piece of the above pie in Hal’s hand).

You also need to be bidding close to your competitors. A high quality score won’t necessarily get you a high position if you’re only bidding 5% of what your competitors do. Bidding too low just means you are wasting time not collecting feedback from the marketplace. Get in the game

There are other less obvious factors, such as Google’s perception of relevance, which is a little harder to measure, and truth be told – only known to Google. Google looks to see if the AdWords ad copy wording matches the intent of the query. You can use keywords in your ads and Google may do semantic analysis which approves, but the bar might be higher. Google also employs quality raters which do manual reviews to look at perceived value add and other such fuzzy factors which change with market conditions.

When thinking about your keywords and ad copy, examine the wording of successful competitive ads, defined as ads that have been occupying top positions for a length of time. Do they hint at a clear buyer intent? Are they more commercial than non-commercial in nature? What angle do they take? Interview customers and find there pain points. Are there other market pain points that are not well represented in the ad copy of competitors?

How Do you Find Your Quality Score?

Up until recently, Google has been rather secretive about their quality score, offering only vague descriptions such as “Poor/OK/Great” . However, now you can see it for yourself.

• Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
• Select the appropriate campaign and ad group.
• Click the Keywords tab.
• Click Customize columns, under “Filter And Views”
• Select Show Quality Score from the drop-down menu.
• Click Done when you’re finished. Each quality score will be shown as a number of 1-10.

How Can I Improve My Quality Score?

Once you know your quality score, you can then optimize it, just as you optimize your ad groups and other variables. Focus on the terms that have the weakest quality scores.

Make sure your text ad closely matches the keywords you’re bidding on. Are your keywords with a low quality score only vaguely related to your copy? Either change the copy, put the keyword in new group with specific ad copy.

Your ad groups should all be tightly focused. You don’t need to use exact match on all keywords, but if broad or phrase match isn’t working maybe you should look to tighten it up. Also pay close attention to negative matches. Negative matches help relevance and should help your CTR, thus improving your quality score.

Next, review all poorly performing text ads by CTR (click thru-rate). Can you rewrite the ads to tighten the focus? Rewrite and test. If this doesn’t improve your quality score, keep rewriting, or dump the ad. Be very careful making changes to ads that perform well, however, as this will also effect your score.

After conducting this optimization, remove any poorly performing keywords in terms of quality score. Low quality keywords can drag down your entire campaign, as Google looks at historical averages across your campaign and account, not just specific keywords. However, the higher your overall quality score, the more you can get away with some underperforming keywords.

Review your landing pages. Don’t sweat this too much, as landing pages don’t really have much affect on you quality score, unless they are god-awful. They can certainly do you harm if you stray too far outside Google’s Adwords Landing Page Guidelines. Be relevant, clear, don’t trap users or try to fool them, and focus on usability.

The content network won’t affect your quality score, so don’t be afraid to use it. You might also like to read our Google Content Network Guide.

With Adwords bid prices going through the roof, and competition more fierce than ever, is it time to revisit the Google Content Network?

Google’s Content Network distributes PPC text and graphic advertising publishers sites, in the form of Adsense.

The content network differs from search PPC in that you aren’t bidding on search terms, at least not directly. You’re bidding to appear on certain sites that Google relates to groups of keyword terms. It’s the banner ad model, with a few clever tweaks to ensure relevance.

Why should advertisers pay any attention to the content network in 2010? Isn’t it rife with click fraud and under-performance?

Last year, Google released a study [PDF] showing the difference in performance between the two networks.

Turns out the CPA performance is pretty close:

“In November 2008, the median advertiser running on both the Search and Content Networks had a Content Network CPA
within approximately 2% of their Search Network CPA, suggesting that these advertisers were able to drive Content Network
conversions that were as cost-effective as Search Network conversions.”

Of course, Google would say that

However, the important metric in web advertising campaigns is ROI. If you achieve a good return, then some level of click fraud, garbage traffic and reduced control may not matter, especially when compared to the difference in click price on Google Search.

If your ROI is positive, you win. ROI is one of the key metrics you need to pay close attention to on the content network.

Besides having lower click prices, the content network also has extensive reach, appearing on millions of websites. The majority of web activity, by far, occurs at the content level.

As for issues such as fraud and low performance, the content network has certainly matured from where it was a few of years ago. Google do appear to be ironing our issues, and with better reporting, conversion is easier to both measure and retain.

Let’s take a look at how to approach advertising on the content network.

The Content Network – A Different Way Of Thinking

The advertiser picks a visitor demographic by grouping Adwords themes, as opposed to appearing under a particular keyword term. When people see your ads, it’s not because they are hunting for something specific, as signaled by a keyword search, they tend to be engaged in reading or browsing.

This fundamental quality requires that you use a different approach that you use in your PPC campaigns.

So, the first step is to split your campaigns between the search network and the content network, so you have a basis for comparison. Whilst it can be more work setting it up, the split allows you to test different wording and approaches on both networks.

A Strategy For The Content Network

Placement on third-party sites can be a little hit and miss.

Google’s algorithms try to figure out where best to place your ad and do so by crunching numbers based around historical performance of ads similar to yours.

It is reasonable to assume that Google rewards the ads that are clicked on the most.

You can hand-select sites, which is also a legitimate approach. However, you might end up making worse guesses than Google, who at least have some content network data to crunch.

With this in mind, one effective strategy is to cast a wide net, then refine your campaign once you have some data to work with. Let Google decide placement, no matter how weird and wonderful, monitor your data, then cut the losers and run with the winners.

Step One:

Download Google’s Adwords Editor, if you don’t have it already. You can also use your Google Adwords web-based account, but I find it easier to manage these campaigns with the desktop version.

Step Two:

Setup conversion tracking. Google Analytics is free to use, and there are various third-party tools available.

Step Three:

Open the Adwords Editor and import an existing Adwords campaign.

Step Four:

Change search network to “none”

Step Five:

Change content network to “anywhere on the network”

Step Six:

Set your daily budget. A good rule of thumb at this point is to slash your bidding by 50%.

You now have a basis for comparison of the content network vs your PPC campaign on the search network. It’s a good idea to separate the two different networks out, as you likely find your advertising needs tweaking in order to work well on the content network. We’ll look closer at this aspect shortly.

Step Seven:

Get rid of negative keywords, keyword bids and any other variable used to hone and optimize your Adwords PPC campaigns as these may affect your placement on the content network. You may end up having to replace some of the specific negative keywords with broader irrelevant keyword modifiers and themes.

One important aspect of placement on the content network is keyword themes. More on this shortly.

In this exploration phase, you want to cast a wide net as possible, as you may find good traffic in places you never considered, or knew existed. It matters little if that a site Google places you on doesn’t appear to be appropriate. That site may have the target demographic you’re looking for, and that target demographic may exist on a sub-page of that site that isn’t immediately obvious at first glance. Once you’ve had a chance to evaluate performance, you can then go through and optimize by removing sites.

Some people do it the opposite way, of course. They have certain sites in mind, and only target those sites. Both methods are legitimate. The advantage is that you retain tight control from the outset. The disadvantage, as noted above, is that you may miss lucrative traffic streams from sites you don’t know about.

Once you’ve got some data, you can run a third campaign on only the content sites that convert well. The bids for this campaign can be set higher.

Use Google’s Placement Algorithms To Your Advantage

Like with any Google algorithm, there is a lot of conjecture about exactly how Google decides where to place your ads.

Essentially, the same factors as Adwords apply, such as bid pricing and the relevance of ad text, with the addition of theme matching.

Google matches the theme of your adgroup to the theme of the content page on which it appears.

What this means in practice is that your should ensure your ad groups are tightly focused around a thematic idea. One way of doing this is to pay close attention to the terms Google associates with your keyword research in Google Keyword Tool and the ~ command i.e. place a ~ before your keyword search in Google to find associated terms.

For example, “Ford Mustang, Mustang, Used Mustang, Classic Mustangs” is an example of a tightly focused thematic group. “Cars, Sports Cars, American Cars”, less so. Google may place you on sites related to cars, but not specific cars, which may lower every positive metric relating to ad relevance.

Bidding occurs at the ad group level. Be sure to adjust your bids down on the content network – 50% is a rough guide – as content clicks tend to be worth less than search clicks, especially in the experimental phase.

Google’s content pricing is per click, however you will be charged different rates per click, depending on the site your ad appears on. Google attempts to work out where
in the buy cycle a visitor might be, based on the type of content a page displays, and the closer that person is to buying, the higher the price charged. However, the conversion rate is likely to be higher from such a page, than from a vaguely related page not related to strong buyer intent.

Think carefully about the context of your ads. Ads aren’t appearing as a result of a specific keyword search. Someone will be reading a page, perhaps on a site they are very familiar with, and they probably aren’t in hunting mode. It’s more a form of discovery, of stumbling across something.

Experiment with your ad text, as what works on the search network may not translate to the content network. Bear this in mind when creating your ads.

Google offers placement reports. These can be found under Report Type section, select Placement Performance.

These reports show you where your ad is shown, number of impressions, and other data you’d normally expect to see in you Adwords reports. You can determine which sites offer you the best bang for you buck, and which sites are not converting. You can block the low converting sites with the Site Exclusion tool. Even if a site which is getting you a lot of ad impressions is not yielding many clicks it can still pull down the overall quality of your campaign. Each layer of inefficiency that you block makes your remaining account that much more potent because your clickthrough rate and ad quality are improved.

Branding & Image Ads

A final note about branding. You tend to get a lot of impressions on the content network, which can help drive brand awareness. If branding is important to you, then consider placing image ads, or writing your text ads with this aim in mind. You may rack up a lot of exposure and awareness before having to pay much in the form of click-thrus! In many cases image ads will require higher bidding since you are blocking out competing ads.

Here are a few popular image ad strategies

• the well branded image which aims to not only drive traffic directly, but also aims to create awareness to fuel online or offline conversions. many of these types of ads contain an interesting offer like some interactive quiz or goal
• the coupon ad which aims to drive direct conversions
• the affiliate “1 secret” ads where they have a cartoon character which makes it seem like anyone can do _____ (by over-promising and under-delivering)

No matter what ad strategy you use it helps to test multiple variations. Right now JillianMichaels.com is using at least 3 different ad formats to help keep them fresh. Image ads may need to be refreshed every few weeks to every few months to prevent a nosedive in CTR. What was once a successful strategy become less effective as people see the same ad over and over again, and as other advertisers copy a particular strategy it may become less appealing (this is especially true in the fast moving affiliate market).

And if a specific site performs well for you then you might want to create an ad just for it…though sometimes one can go too far with the blending…the goal should not be to anger the publishers!

Warning:  This post is a long one, but it’s worth the read:)

The Great Adwords Affiliate Massacre of 2009 will be forever remembered as a dark and confusing time for advertisers with affiliate relationships as the heart of their business model.

Educated estimates indicate Google culled over 30,000 advertisers during Q4 of ‘09.

“Google’s Gonna Miss My Money!”

Asked about this seemingly unprofitable move during Google’s Q4 analyst Q&A session, Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s VP of Product Management indicated just how little banning this many advertisers effectively mattered to Google’s financials:

Aaron Kessler – (Kaufman Bros):

I think there were some reports that you may have filtered out some of your advertisers this quarter on the ad sense side. Can you provide any more details about that?  - ED. Note:  Obviously the analyst is referring to Adwords not Adsense

Nikesh Arora (Google):

Obviously we are constantly looking at our advertisers to see whether there is an extraordinary [expand] that is happening. We have thrown in those advertisers who repeatedly attempt to scam users. So we went through one of our regular processes of looking at advertisers and seeing which ones of those we though weren’t adding quality or adding sort of value to our users. In those cases we chose to suspend them permanently.

Jonathan Rosenberg (Google):

This was happening this quarter with the approach we took to suspend the repeated scam users as opposed to before where all we were doing was disabling certain bad ads.

Aaron Kessler – (Kaufman Bros.)

Does this have any material impact on the quarter numbers? It sounds like it could have had a slight impact from what I was reading.

Jonathan Rosenberg (Google):

No the impact is slight. It is a relatively small number.

In short, the 30,000 banned advertisers didn’t make much of an impact on the Adwords cash machine at all. So the screams of affiliates bitterly pointing that they ’spend millions on Adwords’, fell on deaf ears.  By all accounts, so did affiliates’ appeal requests to Google for reconsideration.

Who Was Cut & Why?

It’s pretty fair to say that aggressive affiliate marketers pushing fraudulent re-bill offers could likely have seen this coming.  However, the wide net that was cast “disabling” the accounts of affiliates who hadn’t promoted “get-rich-quick-with-Google” or re-bill diet offers crushed a lot of affiliates’ primary revenue channel, while they begged for an exceptions to their bans.

Subsequent forensic analysis on what metrics Google could have used to algorithmically cull the herd points to a couple of primary factors:

• Repeated “slaps” of across-the-board ‘poor’ landing page quality scores against one or more domains used in affiliate campaigns.  In retrospect, it looks like if you’d been “slapped” in the past more than once and just reloaded your campaign to a new domain, you were permanently disabled instead of bring ’slapped’ again.
• If you had ever promoted any products associated with using Google’s brand to sell information products or business schemes, you were toast.

By and large, direct-to-merchant affiliates or ‘direct-linkers’ were pretty much untouched.  There were a number of merchant-of-record Adwords accounts that were disabled as well, likely false-positives in the automated sweep.

Google’s New Affiliate Guidelines

Google denies the charge that they don’t want affiliates to use the Adwords system, and have updated various sections of their Adwords’ TOS in several places to supposedly clarify what exactly it is that Google wants from affiliates.

Google has added a definition of an “affiliate” that looks like this:

An affiliate is an individual advertiser or website owner who has a business relationship with a merchant to promote the merchant’s product or service. The affiliate earns a small commission from the merchant for each referral that results in a sale; the merchant handles payment and fulfillment.

Their updated Site Quality Guidelines add additional details on one of the main sticking points affiliates have constantly been chastised for by Google: “unique” or “value-add” content:

Non-unique Landing Page: Google won’t show multiple ads leading to identical or similar landing pages at the same time, even if the pages have different domains. This means that if another advertiser’s ad leads to a landing page that’s similar to yours, and his keyword has a higher Ad Rank, his ad will show instead of yours.

What the guidelines don’t point out is that if your site is repeatedly determined to be “low quality” as a result of insufficient amounts of “unique” content, it’s possible that you’ll likely to get swept out of the system altogether, or “disabled” as an advertiser, as you’re clearly (according to Google) egregiously violating their landing page -and by extension- affiliate guidelines on a repeated basis.

Google even warns merchants who have affiliate programs of the danger that their affiliates can place them under as a result of this unique content enforcement policy.

So What Exactly Does Google Want from Affiliates?

There’s been a lot of speculation on this point, particularly since the Adwords ban hammer cleared the decks in Q4.

For instance, some feel that direct-linking to a merchant’s site is all “Google really wants” to allow as far as affiliates on Adwords are concerned.

Other PPC marketers feel that white-labeling products or somehow ‘rolling your own’ version of products or services you’ve previously promoted as an affiliate is the answer.

What’s the real answer?  No one knows, and there’s likely plenty of internal debate at Google as well as to what is acceptable and what isn’t.

That said, in 2010, it’s safe to say that the key to long-term affiliate marketing on Adwords lies in the “unique content” itself…

Show Me, Don’t Tell Me!

NFL coach Mike Singletary made that phrase famous, and most affiliate marketers just wish Google would “just show us what is OK” instead of subjective guidelines that make affiliates guess at exactly what kind of “unique content” they need to somehow generate in order to stick around on Adwords long-term.

It’s obvious at this point that slapping together a bunch of ‘how-to’ articles or unremarkable wiki-style content about the topic you’re advertising on isn’t going to cut it, and Google isn’t about to cough up a list of their ‘favorite affiliate sites’ that you can run off and replicate.

So we figured we’d put forward three examples of sites in different affiliate verticals that ‘get’ the unique, value-added content proposition in general.

Hopefully they’ll provide some clear clear quality markers that even Google couldn’t possibly argue with.  Not all of these sites use Adwords, but the principles apply nonetheless.

Mint.com:  Lead-Gen Affiliate Marketing Done Right

Mint is a personal finance and savings site, basically an online version of Intuit’s Quicken.  The biggest portion of their revenue model is credit card, insurance, and financial products lead generation paid out on an affiliate CPA basis.

Their calculators, configurators, and search filters add tremendous unique, value to the end-user:

Of course, Mint has a lot more going for it than just calculators and the like, they also have reams of in-house generated, useful content covering a huge range of topics from personal finance and budgeting to investments and more.

They also have a detailed section on user privacy, including videos from the founder on how they handle user data in a vertical where users are clearly sensitive to privacy.

Ask yourself: Even if Mint had no corporate brand, when you look at this site, would it look like a “thin affiliate”?  If Mint was using Adwords to promote credit card or auto insurance leads, would you consider them as providing a “value-added” affiliate experience?

Trip Advisor: Affiliate Travel Referrals on Steroids

At its core, TripAdvisor.com makes money on affiliate booking referrals for hotels, flights, car rentals, and the like. How do they add value in such crowded space?

Note the yellow-highlighted portions here:

There’s some solid quality markers here:

• Segmented user reviews. Not just regular user comments, but ratings, and review segmentation that allows other page visitors to read reviews from people traveling for a similar purpose (business, family etc…)
• A system-wide rating and comparison engine, enabling customers to easily compare the popularity and quality of this particular hotel to others in the same hotel vertical (in this case business hotels).
• User-submitted photos. Customers can view and compare actual on-site photos from the hotel that other users have submitted to get an idea of what the hotel rooms really look like.

Does this mean that your affiliate review site needs to have 247+ reviews to indicate a ‘quality’ site experience?

Hardly.  Obviously the more reviews and ratings the better, but if you work hard to populate your site with real user feedback (not fake comments!) over a period of time, you’re going to send similar signals to Google.

Ask yourself: Even if your site was smaller than TripAdvisor, if you provided this kind of end-user value, would you look like a “thin affiliate”?  Could Google say you’re not adding “unique content” when advertising hotel or flight bookings with Adwords?

CrutchField.com: e-Commerce & Then Some

Granted, CrutchField is an online reseller and not strictly an affiliate, but the differentiators they’ve implemented hold a plethora of ideas for e-commerce affiliates to move beyond the straight-up product feed.

Every electronics reseller is pitching basically the same thing, no doubt fed from a reseller product feed.

Crutchfield however separates itself from the pack by incorporating a number of unique, value-adds like these:

• The Learning Center. Crutchfield has gone to the trouble of strategically placing helpful, expert advice on the products genre being viewed, and placing a drop-down list of other “shopping guides” and “need-to-know” pointers specifcally applicable to the products listed.  The pictures and names help add a personal, trust-enhancing aspect to the additional content.
• The Popular Questions and Helpful ideas portion of the page also helps hook the visitor on the page longer by answering common questions that shoppers have.  Note that these portions of the page aren’t hidden, buried in light-colored footer links.  They’re front and center, and can no doubt help improve conversions for the highly technical products being advertised.
• The Shopping Tools feature in the left nav provides custom tools that Crutchfield has taken the time to develop to help set them apart from competitors and enhance conversions.

If you’re promoting affiliate shopping feeds on your site, with Adwords or without, you have to read Rae Hoffman’s outstanding article on how to make your feed site unique.

Ask yourself: Would Crutchfield’s e-commerce site be easily classified by Google as a “duplicate-content, affiliate feed site”?  Would it be fair to say Crutchfield has earned the right to have its ads shown right up against the Amazon’s of the world in the Adwords auction?

But That’s Way Too Hard!

Is it?  How many man-hours would be required to thicken out your site enough to be secure as an Adwords affiliate advertiser in 2010?

Would you make your money back on the work involved if you were able to take advantage of the fact that thousands of competitors have recently been removed from the platform?

Who Says This is What Google Wants?

This question is broken.  The bottom line is that no one knows what Google wants now, tomorrow, or 3 years from now.  The answer lies in what the user wants.

The Adwords affiliate game is now dramatically harder.  If you’re not a publicly recognized brand advertiser, auto-generating 25 pages of crap article re-writes, stripping out all site nav, and squeezing visitors too hard into a lead form or cart is just not going to work in 2010.

As always, there will be some affiliates that continue to fly under the radar for a month or two here and there, but if you’re looking to be around on Adwords long enough to make all the additional heavy lifting cashflow-positive, you’ve got to up your game.

In the startup world, venture capitalists look to invest in companies that have a “defensible business model”.  The same is true for affiliate sites on Adwords going forward.  Your site needs to stand on its own two feet by embodying the spirit of Mint, TripAdvisor, and Crutchfield:

It’s not what you think is “enough for Google”.  It’s about unique site features actual users would give a crap about.  If your site was removed from the web, would anybody notice? Would anybody care?   If you didn’t own your site, would you visit it or buy anything off of it?  Why would you recommend your site to a friend?

Some say SEO and PPC are converging into a Quality Score black hole.  Maybe if we could honestly find good answers to questions like these, Google’s quality team wouldn’t seem so scary.

Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system…optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google’s yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don’t yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.

To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator – a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.

Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.

Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google’s products, our calculator is starting out in beta

There is a lot of nonsense written about copywriting.

The more prescriptive copy writing courses describe how to write copy, seemingly suitable for any PPC campaign, regardless of audience. “Use big hooks, create immediacy, use long sales copy, tell a story, start with “Dear Friend”.

There’s really no such thing as generic rules for copywriting.

In order to write copy that sells, a writer must make the right offer to the right audience. No matter how well copy is written, if the offer isn’t compelling to the target audience, then PPC campaigns won’t succeed.

Therefore, good PPC copywriting should start before a word hits the page. Good PPC copywriting starts with market analysis, observation and understanding people.

1. Compare Your Offer

The first step is to undertake market research. Compare your offer with those of your competitors.

Examine the existing PPC ads in your niche. Pay the most attention to the top three advertisers. If they keep advertising for any length of time, their offer is resulting in high enough click-thru rates, and return, to earn them those positions.

They most likely have the offer and wording right, or close enough.

Compare the top three ads with those ads lower down. Bid prices and other metrics aside, the top advertisers often use wording that is more compelling. Do you notice a marked difference in wording and the way the offer is presented? Are they giving something away for free? Are they promising something that sounds remarkably valuable?

Next, examine the advertisers landing pages using the same criteria. Take note of what they are asking the audience to do. Are they asking people to “Buy Now”? Are they merely asking them to give an email address? Are they giving away something for nothing? Are they putting fewer hurdles in the way of the visitor that their competitors?

Make sure your offer is at least as good as theirs. In fact, you should aim to beat their offer. When the competition is only a click away, it makes it very easy for people to compare offers.

Make sure your offer is the most compelling.

2. Understand Your Market

Who is your market?

Try to imagine the people who buy from you, as if they were walking into your shop or office. How old are they? What jobs do they have? How much money do they have? What do they need so badly that they will buy it from an anonymous supplier they have never heard of before until now? What will stop them buying from you, even if they need what you have? Why aren’t they going to a local brick-n-mortar supplier, or a major retailer, to buy your service or product?

You also need to know how they talk about their need.

Someone who has a sore ear might talk in terms of symptoms, or they may leap straight to diagnosis. They may worry they have something serious and simply be looking for reassurance from an authoritative source. Or they may describe their symptoms. They may have had the condition before and be in search of a new remedy. They may want to find out where to find a local doctor.

Same problem, much the same market, but different requirements.

By examining how people talk about their need, you’re more likely to be able to pitch an offer they want. If you’re selling remedies online, then most of these visitors aren’t people you should be targetting, at least not directly. This is what is known as market segmentation, or dividing the market into subgroups with similar motivations. Your offer should be pitched at the right subgroup, which will not only result in higher conversions, it will reduce your PPC spend.

By now, you may be thinking that this all sounds too hard. Isn’t this type of market research expensive and time consuming?

It can be, but there are a number of cheap and cheerful ways you can get such information.

Buy market research reports. It is reasonably cheap to obtain generic research reports. Whilst not as good as data gathering specifically for your purpose, they can provide valuable insights into market trends. For example, many people who seek medication on the internet worry about safety. Your copy may seek to ally such fears.

A/B testing. People engaged in PPC often use A/B testing, also known as split run testing. For those new to PPC, A/B testing is when you test one landing page against another. Each page will be different, featuring alternative wording and or layout. The page that results in the most sales, wins. Here’s a good overview of A/B testing.

Ask your customers. The best people to ask are the people who have bought from you. You can use simple surveys, and offer people rewards in exchange for their views. Why did they buy from you and not the others?

Ask your non-customers. The conversion percentage of most websites is low, around 3%-10%. That means over 90% of people aren’t interested in your offer. Why not? Is there a way you can capture this information before they leave? It might be as simple as prompting them with a dialogue box or chat box. You could ask them to sign up for a newsletter by giving them something of value, so you can extract this information at a latter date.

Facebook/Twitter/Social Networks – these can be great places to learn about your target demographic. Join groups relating to your niche and observe. Note the way they talk, the words they use to describe needs, the sites they recommend and their interests.

Aligning Your Copy With Your Market

By now, you have two very important pieces of information on which to base your copy. You understand something about your audience, and you understand the nature of the other offers they may be seeing.

Make a more compelling offer than your competitors. Make an offer that is closely aligned with the needs of your market, and phrased in their terminology. Cover the basics – create a message that has emotional appeal, is personal and conversational. Repeat the call to action clearly and often.

Above all else, keep it simple.

Even if your target audience is high-brow intellectual, it doesn’t necessarily mean they want to be pitched in such terms. The may require extensive detail, they may require obscure specifics, but it’s usually best to relegate such detail lower down the page, or off to a separate page. The thing they need to be crystal clear about is your offer and how it benefits them.

Whoever our audience, they most likely fall into one of four distinct groups:

The Unaware

They know they have a need, but they haven’t thought much beyond that point. This type of person requires a lot of education about the problem itself, then the solutions.

The Ambivalent

They have a problem, and they know something about the solutions, but they’re not sure they really need to solve the problem. At least not right now. Maybe tomorrow. You need to spend a lot of time focusing on the solution, the merits of the solution, and why acting sooner than later is in the buyers best interests.

The Hunter

They know they have a problem, and they know about the solutions, but they’re hunting around for the right deal. You have to convince them that your offer is the best one for them. Convince them that they are smart for deciding to go with you.

The Desperate

They must have what you’re selling. This is the dream buyer. They want to buy quickly, so get out of their way and enable them to do so. Use credibility markers and a clear, precise sales process.

I’m skating over the surface, as I’m sure these aspects aren’t new to you, but it’s a good idea to keep in mind what stage a buyer may be in the buy cycle. As you can see, it will change the emphasis of your pitch.

There’s one other important aspect to landing pages that is seldom, if ever, mentioned in traditional copywriting manuals.

Interactivity.

The easiest thing for a consumer to do is click links and buttons. So offer them something to click. It’s an affirming action, so long as that click isn’t back!

This also serves to draw people deeper into your world. You can segment your visitors by offering them different click paths, and so craft the message specifically for that type of buyer over a series of pages. Different types of visitors will take different click paths.

You can also match up click paths with keyword terms, thus helping you improve your targeting in future. For example, you may find that people who searched on “ear infection” tended to opt for click paths that offered deeper, diagnostic information. In future, you may bring people who search on “ear infection” directly to a page oriented around diagnostic information.

Attention spans are getting shorter. Long sales copy pages, particularly when used as landing pages, are becoming less common than they were a few years ago.

A YouTube/FaceBook, brought up on on-demand media and instant gratification generation isn’t going to spend a lot of time reading long text blocks. An older audience may do so, yet another reason for understanding and segmenting your audience.

This is not to say long copy sales pitches do not work, but if you use them, be sure to “chunk it” i.e. regularly restate your offer, and offer the call to action, after making each point, or after every few paragraphs. This means visitors don’t need to read the whole thing in order to understand your offer.

We’re also seeing a lot of landing pages that offer video and audio, and very little in the way of text. The copywriter is not out of a job, however, as the script is just as important as the written word. We have the ability to make landing pages very rich and compelling, but the use of technology should never distract from the fundamental principles: make the right offer to the right audience.

A Final Note On Credibility

We live in a world where trust isn’t what it used to be.

In times past, people tended to place more trust in authority that they do now, including the claims made by advertisers who appeared in trustworthy magazines and newspapers. This is still the case, in some demographics – typically elderly – but generally speaking, we live in very cynical times.

And it’s no wonder. By the time a person reaches an age where they become an active consumer, they’ve been bombarded with millions of messages. Messages saturate every media, so in order to retain any sanity, people get very good at tuning most of them out.

Unless it relates directly to them.

Again, this is why focusing on people, their needs, and how they say things is crucial. In the 10’s, we need to speak the customers language more than ever. They have the back-click button. Those under 30 have most likely been brought up in a world where they are the center of the universe. It’s all about them. So credibility, in this day and age, is largely about holding up a mirror to the audience. If you appear to be like them, then they tend to trust you. There are many markers of trust, of course, but bear this point in mind, particularly for youth demographics. If your copy talks down to them, or assumes to be the voice of authority, you’ll likely lose them.

For the longest time, Google kept searchers’ actual queries close to the vest. Their search term report lumped most actual user searches into “Other Queries”.

In early 2009, Google finally included the details of what make up these “Other Queries” instantly creating a number of highly useful data points.

How can you generate actionable data from Adwords Search Query Reports?

Here’s four quick points to start…

Capture New Keywords from Phrase Variants & Synonyms

See what ancillary terms are triggering your ads via broad and phrase matches. Where else can you get exact click-through and conversion data from phrase variations enabling you to isolate and target these terms more closely?

Look closely for new ideas:

• Are your customers using acronyms or abbreviations you haven’t targeted yet?
• Are they using spaces between initials and multiple-word keywords? (”jp morgan”, “jpmorgan”, and “j p morgan”are all different keywords)
• Are they using navigational queries like domain names or URLs that you haven’t broken out yet?

Why target these individually if your broad matches are already catching them?

• Well, how’s your quality score for that broad term? Could it improve?
• Could you be over-paying for matches to these new keyword possibilities?
• How targeted is your ad text to these new variants?  Could it be better, resulting in more visitors and conversions?

Uncover Missing Negatives

Seeing precisely how Google is matching your keywords, you may notice irrelevant searches seeping in.  These irrelevant terms are easy negatives to add.

Even if impression or click counts for these badly-matched searches are initially low, adding them as negatives immediately to your campaign-level negatives can help the Adwords system improve its matching accuracy:

You’re directly telling Google what’s NOT relevant to your particular campaign.  This saves ad spend and improves your CTR going forward.

Pump Your Keyword Quality Score

Use the Search Query Report to find high-volume variations of your broad keywords.

Next, isolate these keywords and create new, more tightly-knit adgroups consisting of these keywords only and ruthlessly fine-tune your ad text to more precisely match this reduced keyword list.

The result from doing this?  Increased CTR.

Your increased CTR will in turn raise your keyword relevance quality score, lowering your actual CPCs in the process.  Lowered actual CPCs leads to a little something all PPC advertisers want…

Boost Your Campaign’s ROI

Obviously, reduced actual-CPCs helps the pocket book, but the Search Query Report can tweak your ROI even further:

For instance, if you notice that a query variation doesn’t ever seem to convert, add that exact phrase as an exact-match campaign or adgroup-level negative, cutting that particular query while leaving everything else as-is.

There’s no sense beating a dead horse.  If a phrase or keyword just flat-out doesn’t work, dump it.

Anything you can cut without reducing conversions will net you a higher return on your spend.

A couple closing notes for the road: For any of the above to be truly effective, a decent amount of click data spread over a sufficient space of time is required.  Never cut without enough data to make an accurate judgment call.

What actionable metrics do you pull from your Adwords Search Query Reports?  Leave a Comment!

Adwords content advertisers might be left wondering where all their impressions disappeared to today.  That impression vacuum?  It’s Google bogarting a large portion of their content network with Nexus One display ads.

This morning, Adsense publishers were reporting a dramatic drop in Adsense clicks and revenue.

Sadly, many of the sites brandishing Nexus ads weren’t exactly tech-related…

Have a cooking site?  Google thinks the Nexus One ads are a perfect fit for your visitors.  Soccer fan site?  Here’s some Nexus One for you too.

But if you’re a content advertiser looking to advertise pots and pans on cooking sites?  Sorry, no impressions left…

Obviously, search impressions are Google’s to do with what they please, but publisher inventory is a bit different.

Given Google’s big push towards making advertisers provide a more “magazine content-style landing experience”, it’s with keen interest that we examine Google’s Nexus One landing page:

10/10 Quality Score?  As we can see here, the user experience is nicely augmented here by the volumes of valuable ‘magazine-style’ content.

To be fair, Google has a nice little click-to-learn-more interface on the phone and a 3D tour to boot.  Hopefully they were just kidding about the amount of content and navigation they’ve been asking advertisers to incorporate on their landing pages at the expense of conversions.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  Chrome ads are also around, but not in anywhere near the volume of the Nexus One units.

Some have also noted the mantra of the ‘clean Google search page’ has undergone some adjustment:

At least Adsense pubs can take solace in knowing that the ads are good enough for Google.com, so they should be good enough for them.

Hopefully this is just a one or two day push and when they’re done perhaps Google’s advertisers can have the content network back.

Seth Godin mentioned it is easier to change with the market than it is to change the market:

Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean the market cares any longer.
…
It’s extremely difficult to repair the market.

It’s a lot easier to find a market that will respect and pay for the work you can do. Technology companies have been running this race for years. Now, all of us must.

With that in mind, Google long ago highlighted that they didn’t like certain advertising arbitrage business models. Last year they went one step further by releasing a video claiming how searchers are demanding more for advertisers.

One of the factors among many that will be key for marketers to be successful moving forward is that they’ll increasingly need to think about acting like a content creator, or thinking like a publisher is a way to think about it.

When you walk into a bookstore, a Borders, there’s 500, a thousand magazines on the shelf, and each of those publishers is thinking about not how to stop, shock, interrupt, or detract that reader. They’re are thinking about “what is that I can say in this moment that will be helpful content to a reader”.

The above such claims were, of course, nonsense. They are not what the marketplace demands, but are just a reflection of Google’s desire to sell more keywords and push advertisers toward buying more along the search cycle. But they have enough search marketshare that in the worst economic climate in nearly 100 years they can chose what money they want to take and what they leave on the table.

Thin affiliates are viewed (at best) as unneeded duplication in the marketplace, and (at worse) purveyors of scams and spreaders of fraudulent offers. Most of the affiliate market could be clean, but the 2% of the market operating at scale with shady practices did enough damage that Google would rather flush the business model than spend time sorting through it.

Perry Marshall tied in recent AdWords marketplace changes for affiliates to the above concept that it is easier to change with the market than it is to change the market:

As of today, in some categories, the number of advertisers has gone from 50 to 5. The land has been cleared for people who create original products. A lucrative opportunity for content creators.
…
But the only way you can survive as an affiliate on Google now is to have a website with a lot of great, original content, and an email list.

If you’re gonna do that…. you might as well have original products too :^>

It is nice to believe that we have Google’s power to change the market or that we can make the market like it once was, but profit is rarely (never?) created by wishing time goes backwards.

If you know how to do targeted advertising it is not hard to take that knowledge and create a niche vertical product around it. Lower margin and higher maintenance (at least off the start) than slinging bits, but over time as you build brand awareness, social connections, get marketplace feedback, and build organic traffic streams you enjoy margin expansion.

Oh, and that thin affiliate who is killing it on Google AdWords… well you already know who they are. Once you own a big slice of media, you can set the rules as you wish.

Guest post by Tom Demers

At WordStream, we just launched a couple of free tools I think paid search marketers can get a lot of utility out of. I’ll walk through how both of them work and what you might be able to use them for.

The first tool is something we’re calling The Free Keyword Niche Finder. Basically the premise is that rather than offering you single keyword suggestions we’re showing you the pockets of keywords (or “keyword niches”) that are the most popular.

This is valuable for a few reasons:

1. Keyword Niches Versus Single Keywords – It helps you prioritize your content, keyword targeting, and campaign/AdGroup creation based on an entire “keyword universe” surrounding your topic. Many times you’ll find the most popular keyword you could target will have the “longest tail,” but not always.
2. Suggested Keyword Variations – It shows you popular variations within a given keyword cluster, or niche – this helps you to vary page content and anchor text: something real SEOs advocate – and it helps you to structure comprehensive PPC campaigns or Ad Groups
3. Campaign Structure Suggestions – It helps you to create a nice semantically-themed campaign and/or Ad Group structure for paid search account creation

I’ll walk through each of these advantages, and then introduce another tool we’re introducing called The Free Keyword Grouper.

1. “Keyword Niches“ Versus Single Keywords

It’s interesting to compare the results of a traditional keyword tool to The Free Keyword Niche Finder.

Here is the list of results from our Free Keyword Tool:

Now let’s look at the results for the same topic using The Free Keyword Niche Finder:

The interesting thing here is in the difference between the two results, and the way that the two tools function. The Free Keyword Tool looks at the volume of results across a variety of sources (ISPs, search engines, and toolbars). The Free Keyword Niche Finder, meanwhile, takes the same data that The Free Keyword Tool is using (our own database) and then clusters that information semantically.

So what we’re seeing here is that some keywords have a longer or more substantial “tail”. Look:

The aggregated keyword “niches” are more centered around brands. If we dig deeper into the refurbished laptops – ibm cluster we get a pretty good idea of why the tail for brands is longer:

So while “used refurbished laptops” is a more popular single query than “refurbished laptops ibm”, the sum of the refurbished laptops keyword niche is actually greater, and it contains more specific, buy-focused terms.

By looking at the data side-by-side, it definitely appears that IBM refurbished laptops is a more profitable keyword niche to attack.

2. Suggested Keyword Variations Within a Group

The tool also shows you closely related variations, as you can see above, so that you can structure a single landing page and Ad Group/ad text to target a variety of phrases, allowing your campaigns to generate more ROI and to become more scalable.

3. PPC Campaign Structure Suggestions

One of the neatest things about this tool from a PPC standpoint is that if you’re starting a new paid search account or campaign, you can get some great suggestions for either high-level campaign ideas, or even for actionable Ad Groups (depending on the term you put in). Following our example from above, we might turn each of the top ten suggestions into high-level campaigns. From there, we could drill down to find specific Ad Groups for each of our campaigns. Let’s take one of the more popular niches, refurbished laptops – dell, and enter that keyword into the Niche Finder:

Assuming were using Refurbished Dell Laptops as a campaign, these would make for a series of pretty tight Ad Groups, ranging from around 10 keywords to around 35, and allowing us to write a very targeted ad and create a very specific, compelling landing page for each group.

The Free Keyword Grouper – Finding Keyword Niches in Your Own Lists and Data

Our other free tool, The Free Keyword Grouper, offers pretty similar functionality, but instead of asking for a keyword as input, it groups your existing data (whether you generated a list from a keyword suggestion tool like the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool or WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool), or allows you to export data from your analytics or a search query report, drop it into the tool, and then The Free Keyword Grouper segments that data for you:

If you drop in a list of keywords, it’ll spit back a list of results similar to what you would find with The Free Keyword Niche Finder. This is a nice way to look at either a list you already have, or to examine historical data on a client site or an existing site you may be taking over. You can then leverage the same advantages The Free Keyword Niche Finder offers.

So What’s the Catch?

As with anything, our new free tools are imperfect. While they’re free, you do have to spend a few seconds creating a free WordStream account to use them, and once you do we’ll occasionally send you relevant Email communications about the tools themselves, or about some of our products you might be interested in.

The Free Keyword Niche Finder works off our own database, and as with any keyword tool, you have to be careful not to be over-reliant upon keyword suggestion data. That’s one of the neat things about The Free Keyword Grouper, though: you can take blended data from multiple tools, or even your own log file or analytic data (which you know to be accurate) and run the tool against that.

Finally: this is just a start. If you’re going to develop really effective paid search campaigns, you need to do a lot more work building out specific Ad Groups and then monitoring their performance to have a really effective paid search account structure. That said these tools are free and easy to use, and we think you’ll find a good deal of utility in them. If you have questions, feedback, or future feature requests, please leave them in the comments!

The Wonder Wheel is a great little free tool by Google.

You can use the Wonder Wheel to quickly build keyword lists and Adwords groups in a visual way. With this tool, Google shows you the terms that relate most closely to your chosen keyword terms.

What Is The Google Wonder Wheel?

The Google Wonder Wheel is an interactive graphical application that shows related keywords.

The wheel starts with your keyword in the center, and shows terms related to that keyword in the “spokes” surrounding your keyword “hub”. If you click on a related term, the wheel creates a new hub, revealing more related terms.

Here’s how to find it:

1. Search on a keyword term.

2. Select “More Options…”

3. Click “Wonder Wheel”

Let’s say your main keyword area is “culinary schools”. The Google wheel suggests related keyword terms such as “culinary arts”, “pastry schools”, “le cordon bleu”, “top 10 culinary schools”, and so on.

These keywords become your Adwords groups. Next, click on each of those terms, and you get further terms that will make up each group.

Easy, huh.

You get Adwords groups built around related keywords, which come together to form a theme.

Themes And The Content Network

The theme is particularly powerful when it comes to the Google Content Network.

The Content Network is Google’s syndicated advertising network. You can choose to have your ad appear not just on Google search results, but also on sites across the Google’s Adsense partner network. This option is turned on by default whenever you create an Adwords campaign.

Traditionally, many Adwords advertisers have turned off the content network because of perceived abuse and junk traffic. However, attitudes are changing as the network matures and the bid prices on Google’s search engine head into the stratosphere. The ROI from the content network starts to look more appealing.

It all comes down to ROI. If it’s positive, run with it.

In Google’s whitepaper entitled “CPA Perfomance Trends on the Google Content Network“, Google found that:

…..half of the advertisers had a Content Network CPA at least 2.6% lower
than their average Search Network CPA. In total, 51.6% of advertisers analyzed had an average Content Network CPA equal to or better than their Search Network CPA

It has taken a while, but it looks like Google and advertisers may have got Google’s content network figured out. As the report suggests, it is important that the advertiser pay close attention to landing page optimization and site exclusion.

How does this all relate to the Wonder Wheel?

When Google looks to place your ad across the network, it does so based on themes.

If you use terms that are defined as being related in the Wonder Wheel throughout your text, particularly in your ad groups, you’re more likely to show up on relevant sites across the network.

Google describe this affect on their Adwords Agency blog:

One particularly useful application of the tool is to identify new ad group themes for content campaigns. Since your ads are matched to publisher pages at the ad group level, creating different ad group themes helps you target your ads more precisely on the Google content network…..

You can then use the Google keyword tool, and your other favorite research tools, to flesh these groups out further.

As the blog notes, this is no guarantee of better performance, however the Wonder Wheel is a great – and fun – place to start.

Other attempts at keyword clustering can also be useful for campaign creation. Such features are offered via search suggestions on major search services, via synonym search (using ~) on major search engines, and as keyword clusters on many meta search engines. Specialty search services like the Quintura keyword map, Microsoft Search Funnels, Google Sets, and Google Squared can further help you come up with relevant keyword ideas.