The ROI Revolution BlogArticles Tagged with 'Adwords' Clean Up Your Google Display Network StrategyJune 14, 2011
But guess what? Your competitors are making it profitable; with ease, no less. This is why it's absolutely crucial that you have a solid strategy for advertising on the Display Network. After all, people spend 95% of their time browsing websites, not scrolling through the Google search results. An entire book could be written on how to most efficiently launch and optimize various Display Network campaigns, but we'll focus on a few tools and strategies that will help you succeed. Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Justin D'Angelo, Team Leader at 2:40 PM 8 Reasons to Bid on Your Own Branded Keywords in Paid SearchJune 7, 2011
It's understandable to initially focus more on the cost of branded keywords, rather than the value. Cost is a measurable, absolute number that's seen in paid search accounts and credit card statements. The value is usually less-measurable, with some shades of gray in the calculations. Sometimes it can be tough to quantify the effect of branded exposure, especially in dollars and cents. Our experience shows that branded keywords almost always convert at pennies on the dollar, with very high profitability. That's only for the immediate, measurable traffic though. What about the long-term effects in customers' minds or residual traffic that may come later on? In my opinion, the harder-to-measure effects of "bidding on your own branded keywords" are almost always a reason to spend more on them, not less. Here are eight reasons why bidding on branded keywords can be a good idea (and a good investment): Permalink | Comments ( 6 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Mark Curtis, Paid Search Team Leader at 9:20 AM Updates to AdWords Search Funnels ReportsOctober 14, 2010
Thankfully, Google is not oblivious to the need for more in-depth attribution funnel analysis. This past spring, they introduced AdWords Search Funnels, which finally gave AdWords advertisers the ability to drill down and see the search paths that visitors use when clicking through to their sites. And last week, Google added additional features to these reports, including an increase in the conversion history window and a way to sanitize conversions that were potentially affected by cookie deletion bias. Are you using the AdWords Search Funnels yet? If not, read on to find out why you should. Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Analytics Posted by Mark Curtis, Paid Search Team Leader at 4:36 PM Google Launches Enhanced CPCAugust 17, 2010
The premise of the tool, much like Conversion Optimizer, is to "boost your ROI with an easy to use, automated bidding tool." Enhanced CPC will automatically adjust your max CPC bid based on the likelihood your ad will convert. Permalink | Comments ( 3 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Sarah L. Hackney, Senior Analyst at 9:38 AM New, Live Webinar: The 6 reports that contain 90% of actionable AdWords insightsApril 14, 2010
Brad is a long time internet marketing veteran who regularly speaks at search marketing conferences throughout the country and is the only Google AdWords Seminar Leader in the world who teaches, under Google's authorization, AdWords 301 and 302. I've personally used Brad's techniques to come up with powerful new ad text for my clients, find new keyword opportunities, and find areas where my bids were limiting exposure on profitable keywords. Brad has recently written a new book, Advanced Google AdWords, and we've already purchased five copies for our office. We've got a unique opportunity to join us for a live webinar with Brad Geddes. Brad will shed light on the 6 most important AdWords reports that will give you all of the actionable insights you need to make some powerful changes within your AdWords account. The AdWords report center is a powerful tool that should be leveraged by every advertiser, but without knowing what data to focus on it's easy to waste time running useless reports. The webinar will be on Thursday, April 22nd at 2pm ET. Click here to get signed up for this free event: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/855171728 Hosted by: ROI Revolution's CEO, Timothy Seward Permalink | Comments ( 4 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Page Long, PPC Specialist & Sales Consultant at 1:54 PM Easy Recipe for Successful Ad TextJanuary 7, 2010When it comes to ad text "Always Be Testing" is the motto that we hold in high esteem here at ROI Revolution. If you continually test your ads (to beat the current best performer) you will constantly improve the performance of your campaigns. It is important to remember that there are a few strategies and tips you pretty much always need to implement as you are writing and testing ads. I"ve come up with an "ad recipe" that I keep on my desk to ensure all necessary elements are included in the new ads I write.
I"ll break down each ingredient: Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Page Long, PPC Specialist & Sales Consultant at 2:00 PM Are Long Page Load Times Driving Your Visitors Away?November 25, 2009
But chances are, if you're reading the ROI Revolution blog, you're on a high speed internet connection. If your webpages are loading in nanoseconds with your T1, how are they faring for those visitors who aren't as lucky as you? You know, the ones on crappy cable modems and DSL and (gasp!) the dreaded dial-up? Does it matter? Well, it depends. If you're a gaming website or Internet marketing blog, most of your audience is probably on broadband. But if you're running a site for a retirement community in Florida, then my grandma is hitting your Flash-encrusted site in her AOL browser and she's waiting. And waiting. And waiting. She's a patient old gal, my Meemaw, but she's not going to wait all day. She's going to point her browser and her pension elsewhere. Aside from your visitors, your site's load time is also important to Google. Not only does page load time affect your AdWords Quality Score, but according to Matt Cutts, it's going to be playing a bigger role in the organic search ranking. So read on to learn how to optimize your landing pages' load times, and maybe make a few bucks off my Meemaw. Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Analytics Posted by Mark Curtis, Paid Search Team Leader at 3:43 PM Leverage Your Brand in your AdWords AccountOctober 12, 2009
Not only do you want to ensure ad dominance for your own keywords, but it will help separate these highly performing keywords from everything else, so as not to skew your overall account statistics. Creating a branded campaign is key to online advertising success as you will want your company to come up when users are specifically searching for your company. You would want to bid on all versions of your company's name including:
For example, say your company was called Cheesemonger. You would want to bid on the following keywords:
Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Matt Fritz, PPC Specialist at 12:27 PM AdWords Conversions: The One vs. Many-Per-Click BreakdownJune 25, 2009 There's a lot of confusion regarding Google's recent change to conversion metrics with the AdWords conversion tracker. Previously a "1" in the "Conversion" column would tell you there was at least one conversion that happened within 30 days of that date. You were happy with this limited knowledge.Messy and/or complex data was disguised as clean & simple data. The "1" was all you knew. If the user clicked an ad and purchased something, you'd see a "1." If the user bookmarked the page with the conversion tracking script and went back to it a week later, you'd still see a "1." If another purchase was made two weeks later, you'd still see a "1." Simple, right? In early April, Google exposed some of the potential mess to be more in line with the way conversions and transactions are tabulated in DoubleClick and other online ad platforms. They changed the name of "Conversions" to "Conversions (1-per-click)" and added a new metric called "Conversions (many-per-click)". While the 1-per-click conversion spot can only be filled once, the many-per-click conversions are incremented whenever any of your conversion scripts run within 30 days after a click. Under the new system, consider the following scenarios and what conversions would be tracked for each: Permalink | Comments ( 9 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Chris Crompton, Technical Marketing Manager at 11:41 AM Understanding Correlations in Google AnalyticsMay 28, 2009Website traffic does not exist in a vacuum. Here's a simple example: Jack comes to your website on Monday after seeing one of your AdWords content ads and he likes what he sees. He's a careful shopper though, so he's not ready to commit quite yet and leaves the site for the day. He takes some time and does some comparison shopping throughout the week, talks to some of his friends and comes back to your site again after typing your company name into Google and clicking on an organic result. He sees an offer for a 10% off coupon if he signs up for your newsletter, so he does, and then leaves the site again. In a week, he gets an email about a sale you are having, and clicks on a link within the email, finally making a purchase on this, his third visit.
So the big question is - how does this show up in Google Analytics? Does AdWords get any credit for the sale? The simple answer is no. Depending on if you are tracking your emails in Google Analytics (and how you are doing it), you'll either see a conversion for the email, the organic branded search or even a direct visit. Wouldn't it be nice to know that at one point AdWords had something to do with the sale? Better yet, wouldn't you like to know the Campaign, Ad Group and Keyword that was responsible? Jack's example is a very common one, and pretty simple in comparison to the way a lot of people use the Internet, so it is important to try and understand the relationships between your different traffic sources. Still don't care? Let me give you a real-world example of what can happen if you ignore it: Case Study: A company that deals in a software product noticed that it was getting what looked like a pretty poor return on Content Network traffic from AdWords (responsible for what Google Analytics reported as roughly 5% of daily revenue). In an attempt to reduce costs, they decided to pause this traffic completely. The result was that almost immediately they noticed a 15-20% drop in daily revenue! What the heck happened? Well, it turns out a large percentage of that content traffic was coming back as either organic branded traffic or direct traffic. They never bothered to look at the relationship between their content traffic and other traffic sources, and it cost them. Conversely, by understanding this relationship, they have been able to not only gain back the 15-20% that they lost, but improve the return even further! So how can you learn from their mistake? Here are a few things you can do, ranging from fairly simple to more complex, to help you grasp the relationship between your marketing sources and mediums: Permalink | Comments ( 6 ) | TrackBacks ( 1 ) Filed under: Analytics, Analytics Posted by Shawn Purtell, Senior Web Analytics Engineer at 10:25 AM |
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If you've ever advertised on Google's Display Network (formerly called the content network), then your story probably sounds something like this: you launch a campaign with high hopes, it burns through enough cash to buy a used car, and you reel in horror at the dismal ROI it brought in and you pause it in disgust, refusing to spend another dime there ever again.
We're sometimes asked "why should I bid on my own branded keywords?" In most cases, the asker wants to know if they can save money (or improve ROI) by not bidding on their brand keywords. It's an interesting question, with a not-so-simple answer. Each click costs money, so yes, theoretically, you can save money by not bidding on your own branded searches. But with that same logic, can't you also save money by keeping it under your mattress instead of in a 401k?
One of my biggest complaints about Google AdWords and Google Analytics has always been the oversimplified attribution models they use. Last touch attribution sucks. It completely ignores upper funnel search visits to your site—first-time visitors who use broader search terms to get there. These are people who are curious about your products or offers, but not quite ready to buy.
Google released their latest addition to the bidding features family - Enhanced CPC. It's been in beta since March, but 
Here at ROI Revolution we are always students of the best practices and the smartest strategies in the world of data driven paid search. Brad Geddes, founder of the Internet marketing training firm 
You're always checking on your 
Be sure to have a "branded" campaign filled with variations of your company name and website. 
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