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The ROI Revolution Blog

Articles Tagged with 'Adwords'

New, Live Webinar: The 6 reports that contain 90% of actionable AdWords insights

April 14, 2010

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 bgTheory (pictured right), has some of the most powerful pay per click insights around.

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
With Guest Presenter: Brad Geddes, Founder of bgTheory

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Easy Recipe for Successful Ad Text

January 7, 2010

When 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:

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Are Long Page Load Times Driving Your Visitors Away?

November 25, 2009

You're always checking on your landing pages, right? You read the blogs, run experiments, and generally try to make your site as user-friendly as possible.

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.

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Leverage Your Brand in your AdWords Account

October 12, 2009

Be sure to have a "branded" campaign filled with variations of your company name and website.

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:

• the correct spelling
• common misspellings
• your company name followed by.com
• your company web address
• your company name with the www. before it

For example, say your company was called Cheesemonger. You would want to bid on the following keywords:

• cheesemonger
• cheesemongers
• chesemonger
• cheesemunger
• thecheesemonger
• www cheesemonger
• cheesemonger com
• www.cheesemonger.com
• www cheesemonger com

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AdWords Conversions: The One vs. Many-Per-Click Breakdown

June 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:

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Understanding Correlations in Google Analytics

May 28, 2009

Website 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:

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Google Analytics Keyword Sleuth vs Search Query Performance Report

March 24, 2008

If you've been following this blog, you've likely heard several references to the Google Analytics Keyword Sleuth that Michael Harrison wrote back in April of 2007. This is a tool that anyone in paid search should be using. Basically, it captures and displays an ongoing list of new keywords and phrases straight from your customer's mind. We're often advised to "imagine what your customers are typing before they see your ads, then bid on those keywords." With the Keyword Sleuth in place, you don't have to imagine anything. They've already told you.

For a long time, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others would not reveal exact search queries, and still don't for the most part. They'll tell you the bid keyword, but not the exact search query. In May 2007, Google stepped up and created the Search Query Performance Report (SQPR), which now shows this data within the Adwords reporting tab. There was a wave of excitement when Google released the SQPR, and it's become a popular report for Adwords users.

Both the Keyword Sleuth and the SQPR were developed to do essentially the same thing, but in reality, they can be worlds apart for the PPC manager. In explaining the Keyword Sleuth to other PPC professionals, I'm often asked how it's different than the Adwords SQPR. There is a lot that is different. A side-by-side comparison between these two tools is long overdue.

Speed
First, I'll run Google's SQPR. When that's done, I'll retrieve the same data using Michael's Exact Keyword Sleuth. In summary, I'm gathering the same data from the same Adwords campaign and the same time frame (one month), using two different methods. My teammate Matt will time it from the moment I touch the keyboard to the moment the report is viewable on screen.

The results...

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