1. Use keywords in ad text
   Show the searcher that your ad is relevant. Google will display the search keywords in bold in your ad if they’re present. This helps your ad stand out from the crowd.
2. Keep ad group keyword list short
   Instead of having a single ad group with a large list of keywords, create many ad groups, each with a short list. This will help you achieve tip #1.
3. Bid high initially
   Google’s ad system determines placement by both bid and CTR (click through rate). To earn a high CTR, you first need to generate some clicks. Bid high initially so your ad is seen early in the search results. Once you have a high CTR, lower your bids. Read this article for more information on bidding strategies.
4. Set daily budget higher than Google recommends
   If you set your daily budget too low, your ad will be displayed intermittently. This is not what you want. You always want your ad to be shown when someone searches for your keywords. Control your ad spend through other means such as employing negative keywords, using exact matches, targeting by region and adjusting keyword bids.
5. Avoid bidding wars
   Don’t waste money getting into bidding wars for a handful of high volume keywords. Instead, expand your keyword list to include more specific keywords that have a lower search volume. Collectively, these keywords will reach the search volume of more expensive keywords. Your average CPC (cost per click) will fall dramatically using this tactic. Use keyword research tools to expand your list of keyword phrases.
6. Set higher bids on exact matches
   Include both broad and exact matches for a keyword phrase. Set the bid higher for the exact match. This allows you to control the position of the ad for the exact search. For example, if your ad group bid is set to 10 cents, you might set a 25 cents bid for the exact match:
   [keyword phrase] ** 0.25
   keyword phrase
   Read this article for more information on exact match bidding.
7. Use negative keywords
   
   Your ad will not be displayed if the search includes a negative keyword. Add more negative keywords at regular intervals. As your negative keyword list grows, your ad group’s CTR will increase, saving you money and/or improving your ad’s position. For example, if you sell products or services at a premium, include negative keywords like:
   -free
   -cheap
   -discount
   Read this article for more information on negative keywords.
8. Use a relevant landing page
   For most searches, don’t point the ad to your home page. Choose a landing page on your site that includes the keywords from the search. In some cases, it’s worth creating a custom page that’s not in the normal navigation of your site.
9. Separate search and content campaigns
   Many people lose money using AdWords when their site is swamped with hits from content ads. Most people don’t realize that displaying ads on Google’s content network is turned on by default. Either turn off the content network or create separate campaigns for search and content ads. Read this article for more information on Google’s content ads.
10. Test multiple versions of ad
    Take advantage of Google’s feature allowing multiple ads to be created and rotated within a single ad group. Test different ad text and see which version works best, both from an ROI and CTR perspective. A better ad will lead to a higher CTR and lower bids for the same ad position.
11. Track your results
    Don’t rely on Google’s reporting tools. They’re good, but you need more detail, particularly to see which actual keyword phrases your broad matches are triggering. You’ll need this to help build your list of negative keywords for each ad group. Plus, click fraud is a problem and needs to be addressed. If you don’t have tracking software in place, use our free web analytics software.

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http://ghosts-it.com/

Last 2 weeks were just crazy. Fighting with my project cost engineers to cut the cost of my projects along with the issues with wordpress 2.8 for my other websites and my family, it was fun. Last couple of posts, I have talked about Google Quality Score, and how to improve Google Quality Score. So, by now you already know behind the stories of Google Adwords and it’s time to execute. Today I will share some of my learning form my first round of beating from google adwords in 2006. I remember that it took me a quite a while and loosing a bunch of money (come one, I was a student back then and every single dollar was counted for). This a set of very basic, simple and my golden rules that works and keeps me out of trouble during my initial phase of learning about google adwords. So, lets take a look at the following 9 golden rules for google adwords.

Budget Allocation:
Determine the amount that you will spend for you Google Adwords campaign and for how long. Then in the name of God, stick to it for the allocated time.  Also find out what’s the rate of return that you are looking for (ex: if I spend 200/week then I am looking to get back $400/week with $200 profit and $200 expense).

No Automation:
Never allow a Google Adwords account to run itself. Automation is good but not in this case.

Haste is Waste:
Applies with your Google Adwords account as well. Never make too many changes at a time. If you do then it will not give good enough information for you to make right decision. Allocate 5-7 days with different time setting for each group and stick with it.

It’s Your Money:
Never let Google control your budget. Google is not your personal finance advisor; she is a sales woman who will rip you off every chance she gets.

It’s Your Business:
Never let Google decide what’s best for you. It’s your business and you should make all the executive decision.


Too Quick is Too Bad:
Always allow time for changes to take effect. Keep in mind that gathering information is key to find out a trend. And those trends will help your Google Adwords campaign a success.

Set a Time and Stick with it:
Initially work in time intervals of seven days. Usually a 5-7 days window is enough for an ad to give you enough information whether you should move forward with that is not.

Control, control and control:
Always keep control. Micromanaging and being control freak by check your campaign every house and tweaking it will make you relax later.

Promptness =$$$
A neglected Adwords account is a dangerous. Don’t believe it, then go ahead and give it a shot. You will be amazed how quickly you will overspend your budget.

Now you already know the golden rules for your Google Adwords, if you dont have any account yet. Go ahead and do so.  Remember,  practice makes perfect.

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How to Improve Your Google Quality Score

Yesterday I have talked about what is google quality score. And today I will talk about what you can do to improve google quality score which in turn will do two things:

• It will save you money by lowering your cost per click
• It will increase your profit by increasing your ad display

To refresh your memory, google’s Quality Score depends on the following equations

QS= CTR + HCTR + PRF + LPQ + ORF

Now, let’s take a look at what we can do as a user to control our cost per click. I took all the variables and made a chart as follows based on importance ranking:

My thought behind the importance ranking were that if you have an advertisement with relevant keyword then google will display it more  as well as it will get more licks. And once the customers click through it, since you customers will like you landing page, they will spend more time in your website. And in total you will receive a high quality score for your keyword.

How much you will spend on you PPC is depends on a lot a variables and majority of those variables are dependent on you. In others words, you are the only one who either can make you a lot of profit or make you looses a lot of capital.

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It is not easy to guarantee that the third parties services can help you boost your blog PR in a short time as Google determine this on its own way. Google will update its ranking system without any fixed schedule and backlinks – the key factors that help your blog get PR, sometimes do not work if Google identifies your blog contents are written per requests from different advertisers.

Many of bloggers have needed financial help for their marketing campaigns in promoting their services to the worldwide but they did not know that buying backlinks was not the right way to gain PR nowadays.

Not all backlinks of your blog are counted by Google system but only quality backlinks from the same type of linked-blogs are the most important factors that help determine your blog rankings. If you need these backlinks, you need to pay for it through a quality company with high reputation. Further, these quality backlinks must come from other blogs that have higher PR level than yours.

Another tip that helps you gain PR for FREE is to read other related blogs and comment on their posts with your blog URL added. This is a simple way but not many bloggers apply as they are very lazy.

If you think you do not have time to go around to comment, you should pay for this service. There are a lot of companies that can offer you online lending service in short time and you can use this budget for your marketing campaigns.

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SECOND IMPORTANT THING: Further increase website traffic by using “Top search queries”

By going into Dashboard -> Statistics -> Top Search Queries, you can see important columns of information. They are Impressions, which is a measurement of how many times your website appears for a certain keyword; and Traffic, which is a measurement of which keywords generate the most traffic for your website. So how do you get the most out of using this information?

Rule number 1. If the highest contributing keyword under “Impressions” is NOT the highest contributing keywords under “Traffic,” then that keyword has great traffic potential. To exploit that keyword, optimize it in to your website; this means doing some ethical SEO work targeting that phrase.

Rule number 2. If the highest contributing keyword under “Impressions” is the same as the highest contributing keywords under “Traffic,” then you know you’ve reached your optimum traffic potential for it. Consider a broader keyword this time.

For example, if “Affordable housing loans” is on top in your Impressions column, and also on top in your Traffic column, you can start targeting just “housing loans.” It also means that your website is already relevant for “Affordable housing loans” and that targeting a broader keyword makes sense.

Rule number 3. If there are less than five keywords on the list (or none at all) in the Impressions and Traffic columns, or if there are more but the percentages are be relatively small, you need to put more content on your site and exert yourself more in marketing and networking with other sites.

THIRD MOST IMPORTANT THING: Know the back links pointing to your site

Back links are one of the most important ingredients for search engine ranking. To examine the quality of your back links, you can go to Dashboard -> Links -> Pages with External Links, and then under the External Links column, click that hyperlinked number. It will then show the back links that are pointing to pages in your site.

How can you use this data? If you are planning to increase the quality of your links, check to see if those sites that link to yours are related to your site. If not, start networking with related sites so that you can get more quality and targeted traffic, which can increase sales and conversions.

Referral traffic can be a significant contributor to site conversions/sales. Referral traffic is coming from those sites that link to yours, so make sure you have done a good job in getting only related websites to link to yours so that your traffic will be useful and at the same time its bounce percentage will be low.

FOURTH MOST IMPORTANT THING: Check your robots.txt and submit an XML sitemap

Robots.txt helps to prevent duplicate content and maximizes bandwidth in your site. By navigating to Dashboard -> Sitemaps (for sitemap XML) and Dashboard -> Analyze robots.txt, you can upload an XML sitemap and test your robots.txt before uploading to the root directory of your server.

For more details on robots.txt analysis, you can read this article.

FIFTH MOST IMPORTANT THING: Remove URLs from your site

In any website, there are pages that are unimportant and not useful for both visitors and search engines. In this case they can simply be blocked in robots.txt, and then you can remove that URL in Google Webmaster tools. The overall purpose is to have a clean index. A clean index in Google means that crawling will be efficient and Google will not revisit those unimportant URLs.

To remove URLs, you can go to Dashboard -> Tools -> Remove URL

Make sure you have followed the requirements before you remove the URL, which can be any of the following:

• The URL will be blocked in robots.txt.
• The URL will be placed with meta no-index tag.
• The URL returns a 404 header status.

Other than that, Google will deny your request. So make sure to double check things first before removing any URL.

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One of the most important tools available to any webmaster is Google Webmaster tools. This is a FREE tool from Google, and its sole purpose is characterizing and diagnosing website technical-related issues. The objective is to make the website as search engine friendly as possible, not only for Google but other search engines as well. A search engine friendly website will then have no problems in rankings and maximize visitors’ site experiences.To be able to use Google webmaster tools, you need to have the following:

• A Google account – Since this product belongs to Google, it needs you to have a Google account. Registering is straightforward and easy, just go to: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
• Access to your website’s main header template — This does not necessarily mean full FTP access. As long as you can access the main header template of the website, you can install the Google verification code. For WordPress users, this will be placed in header.php. For Blogger users, this will be placed in the template source code.
• A fully indexable website — If you have placed restrictions on your website such as requiring a password or blocking the site in robots.txt, you cannot verify the site in Google Webmaster Tools.

Below are the important steps you need to take to use Google webmaster tools.

1. Create a Google account here: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount.
2. Log in to Google webmaster tools here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ using your new account.
3. Add your website to the Dashboard. When adding your website, add only the root and canonical URL of your domain.

For example, if the canonical version is http:// and you’re using www version, it should be in the form of http://www.yourwebsite.com. If the canonical version of your domain (canonical means “the official” or your “preferred version” to be indexed and to be shown to the visitors) is non-www, you should be adding the non-www version to the Dashboard (Add site), so it will be http://yourwebsite.com .

You can even add the secure version of your domain. In this case, add something like https://www.yourwebsite.com . The tricky thing in Google Webmaster Tools is that if you have both secure and non-secure versions of your domain, you really need to add and verify each of them, unlike in Google Analytics where you can add the secure JavaScript code which will gather traffic data for both secure and non-secure versions of the domain.

It is recommended to add only the root URL and not other URLs in the domain. For example, do not add something like http://www.yourwebsite.com/thisisanotherpage.html. Instead add only the root in the “Add site” section, http://www.yourwebsite.com .

Finish Verifying the Site

When verifying the site, the most recommended method is to use a verification meta tag since you can just copy and paste it to the template in the <head> section. Click “verify” if you have finished pasting in the verification meta tag. After verification, you should see that your site is “checked” in the Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard. See screen shot below:

Wait around for two weeks to one month for Google Webmaster Tools to fully gather the initial data for your site. Note that the more popular your website (the greater will be the number of inbound links pointing to it), the faster Google will index your site and return those initial sets of data.

FIRST IMPORTANT THING: Turning 404 errors in the “back links” to your site into a live link.

One of the important but advanced features in Google Webmaster Tools involves diagnosing 404 errors in your site. 404s are URLs that are simply “NOT FOUND” when someone visits your URL. The primary causes are the following:

• Someone puts a link to one of the pages of your site but it was misspelled. So when Google or any person follows that link, they will be taken to your 404 page. Google will then report this incident in your webmaster tools account for that site.
• You have a design-related issue. This means it is possible to have live pages, but the actual server header status for it will be 404.

So how do you get the most out of this piece of information? 404 means lost traffic or a lost sale, though not all 404s will be useful. Anyway, here is what you have to do:

• Click on your site in the Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard.
• Under “Overview,” find “Not found” and then click “Details.”
• Take note of the URL that returns the 404 error.
• 301 redirect that URL to the correct URL. This can be done in .htaccess or with a PHP-redirect script.
• The next time a visitor clicks that link, it will now be 301-redirected to the correct URL.

For example, say the correct URL is: http://www.yourwebsite.com/product-23.php

But someone links to it using this URL: http://www.yourwebsite.com/products-23.php . This will give a 404 header status. If you 301 redirect http://www.yourwebsite.com/products-23.php to http://www.yourwebsite.com/product-23.php you will turn the dead link into a live link. Of course, you do not have control over the person that links to it. The only thing you can do is 301 redirect to the correct URL.

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It can be very difficult at times to find the actual search terms your PPC traffic arrives from, so this is a Google Analytics trick all advertisers should know. Google’s search query report can be useful but for high-traffic phrase or broad match keywords being told that 8 of your clicks arrived on “85 unique queries” doesn’t really give you the complete picture!

Since the introduction of expanded broad match Google can (and does) match your broad match keywords to just about anything vaguely relevant; knowing these queries is important, either to negative match them or to reduce CPCs by using an exact match. The image below really does highlight this point, notice the extremely irrelevant term “shooting holidays USA” was triggered by a broad match of travel PPC!

This report was setup last week and shows the AdWords keywords (either exact, phrase or broad match) followed by the actual search term which triggered the clickthrough in brackets:

Step by step guide on how to setup a Search Query report in Google Analytics
This information can easily be found in Google Analytics but, although the method is simple, it is not obvious; to be able to access this PPC goldmine you have to use filters. Until last week I didn’t even know the filters feature existed and even if I had I wouldn’t have been able to do the regular expressions stuff that our filters will need. For this reason I’d like to thank the Google Analytics Experts and the linklove blog for giving me some simple step by step instructions.

• In the above case we’ve set up a new profile before messing around, just to ensure that if a mistake was made none of the data is affected. There’s an “Add a Website Profile” option on the Analytics settings page; you want to add a profile for an existing site and then name it.
• Then you want to write the two filters; click the “Filter Manager” button and then add a filter.
• This first filter will get the search query and place it in a user defined field. I call it “Get Search Query” but you can name it whatever you want to. Select “Custom Filter” from the filter type drop down menu and select the “Advanced” radio button. You should see some input fields named “Field A -> Extract A” and similar.
• In the “Field A -> Extract A” drop down menu select “Referral”; this will pull out the SERP’s URL on which the ad was shown. In the box to the left on the drop down menu write “(\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)” without the quotation marks. This is a regular expression which extracts the search query from the SERP’s URL.
• In the “Field B -> Extract B” drop down menu select “Campaign Medium” and write “ppc|cpc” in the box. This filters out all the organic clicks.
• In the “Output To -> Constructor” drop down choose “Customized Field 1” and enter “$A3” in the box. This just tells Google Analytics where to store the data. Finally you need to click the button to make field B required and the one to turn off case sensitivity. Then apply the filter to your new profile.
• The 2nd filter includes this new data in the keyword report. Again, you want to set up an advanced custom filter but this time choose “Customized Field 1” from the “Field A -> Extract A” drop down. In the box write “(.*)”
• For “Field B -> Extract B” select “Campaign Term” to find out which of your keywords the search query matched and enter “(.*)” again in the box.
• Finally in the “Output To -> Constructor” menu choose “Campaign Term” or wherever you want your data to go and then enter “$B1, $A1” The space after the comma means that you can export your data to a .csv and have a separate field for the actual search term.
• If you’ve followed the steps as I’ve laid them out then the filters should be applied in the right order; if you want to check the information is there when you click to edit the new profile from the “Analytics Settings” page.

As always, it’ll be a little while before Google Analytics starts to register the new data so don’t be too impatient. Unfortunately the filters can’t be applied retrospectively so you can’t start using them on all your old data but as far as I’m concerned this is the only downside. Set up the filters and start refining your AdWords campaigns!

Author: seoptimise

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I just read quite a funny post over at the SERoundtable regarding Googles stance to adverts appearing in the same search results which are effectively part of the same domain yet have a different TLD.

“For example, if site A advertises domain.com in Google’s AdWords. And also, site B advertises domain.co.uk in Google’s AdWords. They both are bidding on the same keywords. In this case, only one of the two ads should be displayed according to Google’s affiliate policy.”

AdwordsAdvisor2 explains -

“Under our affiliate policy, the .com and the .co.uk will be considered the same domain, so they should not both show ads at the same time. On a search where more than one ad with the same domain is available in the auction, we will show whichever one would have the highest position. There is no bidding competition between the same domain ads, so it should not effect what your actual CPC is on that search.”

Sounds great in theory right? But realistically its pretty much bullcrap. Lets take a quick look under a search for MacDonald Hotels -

So what do we see? Oh, not 1 but in fact 3 adverts, all affiliates, advertising against effectively the same domain. Using the MacDonaldhotels.co.uk, MacDonaldhotels.com and even a nice hyphenated MacDonald-hotels.com. The funny thing is, where businesses purchase multi tld’s, it gives affiliates a chance to basically double (or triple in this case) serve adverts without generally getting spotted. Google cannot check every SERP there is to police this guideline and they certainly do not seem to get picked up in editorial.In fact, looking at the above example there is actually a chance that MORE adverts could be shown…Without spending to much time on this, the hotel chain seem to own;

MacDonaldhotels.co.uk
MacDonaldhotels.com
MacDonald-hotels.co.uk
MacDonald-hotels.com

Only one of the above domains might be stopped from serving in an advert editorial review, that is the MacDonald-hotels.com url. The advert will run to start with as shown in the above pic, but it forwards directly onto MacDonald-hotels.co.uk (where as the others do not). This is against Googles guidelines and would probably be picked up on when reviewed.

Author: PPC Blogger

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Google have started testing Adwords ads within Google suggest, like this example below from Search Engine Land -

Normally Google do not charge for clicks on new advert testing like this which is good news. But for me it’s quite scary how far they are taking the expansion of where they show their adverts.

At the top of search suggest is far to easy for accidental clicks in my view although Google are also testing showing ads at the bottom which would seem better. Another concern for navigational brand searches, are Google offering you any real value in showing your advert here? Especially with increased use of Chrome which combines a traditional url bar with search.

Google recently removed keyword trademarking in the UK and subsequently profit through increased brand bidding from advertisers in fear of losing brand traffic to competitors.  In many cases advertisers do not need to bid against their brand or the money would be better spent elsewhere, so will these adverts fuel even more fear? Johanna Wright Director of Product Management at Google argues -

“This is another example of search becoming more dynamic and Google getting users to the correct results as fast as possible,”

Is Google really focusing on the user experience here or is this a revenue making exercise? Lets hope Google make this opt in or at least have an opt out feature at the time of its (potential) introduction, not months after.

Author: PPC Blogger

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