Ambient and Transparent

In September of this year, Yahoo! announced the formation of a Digital Advisory Council to drive discussions with advertisers. Our agency was invited and we welcomed the invitation to listen to what Yahoo had to say and provide some feedback. Our office being literally less than ten minutes away made the decision a little bit easier!

During the meeting we were told that we are under an NDA so I won’t go into the specifics.  But here are some comments and thoughts:

• We applaud Yahoo’s efforts to be open, reach out to their clients (advertisers and agencies), and solicit their input. That spirit was felt throughout the council meeting, from the Senior VP that hosted the event to managers and other Yahoo staff.  They really wanted to be transparent and sought input from us.  Good job, Yahoo!
• Despite the poor picture that might have been portrayed in the news about Yahoo and search, we were reminded that Yahoo! is still a profitable company and has some very high traffic sites, including Yahoo! Sports (we were told it has more traffic than ESPN) and Yahoo! News (gets more traffic than CNN).  I didn’t know that and I would say it is pretty impressive!
• Various folks from Yahoo! presented about new features and innovations (sorry, can’t blog about it yet ) but expect to hear from Yahoo! on areas they are strong in, including Display (banner) Advertisement.
• There was a talk about Traffic Quality and the favorite discussion topic of click fraud.  Without spilling their beans, we got a better picture of how Yahoo! handles click fraud and also learned that you can get reports from within your Yahoo! Search marketing account about credits your accounts is getting for false clicks.
• Lunch was really good too, including the Israeli Couscous which was very tasty!  To be fair, I have to say that the food in Mountain View during the GAAC Summit was really good too.

So in summary, I am really glad to see Yahoo! opening up and creating additional forums to communicate with advertisers and agencies.

While we are on the subject of Yahoo! Search Marketing, there is another topic that we have been wanting to blog about but didn’t get to until now.  Yahoo! has a mechanism of optimizing your accounts and campaigns on their own! Yes, that means without your
knowledge.  Maybe this is not so recent but many clients I speak with are still not aware of this mechanism, so it is important that we share it. The following was drafted by a couple of folks in the office:

---

We hope you are aware of Yahoo’s decision to optimize PPC accounts by creating optimized campaigns on their own and running them without checking with the client. As strange as this may sound, it is very true! For a regular advertiser who doesn’t tag his campaigns and review them in any analytics tool, this may not be that bad. For those who do tag their campaigns and review all of their traffic sources and conversions via an analytics tool, this could be trouble.

Yahoo does the whole nine yards when it comes to campaign creation (naming convention, ad group, keywords, ad copy) but they miss a very crucial step. They don’t tag the campaign at all with tracking parameters so a web analytics tool can recognize it as PPC traffic. This means traffic from this new campaign will be recorded as organic traffic and will dilute the quality of your data. The number of visits attributed to Yahoo cpc and Yahoo organic will be wrong, and conversion rates for these two sources will be subject to speculation.

There are two ways that you can deal with this issue:

1. If you would like to try these optimized campaigns and see how they will perform while capturing the data properly in your analytics account, you need to go to your Ads under the AdGroup they created and make sure that you tag the destination URLs properly. If you are using Google Analytics, here is a good post from our friends at PPC Hero that will help you.
2. Otherwise, once you see a new optimized campaign in your account, pause or delete it and make sure that you opt-out from this service. You can opt-out by submitting a request to Yahoo customer support.

If you have too many campaigns in your own or your client’s accounts, the easiest way to spot the Yahoo optimized campaigns is by their naming convention. See the below snapshot for an example.

Alternatively, if you are using Google Analytics, under Traffic Sources/Campaigns you can use the inline filter with the “ysm_optimized” parameter and then schedule this report to be emailed to daily, weekly, or monthly. This way you capture any new campaigns as they pop up in your account.

---

My request to Yahoo! is that they back out of this practice and allow user more control before they turn campaigns on and spend someone else’s money!

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: google analytics, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

At a recent speaking engagement on analytics, I was asked some questions on what appears to be discrepancies between search marketing platforms (such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing) and the data in the Google Analytics. I didn’t get a chance to answer these questions in details but here are some pointers on where to start your investigation!

In Adwords, ensure that your “auto-tagging” feature is enabled under account preferences.

Ensure proper URL tagging for all your PPC traffic. A useful tool to help you set up your URL tags is the Google URL builder. For tips on tagging Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns and MSN adCenter PPC campaign, check our earlier post.

Another area where problems may occur is URL redirects. Check our earlier post on this subject for more details.
So assuming you have turned on auto-tagging or your URLs are manually tagged, you will still see a discrepancy but don’t panic! Some Google Analytics help posts come to the rescue and explain why your “click” and “visit” numbers won’t match :(.
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57164
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=55610&ctx=sibling
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=63917&ctx=sibling

Click on the the following thumbnail to view the full screenshot. It shows Adwords clicks and Google Analytics visits.

Now you have something to go back to your customer with (if you are a consultant) or to your boss (if you are an in-house analyst) and let them that the culprit wasn’t you. It isn’t Adwords, it isn’t Google Analytics, it is just how things are when looking at data from two different systems. Instead, we want to examine trends and not just absolute numbers (easier said than done ).

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: google adwords, google analytics, msn adcenter, pay per click, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

Strategy, Techniques, and Track it all with Google Analytics

So you are the resident pay-per-click (PPC) guru, you have your campaigns running in Google Adwords, your metrics are looking good, your cost per acquisition is looking great, your post-click metrics in Google Analytics are just shining, and your return on your marketing spend is just outstanding. Your boss, or your client if you are an online marketing agency, says: “bring me more (and dangling the promotion/bonus carrot)!” And being the good sport you are, you say with confidence, “of course!”

You know Google is king when it comes to traffic volume, but you more or less exhausted your creative ideas to drive additional traffic through Adwords - what do you do? It is now time to explore other search engines, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, and maybe some vertical or secondary search engines.

In this blog post, I’ll cover some PPC implementation techniques to optimize your paid search marketing across multiple search engines, especially Google Adwords and MSN adCenter, while ensuring your PPC post-click metrics are properly tracked in Google Analytics.

The process of transferring campaigns from one search engine to another can be very time consuming and tiring, especially when you have a big account with a large number of campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. A frequent problem popping up on the web these days is the ability to transferring campaigns from your Google Adwords account into your MSN adCenter account. In this post I hope to to answer this question and a little more.

• We first advise that you optimize your campaigns in Google Adwords, allowing enough time for testing different ad variations, adding relevant and negative keywords, and applying other PPC optimization techniques. You can even go further and test few landing pages and pick the best performing ones. When you feel satisfied with the performance in Google Adwords, you can now start planning to migrate them into your MSN adCenter account.
• You need to create and run an ad performance report in Adwords to get the needed information to transfer into your adCenter account. Our friends at Affiliate-Blog have came up with a clean and straightforward way to create this report and transfer it into your adCenter account.

Adding the campaigns in adCenter is one thing, but to be able to see campaign data and more in Google Analytics requires a little more work. It is time to tag those URLs! Here are few tips that will help you tag your URLs properly so that the data shows up in a clear and consistent manner. You can use the Google URL builder to create custom tags for your adCenter destination URLs.

Here is a list of the elements you needs to tag.

1. Campaign Source: msn
2. Campaign Medium: cpc
3. Campaign Term: {QueryString}
   Adding this parameter will allow you to track all your keywords in Google Analytics without having to type each keyword manually.
4. Campaign Content: (used to differentiate ads)
5. Campaign Name: (whatever the campaign name is)

Example:

http://www.domain.com/?utm_source_=adcenter&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=mykeyword&utm_content=variation1&utm_campaign=campaign1

For more details, check out this article written by our friends at PPC Hero

Few Suggestions:

• I recommend you use a unique naming convention to make it easier for you to identify your adCenter campaigns in Google Analytics reports. For example, I want to set up a campaign to market E-nor’s Google Analytics services. In Google Adwords, the campaign name can be g_GAServices and for an adCenter campaign you can name it m_GAServices. Using this naming convention will make it very easy for you to visually identify which PPC system the campaign belongs to.
• I would recommend you import one campaign to adCenter and allow enough time to test it. Check the results in GA to make sure your URL tagging was thorough. If everything goes smoothly, then start transferring the rest of the campaigns after following the same steps we mentioned earlier.

Have a great day transferring and tagging your campaigns!

written by PPC Team \\ tags: google adwords, google analytics, msn adcenter, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

I just returned from my Internet marketing and web analytics training session in Melbourne, Australia. The training session went very well (my user engagement metric was calculated as the number of trainees awake after a heavy lunch divided by total number of trainees ).

Seriously though, in the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) optimization session, one of the consultants asked about Adwords account structure for clients that have campaigns targeting different geographies/countries. It is best practice to set up a unique/separate campaign for each geography, even if you are using the same list of keywords.

For example, if you have a client in the hospitality industry and they want to drive traffic from the UK, Australia and Japan, one campaign per country should be created. You’ll then have control, at the campaign level, for each of the following attributes:

• daily click budget
• language preference
• ad serving and distribution options
• start and end date

Following the same example above, if we see high traffic potential and good conversion from the UK campaign, we can increase the daily spend for that specific campaign with one click. And while the UK campaign is performing well, we can examine the other campaigns that might not be performing as well and make the necessary adjustment.

Another benefit of having different campaigns for different geographies is that it will make your analytics and ROI measurement much easier.

I also recommend you use a campaign naming convention that relates to the content of the campaign. For example, AirportTransportation_UK and AirportTransportation_Japan are much more meaningful than Campaign#1 and Campaign#2.

Will have a more detailed post on campaign naming conventions sometime in the future.

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: google adwords, pay per click

If you are running PPC campaigns in Google Adwords and you are not taking advantage of the enhanced Adwords Editor, you are missing out big time!

The Adwords Editor is a free desktop application that you can download, import your Adwords account into, work on them offline, and then upload to Adwords when you are ready to take the changes live. The application might take some getting used to (especially for making changes <–> approving changes <–> sharing files with changes) but once you get the hang of it, you’ll love it.

Check out these top ten features and put them to use right away. You’ll save yourself a whole lot of time and effort and end up spending more time on analysis and campaign performance improvements than edits and updates.

Thanks!

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: google adwords, pay per click

Here is a cool tool to help advertisers see how their ads are shown on Google. Check it out at the following link; it is referred to by some as the “Ad Preview“.

I recommend you use this tool instead of you (or your colleague or clients) going on Google and searching for your ads. This way you don’t add unnecessary impressions to your keyword/ad performance.

Along the same lines, clients often ask why they can’t see their ads on Google. Here is a recent post on Google’s Inside Adwords blog that addresses this issue.

Hope you find this useful!

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: google adwords, pay per click

I was traveling last week at my Ambassador Training Session and super swamped this week catching up, so I missed few days of reading my blogs and forums and it seems that I am two years behind!

One the most important announcements this week from Google is the availability of Google Website Optimizer (GWO) to all AdWords users. The folks at Google did a fine job with this tool.

We were beta testing the GWO on a few of our accounts and the results were pretty amazing. I read somewhere today that this is like free money! The tool allows you to test various combinations of copy & images on your landing pages, manage all the combination juggling and crunching for you, and finally announce the winning combination when the experiment ends. We ran a quick experiment for one of our clients and achieved 129% improvement in conversion rate. This is just the beginning and it is on top of an already high performance landing page.

If you have a client that is investing money in Adwords, GWO is a must. You’ll improve their conversion rate and they’ll reward you for the improved Return on Investment (ROI). We offer Google Website Optimizer services to anyone that is interested. We’ll be more than glad to help you!

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: actionability, actionable insight, google adwords, google website optimizer, ROI

Over the last few months it seems that a good percentage of the business we are getting is of the consulting or audit nature. Instead of clients asking us to implement PPC, they are actually complaining about PPC and how they are not realizing the anticipated ROI.

I once heard that “PPC is so easy to learn but it takes a lifetime to master”. That is so true! It only takes minutes to set up a campaign but few people invest the time to do the job right.

One of the most common mistakes we find when we audit an existing PPC account is the lack of meaningful account structure. The advertiser will create one campaign and then throw in all types of keywords in to one ad group. After turning the traffic on, they wonder why they are not seeing a good ROI!

It takes work and effort and creativity to implement a high performance PPC campaign. A recent post in the Inside Adwords blog addresses this issue of PPC Account Structure. Take look and re-examine how you set up your Adwords campaigns and see improvement & ease of management almost immediately.

We would love to hear your questions or comments!

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: google adwords, pay per click, ROI

In our discussions with customers and consultants that run PPC campaigns on their own, and in reviewing how the PPC accounts are managed, we often find opportunities to significantly enhance the performance of the PPC campaigns. We believe that it is a misconception that you can set up your account once, leave it on “auto-pilot”, and then expect good results. You might get some results, not definitely nothing to write home about. This directly applies to consultants, as your clients expect you to add value and get them better results for their marketing dollars. Once clients start seeing results, improved ROI, consultants will be rewarded generously, at least it has been the case on our experience with our clients.

What is that we will blog about? Well, improving the performance of your AdWords campaigns. Some improvements are related to the actual account/campaign/ad group structure, while other improvements can be done by applying best practices and on-going PPC optimization techniques.

In this December, our plan is to dedicate some time to share PPC best practices and useful tips and techniques. We would love to hear from you on specific areas you want addressed or specific questions you want answered. Although the tips and examples will directly be related to Google AdWords, the concepts apply to other PPC programs, including the new Yahoo Search Marketing PPC interface and the MSN AdCenter.

Add a comment with your questions and we will sure get you an answer or at least point you in the direction to find what you are looking for.

Thanks!

written by Feras Alhlou \\ tags: google adwords, pay per click, ROI

For tips on presenting and selling PPC/Adwords, Google has a set of very good Powerpoint Presentations. You can access these presentations and other useful information by signing up for Google Advertising Professional Program (at no charge).

Meanwhile, contact us if you have any questions or need help in selling or managing your client’s PPC accounts. Feras as well as Gazlan (our Senior PPC Consultant) are both Qualified Google Advertising Individuals, (Feras is also a Yahoo Ambassador), and both are a good resource to tap into for optimizing PPC accounts of any size.

written by Team Marketing \\ tags: google adwords, pay per click, search engine marketing