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Coming to Phoenix – AdWords Seminars for Success
The AdWords Seminar for Success series is going to Phoenix.
When: January 22 & 23
Where: Embassy Suites Phoenix - Scottsdale
4415 East Paradise Village Parkway
Phoenix, AZ 85032
The AdWords Seminar Curriculum has been completely revamped based upon feedback from previous attendees. We’re now offering a two day seminar. Each day is optional; however, we’re offering a discount to those attending both days.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Before you read the new curriculum, don’t forget the fun goodies you also get for attending:
- $100 AdWords Credit ($50 if you register for a single day) **Must Register 7 Days in Advance
- 2 USB Thumb Drives with Presentation Materials (1 for each day)
- Other Google Goodies
| AdWords Seminar 301: Advanced Account Optimization | |
| Morning Session | Afternoon Session |
| Psychology of Search
Best Practices for PPC Success
Advanced Optimization Techniques
Open Q&A |
Quality Score Demystified
Beyond Text - Multimedia Ads
Content Network Deep Dive
Advanced Geographic Targeting
AdWords Editor: Quick and Easy Account Changes
Google Analytics Implementation Open Q&A |
| **Bonus Presentation: Marketing in a Down Economy | |
“I attended this conference in order to learn the latest Adwords developments, and in this respect, I found it to be most useful. We are using Adwords tools daily, so know more about them than the average user. Still, it is useful from time to time to take a step back and listen to an expert who is obviously plugged into the latest, as well as upcoming, developments.
Brad is an exceptional speaker, offers insightful views about marketing theory, and is a technical master. Aside from that he demonstrates during his presentations a willingness to roll up his sleeves and delve into the nuts and bolts of how to manage Adwords to improve ROAS for clients.”
Chris Lude
Denver-PPC.com
Curriculum Day 2
| AdWords Seminar 302: Advanced Conversion Optimization | |
| Morning Session | Afternoon Session |
| Setting Profitable Business Goals
Putting Your Ad Dollars to Work
Learn How to Track Conversions
Exploring ROI and Profit
Effective Bidding Strategies
My Client Center Successful Account Organization
|
Find Effective Messages through Split Testing
Be More Productive Using AdWords Reports
Google Analytics Reporting
Click Quality and Reporting Even More Tools for Effective Research
Resources Open Q&A |
| **Bonus Presentation: Actionable Items: Step-by-Step: How to Maximize Results for Your Limited Time | |
Do SEO & PPC Cannibalize Each Other?
ClickZ ran an article about PPC cannibalizing SEO recently; and it brings up the old debate “If I’m number one for my keyword, should I do PPC?”
This is a tricky question; but with most things in the PPC world – it comes down to numbers.
I once worked with a client who’s traffic on a highly branded term per month looked like:
- 800 Organic clicks
- 400 PPC clicks
So we stopped doing paid search for a month and ended up with 1000 Organic clicks for that word.
Ahh HA! PPC stole 200 organic clicks – we should stop buying that word.
Was that your reaction?
Mine was to ask where the other 200 clicks went. 200 branded clicks went to a competitor.
The real question should have been “Is it more profitable for our company to buy that keyword knowing we’re paying for some ‘free’ traffic than to give up those 200 highly branded clicks?”
In this case, it was a high converting term and it was worth ‘cannibalizing’ the organic traffic.
That doesn’t mean you should always buy traffic where you’re receiving organic traffic.
It means you should let the numbers tell the story.
Using Symbols in Ad Copy can have Dramatic Effects on CTR
PPC Hero wrote a nice article on adding Copyright and Trademark symbols to ad copy.
Do you or one of your clients have a registered or trademarked company name? If so, try putting the trademarked or registered symbol in your PPC ads to help increase click-through rates.
The reasoning behind this strategy and how it may help increase your click-through rates is two-fold:
1. It will help your PPC ad stand apart from other competitor ads in the SERPs.
2. It will help ensure confidence in consumers that you are a professional business.
Honestly, I wish they hadn’t written the post. I tested out adding symbols with a company in 2002 and found that in highly competitive industries it can definitely help CTR. In highly researched industries (such as b2b), it can make a critical difference in your ad copy success.
I’ve been using this technique for 5 years, and this is the first time I’ve seen someone actually write about it. While some have used it before, no one’s actually said that much about it. Since the cat is out of the bag, here’s some info to go along with their post:
The easiest way to enter these symbols into your ad copy is to hold down the alt symbol, type the below number, and release the alt key:
- Trademark symbol ™ - Alt + 0153
- Copyright symbol © Alt + 0169
- Registered trademark symbol ® Alt + 0174
It’s worth split testing using a symbol in your ad copy.
PPC Account New Years Resolutions
I wrote an extensive article last year about resolutions for your PPC account. Instead of rehashing everything, I thought I’d send you the link to the article and then list out the tools which have launched in the past year that I’m still using.
New Years Resolutions for your PPC account
Instead of listing all my tools, here’s a list of tools that launched in the past year that I’m still using today:
- AdWords SKTool – new enough, still not sold on it yet.
- AdWords Display Ad Builder
- Google AdPlanner
- Google Insights for Search
- adCenter Community Site
- adLabs Online commercial intent detector
- Technically, it’s updated and not new; but Microsoft adLabs doesn’t get enough press for how good the tools are
- adLabs Location Platform I have high hopes for this one (it’s still young) as local marketing is very different if you’re marketing to locals or non-locals
Brad interviewed by Dr. Ralph Wilson
I’ve been a long time reader of the Wilson Web newsletter. Dr. Wilson and I did a quick video about quality score a couple months ago which was just published.
If you’re wondering why we’re laughing and seem to be moving quickly at times, it’s because we had just done the entire interview and found out that the tape wasn’t rolling. So, we were almost rehashing a conversation we’d just had in simpler terms. Overall, an enjoyable experience.
Don’t forget the factors that make up quality score.
You can see the entire video here: How to Improve Your AdWords Quality Score with Brad Geddes (6:55).
Friday Fun – What not to do on a website
These two sites are pretty self-explanatory. Everything you shouldn’t do in a website in two easy to see examples.
Usability? Readibility or Navigation?
Please turn the sound on, this site had me laughing for quite some time.
Businesses are confused by internet marketing - Can your business find the right product mix?
The Yellow Pages aren’t dead.
Small businesses are confused by search marketing.
Over 50% of small and midsize businesses fail to properly track successes (Source)
Who will empower reps to sell the full marketing package?
Will your company be the one that breaks the magic formula?
There are millions of dollars for both small agencies and large sales forces lying around just by helping small businesses.
Some Background
In 2005, I spoke at Pubcon on how search engines need to make changes to help local adoption. About half of my points have been implemented by the search engines. At that time, there wasn’t an ad display hierarchy system that examined the search intent (by keyword or property) to display ads. These suggestions were implemented:
- Stop showing national ads over local ads on local search intent queries
- Show local ads on local properties
- Better tools for local advertisers
In 2006, I spoke at SES Local in Denver about SME campaigns. I had two points to make:
- Fulfillment from aggregators had to be better: Most campaigns were being set up with 1 ad copy and 25 keywords due to technology and scale limitations (although, I’m proud to say LocalLaunch could do hundreds of ads and thousands of keywords for a single SME campaign).
- Search Engines needed to empower agencies. A small business doesn’t have to understand the inner workings of search marketing; they just have to believe in the power of it. While part of this responsibility falls on the sales force – the rest falls on the search engines. There’s a reason both manufacturers and dealers run ads – they’re complimenting each other.
Both of these points have improved – but are definitely not solved.
In 2007, I spoke at Google on the network effect of searchers to publishers to advertisers. Along the way I made several suggestions; of which 90% have now come to pass (Thank you AdWords Team).
While the network effect works well for non-local queries; the process is still breaking down at the local level.
Yellow Pages + Internet Yellow Pages + Search Engine Marketing
Throughout those years, I worked with some very smart sales trainers on selling the “Triple Play”, which is a combination of Internet Yellow Pages, Yellow Pages, and Print advertising. It was RHD’s future strategy; and was so believed in that RHD acquired Business.com.
Why sell all 3?
There’s not enough search for all local businesses. The Yellow Pages are still highly used. One should never lean on just one source of leads for their business. IYPs have fantastic conversion rates. The list goes on.
However, just like one should not just buy AdWords or just rely on SEO for all of their traffic; advertisers should diversify their traffic sources.
While we were selling the Triple Play; that doesn’t mean you need to sell print. You need to sell a combination of advertising mediums that make up most (if not all) of a company’s leads.
A company’s position should be: When our clients think of advertising – they think of us first.
You should be the gateway between your clients and their leads.
Do you want to be part of the marketing mix or do you want to be the marketing mix?
Where does that leave us today?
Print and Search Engines are highly used to find local data:
You can also look at this and not think just YP and Search. It’s where eyeballs currently lie. If you can put a business in front of enough (and the correct) eyeballs, then you can be the marketing mix.
According to the study, the first sources used are Search Engines (31%), Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%), Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%) and Local Search Sites (11%). This represents a change from last year’s study, which ranked Print Yellow Pages first (33%), followed by Search Engines (30%).
- 47% of consumers have used a search engine in the past 30 days, compared with 64% for print Yellow Pages
- Teens are almost equally likely to have used a search engine (52%) or the print Yellow Pages (47%) in the past 30 days
- Search engines were deemed the “most useful” of the eight key platforms tested; they rated highest in satisfaction for being a free service, providing the right amount of information quickly, acting as a trusted resource, and providing relevant results
Businesses are confused by search engine marketing.
Source: Opus Research, AllBusiness.com (2008)
The study revealed that 59 percent of small businesses with Web sites don’t currently use paid search marketing, and of those, 90 percent have never even attempted it.
One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too complex. Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming. Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a search marketing campaign.
If we examine the numbers:
- 15% State lack of time. Translation – they need a 3rd party
- 19% State Internet not relevant. Translation – they haven’t heard an internet marketing product pitch that resonates with them, waiting for the proper 3rd party to come along.
- 7% Skeptical of effeteness. Translation – still waiting on the correct product to come along.
- 25% State Confusion. Translation – they need a 3rd party.
That means 66% of businesses which are confused by search engine marketing just need the right product and sales rep to come along.
Will your company be the one that breaks the magic formula?
The formula isn’t hard:
- Create marketing products that:
- The business, executive team, and sales reps believe in.
- Bring ROI to the customer
- Will produce excellent renewal rates
- Can be understood by the business
- Can be understood by the sales reps
- Can be measured to show tangible value
- Train sales reps to:
- Use a need based analysis sales approach
- Understand what the business needs
- Determine which mix of products fits that need
- Be able to sell multiple products if necessary. If you’re not a newspaper or Yellow Page company, you can still sell display, IYP, websites, local data inclusion, etc. While search marketing is sexy; all of the above venues can work for a company.
- Understand the product
- Believe in the products
- Explain the products in simple terms
- Training the sales reps is often undervalued – please make sure your reps have the proper training.
- Use a need based analysis sales approach
- Train your analysts to:
- Understand search marketing
- Understand other marketing avenues of your product (IYP, display, print, etc)
- Understand the product (sales and analyst alignment are crucial)
- Properly fulfill the product
- Don’t use the ‘set and forget’ mentality
- Understand search marketing
- Implement technology to:
- Scale your business
- Improve your product’s value
- Showcase your product’s value to your clients
I could write another 20 pages about the formula, so this is the simplistic view.
Where does your business fit?
Small Businesses are confused about search marketing.
There is value in selling multiple products.
There is value in selling SEM (SEO + PPC).
There are millions of dollars on the table.
Is your company ready to help businesses?
If the answer is yes, good luck, there’s a lot of money sitting on the table waiting for the right product.
AdWords Editor Update – Now Showing Quality Score & First Page Bids
The AdWords Editor was recently updated; and now shows this information:
- Quality Score
- First Page Bids
- Keyword opportunities now shows data by location
- The volume column in the keyword opportunities tab now shows last month’s data
- Full release notes
It’s now easy to sort by quality score within the editor to see where you should stop making bid changes and do some quality score optimization work.
I also like the fact you can see a 1-10 number for advertiser competition within the search-based keywords research tool in the editor.
Caution before updating
At present, the only way to see minimum bid information is the an older version of the editor. The reason that’s useful is that the higher the minimum bid (especially over $1) the more likely the landing page was at fault. You might want to export your account into an excel file so that you can see cases where you might want to update your landing page over work on ad copy to keyword to landing page relevancy work.
Getting Things Done in a Communication Overload World
I recently bought my first BlackBerry, the Storm. Until all of my emails for an entire day were stored in a single place, I didn’t realize how many communication pieces I received in a single day. And yet, I manage to get things done in a communication overload world with just a few simple applications.
If your day looks like this (and this is what I’ve received from 6am-5pm today):
- 79 Facebook notifications
- 106 direct/reply twitter messages
- No idea how many twitter messages I actually saw
- 112 personal emails
- 258 business emails
- 17 blog comments
- 11 forum emails
- 200+ IMs
- 50+ SMS txts
- Who knows how many new RSS, news, and other random items
- and 23 phone calls (but only 14 voice mails)
There’s a simple way to manage everything
First, use either GMail or Google Apps for Domains.
Secondly, use Firefox.
Third, install these Firefox extensions:
- GTD Inbox and then read the page about how to use it. It will help with prioritizing email
- Remember the Milk and sign up for an account while your at it. It will help with task management
- Better GMail2. It will assist with a more usable GMail account
- WiseStamp for your signature
- If you’d like a more custom GMail, you can use Greasemonkey or Stylish
- There are many other good Firefox add-ons, but the above will help with email management the most
Next, customize your GMail filters. By creating filters (or even aliases with GMail for domains) you can have items like news go into one label, and twitter into another one, etc – as long as they bypass the inbox and then only view those folders when you have time. With GMail you can also send yourself email that triggers filters.
Lastly, use the GMail labs features and enable the labs that will help you. I prefer the ‘default reply to all’; quicklinks, forgotten attachment detector, custom label colors (Red for next action, yellow for action, etc so it pairs with the GTDInbox priority list), and superstars.
Managing Your Work Flow
Go through your inbox and put a GTD Inbox filter (next action, action, someday, waiting on, etc) on each email and archive it. If it’s not due for a while, put it in either the action folder and use Remember the Milk to set a reminder when it’s due. I also like using the superstars to ‘sub-label’ emails within action. Don’t forget with GTD Inbox you can send yourself personal emails and put them into categories as well.
Then…
- Go to the next action label
- Work on the items until its empty
- If you need a break, check your RSS feeds, twitter, Facebook, etc labels
- Check Remember the Milk to see what tasks you have due that day
- Go to the action box and see what needs to be moved to next action
- Go back to your inbox, prioritize the email you’ve received and archive it
- Notice, we never went back to the inbox until we were ready. This is important for managing information overload.
- Start over again
Some Quick Tricks
- When you send an email to someone where you want a response, BCC yourself
- Label the BCC email ‘waiting on’ and archive
- At the end or beginning of each day, if you have emails that are in your ‘waiting on’ folder that you need responses to that day, send a quick reminder to the person. Since you’re forwarding the email you BCCed yourself on, they have the full context of the email so you don’t need to rewrite it again, just a quick forward and note as to a timeline when it will be completed (or something nicer if it’s a prospective client)
I also like using Vonage’s visual voice mail so that I receive a text of the voicemail message to determine where it fits into the priority list. I rarely answer the phone and instead prioritize responses (hence why with some people you get much faster responses via email than voicemail, such as myself).
Your Inbox has 0 Messages in It
Most of the time my inbox doesn’t hit the dream of 0 emails. However, it’s almost always under 30 emails.
Today’s social world is not about communication overload. While it’s easy to drown in a sea of emails and to-do list, the goals of productivity have not changed. It’s just about effectively managing time and expectations.
Step by Step Guide to Blocking Domain Parked Sites on Google AdWords
Google’s recent announcement to extend their domain parking service to all publishers has caused a bit of stir among advertisers. However, from an advertiser’s perspective; it really doesn’t matter as long as you know how to see which domains are doing well for you, and how to block the ones not doing well.
Here’s a step-by-step instruction manual to removing your ad from displaying on under-performing parked domains.
What is a parked domain?
A parked domain is a website that has not been developed. Essentially, someone buys a domain page and then instead of putting content on the page, they just put ads on the page. Most traffic from parked domains are direct type in traffic.
Step by step guide to making decisions about parked domains
First, head to your reporting interface in AdWords and run a placement performance report. This report will give you detailed information about where your ads are being shown, and if you use AdWords conversion tracker, it will also show you conversion data.
One of the columns of the placement performance report is called ‘special categories. Here, Google AdWords will tell you which site is part of the domain parking program.
Next, export the data into excel. The useful items on the content network are cost per conversion and total conversions. Items like CTR and even conversion rate aren’t very important on the content network.
![Microsoft Excel - report [Read-Only] 12122008 95337 AM](http://www.bgtheory.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/microsoftexcelreportreadonly1212200895337am1.png "Microsoft Excel - report [Read-Only] 12122008 95337 AM")
In the placement report, you need to take note of the ‘domain’ column. This will be made up of 1 of 2 pieces of data. The first will just say ‘parked domains’ In this instance, Google is not giving you the actual domain where the ad was clicked. In these cases, you might want to average up the entire section to see how the domains are doing for you. However, you will also see specific domain names where your ad was shown.
If you have certain domains where you’re doing well, you might consider adding them to a placement targeting campaign.
However, the domains not doing well – take note of these URLs. In the next step, we’ll show how to block those domains from displaying your ad.
Block Domains from Showing Your Ads
Navigate in your account to the Tools > Site and Category Exclusion Tools. You will need to select a campaign. Once selected, here is where you can block sites from showing your ad. You have two options.
Option 1 – Block your ad from showing on any parked domain sites.
Navigate to the ‘Page Types’ tab. This will show you your stats by different types of pages where your content ad is shown. Here you can quickly choose a complete page type (such as parked domains or other special categories) and keep your ad from showing on those pages.
Option 2 – Just block underperforming sites.
Click on the ‘Sites’ Tab. This will open up a text box where you can add all of the sites you noticed in excel weren’t performing up to your goals.
Conclusion
Wile the parked domain program is quite controversial. With very little work, you can either completely opt out of this program, or opt out of sites that are not converting for your AdWords account. It doesn’t take that much time.
Previously,many companies did not see a huge amount of impression on the parked domain program (and yet others did); however, with the new announcement, many companies will start to see many more impressions from these pages. Instead of complaining about the results, take the simple steps above to optimize your account for these impressions.
Google AdWords
Seminars for Success
Learn about Google AdWords from experts hand selected by Google.
These seminars will educate advertisers on the creation and management of successful AdWords campaigns.
Upcoming Seminars:
Phoenix AdWords Seminars January 22nd & 23rd
Austin AdWords Seminars January 28th & 29th
Vancouver AdWords Seminars February 11th & 12th
Learn More about the Seminars:
Seminar Information
Official Google Seminar Page
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Brad Geddes
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