Search Marketing Strategies

Budgeting 101 for Google AdWords

The other day we had a client ask a question about the Delivery Method section in Adwords Campaign Settings and which Delivery Method we prefer.  Here is the explanation of the two options directly from the Adwords Interface:

Budget Delivery Options
Choose either standard or accelerated delivery for your daily budget to determine how quickly your ads are shown each day.

• Standard delivery distributes your budget throughout the day to avoid reaching your budget early on. Your ads will show periodically throughout the day.
• Accelerated delivery displays your ads as often as possible until your daily budget is met.

In the past, we have seen great inaccuracies with the ‘View Recommended Budget’ feature in Google.  A lot of times when budgets are capping out, Google will say that the current budget is okay.  If this was working correctly, it should give an estimation on how much we should bump our budget up to so we do not cap out.  With that said, we recommend that for any Campaign that has an open budget, you should select the Accelerated option.  This way if Google’s budget estimator is wrong, your ad will be showing as often as possible, so the delivery will not be staggered throughout the day.

written by Andrew Belsky -- andrew.belsky at channeladvisor.com

Landing Page Load Times affecting your Google Quality Score?

Back in March Google announced that there would be a new factor in the Quality Score algorithm, landing page load time. With this, not only does the quality of the page content affect your ranking, the speed of which it is displayed will come into play.

Last Thursday (May 8, 2008) Google added a new feature to help facilitate the management of landing page load time and its affect on your keywords. On the Keyword Analysis page you will be able to find the load time evaluations and from that data take appropriate measures to help increase that performance on your site.

You have a little bit of time to evaluate your page situation and get any changes done before the landing page load time will start affecting your Quality Score. The implementation for the algorithm change is scheduled for mid-June 2008.

You can read more about how load time will affect your landing page quality in this AdWords Help Center article.

written by Steve Terjeson -- steve.terjeson at channeladvisor.com

Yahoo Minimum Bid Update

Likely lost in all the press about Microsoft’s failed attempt to acquire Yahoo! is that Yahoo! Search Marketing continues to add features to its Panama platform in an effort to compete with Google. We posted here last month about the rollout of Variable Minimum Bid and thought an update would be useful. 

So how are the early results looking?  So far, across ChannelAdvisor customers we are seeing most bids (84.5%) staying at $0.10 (not too surprising as Yahoo is gradually rolling this out).  The encouraging news is that the vast majority of the keywords that have changed have moved down – 14.5% of the total are now less than $.10 with only 1% of the total getting raised above $0.10. Similar to Google’s rollout I would expect that these results may not apply across all verticals since pretty much all our keywords are very targeted retail oriented keywords.

What changes are you seeing in your campaigns thus far? Are your minimum bids going up, down or not changing at all yet?

written by Link Walls -- link.walls at channeladvisor.com

Broken URLs & 404 Errors

Ahh, the dreaded 404 error. Nothing is more irritating for a shopper to click on a dead link or land on a out of stock product page. The buyer gets frustrated, and in addition to losing a potential sale, the brand gets hurt as well. You spent good money to bring the buyer to your site, just to lose them immediately by displaying a 404 or file not found error. Unfortunately, it happens all the time.

So how to prevent this? For the paid searching marketer, it's challenging to manage a large campaign of thousands or tens of thousands of product terms, and make sure all of the active keywords are for in stock products. I have clients for whom a hundred products may go in or out of stock every week. There are several things you can do to minimize the likelihood of clicks to dead product pages.

1. Product Feed: I ask all my clients to send me a product feed on a regular basis. By comparing the old product feed with the new one, I can quickly identify the products that are no longer in stock, or new products. If the product feed is connected to your paid search campaigns, you can keep the two in sync. At ChannelAdvisor, we have a solution that allows us to automate pausing keywords that go to an Out of Stock page.
2. Category Pages: When it's appropriate, consider using a category page instead of a product page as your landing page. As long as there aren't too many products displayed on the category page, conversion may actually be higher, even on searches for a very specific product. Buyers appreciate the additional choice of products, and should the original product go out of stock, at least there are other similar product available.
3. Validate URLs Regularly: Check all URLs in the account and look for dead links or out of stock messages. We have scripts we use at ChannelAdvisor that can check large numbers of URLs easily and quickly.

written by Jason James -- jason.james at channeladvisor.com

Yahoo Eliminates Minimum Bids

Yahoo announced in February that they were going to start eliminating minimum bids for paid search results. Historically, Yahoo has charged a minimum of $0.10 for every click. For our retailers, this has long been a sore point with Yahoo. The terms most likely to cost less than $0.10 are brand terms. Brand terms tend to get clicks when someone is looking for your brand. In many cases, the searcher is using the search engine and paid search as a way to navigate the web, rather than simply typing the website into the browser address bar. And for retailers with a  strong brand, clicks on brand keywords can be a significant portion of paid search revenue. For example, Calumet Photo gets a lot of paid search clicks from searchers who type in the word "calumet". Clearly these searchers were looking for the Calumet site, but might not have known the actual URL, or have just gotten in the habit of searching on Google or Yahoo for any site they want to navigate to. Unlike Yahoo, for some time Google has charged Calumet Photo very little for these clicks. These brand keywords have very high quality scores because of the high click through rate, and high relevancy between the keyword, ad, and landing page.

On April 17th, Yahoo announced that the minimum bid had been eliminated. For brand terms, this should mean an immediate decrease in the actual CPCs being paid. I have several clients who pay between $0.02 and $0.04 per click for brand terms on Google. I checked today to see how they were doing on Yahoo. Unfortunately, clicks are still roughly $0.10 per click. So, either the change hasn't rolled out to all clients yet, or Yahoo's algorithm is not giving these keywords enough quality score to reduce their click cost significantly.

At the end of the day, this feature is a good thing for retailers and Yahoo. My clients will be able to take the money they save on brand terms and spend it buying more keywords related to products and services, which should increase total revenue and ultimately lead to more paid search advertising.

As an aside, you might wonder why you should advertise on your brand terms in the first place. If, after all, the searcher is looking for you, then why should you pay Google, Yahoo or MSN for a visit you would probably get from the natural search results or from the buyer typing your URL in the address bar of the browser? We have done several studies that show that the conversion rate is much higher for paid ads than natural ads alone, and that overall revenue suffers when brand ads are turned off. So, for most retailers, the brand ads more than pay for themselves. In some ways, this is logical. Conversion is higher when the buyer sees your name in multiple places and this includes on search results pages. If your paid ad is next to your natural listing, conversion is better for both. In addition, you can craft your marketing message more carefully and update it more often with a paid ad, for example to promote a sale. Natural listings depend on the web crawler for updates.

written by Jason James -- jason.james at channeladvisor.com

Pump Up Paid Search for Mother’s Day

This week is the time to start preparing your paid search campaigns for Mother’s Day if you have an applicable product or service.  Trend reporting for popular Mother’s Day gifts show a historic spike in traffic starting around April 15th thru May 9th.

written by Erin Gordon -- erin.gordon at channeladvisor.com

   

Low Keyword Search Volume?

Outside of brand keywords, the most efficient keywords in any paid search campaign are product-specific, long-tail keywords. After launching these long-tail keywords, however, make sure to check your AdWords account for those keywords Google has rendered inactive due to inadequate search volume.

This Google policy has been in place for some time and can pose quite a problem for search marketers. In some cases, Google will map one of your other keywords to the long-tail query (sometimes relevant, sometimes not.)

There is no magic number of searches a keyword must receive in order to show, so don’t try spending two hours searching on the same keywords over and over again to try and increase the volume!

Fortunately, you do have a few options:

1) Try keyword insertion in your ad. This could improve the relevancy of your ad for the few searches there are.

2) To ensure that a relevant broad match result is served, you can either switch closely related ad groups’ keywords to phrase match, or add the low volume tail keywords as negatives to ad groups that might share the word in a keyword phrase.

written by Dennis Hayes -- dennis.hayes at channeladvisor.com

Ask.com Adding Features

 

In a recently released email to ASK.com advertisers, ASK.com is rolling out several new features that will give advertisers more visibility into Traffic and Performance. 

The first enhancement is Impression Reporting.  Previously this data was not available at all levels of an account (Account, Campaign, & Keyword).

The second new feature is Historical CTR Reporting.  As all Paid Search Marketers already know, CTR is a very important metric to optimize to across all Providers.  It shows the effectiveness of ads and in most cases it will improve your quality ranking with the providers, which in turn could lead to lower CPC’s.

The third feature is Conversion Tracking.  All SearchAdvisor clients already see Performance data in our system, but for the marketer who still likes to make a lot of changes at the Provider, you’ll be able to see Conversions, Conversion Rate, and Cost per Acquisition in the ASL Client Console.

written by Andrew Belsky -- andrew.belsky at channeladvisor.com

February Search Trends

Clients often ask us what percentages of searchers are using the various search engines. We all know that Google dominates but it is interesting to see the slight shifts in traffic month over month.  Additionally, clients like to see this data to predict what kind of lift they would see in traffic if they added another search engine to their SEM strategy.

U.S. Search Marketing Trends reports February 2008 Search Query Share findings.  Google still dominates with 59.2% total searches and Yahoo with 21.6%. Microsoft Sites reportedly had 9.6% of the search shares, declining slowly over the last six months. From this data it looks like the slight decline in searches from Yahoo and Microsoft have been picked up by Google.  Both Yahoo and Microsoft have seen a decrease over the last 7 months of about 1.7% each while Google has seen a gain of about 2.7%.

written by Erin Gordon -- erin.gordon at channeladvisor.com

Google URL Policy Change

 

Starting in April, Google will require ad display URLs and destination URLs to match. This policy will include redirects and vanity URLs. Google is making this changed based on feedback from both users and advertisers.

This would seem problematic to clients using agencies like ChannelAdvisor to run their paid search accounts, since most agencies use a redirect URL for tracking purposes. DON’T worry, as long as the agency redirect resolves to a landing page that matches the ad’s display URL, you won’t be penalized.

For example, if the display URL in your ad is www.yoursitecom and the tracking redirect on your destination URL looks like http://tracking.searchmarketing.com/click.asp?aid=12345678999  but resolves for the user to www.yoursite.com (or a sub-domain), your ads will meet the new Google requirement.

Sub-domains will continue to be accepted, as long as the top-level domain matches the URL of your landing page.

Acceptable:
Display URL: www.yoursite.com/abc
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/yoursite123
--> Landing page URL: www.yoursite.com

Unacceptable:
Display URL: www.yoursite.com/abc
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/yoursite123
--> Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com

written by Erin Gordon -- erin.gordon at channeladvisor.com