Optimize Pay-Per-Click Display Campaigns for ROI

Many advertisers are reluctant to use display due to lack of control and poor ROI, but with the right set-up and optimization, display can be a great source of leads, and not just a branding tool. Display includes websites, such as blogs, articles, and other sites that will show ads relevant to their content. The Display Network has the advantage of reaching potential customers at different points of the buying cycle, and capturing the attention of those that were not yet considering searching for your services. For example, someone reading an article on how to clean a carpet might decide that they’d like to hire your carpet cleaning company after seeing your ad next to the article they were reading.

As you get ready to advertise on Display, keep in mind that users browsing online content behave very differently than those searching for specific information. Also, you will see different results from the two networks. Lower CTRs on display are normal and will not affect the quality of your search keywords. Most advertisers see higher conversion rates for search, but that’s not always necessarily the case. Some of my clients get most of their conversions from display. Then, there are advertisers who see lower conversion rates on Display but still get valuable traffic at lower costs than Search. The only way to know how Search and Display will perform for you is to test them both.

Here are my top 5 recommendations for optimizing display campaigns:

Display only campaigns: When advertisers create their AdWords campaigns, they’re automatically opted into both networks. However, I do not recommend simply enabling Display within your existing campaign, keep the two networks separate. To get you started, create a mirror version on your search campaign, opt it out of search and leave it opted into content only.
What placements to target: You can either run display ads by choosing Automatic Placements, where AdWords chooses for you what websites are relevant based on your current keywords and ads. or, you can target specific websites you’d like to show on by selecting Managed Placements. At this initial stage, I recommend going with Automatic instead of Managed Placements.
Budget: While you test effectiveness of Display for your website, I recommend setting an initially lower budget for Display than for Search (10-20% of your total AdWords budget), and lowering your bids by about 20% for Display.
Display ads: Create different ads for display to capture attention of users that are at different staged of the buying cycle. Also, create image and rich media ads. AdWords offers a free Display ad builder that will help you get started. Image and rich media ads tend to get better CTR on display than regular text ads.
Exclude poor performers: Monitor what websites your ads have appeared on and exclude poor performers, which are sites that generate a lot of impressions but few clicks, and sites that you get a lot of clicks from but that don’t convert.

Keep monitoring your campaigns and adjusting based on incoming data. Display could prove a valuable source of cost-effective traffic you’ve been missing out on! What strategies have you tried that worked?

Increase exposure to your site with flash and image ads

According to the latest data, flash and rich media ads account for 40% of online display ad impressions. AdWords, and most other PPC programs allow you to create these ad formats through their display network. Many advertisers have been reluctant to use display but with the right set-up and targeting you can optimize ROI as well. AdWords even offers a free display ad builder to help you get started. Are you taking advantage of this growing market?

Enable Ad Sitelinks in AdWords and boost your CTR

AdWords recently announced that they are enabling Ad Sitelinks for all campaigns, which advertisers previously had to pre-qualify for. Only advertisers with very high quality scores actually saw this as an option in their accounts. Now, it’s available to all campaigns, and you should be taking advantage of it. Sitelinks allows you to link to other pages on your website with the links visible immediately below your Display URL.

Sitelinks not only acts as an extra line of ad text and provides your visitors additional navigation options, it can reportedly boost CTRs by up to 30%. To set it up, go to your campaign settings, and under Extensions, enable Sitelinks by clicking on Show additional links to my site within my ad.

Find out when your AdWords ads convert to maximize budget and ROI

Many advertisers have observed that their ads convert differently during the day. In fact, hourly conversion rates can vary as much as 50% from the overall average. To maximize your budget you should first find out when visitors are more likely to covert. To do so, log-in to your analytics account, go to Traffic Sources, click on the AdWords tab, and select Day Parts. There, you can see goal completions by hour of day.

If you notice that most of your conversions happen during certain times of the day, say during standard business hours, you may want to run your campaigns during business hours only. This can be set-up automatically within your AdWords campaigns by enabling Ad Scheduling. Be aware that restricting your ads to certain hours only will results in decreased impressions and clicks. However, this may still be a viable option for you, especially if you have a limited budget. Understanding when your ads convert and acting on that information can help you maximize advertising dollars and improve ROI. You’ll avoid spending money on clicks that are less likely to convert and focus your efforts on what’s working for your website.

Yahoo & Microsoft announce new editorial guidelines for paid search.

Yahoo and Microsoft announced their new paid search editorial guidelines that will begin in early August. The new guidelines are part of the alliance between Yahoo and MS (see previous blog post). Make sure you review the new content restrictions and policies and see if you’re impacted. If content policies do not apply to you, still read through the ad content and style policies to ensure you’re ready for the transition.

Use the broad match modifier in AdWords and get more clicks, while maintaining control

AdWords just released a new keyword match type called broad match modifier that gives more control over how your ads will show. The broad match modifier is more specific than broad match but provides greater reach than phrase or exact match. Unlike phrase match, it will trigger singular and plural variations, as well as misspelling and closely related words. And, unlike broad match, it will not expand to wildly irrelevant variations that hike up costs.

The broad match modifier is meant for advertisers that have been using phrase and exact mainly. This type of advertiser has been avoiding broad match because it’s shown their ads on variations that are too far outside the target audience. Even if you’re running on mainly broad match today I recommend testing the braod match modifier, as the more precise matching might improve your conversions. It’s recommended to add the new keyword in addition to your existing match keywords, rather than replacing them. Then, analyze your data and adjust bids and strategies accordingly.

To implement broad match modifier, simply out a + before each word in the search term. Make sure there are no spaces before or after the + sign, but there should be a space between the search terms in the query.

Correct: +sell +widgets
Incorrect: +sell+widgets
Incorrect: + sell + widgets

Implementation is still a little slow and manual. Within the interface, you have to click to edit a keyword and add the + sign manually. Hopefully, AdWords adds a feature that will allow us to change the keyword match type to the modifier within the interface and AdWords Editor soon.

I can’t blame advertisers for avoiding broad match, however phrase and exact can severely limit traffic. The issue of keyword being expanded too broadly with broad match has caused me hours of work reviewing search queries and adding negative keywords to maintain click and conversion volumes. The broad match modifier will be a valuable tool in my campaigns.

Microsoft & Yahoo unite to provide a unified search advertising platform

Microsoft and Yahoo announced earlier this year that they’re forming an alliance by uniting their search advertising platforms. The alliance will make both companies more competitive with the current leader in online advertising, Google AdWords. Advertisers will reportedly benefit from greater reach, better technology, more resources freed up for innovation, and improved customer support.

What does this mean for current advertisers? Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for search campaigns for both companies and those using Yahoo will need to transition their ad campaigns over to adCenter. The transition is planned to take place before the 2010 holiday season, but it may be delayed until 2011. Advertisers should prepare by learning more about the upcoming changes. You may need to shorten your ads, expand keywords, and check your bids. Start making changes now, so you experience a smooth transition!

I, for one, am very excited about using only one platform and am looking forward to a more unified experience. More importantly, I am hopefully that this alliance will make Yahoo and Microsoft better source of qualified traffic, as both have been struggling to keep up with Google. The reality is that most of my clients get the bulk of their traffic and leads from Google, plus the AdWords platform provides far more advanced options and features. Getting some real competition in the PPC world can only mean good things for advertisers and agencies.

See how you stack up against your AdWords competitors

There’s a new tool in AdWords that allows you to compare your account performance against your competition. You can access it by going to your Opportunities tab and clicking on link Analyze Competition. It’s limited in terms of what data you can analyze and currently provides comparisons for the following metrics: impressions, clicks, CTR, and Avg. position. This is a good start, but what I’d really like to see are CPC and conversion metric comparisons, as impressions and clicks are heavily driven by budget and you can quickly increase those numbers by increasing your budget.

Data is available for the last two weeks or so, and there is no option to change this date range, which would be necessary if you wanted to review trends. Filtering is also available allowing you to select specific countries and states. A major con of the Analyze Competition tool is that it’s pretty vague about who your competition is, for obvious privacy reasons. It separates out competitors bidding on the same terms under several industries and provides data for those verticals. However, some of the competitors bidding on your keywords may not be your actual competition for your sub-vertical or areas of specialty.

Overall, an interesting tool to check out and even more data from Google to arm you with information to potentially act upon. However, in order to be truly useful, the data would have to be more specific to your true competition and include CPC and conversion metrics. Meanwhile, I recommend checking out some of the other software sites, such as KeywordSpy or SpyFy that do offer more detailed information about your competition.

AdWords finally makes it easy to find out why your ads aren’t showing

Why are my ads not showing? That was the most common question I heard from advertisers while working at Google, year after year. There are many reasons this might be happening, such as a low budget, Max CPCs lower then the first page bid estimate, regional targeting, and many other potential issues. There isn’t always a simple answer to this question and it is highly specific to each account. This is why help articles are not always, well, helpful. Clients have to browse through technical jargon and are still often unable to find out what the issue is. Worse yet, they are not even aware of the available tools that can help them troubleshoot.

AdWords just released a feature that aims to ameliorate this common problem by allowing advertisers to easily diagnose keywords and find out why they might not be triggering ads. Previously, advertisers had to navigate to the tools section in their account, which many never made it to or even knew about.

Now, the tool has been integrated into your campaigns and can be found while looking at data within the Keywords tab in your AdWords account. While on the Keywords tab, click on More Actions and then Diagnose Keywords. The tool will walk you through the rest.

Dedicated customer support isn’t a strength for AdWords, especially when it comes to small, lower spend clients. So, I hope advertisers empower themselves and use the various tools AdWords has developed to help them manage and troubleshoot their accounts.

Best practices for using dynamic keyword insertion in AdWords ads

Keyword insertion is a tool that allows AdWords advertisers to automate their ads with a single piece of code in the ad copy. Keywords users are searching on are automatically populated into the ad, usually the ad title, possibly making the ad more relevant. To use it, you’d simply enter the following piece of code {KeyWord:Default Headline} into your ad. Keyword insertion is used most commonly in headlines. However, the code could also be placed in the rest of your ad text, as well as in your display and destination URLs.

There are many benefits to using keyword insertion, but you should also be careful to avoid weird looking ads that don’t make sense or aren’t converting for you. The table below explores some pros and cons of keyword insertion as well as my tips on how to best take advantage of it.