Archive for the 'Adwords' Category

I just went thru an invoicing hell with a whole bunch of past-due invoices from Google. This was across several different accounts, that are contained within 2 MCC accounts. I was dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and the invoices were not addressed in the way to comply. As a side note, Sarbanes Oxley Compliance, “has increased costs associated with being a publicly held company by 130 percent.”

In this particular case, since they didn’t have specific “Bill To” information on the invoices, the invoices got stuck in the SOX process, and hadn’t been paid. Eventually, chargebacking was involved in a few cases just to get the invoices paid.

Alas, everything is resolved now. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience. But, thank G-d it’s resolved. Certainly at the very least, this was an interesting learning experience.

Here’s a short but sweet post that should save you time, and increase your productivity so you don’t have to go thru that same unpleasant experience I did.

Steps before you start the campaign:
Step 1: Make sure you have all the necessary approval(s).
Step 2: Remember to get PO#’s before each campaign, to be applied to each invoice/campaign.
Step 3: Make sure the account/invoices will have the correct “Bill To” information.
Step 4: Submit invoices as they are generated by Google. Google won’t necessarily have the invoice ready at the end of each month.

For those of you that manage a Google MCC Account, there’s no need to click into every single account to generate a monthly invoice. Depending on the amount of accounts you manage, this exercise could take quite a long time.

So, here’s an easier method to grab all of your monthly invoices, broken out by specific accounts.

GENERATING INVOICES:
1) Log into your MCC.
2) Click on “My Account” tab.
3) Use dropdown to select Date Range.
4) The Billing Summary will appear on the next screen sorted by Month/year.

On that screen you are given several hyperlinks from which you can grab information. The choices are consolidated (.pdf) | spreadsheet | account-level (.zip) .

I prefer to use the account-level (.zip) which contains every invoice by account for that month.

That’s it. Hopefully, this post has saved you time and energy whether you’re an SEO Consultant, Agency person, or on the client-side.

Start off by downloading a Keyword Report for a previous Time Period out of Adwords report center. Sort by your specific success metric (eg: Cost-Per-Coversion, Orders, etc.).

Create a new Adwords campaign using the Google Buildout Spreadsheet (Excel). This new campaign will replace the pre-existing campaign.

1. Only use the keywords that converted from the previous time period. This is effectively cutting away all the excessive “no results” keyword spending.
2. Bucket the keywords into tight-knit adgroups.
3. Write fresh ad copy for all the adgroups. Write two ads per adgroup so you can a/b split test ads, and conduct an ad optimization.
4. Customize the Display URL’s to contain the keyword representative for that adgroup (eg: www.mysite.com/keyword).
5. Keep the CPC’s the same to launch with. After launch conduct daily bid mgmt.
6. Use multiple Destination URL’s. This is for testing purposes.

After you get client approval, upload the spreadsheet using Adwords Editor. Once the campaign is live here are some things to do for every adgroup in the Adwords account:

1. Pause underperforming keywords that are bleeding the account without converting.
2. Reduce bids into lower positions for keywords that have a high cost per conversion.
3. Add more keywords to select adgroups.
4. Change some Keyword Matching Options.
5. After you get a little more data in the account, conduct an Ad Optimization.

It’s ideal to use a significant amount of data to make additional changes. Typically 50-100 clicks per converting term, or another metric to watch like a threshold for Cost-Per-Conversion.

Lets say you want to track individual keyword performance, and separately track ad copy performance. If you’re using Adwords, you don’t need to place tracking code on the destination URL’s to track the performance of each keyword, and separate tracking for the performance of each ad.

You just need to make sure you link your Google Adwords account to your Google Analytics account. Google will automatically pass the gclid code, thru Auto-Tagging.

Google created auto-tagging (turned “on” by default) so that large and small accounts could easily see how their AdWords keywords were performing from click to conversion and back to cost. Auto-tagging automatically associates a parameter with the click on your ad which then allows Analytics to report the details of the click, including which AdWords keywords brought a visitor to your site, which campaign that keyword was from, and how much that click cost. This information can then be associated with richer information within your Analytics reports, such as goal or e-commerce conversions, to give you a sense of how your AdWords spending is really performing.

The screenshot below shows exactly where you will find this within your Adwords admin:

If you’re running 2 ads per adgroup, then in order to track the ad copy performance, just make sure the Headline is different for each ad. The description can be the same. But, the Headline can’t. Because that is what will appear in Google Analytics. The difference can be as subtle as a semi-colon, or a period, as long as they’re different headlines.

You can see that data under “Traffic Sources” –> “Ad Versions”.

If you are running non-adwords campaigns (eg: Yahoo, MSN, email, banners, etc), then you will need to tag your URL’s with tracking code.

Below is some “Google Internal” data. About a year and a half ago, I asked one of my Google reps if she had Average CTR’s by Industry for Google Only. I was going thru some old files, and I found this ppt slide. It doesn’t tell me what companies were used in the accessment, and whether or not the PPC Keywords were more brand-related than generic keywords. Obviously, brand-related keywords would skew the results with higher CTR’s.

In a previous post, I discussed Methods To Increase CTR on PPC Ads. For example, things like position, keywords, ad copy, dynamic keyword insertion, etc. have an impact on CTR.

Campaign objectives make a difference. It depends on each advertiser’s campaign objectives. If they are Conversion-Oriented, then their Clickthrough Rates are most likely lower. Because, those are the advertisers that can have their ad in Position #7 and that’s their sweet spot for conversion rates.

As opposed to the Brand-Oriented campaign. In which case, findability is crucial to their campaign success. That means a Position-based success metric. Hence, higher CTR’s. Some of these brand campaigns use CTR as an Analytic Metric, so their is a heavy emphasis on optimizing CTR.

I was told that these are from large comprehensive PPC campaigns from industry leaders. I don’t think this can really be used as representative data for the Avg CTR for each of these industries. But, it’s interesting data anyway.

You just launched your PPC Campaign. Now what?

It’s time to follow your PPC Strategy document, and make all the day-to-day tactical executions and implementations necessary to optimize the campaign to the success metrics.

Post-Launch PPC Optimizations:
1) Daily Bid Management / Bidding Strategies.
2) A/B Split testing (Ads, Landing pages).
3) Ad optimization / Ad creation.
4) Create customized Landing pages.
5) Keyword expansion / Keyword Bucketing.
6) Search Engine Expansion & Contraction (possibly using 2nd Tier Search Engines). Consumer behavior will dictate how to manage & optimize budget allocation based on traffic/performance metrics on each search engine.
7) Measuring. Testing. Reporting.

Client Meetings/Phone Calls:
Schedule weekly “real-time” campaign status meetings to discuss campaign performance, optimizations, and recommendations. Send the proposed agenda to your client, and ask them if they would like to add anything to the list.

Sample PPC agenda:
1) Improving landing page quality.
2) Brainstorm session to discover new keywords.( 25% of all searches on Google have never been searched for before).
3) Discussion of campaign performance in relation to campaign objectives (PPC Goals).
4) Discussion of Web Analytics & Conversion Tracking.
5) Click Fraud Management / Philosophy.

Related Posts:
PPC Campaign “Kick-off” Templates.
PPC Strategy document.
How to Upload an Adwords Bulksheet.
Monthly PPC Performance Report Template.
Methods To Increase CTR on PPC Ads.
4 Steps To Optimize Google Adwords Content Targeting Campaigns.
Integrating PPC search ads with online display ads.
Google MCC Accounts - Generating Invoices.

Here’s a short post that’s meant to help you save time, and increase productivity.

For those of you that manage a Google MCC, there’s no need to click into every single account to generate a monthly invoice. Depending on the amount of accounts you manage, this exercise could take quite a long time.

So, here’s an easier method to grab all of your monthly invoices, broken out by specific accounts.

1) Log into your Google MCC Account.
2) Click on “My Account” tab.
3) Use dropdown to select Date Range.
4) The Billing Summary will appear on the next screen sorted by Month/year.

On that screen you are given several hyperlinks from which you can grab information. The choices are consolidated (.pdf) | spreadsheet | account-level (.zip) .

I prefer to use the account-level (.zip) which contains every invoice by account for that month.

That’s it. Hopefully, this post has saved you time and energy.

Related Posts:
Google MDS - Manager Defined Spend.
How to Upload an Adwords Bulksheet.

Once your Google Account Team sets you up a My Client Center. You become empowered to upload accounts yourself, and link accounts to your MCC.

From that point forward, the only thing you’ll you’ll need them to do, is to generate a Service Agreement for each campaign you want to run. Here are the steps:
1) Build your own campaign using this Google Bulksheet template.
2) Load the campaign into Adwords Editor, and upload to Adwords.
3) Link the campaign to your MCC.

Here are the details…

Follow these steps in AdWords Editor to upload your campaign:

- Start with the “Campaign” tab and be sure to include the appropriate dates and daily budget.
- When uploading keywords, please click on the “Keyword” tab and hit the “Make Multiple Changes” button.
- Select “Add/Update Mulitiple Keywords”
- Hit the second radial button (My keyword information below includes…..)
- Then, copy the entire data area on the buildout spreadsheet within the “keywords” tab. Paste within the popup box in Adwords Editor. Then, hit finish!

To copy and paste text ads, you can follow these same steps but do so in the “Text Ads” tab. Additionally, once your CPCs have been set, please be sure to update and include an overall ad group CPC in the “Ad Group” tab.

Once you’ve uploaded the campaign from Adwords Editor into the Adwords interface, you still will NOT be able to see it in your MCC until you “Link” it to the MCC.

Now, go to your MCC. There should be a hyperlink on top of the campaign list that says, “Link existing account“. Click on the link, and type your CID (Customer ID number) into the box.

Now, go login to the individual adwords account you just linked. It will ask you to approve. Now, approve it.

That’s it. You’re finished. Congrats! The only thing you’ll need your Adwords team for now, is to generate Service Agreements.