Display Advertising - Target Your Own Placements

Advertising in the Google Display Network (GDN) can be a great way to generate leads/sales at a lower cost than with advertising on search networks. The lower cost comes about because the cost per click is often much less on display network placements than on search placements. A common mistake advertisers often make is to run a single campaign on both the search and display networks. This is a mistake because the way to optimize for both networks is quite different. My best advice is to duplicate a campaign and run one version on search and one on display to test them against each other.

When setting up a display network campaign, a shortcut many advertisers take is adding keywords to the campaign and letting Google select where the ads will be displayed based on the keywords. It is much better practice to select your own network placements. If you really want to reach your audience, it is important to target your ads to websites that your customers are likely to visit. If you let Google select your placements, they just match keywords in your campaign to words on the pages and often place you on completely irrelevant websites. To find placements that are relevant to your customers, try using the Google placement tool.

Pay Per Click Advertising Tip - Define Customer Personas

When setting up a pay per click advertising campaign, a very important key to success is to break your campaigns into tight, granular ad groups. One way to carefully segment campaigns is to identify customer personas.

As internet users, we don't all search for the same products and services the same way. Different demographic groups may use slightly different search phrases and respond differently to offers. For this reason, it is important to understand what groups would be interested in your product or service and how to speak to them through your advertising.

Identify your customer subsets and give them names (i.e. high school students, soccer moms, etc). Think about the words each segment would search that would result in a sale/lead. Set up a different ad group for each customer segment and focus on the phrases that specific group would likely search. This will also allow you to present different ad copy/creative and landing pages to each segment.

Spend Less in AdWords with URL Testing

Advertisers place a great deal of focus on the title and description in their ad copy, but the url is often overlooked. The display url of your ad also has an effect on whether or not people are likely to click on your ad. If you use a display url that contributes to a high click through rate, you will in turn be paying a lower average cost per click and saving money. Testing display url's is a great way to increase your click through rate.

Both differing domain names and differing url extentions should be tested. The domain name you use should be very relevant to what you are advertising. If you advertise a wide range of products or services, it may be worthwhile to set up several domains, each with a relevant domain name to a specific product and use these in your advertisements.

You should also be testing different url extentions. For example if Ten Golden Rules has an ad group set up to advertise SEO Consulting, rather than just including the top level domain (www.TenGoldenRules.com) as the display url, variations should be tested, such as (www.TenGoldenRules.com/SEO-consulting).

AdWords Trick - Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Many pay per click advertisers are now using dynamic keyword insertion in their ad copy. Many, however are no getting the most out of this trick because they do not understand the capitalization techniques. The way you use capitalization in your keyword insertion command will directly affect the capitalization in the ad that appears. Here are some ways to control capitalization in your keyword insertion ads.

Lets say a user is searching "ten golden rules". Here is how it will look using different keyword insertion capitalization variations:

If your ad uses this command: {keyword:Internet Marketing}, the ad will read "ten golden rules". (no capitalization)

If your ad uses this command: {Keyword:Internet Marketing}, the ad will read "Ten golden rules". (only the first letter of the first word is capitalized)

If your ad uses this command: {KeyWord:Internet Marketing}, the ad will read "Ten Golden Rules". (the first letter of each word is capitalized)

If your ad uses this command: {KEYWORD:Internet Marketing}, the ad will read "TEN GOLDEN RULES". (all letters are capitalized)

In most cases, it is best to capitalize the first letter of each word (KeyWord:). Play around with some different variations and see how they work for your campaign.

More Work for Google Advertisers

If you are advertising in Google AdWords, you may have a new task at hand. A recent policy change now in effect by Google is disallowing multiple display URL domains within a single ad group. If you currently advertise multiple domains in a single ad group, you will have to go in and change your ads.

This policy change only applies to ad groups that display different domain names. Different subdomains and domain extensions are still acceptable. For example, if you have an ad group with the following display urls:

www.tengoldenrules.com
marketing.tengoldenrules.com
tengoldenrules.com/marketing

You will not have a problem because all of the above urls have the same root domain (tengoldenrules.com).

However, if you have an ad group with display urls like these:

www.tengoldenrules.com
www.10goldenrules.com
www.tengoldendeals.com

The ads are no longer accepted by Google because the root domain differs in each.

Fixing your ads to comply with this new policy could be a large, arduous process, especially if you have a large scale account. The easiest way to find out which of your ad groups cause an issue, you can contact your Google rep or call 1-888-246-6453 and they will be able to tell you exactly which ad groups you need to change.

Pay-Per-Click Tip: Getting the most out of your ad space

Pay-per-click for search is some of the most targeted online advertising available. The problem with advertising on a search network, such as Google, is getting your message across in a very limited space. Pay-per-click ads, when served on search engine results pages, usually only provide you with 25 characters of headline space and about 70 characters of ad copy space.

Advertisers always want to get their entire sales pitch out there, and could not imagine fitting it in such a small space. Forget about sales pitches and view the ad not as a selling stage, but as a pre-qualifier for your sales funnel. Sell the visitor on the landing page, not in the ad. By pre-qualifying visitors, those who do click on your ad will be more likely to complete an action on your site. This will reduce your acquisition cost.

The golden question then becomes, “How do I effectively use the ad space?” Well, you should try to include the following items in your ads:

· A value proposition (i.e. “Free Consultation” or “Save 25%”)

· An endorsement from a third party (i.e. “A+ Rating in Better Business Bureau”)

· A call to action (i.e. “Sign Up” or “Buy Now”)

Once you get the type of visitor you are looking for from the ads, you can give them a detailed sales pitch on the landing page.

Another way to fit important information in your ad is to use symbols and abbreviations. For example, using the "&" instead of the word "and" saves you two characters.

AdWords Tip: Identify Negative Keywords

A useful PPC optimization strategy that is often overlooked is including negative keywords in your campaign. Negative keywords are used in AdWords to prevent your ads from being served for irrelevant searches. To paint a clearer picture, assume you are bidding on the term “bass” because you sell bass guitars. If you are bidding on “bass” with broad match, your ad could be served in searches for “bass fishing”. Anyone searching for “bass fishing” is unlikely to purchase a bass guitar from your site. If you included the term “bass fishing” in your negative keywords, you would not be wasting the impression and possible click. In addition, by adding negative keywords, your cost per click is likely to decrease as your click through rate increases.

Understanding negative keywords is only half the battle. Many advertisers know about negative keywords but do not utilize them because they have trouble identifying them. Common sense can certainly get you a starter list of negative keywords, but to really be effective, you will need to constantly be adding negative keywords to your campaigns.

The first way to identify negative keywords is to look for them in your current campaigns. Run a keyword performance report to see which keywords convert poorly over time. Add those phrases to your negative keywords.

There is also a very simple way to identify negative keywords you may not have thought of. Just run your broad keywords through any keyword suggestion tool, like the one provided in AdWords. Look through the list and identify any phrases that include your keywords but are irrelevant to your business. For example, you may have never considered that when bidding on “packaged food”, your ad will be showing up on searches for “packaged food poisoning”. However, if you ran “packaged food” through a keyword suggestion tool, “packaged food poisoning” would be right there for you to see.

Using Google Trends for PPC and Penetrating Foreign Markets

Last week, Michael reported how Google Trends is now tracking not only searches but also compares traffic between websites. However, this is only the start of what you can use Google Trends for.

Local PPC Advertising - marketers can find out which regions are searching for a broad keyword phrase. It can drill down from region (Countries) to sub-region (State) to City. For national companies looking to focus their local advertising efforts, Google Trends is an essential PPC advertising tool.

Penetrating Foreign Markets - Google Trends tracks search trends for the global marketplace. US-based companies that are looking to expand into foreign markets can search and find what countries / sub-regions are looking for their products and services.

Additionally, Google Trends advises what language your target audience speaks and popular news stories related to that keyword phrase / website.