WebShare Search and Conversion Marketing Notes

If you do your own pay per click (PPC) management account, you most likely use the performance reports provided by Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, or the other advertising service. These reports can be extremely powerful in giving you a very quick overview on the progress of your campaigns for a particular time period. However, there is an important thing that you should understand about where the numbers in these reports come from to truly understand the data. The number of conversions could change over time based on the expiration of the advertisements cookie on a user’s browser.

Google AdWords’ cookie expires after 30 days. This means that if a user clicks on an ad during a Google search a cookie is set on their browser. Even if they leave the website that the ad led them to by going to another website or shutting off their computer/browser, the cookie will track them should they come back to that website and complete a conversion at any time during the next 30 days. So if they come back 15 days later by typing in the website’s URL directly and complete a conversion, in these reports that conversion would be attributed to the PPC ad. However, if they come back 31 days later from a source other than Adwords and complete a conversion, it would not be tracked in Google’s AdWords reports as a conversion. Yahoo! Search Marketing’s cookie lasts for 45 days. You also want to keep in mind that if the user specifically deletes or removes cookies from their browser these expirations do not apply.

Besides the lifespan of their cookies, Google and Yahoo! also differ in how a conversion is attributed in their reports. Google AdWords attributes a conversion to the day the click occurs. Meaning if a visitor clicks on an ad on March 1st but doesn’t complete a conversion until March 7th, the report in Google will show the conversion occurred on March 1st as this is when my initial click happened. Of course, if the visitor returns to the website via another PPC ad, the cookie is reset. Yahoo! Search Marketing attributes the conversion in their report to the actual day the conversion happens. Using the previous example, a Yahoo! report will show the conversion on March 7th, which is the day of the conversion, not the initial ad click. Therefore the number of conversions reported via the Google reports can change for up to 30 days. A report created on March 1st for the February 15-29 date range will likely have fewer conversions than a report created on March 15th for the same February 15-29 date range because these conversions can show up in the past for up to 30 days. In Yahoo! Search Marketing reports, you may see new conversions appear for up to 45 days after the click.

Next time you’re reviewing your pay per click marketing performance reports, be sure to take into account the cookie lifespan of the advertising provider and make sure to understand how conversions are attributed in these reports. These subtle differences may have an effect on how you manage where your PPC marketing dollars go tomorrow!

WebShare is a Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador and Google AdWords Qualified Company, and can help you with your Google AdWords Management as well as your Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Ask.com paid search accounts. We help clients maximize their advertising budgets with solutions that range from training to active daily management. We look forward to helping bring you to the next level.

Ready to set up goals on your website? This 7 minute video walks through the steps required to create conversion goals in Google Analytics. You’ll learn about different types of goals, how to calculate goal values, when and where to use different match types and more. With goals configured in your Analytics profiles you’ll be on your way to understanding how your visitors interact with your site from the perspective of conversions:

Webshare is a Google Analytics Authorized consultancy and can help you set up, configure, and analyze this invaluable data. We offer customized analytics training as well as Google Analytics consulting for any project.

Today Google announced the release of some interesting additions to Google Analytics, the free website analytics offering from the search giant. Almost as many times as the topic of Google Analytics comes up, we’re asked whether or not Google is poring over your private data and sharing it among its secret circles in dark caverns. While the answer to this question has always been a resounding “no”, today’s beta releases provide a case for the positives of data-sharing within Google Analytics.

Ever wanted to know if other online stores selling the same products as you also saw a record February? What days of the week other sites like yours experience traffic spikes? How about knowing if people stay on your pages longer than they stay on your competitors’ sites? With the industry benchmarking feature, you can answer these questions and more.

Understanding how your website performs against other websites in your vertical can shed some bright light on your online marketing plans, and even looking at data across other verticals can provide valuable insights that you can turn into action items for your online success.

So how does Google Analytics get all this data on your vertical? Well, the bottom line is that for this to be an effective tool, we all have to share it. The second feature released today is the beta of the “data-sharing settings” page, where Google Analytics users can opt in to sharing their data. To dispel the paranoia that is sure to result from this option, Google is NOT making your individual data available to your market (and your competitors). When you opt-in to data sharing, your Analytics data is aggregated with everyone else in your industry vertical anonymously.

So why stop there? Google is also letting you opt into sharing your Analytics data across other Google services you may be using. Have you tried the Conversion Optimizer from Adwords yet? If so, you’re probably frustrated that you have to set up separate conversion tracking for this feature when all that data is right there in your Analytics account. Cross Google services data sharing is the first step to allowing us to solve problems like this, and we at WebShare are excited to see where this leads.

Webshare is a Google Analytics Authorized consultancy and can help you make the most of this new feature and the wealth of data available to you via website analytics. From website analytics training to Google Analytics consulting, WebShare can help you with all your website analytics needs.

First time Adwords advertisers often don’t understand that the position of your ad is not determined soley by bid price—that is just one of several factors. Google instead tells us that ad rank is a combination of bid price and something called a “Quality Score”. On top of that, a poor Quality Score could cause your minimum bid price to jump by 19,000%!
So the next logical question would be “What’s my quality score?” Until recently, this has been a guarded secret, much to the frustration of advertisers worldwide. Google will reveal that it is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR), relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factor. Google still isn’t going to tell us the formula or even the exact score, but they are now giving advertisers a general idea of the quality score for each keyword. If you want to make the most of your search marketing campaigns, you need to check out your quality score today.
First, I want to clarify that there are actually two quality scores for your keywords, each computed in a slightly different way. One is for determining the minimum bid price the other is for determining ad position. The two are similar in the fact that they both look at CTR, your accounts historical performance and other relevance factors. Where they differ is that the bid price quality score considers landing page quality and the relevance of the keyword to its ad group. Whereas, the ad position quality score considers the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term. For more on the definition of quality score, see the Google help file.
You can view your quality score through your AdWords account. Choose the Campaign then AdGroup of interest. Click the “Keyword” tab. Look for the “Show/Hide Columns” drop down menu. Choose “Show Quality Score”.

Your quality score is listed next to every Keyword along with the minimum bid for that keyword. If you click on the question mark next to the quality score title, Google provides you with a list of possible quality score, information about each one, and links to FAQs.

Remember, if you have a high quality score, your bid price will be lower which means you can pay less for a higher ad position. However, you shouldn’t just be looking at quality score as a way to get a lower bid price. Ultimately you want a successful ad. This score is an indication of how relevant your ad is in Google’s eyes. A relevant ad will be a more successful ad.
If you have a “poor” or “ok” quality score, there are several reasons why this could be happening. Here are some questions to ask yourself: Are you sending people to the correct landing page (more than likely not your home page)? Does the ad text contain the keyword? Is the list of keywords for this Ad group too broad? Is the keyword itself too broad? If you have a poor quality score, you should have answered no to at least one of the above questions. This is where you should start making improvements. The best pay per click campaigns are the ones that are constantly monitored and improved. Now that Google provides us with the quality score the job of improving our campaigns just got easier. So check yours out today!
If you’re interested in learning more, we go further in depth about how to improve and use Quality Score to your advantage in our Adwords/Paid Search Bootcamp—contact us today for more details.

WebShare is an AdWords Qualified Company. We are recognized as a premier pay-per-click management company in the search marketing industry, and offer a wide range of PPC services that can help you increase the performance of your PPC campaigns.

If you continue to manage your Google AdWords account solely via the web interface you are likely wasting a ton of time. Try downloading the new version of the AdWords Editor (version 5). It’s free and you will be happy you did, as it will likely change your entire pay-per-click management process and workflow. This tool always had the ability to allow you to work offline and make bulk (batch) changes to your AdWords account(s). But you may not realize some other features that can really help you.

When doing Google AdWords management via the offline editor in the past there was one major drawback: it was frustrating to have to go back and forth between the web interface and the offline editor just to see the cost, conversion rate, and other crucial performance statistics of your campaigns, which were available on the web interface but not inside the offline editor. Since you can’t manage a campaign without these stats, but the web interface is very inefficient for large campaigns, you simply had to live with use both simultaneously. Thankfully that problem was resolved with version 4 of the Adwords Editor, where you can see all the data in the one place and still get the benefit of large-scale changes made easy. You can configure it to display data from the date range you desire. You can quickly make “mass” changes on keywords or ads. You can sort by cost, CTR, cost/conv, etc. I promise you this feature will vastly improve your efficiency.

There are other great features of AdWords Editor that few people realize when doing their pay per click management. The Find Duplicate Keywords tool is extremely useful when you have lots of campaigns or adgroups. You may have continued to evolve you AdWords campaign over a long period and not realized you placed the same keywords in two different ad groups. This is undesirable as Google will only show one ad per advertiser and thus you are competing with yourself in addition your true competitors. The Find Duplicate Keywords tool allows you to quickly identify where you have inadvertently added duplicates. One note: it is ok to have the same keywords for a keyword-targeted campaign and a placement-targeted campaign since they don’t compete on the same playing field, keyword on search network and placement on content network.

Another helpful feature is the comments feature. For any item you can select in the editor, you can add a comment to that item. Where this becomes really powerful is managing changes over time. If you’ve ever gotten on a roll and made a flurry of changes, only to look back a few weeks later and have no recollection what you modified (or why), this may prove very useful. Granted, Google tracks all your changes online for the past 3 months (in your campaign go to Tools then My Change History). But the changes they track are very basic and will not give you insight into why you thought a change was the right thing to do. With the comments feature you can write yourself, your co-workers, or your clients a simple note regarding the change. One drawback is that the comments are not stored online when you post your changes to Google. You will have to export your local file for sharing with others (in the editor go to File then Export for Sharing).

These are just three of the helpful features in the Google AdWords Editor, you can learn more in our Google Adwords Training Courses. This tool can help you save time and thus money when doing your pay per click management. For a full list of all the new features in Google’s AdWords Editor view the release notes.

WebShare is an AdWords Qualified Company. We are recognized as a premier pay-per-click management company in the search marketing industry, and offer a wide range of PPC services that can help you increase the performance of your PPC campaigns.

In by far the most significant move that Microsoft has made to gain a foothold in the search and advertising market, the company has bid $44.6 billion for the number 2 search giant, Yahoo! Inc.

Offering $31 per share, a full 62% over and above yesterday’s closing price, Microsoft is attempting to make it very difficult for Yahoo! to ignore the bid, presumably in the hopes that the combined forces of Yahoo! and Microsoft in the search arena can be a viable threat to Google, the company that currently controls ~60% of the extremely profitable market.

Yahoo! has struggled in recent quarters, both in financial terms and in a declining market share, and Microsoft’s MSN / Live search as of last quarter held a meager 3.55% of the market as reported by ComScore.

Advertising is the name of the game in terms of revenue generation for the search giants, and Microsoft has much to gain from Yahoo!’s Search Marketing solution.  A solid rival of Google’s Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing provides many of the same features and has come a long way over the past year to make advertising easier and more effective.  Microsoft’s adCenter has been easily recognized as the inferior of the three advertising systems, presenting difficulties primarily in usability and reach.

While Yahoo! evaluates and decides what course of action to take with respect to the bid, the rest of us will be waiting to see what implications the potential takeover would have in the search landscape.

Read more at Forbes…

Are you ready to set up Google Analytics on your website? If so, then you’ve found the right place. In this 7 minute video, you’ll learn how to create a Google Analytics account, install the new GA.js tracking code, and be on your way to a wealth of information about how people find and use your website:

Webshare is a Google Analytics Authorized consultancy and can help you set up, configure, and analyze this invaluable data. We offer customized analytics training as well as Google Analytics consulting for any project.

If you are looking for another way to expand your search marketing program, Microsoft’s adCenter may be good option. AdCenter is Microsoft’s Live Search pay-per-click (PPC) management application. As the fourth most trafficked search engine in the world, Live Search has the potential to be a high performing search marketing medium. Features of Microsoft’s adCenter include campaign importation templates, immediate editorial feedback on keywords and ads, specific ad targeting options and updated reporting capabilities. The implementation of these features brings adCenter closer to the caliber of Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing consoles. There are however, a few things to keep in mind when using Microsoft adCenter to manage your Live Search PPC campaigns.

The adCenter console operates very much the same way Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing do, making it an easy transition to getting started in adCenter. If you already have PPC campaigns in Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing, you can easily import the campaigns and keywords into adCenter through the use of Microsoft Excel templates. The templates can be downloaded from adCenter, and used to help format all of your existing campaign information and keyword lists from other PPC vendors.

It has taken a while for Microsoft to catch up with Google and Yahoo!, but Microsoft finally introduced an immediate editorial feedback function in adCenter. The function makes it easier to create ads that meet the technical requirements for Microsoft’s editorial guidelines. AdCenter instantly validates ads or keywords by checking each ad to ensure it meets the following four conditions:

1. All of the required fields are complete (e.g. ad title, ad text and destination URL).
2. None of the fields exceed character limits.
3. The destination URL is formatted correctly.
4. The display URL is formatted correctly.

Passing the immediate editorial feedback validation, however, still does not guarantee that your ad will be displayed. Your ad must still meet the content requirements in Microsoft’s editorial guidelines. Content editorial guidlines cover ad characteristics such as the type of product or service being advertised and the use of trademarks in ads. Microsoft says that newly created ads that are approved usually become active within a few minutes, and that your ad was probably approved if you don’t receive a rejection email within two hours of your ad being submitted.

Microsoft hypes adCenter’s dynamic text ad and incremental bidding options, which are intended to help you further customize your ads and target them at specific times in order to increase click-through-rates (CTRs). Dynamic text ads use keyword variables to display a customized ad that is more likely to appeal to potential customers. Incremental bidding allows you to bid an additional amount beyond your keywords bid in order to increase the position of your ads and target customers by location, day of week, time of day, customer age, or customer gender. While Microsoft’s claim is true that dynamic text ads and incremental bidding can increase CTRs, it isn’t guarranteed. You should carefully examine your ad campaigns by evaluating keywords, keyword match type settings, ad position performance and budget before implementing either of these targeting options.

AdCenter’s reporting capabilities are typical of what Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing offer. Reports are categorized by report group. Each report group contains reports that are related to a specific aspect of an account. Campaign performance reports can be viewed for an entire account, campaign, ad group, ad, or a specific keyword. Custom report options include a drag and drop feature to reorder custom report columns and the ability to include totals and averages at the bottom of reports.

Recently, Microsoft unveiled their adExcellence program, which provides advertisers with the opportunity to hone their adCenter skills and become recognized as an adCenter industry expert. WebShare is one of the first companies in the world to become an adExcellence Member. Members of the adExcellence program must complete classroom training and demonstrate their knowledge by passing an exam. In addition to being an adExcellence Member, WebShare is also an Adwords Qualified Company and Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador. We are recognized as a premier pay-per-click management company in the search marketing industry, and offer a wide range of PPC services that can help you increase the performance of your PPC campaigns.

In early December Google began testing a new tool called Knol, and of course it is getting a lot of buzz. The theory behind Knol is to apply Google’s “knowledge” of relevance analysis into creating a web space where you can go to find useful information on topics “from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.” They named it Knol because they feel this term should be known as one unit of knowledge. Udi Manber, VP of Engineering at Google explains that “A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.” The structure of the tool will include an endless number of Knols.

With the advent of Knol, the search engine giant may intentionally or unintentionally be trying to pull traffic from Wikipedia and social networks like Facebook. The competition to Wikipedia is easily recognized when Google describes their aggregate system as a place to find knowledge. Just like Wikipedia, Google is asking people to write a trustworthy article on a particle subject for their Knols. However Google is claiming that the main idea of Knol’s design is to highlight the authors. The thought here is that if you know or recognize the author, you can then make a judgment on the level of authority the person has on that particular subject. At first it might be surprising that Google would start a competition with Wikipedia since it seems like you can’t do a search these days without getting a Wikipedia result on the first page of Google’s search results. Looks like Google has just recognized another great place to advertise and who wouldn’t want their own knowledge aggregate system on their home turf?

With respect to social networking sites, Knol may also be stealing some traffic. There is no better authority to write on yourself or your company than YOU, and this concept is similar to other social networking sites already out there. The difference here is that Knol would allow others to write on a subject with competing pages and claims of being authoritative. People like people and they don’t mind some drama - by allowing readers to know the author, they can get content with some background behind it. At this point it is too early to tell how much of a search marketing opportunity Knol could pose for individuals or organizations but it certainly looks promising.

Google has proven they are the online relevance king for search results (those results can be found in the latest search activity numbers). Thus we expect they can apply all that “knowledge” to create a great information aggregate system that is useful and relevant. Udi Manber stated “We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.” We are also excited.

Google Analytics has just put in place a new feature that will be formally announced very soon – comparison graphing for your reports.

For those of you that have grown accustomed to the tireless examination of your key Analytics reports day after day, this new feature is a welcome addition to Google Analytics from a usability standpoint. Whereas we have been seeing key metrics compared to site averages for quite some time now (displayed in red or green, in parentheses next to key numbers), we now have the ability to graph two metrics or two date ranges.

Ever wanted to quickly see things like:

Has all of our work paid off and did we get more traffic this holiday season than last?
Just head to your favorite traffic report and drop down your date selection box and select the two date ranges you’d like to compare. Black Friday 2006 to 2007 or any period you’d care to see.

Are more visitors looking at our December Discounts page after we highlighted it on our major landing pages last week?
Find the page in question in your content reports, set your date ranges to compare and enjoy the view!

Did that string of newspaper ads in San Francisco and L.A. get us more traffic from the state of California? More e-commerce transactions? Better conversion rates?
Just navigate to the Map Overlay report for California, set your comparison date ranges and have a look, city by city. You can use the tabs at the top to compare traffic, conversion, and e-commerce numbers over your date range and any geographic location.

Are visitors from my banner ads staying on my site longer after I made my landing pages better a month ago? Are they converting better as a result?
Have a look at the time on site column of the campaign report where you track your banner ad visitors. Conversion and e-commerce numbers are just a click away!

Does my G1 conversion rate trend in the same way as my G2 goal over time? What does it look like for Chicago visitors that came from a geo-targeted Adwords campaign?
Head over to your All Traffic Sources report, drop down the graph options, select “Compare Two Metrics” and pick the goal conversion rates you’d like to compare. Get even more detailed by finding the cross segment of a specific Adwords (or any other) campaign while in the Map Overlay report. Now drop down the graph options and pick your two goal conversion rates!

The answers to all of these questions can be quickly graphed right in the Google Analytics console now, and there are myriad ways to use this new feature and quickly see a snapshot of date range comparisons.

Webshare is a Google Analytics Authorized consultancy and can help you set up, configure, and analyze this invaluable data. We offer customized analytics training as well as Google Analytics consulting for any project.