Mystery Conversions in Your Pay Per Click Marketing Reports

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.

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.

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.

If you’re using Site Targeting in your Google Adwords advertising strategy, then you’ll want to know about the two changes that Google announced to this feature this yesterday.

Google Adwords Site Targeting has been around for a couple of years now and has allowed advertisers to broaden the scope of where their advertisements might appear by leveraging a large and established network of websites that have the ability to display Google Ads. An advertiser had the ability to browse through the myriad websites within Google’s Content Network and choose those that it would like to display text, image, and even video ads on.

Yesterday Google took this two steps further, and here’s the highlights:

1) Advertisers may now select not only the site they wish their ads to appear on, but also the specific section and location of the website. Why is this important? Well, let’s say you’re using Google ads to generate business selling all inclusive cruise packages. Wouldn’t it be nice to tell Google to show your ads in the travel section of your chosen news site? Or the cruises section of the travel magazine website you’ve selected?

Absolutely, and now you can.As a side note, this change prompted Google to change the name of this feature from “Site Targeting” to “Placement Targeting.”

2) Advertisers now have the ability to choose a Cost Per Click (CPC) bidding option. Until now, Site Targeting (oops, “Placement Targeting”) has relied on Cost Per Impression (CPM), or a price per 1,000 impressions of your ad. If you’ve been at Adwords long enough, you know that one of the most important features of paid search is the ability to turn many dials to zero in on the optimal financial well being of your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords. A CPC model gives you a little more control over what you’re willing to spend for each visitor that your ad brings to your website.

Keep in mind that CPM models still do have a purpose – if you’re interested in maximum exposure and branding type activities, you’ll still be able to choose this option.

If you’d like to give Placement Targeting a try, you can get started for as little as a $0.01 bid in the CPC model or $0.25 for your first 1,000 impressions. Just log into your account, navigate to your main “Online Campaigns” table on the Campaign Summary page, and click on “Placement-targeted” in the Create New Campaign option on the top right.

WebShare is a Google AdWords Qualified Company, and if you need consulting or training on your Google AdWords account, we can help. From in depth training modules on pay per click marketing to daily active management, WebShare has the Adwords Consulting solution to fit your needs.

This past week Google held its annual analyst day and they also recently reported their Q3 2007 earnings. Nick Fox, director of product management in the advertising division made the statement during Analyst day, “the quality of ads is still quite low”. He was referring to the sponsored ads displayed on Google’s search and content networks, and Nick was clearly telling analysts that Google Adwords can still bring in a whole lot of money for the search engine gorilla.

Now just as a majority of us tend to get sick of hearing about the “big dog” winning all the time, at first I cringed with jealousy at the thought of Google making even more money than they do today. But the reality is…he’s right. The quality of the majority of ads displayed is poor.

Why is this? Have people lost creativity in their ad writing? Maybe, but I don’t think so for the greater part. I think it is because people misunderstand the power of continually improving their pay per click campaigns. Most people seem to have a “put up a billboard and field the calls it generates” mentality when it comes to pay per click. That strategy only works for a lucky few, and even for those lucky few it can always be done better. The key to a good pay per click campaign is the pay per click management of that campaign.

It is how someone effectively oversees the ads and distribution of the bids continually. Managing a pay per click campaign requires attention at the keyword, adgroup, and ad level, and one of the most important aspects of the management is constantly improving the quality of the ads themselves with testing. Constant testing will improve your ad campaigns in their ability to (a) attract clicks and (b) attract clicks that are likely to convert. You need to be testing unless you are converting at 100%, which is highly unlikely. It makes simple business sense.

So if pay per click management is one of the most important things to do for your advertising budget, then why are people simply neglecting it? We believe it comes down to time and resources. Companies need to put in the resources to manage their pay per click campaigns to get effective results. Some campaigns need to be managed on a daily basis, and this can significantly draw time from a smaller business’s pool of people. If your business is having trouble finding the time and people to manage campaigns, then there are options that can give you an alternative to neglecting your pay per click advertising. WebShare offers different levels of pay per click management that can meet your needs, from training to active day to day management. We can provide your business the resources and consulting to effectively manage your accounts with Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing Solutions, or Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions.

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.

Now that Google is moving away from a “monolithic” index, it’s common for people in different geographies to get completely different results from a Google search. So when discussing search results with a client or testing geo-targeted adwords, it’s often useful to have Google show me the results as if I were in a different area.

To accomplish this only requires a little manipulation of the query string parameters.

For example, a normal query for mangos might look like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=mangos

Note that the “q=” query string parameter tells us what the search term is. With the region parameters for San Diego, California added on the end, it looks like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=mangos&gl=US&gm=825&gr=US-CA&gcs=San%20Diego

The parameters are:

gl = Country code (full list here)
gll = Lat & Long
gr = Worldwide region code (full list here)
gcs = City (but gr must be set to the same value. Full list here)
gpc = Zip code (only works if country code is “US”)
gm = Metropolitan areas of US (full list here)

A handy trick is to let Google set them for you via their Adwords preview wizard . Simply go to:
www.google.com/adpreview

Specify the region and hit search. Then click on the frame properties on the bottom frame and copy the GL,GM,GR, & GCS params out of the URL and paste onto the end of your search.

If you’re interested in manipulating the other query string parameters Google uses, check out this handy cheatsheet.

Google recently introduced the Conversion Optimizer as a new tool for Google AdWords clients. The idea behind this tool is to manage one’s advertising costs around specific conversion goals. You still pay per click, but instead of setting cost per click (CPC) bids, you specify a maximum cost per acquisition (CPA) bid for each ad group. The Conversion Optimizer manages your CPC bids for you, making adjustments and showing your ads only when you’re likely to get conversions.

Using the Conversion Optimizer does have some requirements that you should be aware of before getting started. First you must have conversion tracking enabled for your campaign. Secondly the campaign must have at least 300 conversions in the last 30 days. These two requirements are essential for the tool to work properly, so if you don’t meet these then unfortunately Google does not allow you to use the Conversion Optimizer. You can set up the tool quite simply in your client center within the “Edit Campaign Settings” section under your “Bidding Options”. In addition, you need to be aware that the Conversion Optimizer does have limitations. There are several AdWords features that are not compatible with the new tool at this time. If you’re not willing to part with things like position preference, budget optimizer, site targeting, advanced ad scheduling, and preferred cost bidding, then the Conversion Optimizer isn’t for you (yet?). Lastly, campaigns that are using the Conversion Optimizer may not be modified using the AdWords Editor.

To find out more on your own about the new Conversion Optimizer please go to the AdWords Help Center.

WebShare is a Google AdWords Qualified Company and is ready to assist you with your Google AdWords Management. We have a great deal of experience in helping customers get the most out of their advertising budgets, and we offer options ranging from training programs to full service account management. Whether you’re starting from scratch or simply would like to learn how to use new tools such the Conversion Optimizer, Webshare has a plan for you.

Yesterday, America Online announced that it will be enacting a number of changes that will “position the company as the world’s largest and most effective advertising network.”

They’ll be doing this with what they call Platform A, an entity that, like Google Adwords, Yahoo!’s Search Marketing platform and Microsoft’s adCenter, will offer advertisers the chance to reach their potential customers through a network of web advertising. So is this any different? Or is AOL simply stepping up their efforts in the pay per click game? Well, first off, Google distributes paid links on AOL’s website and it’s Google technology that runs AOL’s search functionality. Google is also a 5% owner of AOL after its 2005 $1 billion investment. Platform A is not out to replace Adwords, but it will offer access to a whole new type of audience by leveraging already successful AOL advertising products.

According to comScore Media Metrix, Platform A is already reaching over 90% of the domestic online audience, and the platform is leveraging Advertising.com – the world’s largest network of third-party sites that are ready and willing to display ads. Additionally, AOL is bringing in some serious customer targeting features by integrating TACODA (a behavioral targeting company that AOL recently acquired). The platform will also buddy up with Third Screen Media (mobile media network), Lighteningcast (video ad serving) and ADTECH will round out the international ad serving.

We’ll be watching this one closely as it rolls out, and if you’re managing your pay per click advertising efforts, we suggest you do too!