It is getting more difficult to control ad display in Google AdWords because they’re giving the system more liberties. There are a few variations of this – I’m calling them “Ultra Broad Match” because it’s funny:

Automatic geo-targeting parsing of queries.

If a visitor searches a general term and Google pinpoints him/her to a location that is in the target-area of one of your campaigns, the query is sometimes treated just as if it had geographic modifiers attached to it. Likewise, if you are bidding on a term that has geographic modifiers, Google might decide to broad match it to a more general query that does not have modifiers attached. For example, if someone is searching for “plumbers” from an IP address that is located in Detroit by Google’s system, then it might be treated just as if he/she searched “plumbers in detroit.” Likewise, if a person searches for “plumbers in detroit,” he/she might be treated just as if he/she searched for “plumbers” from an IP address located in Detroit. In your account, you can be explicitly bidding on the term “plumbers in detroit” in a nationally targeted campaign, but Google may decide instead to show an ad for the term “plumbers” that is in a campaign targeted to the Detroit area. For an advertiser, this means it is very difficult (if not practically impossible) to keep terms that have geographic modifiers separate from terms that do not have geographic modifiers when setting bids.   This is a problem because you might expect a broad matched keyword phrase like “plumbers in detroit” to have better conversion rates than a broad matched keyword like “plumbers” – even if the more general term is in a locally targeted campaign. I can think of at least four reasons why the geo-modified term should deserve a higher bid for a local business:

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When I’m managing an AdWords account, I can sometimes forget where these ads are going.   A whole lot of AdWords isn’t visible from the user interface.   It’s easy to look at cost per clicks, conversion rates, bids, and ad positions – without really doing a check on the actual substance behind it.   Especially because I’m comfortable with submitting ads and keywords, without having to worry that my ad will actually show on Google and that things will run the way I expect.   But this whole user-interface vacuum, strips away some important performance predictors/indicators:

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A constant source of frustration in the world of SEM is the seemingly conscious decision by Google to prevent the analyst from running reports detailing conversions and conversion rate by hour. From a campaign management perspective, it’s extremely valuable data for day parting.

Day Parting, for those who are unaware, is a technique allowing you to adjust bid rates by time of day and/or day of the week with the goal of taking advantage of times with high conversion rates or low cost-per-leads, while not wasting money during the less effective and more expensive times.

I can see the Google Ann Arbor building out the window next to me, and I’ve shaken my fist in that direction a few times before, but today I’ll avoid the conspiracy theories of why Google would not want to share this beautiful data with us, and instead refocus that anxious energy on solving the problem!

THERE IS A WAY! With a little mixing and mashing of reports from AdWords and Google Analytics, its possible to conjure up   a report that gives conversions by hour (regardless of date) and by day of week. To do this, you will need to have ‘Conversion Goals’ set up in analytics already. If you don’t, do that now and come back in a month.

Let’s map this out….

What do I want?
A report detailing Conversions and Conversion Rate by time of day (regardless of date) at the Campaign level.

1.) In AdWords reports:
Report type: Campaign Performance
Settings: Hourly (regardless of date),   choose a date range and your campaign of choice.

Run the report, and export to .CSV for Excel.

2.) Lets go to Analytics!
- Set the date range for the same time period.
- On the left-hand side, click Goals, then Total Conversions.
- Underneath the graph, it gives you the option to ‘Select Goal’.   For this example, I choose to select ‘All Goals’.
- Next, graph by time of day.   This option is located in the square with a clock in it by the top right corner of the graph.
- Now we need to filter the data to include only the campaign we’re interested in.   To do this, we’ll need to create a new Advanced Segment.

3.) Advanced Segmentation
- Click ‘Create a new advanced segment’
- Dimensions –> Traffic Sources
- Drag ‘Campaign’ to the ‘Dimension or Metric’ box,   choose your campaign from the drop down menu, and name the segment.
- Click the ‘create segment’ button.
- Un-click the ‘All Visits’ tab, and select your newly created one.
- Export the data into a .CSV for Excel

4.) Mash it up!
- Make sure your Time Zones for AdWords and Analytics are the same (and then double check, this is pretty important…)
- Select your Conversion Rate data from the analytics .CSV you just created, and line it up with the AdWords spreadsheet from step 1.
- Format the data however you please.   I’ve added Conversion Rate, Cost/Lead, and % of total Leads

5.) Visualize the data, and interpret it accordingly.

6.) Day Parting
You’ve analyzed the data, came up with a plan of action, and now your ready to optimize your Ad Scheduling.
- Back in AdWords now, click into Settings for the chosen campaign.   Under Advanced Settings, you may now edit to your heart’s content.

Voila! Together, we’ve outsmarted Google for a minute *high five*, and avoided purchasing a 3rd party software!
Now as mentioned earlier, you can view the data by day of the week also.   The only changes that you’ll have to make are adjusting the unit of time you want to view in AdWords to ‘Day of Week’, and in Analytics, view data by day (then organize and aggregate once in a spreadsheet).

Yet another small victory that makes life exciting!

On Wednesday, Google announced the launch of a new reporting feature in AdWords: view-through conversion reporting for display ads on the Google content network.

AdWords display ads show on Google’s partner websites (websites that participate in the Google AdSense program), alongside relevant content. Display ads can have more subtle effects on user behavior than traditional search ads, not just encouraging clicks but also impacting future branded searches and brand recognition.

Google’s new metric sets out to answer the question, “What effect do online branding efforts have on sales and leads?” Now, when a display campaign runs, we can measure not just conversions (sales and leads) coming from clicks directly on the ads, but also conversions that came from people who saw the ad within the last 30 days but did not click.

This may be just the thing that helps sales-focused businesses get into the branding game. If Google can prove that display ads can drive a demonstrable lift in sales, marketing teams will finally have the data to justify branding budget. I, for one, can’t wait to experiment.

At small companies and even large ones, people perform tasks outside of their areas of training. This is a natural occurrence, happening when folks cover each others tasks during a vacation, because of a promotion, during special short-term projects, and for many other reasons. A lack of formal training is almost a condition of participating in certain emerging fields, such as, say, search engine marketing and social media. So, how does a professional ensure they’re current with the existing standards? By self-study – reading books and blogs, by setting goals and measuring yourself against your own high standards, and by participating in professional development activities – attending conferences and obtaining relevant professional certifications.

For search engine marketing, certifications are available from professional associations such as the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO Institute offers a certification) as well as the Search Engines themselves:

• Google Advertising Professional
• Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador
• Microsoft adExcellence certification

Anyone managing projects in this industry should consider Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Relevant but non-certifying professional organizations include: the Usability Professionals Association. Read More

If you haven’t already checked out Google Insights For Search, you really should. Like Google Trends, this awesome tool allows you to figure out how a search query’s popularity has trended over time and compare the trends between these search queries.

But Insights For Search takes this functionality a step further, allowing you to find top searches by location, time range, or any combination thereof.   You can also see the top search terms that include a keyword of your choice. Insights will also make projections of future trends.

While it’s kind of fun to know that “Michigan” is the most popular search term in Michigan (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#geo=US-MI&cmpt=geo), it isn’t immediately apparent how you would use this kind of information to improve your AdWords account.

Here’s an example we ran into recently when we were able to use Insights For Search to inform the way we built out an AdWords account for a client:

The Detroit metro area is home to a large and vibrant Arab community. According to the 2000 census, Arab-Americans comprised 30% of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. Our client, naturally, wondered if we should be targeting the Arabic language and creating Arabic keyword lists since they wanted to target this region. Google Insights for Search to the rescue!

We ran keyword searches within Google Insights and compared the several common terms based on the top searches in Iraq and Lebanon (since Dearborn’s Arab population is primarily composed of Iraqi and Lebanese immigrants or their descendants). In this Insights For Search chart, you’ll find the terms “photos” (blue), “games” (red), and “ramadan” (orange) in Arabic graphed to show their relative popularity in the US. We also tested some terms like “soccer” and “flights” that we thought might be popular, but they were not popular enough to register results.
The states that seem to have a lot of people doing Arabic language searches are Virginia, California, North Carolina, and Florida. According to the last US census, the only state in that group with a larger Arab community than Michigan is California.

It’s possible there aren’t a significant amount of Arabic language searches in Michigan because the Arab population here is longer-standing, much of which immigrated during the first half of the twentieth century. It’s also possible that many of the Lebanese Arabs might prefer to search in French over Arabic, since Lebanon uses both languages, and American keyboards are better-suited to French than Arabic.

Whatever the reason members of the Arab community in Michigan do not search in Arabic, the important question has already been answered – it seems that it is not worth the rather significant investment of time and money to translate keyword lists to Arabic when targeting the Dearborn area.

Google AdWords offers targeting by country and language. If you have a US-based company, you might want to start new campaigns that target countries outside the US because:

1. It expands your traffic reach (duh).

2. It truly is possible, even easy, to find keywords that cost around $0.10/click for top positions (especially foreign terms).

3. Lots of people outside the US can speak English (maybe another “duh” is in order?).

If your company does business outside the US, or would like to explore doing business outside the US, AdWords is a great platform for getting started.   Here’s how AdWords management with international targeting options works.

Managing AdWords Country Targeting

Country targeting is set in your campaign settings under “Locations.”   For international targeting, the most important factors for deciding if a user fits your targeting criteria are:

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There is a question that many newer consumers of paid search products face: How much should I rely on automated tools for management and generation of paid search ads and keywords?

It’s one that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and in my opinion, it’s likely to stay that way. While technologies may come closer and closer to reproducing the ‘gold standard’ of human judgment, accuracy for most automated numerical and natural language tasks continues to lag behind humans, at least for small to moderate paid search accounts.

Human vs Automated Paid Search

This trend reverses when you are working with very high volume accounts (websites). When your paid search visit conversions are in, say, the thousands per campaign, you’ll have a better chance of benefiting from the automated tools. Imagine, for example, what you would pay X paid search professionals to manage 500 campaigns, each of which saw thousands of conversions.

Still, before you go about firing the humans and automating even big accounts, you should inform yourself about a tool’s constraints and abilities. Disambiguating important concepts that pertain to your market, for example, is a process where automated tools tend to lag behind. Advertising on the phrase ‘black leather belt’ that an automated tool deems relevant to your market, when you actually sell ‘black belt six sigma’ courses, is not money well spent. Know enough about the tools you use to prevent these types of mishaps.

Automated tools also may come with limits that prevent you from choosing the budgeting. Omniture’s SearchCenter, for example, requires optimization for a price per conversions, and can’t be capped at a specific level per month, to spread out over a month. Naturally, clicks can’t be guaranteed at any given time, but tools that allow the maximum flexibility of budgeting, such as capping and distributing evenly as possible, are the most useful. Sometimes it just isn’t possible to take the market by storm, even if there might be potential customers out there.

Whether automated or human, paid search management requires some ability to detect anomalies, and to hold on spending when highly unlikely patterns suddenly lead to large spending. Find out whether automated tools are equipped to self-pause, or whether your human paid search manager will be accountable on off-hours for period checks on spending.

In short, human search is a tremendously valuable approach, especially when supported by automated mechanisms. This is particularly true now, as more and more affordable and even free automated tools exist, such as   Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool, Google Adwords Desktop Editor, Google Insights for Search, Keyword Discovery, and Google’s Bid Management tool Conversion Optimizer.

Click fraud is the bane of my existence. And NOT because it’s actually a problem. The PROBLEM is that every time a fear-mongering article comes out about click-fraud, I no longer get to talk about how we can help businesses grow. Instead, I get to spend my time talking people down out of trees. To put it mildly, it gets in the way of our goal to transform the Michigan economy one business at a time.

I am inspired to address the issue of click fraud after reading this New York Times (NYT) “article” (it’s actually an ad, but someone forwarded it to me that thought it was an article, so clearly the advertiser got their money’s worth). The ad takes the typical assault on Google AdWords to a whole new level. It quotes the director of the Center for Digital Democracy, which claims Obama ought to immediately address the issue:

Click fraud should be at the top of the priority list with Obama and the F.T.C.

Here’s my unusually unabashed take: if your paid search suffers from click-fraud, well… somebody isn’t doing their job. (And I’m not talking about Obama!)

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A recent New York Times article on web growth in developing countries discusses a situation we see all too often here at Pure Visibility: an increase in web use of U.S. based technologies and products from developing countries, without an equal increase in revenue for the hosting companies.

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