Group Twenty Seven is hiring!
Are you a PPC professional looking for additional work? We are looking to fill a PPC contract position immediately. If you are dependable, passionate about PPC, and have solid knowledge of AdWords and adCenter, we want to hear from you.
Requirements:
• Currently work as a PPC freelancer / contractor.
• Able to commit to 20 hours per week.
• Weekly progress check-ins via email or phone.
• References
Required PPC Experience:
• At least 2-4 years experience working with AdWords and adCenter.
• Excellent ad writing skills.
• A solid understanding of Google Analytics and how to utilize data to further develop PPC efforts.
• The ability to pinpoint trends and the know-how to capitalize on findings.
• Up to date on latest PPC industry changes and trends.
• Creative thinker
• Enjoys testing and trying new things to improve account performance
This position is virtual.
Please email: careers@grouptwentyseven.com. Include your resume, references, hourly rate as well as a little about yourself and PPC experience.
UPDATE: Sep 26th: I spotted another one!
Click To Enlarge
UPDATE: Sep 19th: I filled out the form and have been contacted by the company’s sales person. Even if this is an old extension, it’s giving this company an nice edge against their competitors.
New AdWords Ad Format?
Although I haven’t seen any announcements in the Ad Innovations or AdWords blog, I stumbled onto this new ad format. What is it? A new subscribe form ad?
Anybody else notice this?
You saw it here first!
Six months ago, we optimized an AdWords account for a great client. We worked with the client for a few months; she was very happy with the results but decided that things were in good shape and that she’d take it in-house.
A few weeks ago, she contacted us inquiring about another AdWords optimization program for the same account. She saw an increase in ad spend without an uptick in sales; her ROI had started to creep downward. She confessed that she hadn’t touched a thing in six months. She was again interested in just an optimization program and not on-going services.
Although, I was happy to hear from her, I was reluctant to go down the same road. I wasn’t really interested in putting a band-aid on things. I thought about what sort of shape the account would be in after six months without having any attention. Some of the things we like to do on a monthly basis are very basic but very necessary such as bid management, negative keyword management and in this case, we had set up several landing page tests in which the results were never checked on. In a way, it’s actually nice that we have six months worth of data for the landing page test, but we have not dug in yet to see if we would have applied obvious findings after a month or two hence possibly losing out on some good opportunities.
We created a list of things our client missed out on during the past six months to give us a sense of the scope of the project. After reviewing, she decided to work with us on an on-going basis because she realizes band-aids just don’t work sometimes.
Haven’t Touched Your AdWords account in six months? Here’s what you missed?
• New Ad delivery option: We are still using the Rotate option for our clients because we like to test things out ourselves and not leave it in Google’s hands. Interestingly, after this option was available we noticed that some of our accounts had this option ticked off even though we didn’t do it. Mysterious. Sure enough, a few campaigns in our client’s account had this option selected.
• AdWords Privacy Policy Update: This is one of those thing that you just have to do. Self-explanatory.
• Call Metrics: Our good friend, Barb Young has a great blog post about the updates to call metrics. Nothing major, just that each call costs $1 while it was previously free. Sigh.
• Remarketing: This option has been available since early 2010 and although, we have offered this option to many of our clients in the past it seems to be getting more main stream as I am getting more inquiries about remarketing since people are actually experiencing remarketing ads themselves and seeing their competitors advertise in this way.
• iPad Targeting: With the addition of iPad targeting, mobile traffic is really taking off for some websites. We’ve been isolating and creating mobile specific campaigns for many of our clients as it’s only going to keep growing. With this strategy, we have better control on bidding, reporting and acting on our findings.
Bottom line: Don’t go the band-aid route. It’s inevitable you’ll miss out on opportunities and eventually waste money. Actively manage your PPC campaigns or hire someone that will.
Last year, we took on a client in dire need of a campaign overhaul. Their Adwords account needed major mending due to Quality Scores of the lowest kind. It would be an uphill battle but we were intrigued and up for a challenge. If you missed the first three posts, you can start at Part 1: Quality Score Killers.
The Results
Overall the account performance is excellent in comparison to the state it was in when we inherited it. Prior to the overhaul, impression share averaged 11.40%, now it averages at about 70%. We have seen the similar improvements with click through rate (CTR). Before it was under 0.27% and now it is over 3.7%. Cost per conversion is also much better.
Below is a snapshot of the overall account performance in November 2010, prior to our campaign optimization and a typical month after the clean up:
BEFORE:
AFTER:
All of our important metrics indicate that we have been successful in our attempt to overhaul this account but this is a series focused on quality scores, so let’s review:
What were the quality score results?
As we held our breath while going live with our new and improved campaigns, we were very relieved to see that our strategy had in fact improved quality scores. They were not stellar but there were no 1 or 2’s in sight. Generally, we started off with 3 and 4’s but since our CTR was quite good now, things improved quickly.
In Part 1, we showed a snapshot of the quality score from the Boston campaign. Here’s a more recent snapshot:
Some markets have even better results:
A few limitations have been discovered.
Although the account is much healthier than it was last year, we’d like to add some keyword phrases that do not include the city modifier. Even though broad match should activate our ads for phrases such as team building and team building programs, they don’t as much as we’d like. We suspect this could be due to the history of the account. We did add non city keyword phrases about a month after our launch and they were hit with our low Quality Scores of 2. We paused and tried again two months later and they started out with a Quality Score of 3, we are slowly adding more as time goes on as the account performance improves.
What type of low quality score issues have you encountered?
Last year, we took on a client in dire need of a campaign overhaul. Their Adwords account needed major mending due to Quality Scores of the lowest kind. It would be an uphill battle but we were intrigued and up for a challenge. If you missed the first two posts, you can start at Part 1: Quality Score Killers.
Landing page relevancy plays an important role in regards to quality score. Originally, the client had been landing visitors on relevant pages of their website. This can work well for accounts that have good quality score but we wanted to stay away from anything that was implemented prior to us reviving the account.
Hyper Focus on Relevancy
Our overall landing page strategy was to hyper focus on relevancy. Instead of landing the visitors on the original pages we continued with our city plus keyword strategy for our new landing pages. Each city campaign ad had its own city specific landing page. Title tags, headlines and content contained our city specific keywords along with a client testimonial and call to action.
The new PPC landing pages contained optimized title tags, headlines and content, just like basic on-page SEO.
Example Title Tag: [Company Name]: Scavenger Hunts in Boston, Massachusetts: Delivering Cutting Edge Team Building Programs And Activities
Example Headline: Boston Team Building & Scavenger Hunts.
In addition to the above examples and content optimization, we included a video of their top programs, a client testimonial and a short form.
Next, we’ll share the outcome of our efforts and some of our findings. Read how we our quality score improvement strategies worked!
Last year, we took on a client in dire need of a campaign overhaul. Their Adwords account needed major mending due to Quality Scores of the lowest kind. It would be an uphill battle but we were intrigued and up for a challenge. If you missed it, please read Part 1: Quality Score Killers.
After pausing all of the old campaigns, we got to work on our strategy, keywords first.
We worried that if we launched new campaigns with the same keywords, we’d still get pinged with the same low quality score issues so we knew we should stay away from all of the original keywords. This was easy for the most part since the client was originally bidding on extremely broad keywords such as Boston, Greater Boston and Team Games for a business and website solely focused on team building programs.
On the other hand, we were in a serious jam when it came to the highly relevant keywords that we most definitely would want to continue bidding on such as team building programs and corporate team building. Since the irrelevant keywords dragged the whole account into the mud, even the highly relevant keywords were penalized.
What was the keyword strategy?
We decided to focus on the city and location targeting aspect of this business. The client provides various team building and scavenger hunt programs in 21 cities around the US. We created city specific campaigns with two adgroups: Team Building and Scavenger Hunts. All of the new keywords include the city names such as Boston team building programs and corporate team building Boston.
Our hope was that broad match would still pull in team building and scavenger hunt queries that didn’t include the city names.
Next, we’ll discuss how we handled landing page strategy.
Last year, we took on a client in dire need of a campaign overhaul. Their Adwords account needed major mending due to Quality Scores of the lowest kind. It would be an uphill battle but we were intrigued and up for a challenge.
Part 1: Quality Score Killers
Although there are a few different factors that can and will cause low quality score, the main issue with this account was that the keywords were extremely broad causing very high impressions with little to zero clicks. In addition, they were advertising on both the Google Display Network as well as the Search Network within the same campaigns which aided in increasing the number of impressions with very low click through rates. Very low click through rate (CTR) is a quality score killer.
By very broad we mean:
The client provides team building programs within several US cities. They had set up separate campaigns targeting the specific cities, which is a good strategy but they were also bidding on the city names, alone, such as Boston and greater Boston, which caused the account to suffer, greatly. Notice that even the highly relevant terms have a quality score of 2. The irrelevant terms were dragging the whole account down.
From Bad to Worse
By the time the client realized that they shouldn’t be bidding on these irrelevant terms such as city names, it was too late. As they added more markets to their business and then in turn added them to their Adwords account, each new city campaign was pinged immediately with Quality Score 1 across the board even though they had started using more relevant terms with click through rates as high as 20% and 25%, it didn’t matter.
Next, we’ll discuss the main steps we took to revive the account: Keyword Strategy.
Once in a while, I get this request from a client.
“Let’s spend more.”
Ah, music to my ears! 
There are so many different scenarios to this situation. If the client had a limited budget to begin with, spending more can be quite easy. A few tactics to spend more in Adwords would be as simple as:
1. Switch from standard to accelerated ad delivery
2. Inch bids up to position ads slightly higher
3. Include ad sitelinks
4. Advertise all days and all hours
And if that doesn’t get ad spend to where it should be:
5. Add remarketing to the mix
6. Advertise on the Google Display Network
What happens when you are doing all of the above? How can you spend more?
There are smart and creative ways to spend more. Here are a few:
1. Optimize the account. Break out campaigns into smaller and tighter themes. This can dramatically increase impression share providing more exposure and more clicks. Look for the best converting keywords and house separately into their own adgroups.
2. Geo-targeting. Are there any states or countries that outshine others? Create state or country specific campaigns.
3. Dig deep into analytics, are there any themes you haven’t capitalized on? Things change all the time, there just may be new trends since your last check.
4. If not already, advertise on Bing and Yahoo! Leave no stone unturned. Many of my clients laugh about this when I offer it up but then we do some searching and find that some of their competitors are in fact, advertising here too. Try it.
5. Expand your efforts on the Google Display Network.
- a. Try using the new contextual targeting tool.
- b. Try targeting with the new Topics option.
6. What are some of the other marketing efforts and promotions? Can PPC enhance these promotions? Communicate with other team members such as the sales teams and content writers. Far too often, teams work in silos, get friendly and find out what they are working on.
What have I missed? In what smart ways have you increased ad spend? Please share.
If you are using broad and phrase match types, you MUST manage negative keywords because you may be paying for irrelevant clicks. To find the actual search queries go to the keyword tab in your Adwords account, choose an adgroup and click on “See Search Terms”. Choose “All” to see the actual search queries that initiated clicks to your website.
As you scan down the list of actual search queries, you may see some irrelevant terms that you definitely don’t want to pay for again. Click on the box to the left of the irrelevant phrase and then click on “Add as negative keyword”.
Although our client does, in fact sell fans, they sell very large industrial fans. We believe the term fans alone is too broad and not worth spending money on. Important: negate terms that may fall into the same situation such as this as an exact match. By doing this, we only weed out searchers using the term “fans” in the search box. This will not stop those searching for important terms such as industrial fans, commercial fans or HVLS fans.
You have the option to include the negative keyword at the adgroup or campaign level. Because we’d like to include this negative keyword to the whole campaign and it is relevant to the entire campaign we chose campaign.
When to negate at the adgroup level?
Each adgroup within your account should contain a different theme. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t always show the most relevant ad. If you have an Industrial Fan adgroup and a Commercial Fan adgroup you expect that when someone searches for industrial fans they’ll see the industrial fans ad, not always…they may see the commercial fans ad or even an ad from a different campaign. We can ensure the most relevant ad is shown by negating at the adgroup level.
For example, we have the following adgroups within our Fan Type campaign: industrial, commercial and HVLS. We have negated HVLS from the commercial and industrial adgroups to ensure our industrial or commercial fan ads are never shown when the search is for HVLS fans. It can be argued that someone could search for HVLS commercial fan so we have not negated commercial from the HVLS adgroup. If you wanted to get even more granular you could even add an HVLS commercial fan adgroup as well.
Be proactive about negative keyword management.
One final tip about adding negatives to your Adwords account: you can be proactive and easily add certain keywords as negatives if you know you don’t want to pay for certain terms. Some common terms are free, cheap, used. At the adgroup level within the keywords tab, scroll all the way down and click on the Negative keywords blue link to add your negatives.
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