SEO Blog

On the 11th Day of Christmas, we bring you 11 AdWords Tips:

1. Invest time in researching keywords
2. Set-up conversion tracking from the outset
3. Move to a standard campaign from starter as soon as possible
4. Create separate campaigns if advertising on the Content Network
5. Ensure you understand the difference in the match types and use as appropriate
6. Use negative keywords
7. Test ad copy to see which is most effective
8. Ensure your landing pages are optimised for your keywords and ad copy
9. Improve your quality score by having a fast and reliable web host
10. Use the search query report regularly and often, particularly if using broad match
11. Use AdWords Editor to make life easier!

Google have just announced the release of version 7 of AdWords Editor.

Having just upgraded and followed the instructions, as always, to back up before upgrading, I was dismayed to find that when I went to restore the account snapshot, my local unposted changes weren’t there.

In addition to this, the proposed changes just had all of the existing campaigns in the AdWords account I was working on flagged as deleted.

There is a known issue that Google have given details of here:

Upgrading to version 7.0 known issues. Sounds easy enough but unfortunately this didn’t work for me.

Normally, I always ensure that I’ve uploaded local changes first but given that the backup option is documented as an appropriate method, I assumed I would be safe to do so. I hope this post saves you from experiencing the same problem.

You have a well designed website with great content and you’ve decided to use paid search to increase the flow of quality traffic to it. You’ve created an AdWords advertising campaign in an attempt to get the most out of your website, but there’s an important factor when using AdWords that you need to consider.

Google AdWords try to present ads by relevance and quality. To ensure this, one of the things they do is to make an assessment of the ad and your website and give an AdWords quality score.

Google Adwords Quality Score

What kind of things affects the AdWords quality score?

• The Click through Rate (CTR) of the keywords in your ad
• The past performance of the CTR to the URL in your ad
• The relevance of the keywords in your ad
• The relevance of the keywords to the ad and the search query
• The quality and performance of your landing page

The quality and performance of your landing page is a vital factor in Google AdWords determining your quality score. The benefits of having a good quality score are:

• AdWords decreases your CPC rate
• AdWords improves your ranking position

This means that your ads will cost less and your chances of being clicked on will improve. Without a good quality score, it will cost you more to get people to visit your site and there’s less chance of them finding you if your ad has a low ranking position.

So what can you do to improve the performance of your website and attain a better Google AdWords quality score?

• Ensure your site contains relevant and quality, original content
• Improve site speed
• Improve server speed

Your website’s content always needs to be fresh, original and well written. This shouldn’t be new to you; content is king and always had been. Google assesses the quality, originality and relevance of your content against the ads you place. One final thing on content-relationship to ads, if you want a good quality score, it helps if the keywords in your ads appear on your website. That might seem obvious, but many people forget to do this.

Your site speed is also essential, slow loading pages will kill your quality score and put off human visitors alike. If your pages are full of heavy graphics files, slow loading Java Script or CSS feeds, you will damage your quality score. Strip back everything non-essential from your website landing page; keep it simple and to the point, your search engine and human visitors will appreciate it.

Likewise, if you’ve hosted your website on cheap, slow servers with a budget web hosting company, your quality score may also be badly affected. If your hosting service is providing you with poor server speeds, it’s time that you moved your site to a new host.

Remember, by making web pages that load quicker, you will save money on you AdWords campaign, and more people will stay longer on your website, increasing the chances of converting them from visitors to buyers.

Further Reading:

Improve Your Landing Page Quality Score, Save Money!

You turn your back for a moment and Google slip in another change to AdWords!

If you go to your campaign settings in AdWords, you’ll now see an option under ‘Networks and bidding’ to select “iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers”.

AdWords Campaign Settings for Mobile Devices

Not to be confused with mobile ads, this is simply stating that you do want your standard text and image adverts to be shown on mobile devices where a user conducts a Google web search or appear on the content (AdSense) network.

Given that the number of mobile devices with full browser capability is relatively small at the moment, the effect of this option is likely to be negligible but certainly worth experimenting with if your spend with AdWords is significant.

If you’re a Google AdWords advertiser, you’ve no doubt been affected in some way by Google’s Quality Score. This is the system within AdWords that rates a keyword “great”, “OK” or “poor”.

It is calculated using your keyword’s Click through Rate, the relevance of your ad copy and your landing page, i.e. the page that a searcher is taken to when clicking on one of your adverts.

What you may not appreciate is that having a poor quality score can cost you more than just pride. Those AdWords advertisers who create highly targeted campaigns benefit not only by higher conversion rates but they will also typically pay less for the click in the first place.

If you’re running your own AdWords campaign and it is littered with keywords flagged as “poor” it really is in your best interest to try and remedy the situation. This could mean deleting the keyword if you conclude that it is not appropriate or redesigning your landing page (or creating a new one) to improve the relevancy.

Google’s quality scoring system isn’t perfect and can sometimes leave even experienced AdWords users scratching their heads but to ignore it and do knowing is sure to end up costing you.

For more on this, watch Google’s introductory video on Quality Scores:

Google AdWords Quality Score Video

With Christmas just a few short weeks away, those very nice people at Google have just released another (free) keyword research application to help advertisers find additional phrases that they could be advertising on within Google’s pay per click platform, AdWords.

The Search Based Keyword Tool acts differently to most in that it uses your site to identify what it believes your web pages are about and then offers up a list of search queries that it believes are relevant to you and that you are not currently bidding on.

As with any keyword research application, you need to take the data and apply your own knowledge before blindly running off and adding a few more billion to Google’s profits. However, this tool has other potential uses. For example, you could also use the data Google presents to you and extrapolate negative keywords, i.e. if Google believes there is a match for a keyword, there is a danger your adverts could be shown if you use broad match in your campaign. Secondly, if there is a definite disconnect between what Google is indicating it believes a page to be about and your intentions, then you may want to review the page in question to validate your copy, e.g. text, headers, title etc.,

All in all, this looks like a useful keyword research tool and astute online advertisers should be able to find plenty of useful data to use to their advantage.

Google have just announced a change in their policy for companies wishing to advertise gambling related services online using their AdWords pay per click advertising platform within the UK.

Google’s announcement explains that this policy change for gambling advertisers has come about “due to recent changes in UK law” and to “bring it inline with the legal and cultural climate around this issue in the UK”.

The statement goes on to say “Our review determined that, at this time, we will allow gambling ads to target England, Scotland and Wales as long as the advertiser is registered with the Gambling Commission and provides a valid operating license number.”

Any gambling site wishing to use pay per click advertising to promote their business will first of all need to create a new Google AdWords account and complete an application form for Google. They will then review the application and notify the advertiser whether they have been successful or not.

Given the competitive nature of the industry, we would anticipate pay per click costs being high for AdWords gambling advertising in the UK and would suggest that new advertisers consider using Google AdWords management services if they’re unsure how to build an optimised campaign.

At last, Google have provided its AdWords advertisers with the ability to see statistics for the search network.

AdWords Search Partner Statistics

The search network (not to be confused with the content network) includes sites such as AOL and ask.com. All good stuff, but up to now you couldn’t see the data for these sites as it formed part of the general data from search traffic generally.

With access to these stats, AdWords account owners will now be able to review the Click through Rate (CTR) and conversions from Google’s search partners and be able to make a rational decision as to whether this is good quality traffic.

Well done Google and we look forward to seeing this data available in the reports. Oh, and being able to create search partners only campaigns!

I mentioned in my 11 Tips To Improve Your Google AdWords Campaign (point #11!) that you need to run the Search Query report if you’re bidding on broad match keywords.

To access this report, you need to log in to your AdWords account, select the ‘Reports’ tab and then go to ‘Create Report’ in the sub-menu.

Search Query Report within Google AdWords

The reason we put so much importance on the Search Query report is because it uncovers some* of the actual keywords that AdWords has used as synonym replacements for those PPC advertisers using broad match.

*Whilst it shows some, it also misses a lot. Depending on how many clicks you put through your account, these ‘Other unique queries’ that appear in your report, could add up to a lot of wasted spend. It is possible to identify these keywords too but that involves setting up some advanced filtering in Google Analytics. We do this for all of our clients and their campaigns benefit from this further optimisation.

So why is it important to identify the actual search term rather than the phrase in your account that generated the click? Negatives! Running a successful AdWords campaign is a juggling act between maximising visits to your site whilst restricting wasted clicks, i.e. those searches that still click on your ad even though there’s no or little relevance to what they were looking for. This is where negative keywords come in. Negatives are added to your campaign and are used as a way to tell the AdWords system that your advert should NOT be shown when this keyword is used, normally as part of a longer search string.

A mature campaign will have hundreds, if not thousands, of negative keywords but this takes time, comprehensive keyword research and a detailed analysis of your AdWords account data.

If you’d rather spend time managing other aspects of your business, you should review our AdWords management services and let us improve your return on investment.

We recently had reason to suspect that one of our client’s PPC campaigns was being targeted by one of their competitors. We suspected that they were clicking the ads to try and use up the daily budget early in the day. The trouble was how to identify who was clicking the Ads.

There are many expensive Click Fraud solutions available but we found a simple and free way of checking who was clicking the ads by using Statcounter.

By putting the Statcounter code on the website pages we were able to easily see the IP addresses of the clickers. This clearly showed that two Competitors were in fact clicking the ads. We then forwarded our findings to Google and hope this will result in a refund for our AdWords client.