It certainly does sound exciting, but more than an element of caution should be exercised. When conjugating vast amounts of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ there is always going to be the chance that some keywords may simply may not make any sense. Without applying some sort of checking procedure, the build software may suggest that I add ‘work as a warehouse’, or worse ‘job in a secretary’ to a keyword list (true story).

It is of course possible that with continual improvements our building software could iron out such a problem; our software will already automatically flag up any duplicates across keyword lists, so what’s to say it can’t automatically remove silly choices like the ones above? While it would be quite easy to adjust the software to accommodate this, then what about the problem of ‘work as a admin’? Of course then we could rectify it to change all ‘a’s to ‘an’s when preceding a vowel, but there will surely be another problem lurking straight after that one that we haven’t yet considered.

Even if we had attempted to cover every nuance we think the English language could throw at us, I still wouldn’t recommend blindly setting the building software to complete auto-pilot. We will always need the human element for this checking process, particularly when dealing with campaigns with hundreds of thousands of keywords. Although of course there is a lot of potential that we can improve our software yet further, as each time we encounter such a problem it is very easy to make it so that we will never have to face it again.

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You first take a number of keywords, then you order the keywords in order of their likelihood to convert based on historical data from most likely to least likely. Conversion Optimiser would use this data and make sure that the appearance is very strong for the top 40% of keywords in the Campaign. The bids will be increased for these keywords to make sure that the strong appearance is continued. Considering these keywords are highly likely to convert anyway, the advertiser is not going to mind a little increase on the CPA per keyword, especially since it is still below the target CPA that they requested when setting up Conversion Optimiser (not considering that they could get it for even cheaper). The Advertiser may become concerned when they see that the CPC is much higher than previously. This is when Google get sneaky.

Analysing the search terms for before and after the Campaigns were taken off Conversion Optimiser shows a massive hike in the number of search terms that were matched to whilst on Conversion Optimiser. About 10% of these search terms converted, pretty low for ‘Conversion Optimiser’ on Campaigns with 20-25% Conversion Rates. The rest of the search terms were made up of irrelevant terms, but the CPC on these other search terms was very low indeed, and I’m talking <1% of the top converting terms. The volume of these low CPC keywords therefore will be balancing the effect the increased bids are having on other keywords.

My main issue with Conversion Optimiser however is that keywords are left out in the cold because of their ‘low conversion rate’, the other 60% of keywords classed as unlikely to convert can still greatly benefit your account. Once I took these campaigns off Conversion Optimiser, it opened them up to a lot more relevant traffic likely to convert and not so likely to convert traffic. After optimising the campaign, the conversion rate has dropped, but with CPC dropping also and volume of traffic increasing, the volume of conversions is higher than before for a slightly lower CPC.  I believe that as long as the keyword list you create is relevant and optimised well, then you can find a happy medium for each keyword within your internet marketing campaign.

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The Facebook-esque feature of en masse social approval, designed as a relevancy tool to recommend sites to your peers has seen promising success after its launch in June this year and from October will be extended to appear across text, image and video ads across the Google Display Network. This also coincides with Google+ opening it’s doors to the uninvited and could be part of Google’s further attack on the social network stranglehold currently held by Facebook.

A view of how the +1 will show on the Google Display Network

One thing to consider however is this; what are +1’ers actually liking on the display network? A small proportion could be +1’ing it when they are attempting to recommend the site. If using an image ad, is the visitor +1’ing the ad itself? Visitors that view an image ad that they like may +1 it without actually visiting the site advertised, rendering that plus irrelevant, despite Google claim that it ads relevancy to advertising and to the consumer. We have only to look across to Facebook and the example of liking Groups. How many times have you or your friends liked a group because of the title, but not navigated further down to view it’s content?

The good news is that it will be an integrated feature across sites, search and display, so that a single +1 will be applied across the board and not be limited to where it was seen.

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Google AdWords – Keyword Tool Homepage

In this section I’ll use screenshots to discuss the basic elements of Google AdWords and how they are used.  The first thing you will see will be the Keyword tool homepage – it should look like this:

•    In the red circle is the area where the marketer types the Keywords that they would like to find the search data for.  In this case I have selects a few examples of Keywords that might relate to search engine optimisation.  You can type as many words or phrases as you’d like, but it’s important remember that you can only use one phrase per line.

•    In the green circle is the area where the marketer can specify a website by entering the URL into the textbox.  After hitting the ‘Search’ button the results will generate Site-Related Keywords.

•    In the dark blue box are some of the advanced options and filters that can be used to refine or broaden the parameters of a search.  This may come in useful when conducting Keyword research for specific countries or devices.  This will be covered in more detail soon.

Google AdWords – Keyword Tool Results Page

•    The red area shows where you can add extra search terms to find data for – you don’t have to keep returning to the previous screen.

•    The dark blue area is where you can change the parameters of your search.  Using the ‘Location’ option you can choose to get search data for a specific country.  Using the ‘Languages’ option you can specify a certain language to get the share data for.  Using the ‘Devices’ option you can use the select a specific device to get search data for, such as ‘Desktops and Laptops’ or ‘Mobile WAP Devices’.

•    The green area is where the search data for the Keywords you typed is shown.  This will be explored in more detail in the next section.

•    The light blue area is where the marketer will see Keyword suggestions based semantically on the terms you decided to search for.  There is also the ‘Starred’ box in this section.  This is a pop-up box that allows marketers to store certain Keywords to return to the results later.  It is like a Keyword bookmarking tool.

•    The brown section is another option that allows Marketers to either refine or broaden their search parameters.  The ‘Broad’ option allows you to get a sense of the volume associated with a set of Keyword and variations of those Keywords.  Using the ‘Exact’ specification the search data generated will refer only to the set of Keywords you have specified.  The ‘Phrase’ option will generate results where the Keyword you typed might appear in a longer phrase; for example ‘how to do search engine optimisation’ or ‘search engine optimisation advice’.  For the next section I will be setting my results to ‘Exact’.

•    The orange area is where you can select the categories that your Keyword relates to as this will help Google provide a more suitable list of ‘Keywords suggestions’.

Google AdWords – Options and Filters

•    The red area is where you can choose the specific country that you would like to generate search data for.

•    The green area is where you can choose the specific language that you would like to generate search data for.

•    The dark blue section lets you select a specific device that you’d like to generate search results for.  The options are ‘Desktop and Laptop devices’, ‘All mobile devices’, ‘Mobile WAP devices’, and ‘Mobile devices with full internet browsers’.  These options would be useful if you were trying to devise a campaign specifically for portable devices or choosing keywords to optimise a mobile phone website.

•    The brown section is lets you filter out certain Keywords based on a set of parameters that you define.  The filters and the parameters you can set are as followed:

•    These parameters enable the marketer to filter out certain results based on the needs of the strategy.  This will be covered in more detail in the ‘Part 2′ of this guide when I will explore how to utilise these tools to build a strategy.

Google AdWords – Resulting Search Data

•    The red area shows the ‘Match types’.  I have selected ‘Exact’ search data as I want results relating specifically to the Keywords I have entered.

•    The green area lists the Keywords I am searching for in a simple format that makes the results easy to analyse.

•    The dark blue section relates specifically to marketers strategizing for a PPC campaign.  It provides a rough graph that quantifies the amount of other PPC advertiser’s worldwide bidding on a specific Keyword.  The terms I have used are all considered to be ‘highly competitive’.

•    The brown section shows the quantity of queries for the ‘Exact’ Keyword that has been entered on Google.  The figure produced is based on a 12 month average and it takes into account queries from all languages all over the world.

•    The light blue section refines the results from the ‘Global Monthly Searches’ column by producing data that relates to the ‘Match type’ you selected as well as the ‘Language’ and ‘Location’.  Again, the figure shown is based on a 12 month average.

•    It is worth noting that the image above matches with the ‘Keyword suggestions’ set of results meaning the same definitions can be applied to each of the columns.

Google AdWords – Export to Excel Spreadsheet

•    Google AdWords lets you export either a selected group or all the search data generated by the Keyword Research tool to an Excel spreadsheet.  This is a fantastic feature that enables data to be stored for easy access without having to conduct another search on AdWords.  Above I have highlighted how the Spreadsheet is laid out using various colours.

Google AdWords –

AdWords is a fantastic tool that is used by internet marketers, search engine optimisers and PPC campaign managers across the world.  This tool allows marketers to conduct the Keyword research that has the potential to make or break a search engine optimisation strategy.  However, understanding how it functions is one thing, but learning how to use that data to build a strategy is one thing.  Hopefully you’ll come back for the next part of my ‘Beginners Guide to Keyword Research’ where I discuss how the AdWords search data to build a strategy.

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It is easy to understand why some keywords will be searched for in seasonal periods such as Christmas, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, winter, summer etc. For example, it is straightforward to see why there will be a large increase in searches for BBQs during the summer months.

For some products and services, seasonal trends are a lot more difficult to predict or understand. Many products and services may also have seasonal trends when you expect them to sell fairly consistently throughout the year.

A good example of a product like this is life insurance policies. Seasonal trends for life insurance policies may be difficult to predict without any research. Fortunately there is a simple tool to help us!

Using the Google trends tool we can easily spot trends in keyword searches to help us predict and understand seasonal trends and how they influence user behaviour.

Life Insurance

We can see using Google trends that there is a drop in searches for life insurance at the end of each year. This may be due to the fact that people won’t be thinking about death at this time of the year and/or are too busy to sort out none urgent matters.

Whatever the reason, spotting this trend will help with building a more efficient campaign for life insurance products. Using a simple search of the Google Trends tool we know that there is less demand for life insurance policies in the last 2 months of the year.

This tool is quick, simple and can be used to spot seasonal trends in search terms for products even if the causes are not known or understood; this is vital tool for agencies planning PPC and other search marketing campaigns.

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1.    Focus on the user

This is a philosophy that is rightly forged upon the mind of any person beginning a career in digital marketing.  Google is a company that prides itself on offering a level of user experience that is unparalleled by the other search engines and therefore, Google wants the websites it lists be built to offer an equally positive user experience.  This serves as a reminder to people working in search engine optimisation or web development that their strategies should be customer-orientated if success is to be attained.

2.    It’s best to do one thing really well

This principle focuses on Google’s commitment to solving complex problems that might affect its main objective as a search engine and using that information to help improve the peripheral services it offers such as Gmail.  This theory should be adopted by those who practice search marketing professionally – the core objective being to improve user experience before focusing on other aspects of a campaign such as increasing conversion rates.

3.    Speed is crucial

An axiom that can often be located within the various departmental Google blogs relates to speed – the theory being that ‘speed is the killer app’.  Just as Chrome claims to be the fastest browser, Google claims to be the fastest search engine and this needs to be reflected in the search results it produces.  Google even provides a free ‘Page Speed’ testing tool where it will provide webmasters or SEO programmers with advice on improving the speed of their websites.  Web users now are used to living in a culture of instant gratification, and every tenth of a second that can be shaved of a page’s load time could potentially win more customers and improve conversion rate.  This philosophy may be more applicable to SEOs, but it is a valuable point for the industry in general.

4.    The internet is democratic

The theory that the Google search engine is a democratic ecosystem might have its beginnings in their PageRank algorithm because it, amongst other things, treated links as ‘votes’ for a website to help determine which were the most authoritative.  As the search engines and the internet have evolved, the algorithm processes have become a lot more complex.  However, the underlying principle still applies, and content that is engaging enough to receive lots of high quality inbound links will generally rank higher in the search engines than content that doesn’t.  This illustrates to web masters and internet marketers that the production of high-quality content is crucial in getting others to vouch for your website through the creation of links.

5.    Cater for visitors using portable devices

An incredible amount of people around the world now own smartphones and one of Google’s philosophies is to remind us to cater for those devices.  By optimising for smartphones and tablets, websites will be made accessible to a whole range of potential new customers.  If you have a high street business as well as an online presence, there may well be an increase in physical traffic as these portable devices make search inherently local.  Optimising for mobile devices shows innovativeness and dedication, and can help increase levels of traffic, potentially increasing conversion rates.  Internet marketers should always attempt to cater for smartphone users in the strategies they devise.

6.    Don’t be afraid to monetize

Working for a search marketing agency, many of our clients approach us with the long term goal of making their business more profitable through the wide range of internet marketing services we offer.  This is largely done through conversion rate optimisation; the process by which we fine tune a client’s website to maximise the number of visitors that perform some kind of desired interaction with the business directly, or the business website.  There are other ways to monetise, for example through Google AdWords, but for marketers and potential investors, there is no need to shy away from services such as conversion rate optimisation which can greatly improve the profitability of a website.

7.    There’s always more to be done

For Google, this philosophy applies to their approach to indexing content, and how they are always looking for new forms of content that haven’t been as readily available in the past.  For example we can now use Google to search for patents, academic journals and news archives.  This philosophy also applies to internet marketers because there is always more that can be done to improve a campaign.  A search engine optimisation or internet marketing strategy does not have a finite stop and start date, and while goals and KPIs should be set, the process should be allowed to progress both organically and through direct human interaction to promote the chances for success.

8.    Don’t limit the reach of your content

Google speaks in this philosophy about their company being based in California, but wanting to facilitate and provide access to information for people around the world.  For internet marketers, this principle can be translated to mean that the business represented should always be looking to transcend the community traditionally associated with it.  This doesn’t mean ignoring that specific online community, but realising that with the creation of engaging and unique content, there is a potentially untapped market of internet users that can be reached.  While the core client or user base should never be overlooked, the creation of compelling content and the practice of active reputation management can broaden the boundaries of all brands.

9.    Be creative

One of Google’s founding principles was ‘work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun.’  Internet marketing campaigns should be approached with the same attitude because while they are challenging, the best results can often come from creative thinking.  This shows that search marketers need to be innovative and forward thinking to create new strategies that keep pace with the evolution of the internet.  While rigidity and structure should not be shunned in the working culture, expansive thinking should be encouraged if the greatest results are to be realised.

10.    Being great isn’t good enough

While this does sounds like a corporate, faux-aspirational mantra that might be better suited to a self-improvement seminar (“don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there’s footprints on the moon” et al.), the thinking behind it has a significant resonance for internet marketers.   When goals are set for a campaign, they should be ambitious and should challenge the agency and the business to push themselves to the limit of their capabilities.  This will encourage the creative thinking mentioned in the previous point, and it will build a hunger for success that is necessary to succeed in internet marketing.  While being ‘great’ might be good enough, don’t impose limits that might marginalise the opportunity to be successful.

If you’ve made it all the way through this post, I applaud you and hope there have been some useful takeaway tips that might benefit your internet marketing campaigns.  Google’s full list of philosophies can be found here on their website – and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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So I decided to put together a spreadsheet which explains in layman’s terms what sort of effect differences in your own and your Competitors Quality Score has on your eventual ad rank when combined with your max CPC.

In the table the Ad Rank = QS x Max CPC. The Actual Price = Max Bid (Position Below) x QS (Position Below) / QS (Your Own). It goes a little something like this:

The effects of Quality Score are apparent already.

You can see already from this that if Advertiser D’s ad gets clicked then he will pay £1.15 more than advertiser B would even though he is in a lower position.

Advertiser E would pay more than either B or D would if his ad is clicked.

Then from here through optimisation of the account, if Advertiser C works to Increase his Quality Score from 6 to 8 then not only does his position increase from 2 to 1 but his CPC decreases by £0.12!

In this instance advertiser E has increased his Quality Score from 4 to 6. However, the improvements have been to his position as opposed to his CPC which has actually increased by £0.04.

Now we see that Advertiser B has upped his game and increased his bid, most notably here we see that Advertiser E is paying the same CPC despite being in a lower position than before.

Now Advertiser A has caught up with all the changes and increased his bid from £1 to £3.

He has leapt him up to position 1 but most notably it means that advertisers B,E,C and D have all dropped one position whilst they are still paying the same CPC.

After Advertiser B Decides to Optimise his Campaign and decides that position 3 is the most profitable position for him, he reduces his Max CPC Bid to lower his position to position 3 which, if you take Volume of Clicks and Conversions as a constant (very unscientific I know but hey it’s an example at the end of the day) he would see a 15% reduction in CPC and an 11.11% reduction in CPA.

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Unfortunately many of our clients have been ‘burnt’ by other PPC agencies in the past. It is a practice of some to report on top line figures only, this means that a generic campaign can be made to look profitable, but upon full investigation the branded keywords are usually holding up the entire campaign. Both of these leave some clients reluctant to bid on their own brand.

I do not believe that everyone should bid on their own brand; for example, in some cases if you dominate most of the 1st page of Google organic results rather than just position 1 and if there are no competitors bidding on your brand through PPC. I am however going to give 3 strong arguments in favour of brand bidding on PPC:

1.    Stop your competitors stealing your traffic. Imagine if your MD searches your company name and see’s your top competitor sitting pretty above your organic listing with their PPC ad. Do not let this happen. By bidding on your own brand you will easily push any competitors off the top spot.  Also once your ad is live, the CTR and Quality Score of your competitors ad will drop quickly. Soon their Quality Score will be too low to maintain the first position and eventually their minimum first page bid will become unprofitable.

2.    Reduce your whole account’s CPC. Even the most inexperienced PPC Manager can get an excellent CTR and Quality Score from their own brand keywords. With time, this excellent Quality Score will begin to affect your entire account. We have several clients with very popular brands, we have seen that brand bidding has reduced their CPC on non-brand keywords.

3.    Complete the PPC campaign loop. Even if you only use standard AdWords Conversion Tracking you can still see a user’s path to conversion using AdWords Search Funnels. However this only tracks PPC clicks, a common path would be to start with a non-brand keyword search and then progress to an own brand search to complete the conversion. If a user clicks on five PPC ads and then clicks an organic listing from a brand search you will never see the assist in Search Funnels. This level of data becomes more important as budgets increase and ROI is key.

The most important thing to do is track and report on any brand bidding separately to any other PPC activity. Do not lose focus on any other campaign just because the brand campaign seems like easy money and do not let anyone pull the wool over your eyes. You need to know the performance of each of your campaigns not just top level.

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The Cheshire-based search marketing agency is reviewing the study that details the incremental growth of paid advertising click-through-rates (CTR), in relation to the CTR of organic search results. Click Consult aim to show to their PPC clients that traffic generated organically is not being cannibalised by the advertising they are paying for.

The survey, called Incremental Clicks Impact of Search Advertising, has shown that there can be up to 89% of clicks on paid adverts in the SERPs are incremental. This means that if a PPC campaign was paused, then the traffic it generates would effectively not occur.

Click Consult realised the survey would be of benefit to their clients by helping them to better gage PPC advertising budgets by quantifying the potential gains that can be made through paid advertising. The results of Click Consult’s review will be published on their blog in the coming weeks.

“As soon as our research and development team picked up on this particular Google study, we knew it was only right that we conducted a further review into the findings, and how they can benefit our clients.” said Matt Bullas, Managing Director of Click Consult. “The fact that 89% of traffic generated by paid ads is not replaced by organic listings is really a statistic that our clients really should be made aware of. We hope that by analysing these results internally, we can increase our levels of transparency by helping clients to more accurately gage their KPI’s, helping to create and sustain a successful PPC campaign.”

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Understanding, or at least being able to accurately estimate the incremental increase in CTR from paid ads, can help a company more accurately determine a budget for a PPC campaign. Thankfully, some intelligent Google boffins have conducted a study showing that 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic traffic when the ads are paused. This incremental traffic is a great reason to invest in PPC services.

The survey was conducted due to the lack of information that can be garnered from ad clicks alone; for example, that does not tell you about the incramentality of traffic generated by paid search advertising. Businesses have been known to pause PPC campaigns because of concerns about whether the traffic generated by them is incremental in relation to the click-through-rate of organic search results.

It was pointed out however that there are certain factors that contribute to the incramentality such as the similarity between the paid ad and the natural search listing. The Google engineers who conducted the White Paper also stated that their meta-analysis is not representative of all the factors that could drive a decline in advertising expenditure. However, the results are taken from a very wide cross-section and they do help to establish an expected rate of incremental ad clicks.

As mentioned, the meta-analysis revealed that over 89% of the clicks on search ads is incremental because it wouldn’t be generated without the PPC campaign. This does not mean, however, that the conversion rates of websites will also be incremental – that is still down to landing page design, and is generally a more holistic aspect of search marketing. Notwithstanding this, businesses are always on the lookout for ways to more accurately gage the potential cost of an online campaign, and this study by Google is a valuable source to be used when determining that figure.

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