Hal Varian – Quality Score and The Google Ad Auction
Hal Varian is the chief economist at Google, and certainly one of the main forces behind the economics of the Adwords Auction AND Quality Score. Google’s had this video available for over a year now, but NOT ONE PERSON I’ve spoken with about their Quality Score concerns had watched it. (Thanks to Rob Sieracki, Chief Operating Officer at RocketClicks.com for pointing this out to me)
In any case, it’s definitely THE starting point for understanding the components of Quality Score, especially the key role Click Through Rates play, and the VERY specific economic impact Quality Score has on bid price. It’s something which EVERY AdWords advertiser should watch. (Especially since it’s under 10 minutes!)
In my humble opinion, Quality Score is all about “Getting them there and keeping them there with relevant content”… which means (mathematically) a high Click Through Rate, a Long Time Spent on the Site, and a Low Bounce Rate. What that means in Plain English, however, is that you simply have to know what your best prospects want, on an adgroup by adgroup level, if not down to the keyword. What’s the best way to do that? Join the hyper-responsive marketing club of course!
Google AdWords Promotional Code – Instant Download
In cooperation with Google, we offer four easy ways to get a valid Google AdWords Promotional Code, from $25.00 to $75.00:
1. Buy our $49.00 Definitive Guide to Google AdWords (instant download PDF ebook, shows you exactly how to organize your campaigns for maximum profit) and you'll get an instant promotional code from Google for $25.
The Definitive Guide will easily pay for itself in days if not hours, from the money you'll save by not making the most common mistakes.
2. Buy our $25.00 Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords (traditional bookstore book, you can buy it on Amazon for $16.47+shipping). You'll get access to a $25 Google promo code after the book arrives.
3. Buy our $97.00 Definitive Guide to Google AdWords Expanded Edition (instant download PDF ebook, shows you exactly how to organize your campaigns for maximum profit). The Expanded Edition comes with 2 supplemental modules of your choice and an array of expanded bonus materials. And you'll get an instant promo discount code from Google for $50.00.
4. Buy our $197.00 Definitive Guide to Google AdWords Deluxe Edition (instant download PDF) with 6 supplemental modules and all available bonus materials. You'll get an instant discount promotional code from Google for $75.00.
If you're a first time Google customer, you'll be able to sign up for a new AdWords account and get a $25.00, $50.00 or $75.00 AdWords promotional credit!
To your success,
Perry Marshall
P.S.: Here's what one enthusiastic customer said about the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords:
From: Malcom Lambe, Paris, France
This is the book your competitors don't want you to read. And it's way cheaper than forking out hundreds of dollars a month for a bogus course on Adwords Marketing.
Don't be fooled by the promise of FREE DVDs, near-worthless "Bonuses" and slick videos. Not to mention the so-called testimonials from happy campers like Juda Thomas, Connecticut…David Simpson, Washington… Tony Jones, Thailand and for all I know Homer Simpson, Springfield.
You Don't Need To Buy a B/S "Program" Costing An Arm And A Leg
That's right. Don't Pay These Sharks.
All you need to get started earning decent money online is to learn how to use Adwords – Google's Pay Per Click Program with this veritable Bible of PPC. It's probably what all these so-called Make Money Online Gurus read in the first place.
It's called "The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords" written by the absolute Master of Online Money-Making, the King of Adwords – the Adwords Ninja Perry Marshall (I tend to call him Perry Mason 
This guy Wrote the Book on Adwords Marketing. Literally. This is the go to guy for Adwords domination. And to making good money online.
There is no Insider Money-Making Strategy…there is no Secret Yahoo Glitch…there is no Unique Adwords Hacks…no "Turn $1 bills into tens and twenties" (like PPC Classroom claim). Forget all that. There is no Silver Bullet these jerks would have you believe. There is no secret turnkey formula to instant online success with Adwords. And you can't hack Google (and even if you were able to they'd ban you forever).
But there is a definitive guide to using Adwords – written by a real expert – not a Johnny-Come-Lately Chancer. A very well-written affordable guide on how to go about marketing yours or other peoples products on Google Adwords. It has everything you need to start making money online.
Two Years Back I Read this book … and it blew my mind. I found how to set up an Adwords campaign properly from the moment you choose your products and pick your keywords. I found some great paying keywords, made some adjustments on my Adwords Campaign and Bingo! – I was making money online overnight.
It's very exciting to see the orders rolling in. You get addicted to monitoring the Click Through Rate – the CTR. In one memorable campaign my Click Through Rate went from 1.1% to 5.6% overall – it was even better for "Search Partners" at 6.6% CTR. Woah man!
~~~
Download your copy of Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and get your promotion code right away.
If you want a business breakthrough, listen in Thursday.
If you need a breakthrough in your business and are looking for the best way to achieve that, listen in on April 1. Discover how we transformed 3 excessively 'nice' guys into badass ninja-assassin marketers in 3 months:
* Jamie & Joey Bridges' online business was a very expensive hobby. They turned it around in 90 days. Then they ratcheted it up again, and again.
They were outperforming everyone in their niche. Then in January 2010 they got knocked down HARD. They're now exiting the old biz.
60 days ago they started a new business which is solidly PROFITABLE already.
How did they do this so fast? They'll share that story on April 1.
* Stephen Hills was chasing the perpetual carrot-on-the-stick for a l-o-n-g time. He was boiling with frustration. Now he's in Maui Hawaii, living a life that he's designed for himself. Adding money to his retirement account instead of taking money out.
He'll tell his story on April 1.
Jamie, Joey and Stephen will candidly disclose exactly what it's going to take for you to accomplish that. They will mince no words and hold nothing back.
Find out if Bobsled is a fit for you. And hear real stories from people in the trenches who've walked a mile in your shoes. Thursday April 1:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/ninja-marketers/
Perry
P.S.: If it ever seems to you like marketing education is some kind of rigged 'game' – that's because it is. I will also talk about that on Thursday. No sugar coating.
Google Adwords Videos
Win Of The Week
[special offer coming soon!]
Newbie ad writer makes $24,000 on his first letter
Maximize Your Google Website Optimizer Wins With Traffic Segmentation
Google Website Optimizer is a very capable testing platform allowing you to setup complex multivariate experiments using a simple, intuitive interface. So what's the problem?
AVERAGES LIE
Simplicity, while being Website Optimizer's greatest strength, is also a tremendous weakness when it comes to data segmentation. Google Website Optimizer doesn't offer the data granularity that Google Analytics does.
In Website Optimizer all of your traffic, no matter how different the traffic source, is lumped together into a single bin. You might be sending traffic from paid search, organic, and content to the same page. When you view data for an experiment on the page, you'll see aggregate data across all traffic sources...
TEST RESULTS WILL DIFFER ACROSS TRAFFIC SOURCES
When we run a Website Optimizer test results at ROI, we manage our experiments just as you would expect - running a test until we have a winner within the Website Optimizer interface. However, when the test is completed, that's when things get interesting.
WHAT DOES A WIN REALLY LOOK LIKE?
We use Google Analytics to dive deep into our Website Optimizer test results, breaking up the test data by traffic source, campaign, ad group, and any other significant way we can segment traffic. When you view the results on campaign by campaign basis, things start to look a little different.
Here's an A/B test we recently ran for one of our clients testing a revamped headline on their paid search landing page:
Sweet - a 60% win overall! But our job isn't over yet...
When we break the test down campaign by campaign in Google Analytics, we can see that the new headline actually led to as much as a 40% decrease in conversion rate in some of our campaigns (Seeing A/B Experiments in Google Analytics). So what should you do about it?
ELIMINATE THE LOSSES
Well, the short answer is to segment your traffic. Typically, when people have a win in an A/B test they send all traffic to the winning page. When you do this, you understate your win.
Take the following example. We run a Website Optimizer test and find after a week of testing that Page B gets 100 more conversions then Page A. Accordingly, we send all traffic to Page B for a 6.45% improvement.
However, if you look closer at the data from our test, you'll see that Page A actually performed better than Page B in Campaign 2. If we optimize where we send our traffic, we can get an extra 50 conversions bumping our actual improvement up to 9.68%!
I GET IT, HOW SHOULD I SEGMENT MY TRAFFIC?
There are a number of different ways to send visitors from different traffic sources to different pages. By far the easiest method is simply update your destination URLs to point to an optimized page for each traffic source.
Really, it doesn't what method you choose to split your traffic to the appropriate page. Just make sure whatever system you go with is robust/manageable enough to handle ongoing testing.
Strike Keyword Gold By Writing A Simple Story
My latest Search Engine Land article is now published title: Strike Keyword Gold By Writing A Simple Story.
Most keyword research is done upon existing words by using keyword tools. However, there are other ways to discover completely new keywords that involves creating use case scenarios for your products and services.
By either writing these cases or using your product teams use cases, you can find entirely new themes of keywords.
This technique will also let you discover the various types of keywords that exist:
- Explicit keywords: Directly describe a product
- Problems keywords: Describes the conditions a product solves
- Symptoms keywords: Describes a problem
- Product names and part numbers: An actual product name and/or part numbers
I hope you enjoy Strike Keyword Gold By Writing A Simple Story.
| Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords | |
 |
Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. |
| Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community | |
 |
Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory. We are currently accepting beta applications. In interested, please see more at CertifiedKnowledge.org. |
Related posts:
- Out Of Keyword Ideas? These 7 Tools Will Help My latest search engine land column is out titled Out...
- Keyword Research & Refinement in 3 Easy Steps I recently wrote an article for RSS Ray promoting the...
Success Anorexia
My wife's close friend Amber really and truly had a 36-24-36 body. She wasn't a fashion model, but she was as attractive as anyone could expect a 30 year old mommy to be. The perfect combination of slim, trim and curvy.
Suddenly one day, the bulimia she had in high school returned with a vengeance. Literally on a Tuesday afternoon in November. SLAM!
She descended into a death spiral. 2 months later she's down to 82 pounds. Her ribs are showing and she's gaunt and pale. Her butt is flat and her jeans are baggy and her arms are bony and we're imploring "Amber Amber please, you're so skinny and you're going to kill yourself, please please please get some professional help and start eating…"
…yet when she looks in the mirror every brain cell is SCREAMING, "AMBER, YOU ARE SO FAT!!!"
It was the strangest thing. You could not reason with it, you could not argue with it, it would not budge. It didn't matter what you told her, she saw a fat woman when she looked in the mirror.
In his book "The Secret Code of Success", Noah St. John puts it this way:
"When someone is said to have the condition called anorexia, we are typically describing a behavior pattern marked by an aversion to or pushing away of food. When someone has bulimia, it typically means behavior characterized by the bingeing and purging of food (gorging on food and then inducing vomiting).
"But when I first became aware that I was settling for the crumbs of life, I realized that there WAS something else we humans could starve ourselves of, and this previously unrecognized method of starvation was affecting tens of millions of people. What no one had considered before was that human beings could starve ourselves of success."
MOST of us starve ourselves of success. I often find myself avoiding really important projects that I KNOW can move me forward, and wasting time on trivial stuff. Can you relate to that?
Ever made a stupid, totally avoidable, million dollar mistake? Do you ever wonder why you do this? Do you ever wonder how to interrupt the cycle and change the voices in your head that hold you back?
I invite you to watch this video by Noah Saint John on what holds people back – and his novel approach to "Success Anorexia".
Perry
Will You Take A Stand Against the Madness?
One of the most compelling elements of your marketing is something you’ll never find in a textbook, in a marketing guru’s course, or taught at a seminar…
It’s your willingness to “Take a Stand Against the Madness”.
Here’s what I mean…
We live in a crazy world. So no matter what market you’re in, there’s madness: a kind of plague of overly simplistic, consensus driven thought which leaves people feeling desperate and alone, yet frightened to question authority.
Your ability to identify the madness, but more importantly your willingness to stand aside from it will distinguish you as a marketer like nothing else I know, because it’s this and only this which gives you the ability to connect with the consumer on the deepest level… to relieve the deepest desperation and despair they’re feeling as a result of living in an insane world.
Moreover, in every market there’s a general madness which obfuscates the most fundamental truths people really need to know, and then a specific madness which prevents people from learning the features and functions they should really be looking for.
For example, the general madness in OUR market (internet marketing) is the notion of the 4 hour work week, and that one can be making a full time living within just a few months. (The truth is it’s more like going to college to get another degree…you should definitely do better with the degree if you pick the right school, but it usually takes a few years and you don’t get a million dollar job right after you graduate, you get a career path you’re happy with instead)
The specific madness is the idea that (a) you can shout emotional benefits at people and they’ll buy (you’ve gotta link emotional benefits to concrete and specific points of difference–real features and functions which distinguish you from the competitors and make sense in the context of the emotion you’re promising to deliver); (b) you can find points of difference by looking at FAQs (when the truth is that frequently asked questions are also frequently answered).
In the “emotional eating” market (the one I demonstrate entering in the hyper-responsive club from month 3 onwards), the general madness is the notion you lose weight for good in 30 days, while the specific madness is the idea you have to learn “how to handle” your cravings (rather than methodically embracing the life force which is behind them without guilt or stress)
In both these situations, there’s a distinct relief which arises as people come to see you take a stand. They feel less alone. They think you’ve “got something special”.
And in fact, you must “have something special”, or your project is unlikely to work as more than a commodity play, squeezed on thin margins in the long run.
Now here’s the kicker…
To have something special, you’ve got to be willing to BE someone special…
Which means you really DO have to be willing to take a stand against the status quo…
To rock the boat…
To be hated by many.
It also means you have to be willing to be changed by your market… to love them so much you’ll give up notions which, going into the project, were critical to the security of your sense of self. (For example, in emotional eating, I thought I was going into the market to help people be more disciplined with their food, and instead I learned that the desire for discipline, in part, was a manifestation of an unhealthy fear of food… this challenged my day to day life in a fundamental way)
Are you willing to take a stand against the madness?
I really don’t think there’s any other way.
Food for thought,
G 
Hyper-responsive club
Truth is Beautiful. Confusion is Ugly.
Please indulge me in a few moments of pure, unadulterated Geek-ness as I attempt to convey a profoundly important life lesson.
In this month's Renaissance Club Newsletter, which just hit the streets, I said:
All great truths can be expressed simply enough to be understood by children.
If somebody’s “Great Truth” cannot possibly be explained to a child it’s not a Great Truth. It’s probably a Minor Truth, or worse yet, an outright con.
OK, so here's an über-geek version of this.
What you see here is what engineers and physicists affectionately call "Maxwell's Equations."
Please just forget for a moment that you and most people may not have any idea what this actually says or means. That's fine. You don't have to, to 100% understand what I'm trying to convey.
What I want you to do is simply take a look at these four equations for a moment. Do you recognize a certain amount of art here? An odd sort of geeky beauty and symmetry? Two of these equations are about "E", two are about "B", two have a dot and two have a cross. One equals zero and the others equal something else.
Well the cool geeky thing is, these four equations tell you almost everything you could possibly want to know about light, electricity and magnetism.
A person who speaks the calculus lingo at a "sixth grade" level would recognize that this is the simplest possible way to describe electrical fields ("E") and magnetic fields ("B"). It actually describes them completely. And honestly, it is actually possible to explain, conceptually, what these formulas mean to a sixth grader. Even if he or she doesn't know the math.
And even if you don't understand something at first, you hope it will be useful and elegant, right? It should be expressed in simple terms without a big long convoluted explanation.
(If you'd like to read a relatively simple explanation of Maxwell's equations, you can get it here.)
Early in his career, Einstein came to realize that if a math formula was true, he expected it to also be beautiful. The ultimate example being E=mc². A math formula 12 miles long is most definitely not elegant and is probably not even useful.
Now the thing about Maxwell's equations is, you can expand them out to mind-boggling complexity without even trying very hard.
But mind-boggling complexity is not what makes things work. SIMPLICITY is.
Einstein said: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
In marketing, complexity per se is fine. The more complex your sales funnel is, the harder you are to knock off.
But at the root of even the most complex marketing machine should be a few simple principles that define and explain everything you do. I have a huge website and miles of autoresponders but they exist for pretty simple reasons, and to accomplish pretty simple goals.
The Tactical Triangle is the ultimate simplification, reducing marketing to just four elements: Traffic, Conversion, Economics, and 80/20. No matter what you're doing, the thing you need to do next revolves around one of those four things.
Truth is beautiful. Simplicity is beautiful.
One last thing:
In your life you will encounter people who are enamored with complexity. They think it's some kind of virtue. They impress you with their Wharton MBA's and their techno-latin. But mostly it's just jargon. They don't truly and deeply understand what they're saying. And they don't embrace simplicity. They actually sneer at it. They babble a lot.
Whenever you encounter those people, RUN the other way. They just create unnecessary work for other people. They pile band-aids on top of band-aids. Those are the people who ram 2,457 page bills through Congress. They are the entrepreneur's worst enemy.
Eventually those guys get old and become bureaucrats. They start companies like Enron, where everybody assumes the guy one cubicle over understands how this whole thang works. And actually nobody does.
Confusion is ugly.
Embrace simplicity. Invite it, court it, study it, admire it, and reward it. For it will reward you.
Perry Marshall
