How Savvy Is Your AdWords Account?
When you do AdWords account audits, you need to go beyond the data to see how savvy the AdWords account is. If the account is well put together, then the account manager generally knows what they are doing and you will end up talking quite a bit about the data and the account’s strategy.
If the account is lacking in the advanced use of features, often your conversation will be geared around education and some strategy.
While I often start with the One Minute Account Diagnosis, there are a few signals you can use to see if the account is savvy or not before you start talking to the account manager about increasing the account’s performance.
Conversion Tracking
Every account should be tracking conversions. Sometimes this is in AdWords, other times it might be in Google analytics or their own in-house system.
If the account does not have conversion tracking of some sort, this should be the very first step to getting an account on track.
Extensions
Every account can benefit from some extension. Everyone can use sitelinks. Local accounts can focus on location extensions. Ecommerce accounts have product extensions. There are call extensions, social extensions, etc.
If an account does not have any extensions, then the account manager generally needs to be educated in not just extensions, but also top vs side performance of ads.
I find a lot of older and very sophisticated accounts often do not have location extensions enabled any longer. These accounts are often large hotel or restaurant chains that took the time to create Local Business Ads, which were retired a few years ago. However, when the ad format was retired, these companies often did not take the time to rework all of the data into location extensions.
Search vs Display Campaigns
A properly organized account will have separate search and display campaigns. If the campaigns are targeting both search and display, you will usually need to educate the company about the display network and how to properly organize it.
Negative Keywords
Does the account have negative keywords? Are they using negative keyword lists? If yes, then at least the manager knows what negatives are and you can go beyond education to finding the words that need to be blocked.
If the account has zero negative keywords, then you usually end up in a conversation about match types and search queries.
Modified Broad Match
Is the account using all broad match? If yes, you need to have a serious talk about match types. I find that many accounts use broad match for good reason, but have never heard of modified broad match. Modified broad match is a nice middle ground between phrase and broad match.
If an account is using all exact and phrase match, the account was often set up and optimized more than two years ago when expanded broad match was spending too much money without enough conversions.
Default Bids
Are all the keywords bids ‘default’? This means that all the bids are at the ad group level and are often 0.25, 0.50, 1.00, 2.00, 3.00, etc. If so, Odds are the account has no bidding strategy at all. There are times when you need to bid at the ad group level such as when you have a lack of keyword data. However, if you are bidding from some conversion metric, then some of the bids should be precise numbers such as 1.03, 0.29, 0.98, etc.
If all the bids are roughly the same, then you need to have a chat about bidding strategies that often ends up being about the company’s marketing goals.
Filters & Automated Rules
If an account has saved filters, automated reporting, or has set up automated rules, then usually the PPC manager is fairly educated. These are strong signals that you are going to talk to a smart person who wants a second opinion or is too overworked to get into the nitty gritty data analysis that can help out an account.
Conclusion
There are many other signals you could use to determine how savvy an account is; however, I have found these signals are indicative of how savvy the account is as a whole. Also, you can see all of these settings in just a few minutes of time. I do recommend using the AdWords editor as that will show you all the campaigns at once so you can quickly see mobile, tablet, desktop, search, display, time of day, location, and other settings from a single screen.
Just because these items are in place does not mean the account is perfect and well run. Also, not having all of these items in place does not mean the account is poorly managed. These settings give you an indication of how many features the account is using so that you can speak to the education level of the account.
You should know your audience, and in a PPC audit – the audience is the account manager and maybe their boss. Therefore, understanding the account manager’s knowledge will help you speak to your audience so that you can make sure you’re spending your time on strategy versus education so at the end of the audit – everyone is happy with the outcome.
How Savvy Is Your AdWords Account? is a post from: Certified Knowledge
Retargeting – How to Research and Launch a Retargeting Campaign
GUEST POST:
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How to Research and Launch a Retargeting Campaign
Retargeting is an online advertising practice that serves your ads to users after they leave your website. Your ads appear all over the web, allowing you to stay in front of your audience even when they’re browsing other sites. The average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertising messages daily, but most can only specifically recall 2 ads that they’ve ever seen. Retargeting is a great way to combat so-called “banner blindness,” people’s tendency not to recall online ads, and help you launch a successful branding campaign and remind users of your products and services even if they aren’t on your site.
Here are some important considerations prior to launching a retargeting campaign:
Determine Your Objectives
Take a moment to think about your marketing goals. What, specifically, are you trying to accomplish?
Do you have only a few website visitors? If your goal is to drive initial web traffic, retargeting is not the right solution. You should work on improving your organic search rankings with SEO, and should implement a mix of paid search and display advertising campaigns to get people to your site.
Do you have some traffic coming to your site, but want to improve your conversion rates? In this case, retargeting is a great solution. Even if your web traffic isn’t quite as high as you would like it to be, it still could be a good idea to add retargeting into your marketing mix. Adding retargeting to existing search or display campaigns is a great way to court new site visitors without forgetting about your previous visitors.
If you’ve decided that retargeting is the right (or one of the right) solutions for you, follow the steps outlined below to get started.
Segment your audience
Divide audience into segments based on purchase intent and show them ads accordingly. Site visitors who only go to your site’s homepage may not yet know much about you, so you should target them with branding ads to get them more familiar with you and your product or service. However, if a user goes to a specific product page, they may be closer to buying. In this instance, you may have better results showing ads with specific deals or incentives tailored to the product they looked at. The most successful retargeting campaign will not treat all site visitors alike.
Set a Frequency Cap
It’s highly recommended to set a frequency cap for your retargeting campaign. You want your brand to be remembered, but you don’t want your users to feel overwhelmed. Setting a strict limit on the number of times any given user can see your ads will prevent them from feeling like they’re being followed around the web, as overexposure can lead to negative associations with your brand.
In addition to negative brand associations, you don’t want to run the risk of “banner blindness,” the very problem retargeting sets out to defeat. If you expose your users to your ads constantly, they will begin to ignore them, diminishing the effectiveness of the retargeting campaign.
Set Conversion and Burn Pixels
A conversion pixel is a snippet of code which tracks when the user converts (for example, makes a purchase or fills out a lead form). The burn pixel is another snippet which tells your retargeting provider to stop serving ads to the converted user.
This is particularly important if you’re targeting ads related to a specific product or service. If you’ve been showing a user an ad for a particular suitcase, and then the user purchases is it, there is no constructive purpose to continuing to show them the ad. If anything, it is likely to have a negative effect on the user who could easily get annoyed seeing ads for a suitcase they already own!
Test!
Retargeting can improve conversion rates by up to 300%. But don’t take my word for it. If you implement a retargeting campaign, test the results yourself by comparing your traditional display ads’ performance with your retargeting ads’ performance.
And don’t forget to constantly A/B test the copy and creative for your retargeting ads to make sure you’re always putting your best foot forward.
About the Author:
Caroline Watts is a marketing associate at ReTargeter, an online ad platform specializing in retargeting.
Learn How to Leverage Existing Content for Your Content Marketing Needs
Did you know:
- 44% of all US internet users have created some content online (Pew Internet – PDF)
- We create as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of man through 2003 (from Eric Schmidt)
- The world’s roughly 27 million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008 (source)
- More video content is uploaded to YouTube in a 60 day period than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years (YouTube press)
- 1.8 zettabytes of data was created in 2011. It would require 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads to store all that info; which would cost $34.4 trillion; or equivalent to the GDP of the United States, Japan, China, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy combined (Source: Mashable)
So what’s my point other than we make a lot of data?
Well – are you having issues with your content marketing? Content takes a lot of time to create. However, there’s a lot of it already.
Therefore, you don’t always have to create content to do content marketing – you can leverage other people’s content (in a legal and ethical way).
That is the subject of this week’s Marketing Nirvana show. It’s about content marketing, but there are some great tips in how to do this type of marketing without having to always create lots of material (sometimes you will want to create it yourself).
The show guest is John Fox (who some of you may remember from a previous episode we did on auto-responders and PPC Mindmeld).
John is also the founder of Venture Marketing – a company that specializes in B2B and partner channel consulting; as well as the author of several books.
We chat about:
- Borrowed credibility (I’m a huge fan of this)
- Connectors vs creators
- A little bit on auto-responders
- Content creation
- Content marketing
- How to leverage (legally and ethically) other people’s content for your marketing
- And a few other random things that hopefully you will find useful
The show aired on January 9th if you caught it live. Right now you can download previous shows on iTunes.
Listen to it, and to previous shows at Webmaster Radio on the Marketing Nirvana page.
It’s yet another fun show, I hope you enjoy it.
Learn How to Leverage Existing Content for Your Content Marketing Needs is a post from: Certified Knowledge
How much do people respect your time?
My most famous ever blog post is called “Perry’s Greed.” It’s about how, at an evening seminar in Chicago, a bunch of people asked me out to lunch. I told them, “If you pay my fee I’ll be happy to sit down with you.”
This made a lot of people angry. They retorted that I had no right to decline such requests.
I responded: “I’m a charitable guy, but I don’t consider regular American business people to be charity. There’s all kinds of poor kids in developing countries who need it a lot more than they do.”
Shockingly few people ‘got’ what I was saying.
I think that’s because they didn’t want to.
None of the angry people, by the way, had ever actually bought anything from me. (I checked.) They were all FREELOADERS.
The world is FULL of freeloaders. And the more accomplished you are, the more entitled they’ll feel to chewing up your time.
You must steadfastly refuse their guilt-trips and their whining. The only reason I could afford to travel to China last month and bring a little girl to the United States from a state-run orphanage was because I assign far more value to my time than the freeloaders who demand free business advice.
If I had lunch with the freeloaders, they wouldn’t do anything I told them to do anyway. Some of ‘em would stick me with that tab, too.
The only way you’ll be able to accomplish your mission in life is when you tell your own freeloaders “devil take the hindmost” and keep the main thing the main thing.
If making your time exponentially more valuable is high on your list this year, you might consider joining my Private Client group. It’s a 12 month program where I personally and confidentially work with you to get more stretches of $10,000 per hour work in 2012.
It will inevitably mean making less time for less worthy people, so you can make room for what is truly important to you.
What is truly important to you?
http://www.perrymarshall.com/pcg/
Martin Luther King – Equality – USP
Today is Martin Luther King day in the US. 236 years ago the founding fathers of the United States declared:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
MLK had a larger vision. Within those words he heard an even deeper meaning. To him they transcended race, not just social class.
One day in 1955 a certain Rosa Parks decided she’d had enough. She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus, and provoked a worldwide movement.
In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville said every single technological development of the last 1000 years has created more equality, not less. Whether it was intended to or not.
Tocqueville said when you make equality possible, you open the door for people (as we say in Planet Perry :^) to develop their own Unique Selling Proposition. So they can make a unique contribution to everyone else.
In 1835 he needed a word for this, so he invented one:
“Individualism.”
Rosa Parks responded to her inner voice, took a stand by staying seated. She asserted her individualism and shifted the atmosphere of the world.
Martin Luther King responded to his inner voice, acted on his individualism. And led a nation of African Americans to freedom.
You are just as much an individual as Rosa Parks or MLK. What is YOUR inner voice calling YOU to do?
Today, just for five minutes, please, would you do this?
Close your computer.
Switch off the TV.
Turn off your cell phone.
Shut out the distractions.
For five minutes, ask:
“Inner voice, will you please speak?”
Don’t think. Don’t talk.
Just listen.
