If you live in the region and want a solid day of training – this is perfect. If you’re going to be at SMX San Jose; come a single day earlier and leave with a lot more knowledge about the intricacies of Google AdWords.

The event will take place on February 27th, 2012. Here’s all the details:

Even with all of the new marketing channels that have opened up over the years, AdWords is still the core of many companies interactive campaigns. If your PPC campaigns are not running efficiently, it can have a drastic impact on your bottom line.

Join Brad Geddes for a full day of AdWords education and discussion that will teach you not only the best practices, but also advanced concepts and strategies that are based upon a decade of research and testing.

What Will I Learn?

Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match types usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.

Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages.

Ad Copy Testing: Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.

Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.

Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.

Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.

Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.

Networking Opportunities: Conferences are fantastic places to network and meet fellow practitioners of online marketing. Lunch will be provided so you can spend time getting to know your fellow attendees.

Who is Brad Geddes?

Brad Geddes is the Founder of Certified Knowledge, a company dedicated to consulting, educating, and training marketers on Internet marketing theory and best practices. Not one to hold secrets, Brad is a prominent educator in the PPC industry.

• Google Certified AdWords Trainer
• Author of “Advanced Google AdWords”
• Host of Marketing Nirvana on Webmaster Radio
• Internationally recognized speaker
• Trained more than 10,000 businesses on AdWords
• Columnist for Search Engine Land
• Founder of Certified Knowledge
• Worked with companies with budget ranges from $17 month to millions each month
• Has worked with Red Lobster, Encyclopedia Britannica, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, YellowPages.com

Past Training Video Testimonials

How to Register

If you would like to attend the Advanced AdWords Training @ SMX West you will need one of two passes for SMX:

• Workshop only pass
• All Access Pass + Workshop

More Information:

• Learn about SMX West
• Register for Advanced AdWords Training
• Learn more about the workshops

Please Note: This is a one day event that is a partnership with SMX. This is not the same as the AdWords Seminar for Success. This is one day event that is jammed pack full of information in a short amount of time. Please come ready to learn.

Join Us at the AdWords Seminar Workshop at SMX San Jose is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Alpha males have the highest Rank. Alpha advertisers have the highest Ad Rank.

Ever heard of the alpha male?

It’s a term used to describe the dominant male among  animals that live in groups. Usually the alpha male has special privileges like eating first, drinking first, being the first to mate or even the ONLY  one to mate.

Wikipedia refers the alpha male as being the animal with the highest  RANK.

What does this have to do with AdWords?

Well, remember how Google ranks ads on search results… Using a mesure called Ad Rank.

Ads with high Ad Rank take high positions while ads with lower Ad rank sink at the bottom.

But that’s just half the story and like social animals, Alpha Advertisers (advertisers with ads of high Ad Rank) get benefits that their competitors don’t. If you can increase your Ad Rank, Google will be generous in terms of traffic, position and cost.

Ad Rank Formula

You can do it.

The formula is very simple…

Ad Rank = MaxCPC  x Quality Score

… and very important to understand.

Anytime you change your bid (maxCPC), Ad Rank goes up or down. Every time your Quality Score (QS) changes, Ad Rank goes up or down.  Every time Ad Rank goes up or down, your ads get preferential treatment… or not.

Where To Find Your Ad Rank

Sorry.

Well, you can’t find it. We know that Ad Rank exists but there’s no place in adwords where you can see exactly what ad rank each of your ad is receiving. However, it is possible for you to find out exactly what you’re missing out with a low Ad Rank using the Impression Share metric.

Impression Share is the percentage of the times your ads where shown out of the times they were eligible to be shown.  By customizing the columns in your Adwords account, at the campaign level, you can see how much impression share your ads have lost due to a lower Ad Rank. That’s one way to tell if you have great Ad Rank or not.

How To Get Higher Ad Rank And Dominate The Jungle

In order to have high Ad Rank, you need the ability to bid high and get high Quality Scores. It’s important to have both and it can be a challenge to obtain them. Although you can work your way up with high QS, it will be much easier and more profitable if you can afford bidding high as well.  Let’s get into more details…

Jungle Rule 1: Earn The Ability To Bid Higher

Yikes!

It’s all about your conversion rate. Every time you increase your conversion rate, you increase your ability to bid high. In fact, you should figure out the bid that yields maximum profitability for your business (yes, there is one) with every conversion rate you achieve.

How to have better conversion rates?

The offer. The copy. The design.

Those are my personal ingredients to high conversions…  in that order.

The offer is by far the most important component and it impacts everything else you do. To have the best offer, you need to know what your potential customers actually want. This is important and most people assume they know and fail to take the extra effort to “really” find out. If you’re interested in having a method to discovering what customers want, I always recommend The Perfection Of Marketing by James Connor, a book that I think every business owner/marketer should own.

Once you know what your prospects want, you need to know how to convey it with powerful copywriting. Spend time crafting a message that resonates  with your target market  in simple words.

Then comes the design. Crappy won’t do it (most of the times). Though some great copy writers can pull it off with crappy web design, you should leverage every tool at your disposal. A clear, clean and simple design wins. And by the way, simple and clear is usually better than beautiful.

Jungle Rule 2: Get The Highest Quality Scores

Yep!

Ah, that little number we love to hate loving over at Tenscores.com. Are you still wondering how to increase Quality Score? Can’t blame you. There seem to be a conspiracy around the web to put people on the wrong track at every turn.

I wonder who started it…

Here’s the ONLY  thing you need to know about QS and it’s not complicated:

If you have low QS… unless the diagnostic bubble tells you otherwise, Quality Score  EQUALS click-through rates. Nothing else.

Let me explain.

The diagnostic bubble is that little place besides keywords that give you some indication about why you have low scores. Take a look at the screenshot on the lower right.

Adwords diagnostic tool

The “keyword relevance” part is key. What they really mean is keyword click-through-rate (CTR). So, unless that bubble tells you of landing page problems or load time problems, all you have to focus on is CTR. That’s it. The tricky part is, the CTR is not necessarily yours, it is sometimes other advertiser’s CTR. But even that is no big deal if you focus on increasing your own CTRs continuously (without sacrificing conversion rates of course).

So unless things change, as of today, November 2011, there’s no such thing as semantic relevance in calculations of quality score. And if there is any at all, it is small enough to simply dismiss it. Since the day I stopped worrying whether my landing page was relelvant or wether my ad had keywords in it and simply sharpened my ad-writing skills for higher CTRs, quality score has become the least of my challenges. All that Google cares about in regards to QS is CTR. Thanks to Craig Danuloff for confirming this in his book on quality: Quality Score  In High Resolution.  Anyone who wishes to disagree should read that book in its entirety first.

So please, will you give more attention to your Adwords ads CTR?! I beg you, for the sake of your business.

And here’s where the circle is closed: the best  way to get higher CTR is to figure out what searchers want and give it to them. Just like increasing conversions.

Once you can afford bidding high because your conversion rates and profit margins are so good and you understand quality score well enough to increase it, the snow ball starts to roll, your ads get more exposure, you get more traffic to your website, your costs are reduced and you become an Alpha Advertiser.

Don’t wait any longer… rule your jungle!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

Ad Rank: What Everyone Ought To Know About The Jungle In Adwords is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Next Wednesday, 9/14/11, I will be conducting a free webinar on the top 11 AdWords Mistakes as part of my Market Motive PPC class.

What I find top mistakes lists are useful for are learning what you don’t know so that you can focus on the areas where you can improve your PPC campaigns.

I often talk to advanced marketers who are unaware of modified broad match or aren’t using the display network properly. The webinar will be geared to all experience levels.

This workshop will cover the top 11 mistakes in about half an hour; and then we’ll leave plenty of time open for Q&A afterwards.

You can register for the webinar here.

I hope to see you there.

Attend the Top 11 AdWords Mistakes Webinar Next Tuesday is a post from: Certified Knowledge

What Perry teaches is a rapidly evolving process and if you want to play there you have to pay your dues in an ongoing basis. What you master today may be the cold ticket next month.

I have been in the software business since the mid 70′s and i work 3000-4000 hours per year to be tops in my game. I can go anywhere and name my deal. My friends when they lose their job will never find another one because the feeling of entitlement or having already paid their dues years ago is stuck in their heads. They are like an athlete that makes the team and stops working out once the contract is signed. What they don’t realize is the job just got started once you make the team.

I could easily pluck their 90k government jobs and replace them with a 30k person as the skills vs what they do are no longer worth 90k plus benefits and they add zero value beyond showing up and pushing buttons. These guys have not picked up a book or improved their skills unless the employer has paid for it. They have wasted endless weeknights and weekends watching last place teams play sports though. They do sometimes ask me to give them shortcuts because they don’t want to do the work.

I picked up Perry’s Google Adwords, other courses, news letters and more a few years ago and yes they piled up and sat here. I am not a web guy but an offline guy that solves complex business issues for multi-national corporations.

I had a new prospect call and need my help with ad-words and i thought now is the time. I wanted to learn it but now i had a paying client letting me loose on their dime. I went to work probably 120 hours per week for 6 weeks, poured over Perry’s materials, bought analysis tools (looking inside competition) and kept at it until i had a working model that I felt great about. I took them live and and generated a profit from month 1. Now we are in our 4th month and they are generating 35-50k in monthly revenue and i get a piece of each deal as these are 1k-3k professional services transactions. We expect revenues to be 50-100k+ in 2012 per month as i introduce more landing pages and refine my selection process and negative keywords.

I am using all that i have learned for my own companies and others I choose to work with. I do filter down to ones where i can make at a minimum 2k+ per month or I don’t get involved. I have a list of companies wanting help and it’s funny as i know in minutes which ones will work and which ones i walk from. The minute they tell me they want page 1 Free Google I hit the door as these are the people that want something ongoing for nothing. They are doomed to failure long term because their greed far exceeds their common sense.

Too many people mix up Activity for Accomplishments. My friends are active but never accomplish anything because they show up, push the buttons and go home with their checks. They never take the time to learn or ask questions or improve themselves.

My point here is you need to do the work or hire a mentor that can help you which means it takes effort and money to make money. The guys that brought me in were not afraid to pay all the ad-words costs and pay me a percentage off the gross deposits in the bank each month. I was firm saying i have 36 years experience offline and i can move my drive and ambition online with the proper tools and training quickly.

Now everybody wins.

If you live in the NYC area and want a solid day of training – this is perfect.

If you’re going to be at SMX East; come a single day earlier and leave with a lot more knowledge about the intricacies of Google AdWords.

The event will take place on September 12th, and the Sheraton in New York City.

Here’s all the good details:

Even with all of the new marketing channels that have opened up over the years, AdWords is still the core of many companies interactive campaigns. If your PPC campaigns are not running efficiently, it can have a drastic impact on your bottom line.

Join Brad Geddes for a full day of AdWords education and discussion that will teach you not only the best practices, but also advanced concepts and strategies that are based upon a decade of research and testing.

What Will I Learn?

Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match types usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.

Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages.

Ad Copy Testing: Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.

Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.

Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.

Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.

Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.

Networking Opportunities: Conferences are fantastic places to network and meet fellow practitioners of online marketing. Lunch will be provided so you can spend time getting to know your fellow attendees.

Who is Brad Geddes?

Brad Geddes is the Founder of Certified Knowledge, a company dedicated to consulting, educating, and training marketers on Internet marketing theory and best practices. Not one to hold secrets, Brad is a prominent educator in the PPC industry.

• Google Certified AdWords Trainer
• Author of “Advanced Google AdWords”
• Host of Marketing Nirvana on Webmaster Radio
• Internationally recognized speaker
• Trained more than 10,000 businesses on AdWords
• Columnist for Search Engine Land
• Founder of Certified Knowledge
• Worked with companies with budget ranges from $17 month to millions each month
• Has worked with Red Lobster, Encyclopedia Britannica, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, YellowPages.com

Past Training Video Testimonials

How to Register

If you would like to attend the Advanced AdWords Training @ SMX East you will need one of two passes for SMX:

• Workshops: September 12
• All Access Pass + Workshop

More Information:

• Learn about SMX East
• Register for Advanced AdWords Training
• Learn more about the workshops

Please Note: This is a one day event that is a partnership with SMX. This is not the same as the AdWords Seminar for Success. This is one day event that is jammed pack full of information in a short amount of time. Please come ready to learn.

Advanced AdWords Training @ SMX East is a post from: Certified Knowledge

There is a simple way to determine how to increase an account’s exposure that can be accomplished in less than a minute.

Generally, when looking to increase your exposure you need to know why your exposure is being limited. There are three common reasons why your ads are not being displayed:

• Budget
• Quality score
• Bid prices

In this article, we will look at how to determine what is limiting your exposure, and show how you can do this analysis in less than one minute.  In this analysis, we will assume you have expanded your keywords a few times and that you do not wish to add new keywords.

Impression Share Report

Start by running an impression share report. This is a report that can be run at the campaign level and shows you why you’re ads are not being displayed. If you need help running reports or finding all the features, please see this video that walks you through creating reports.

You will now have a view of why your account is not being displayed, through either budget or rank.

Budget Loss

In this first case (above image), the biggest reason that impressions are being lost is because of the budget.

When you lose impressions due to budget, then raising your budget can help get you more clicks that should have the same quality as your current clicks. When you see that you’re losing clicks due to budget you should be careful. If you cannot raise the budget, then you are probably overpaying for each click.

For example,, if your budget is $100 per day and you are paying $1 per click, then you usually receive 100 clicks per day. If you could lower your CPC to $0.80 and still spend all of your budget then you should get 125 clicks. That’s a nice increase in traffic without doing too much work.

Eventually, lowering your CPCs will put your ad in too low of a position to get enough clicks to fulfill the budget. When that happens, then you need to find other avenues to receive more traffic.

Rank Loss

The other main reason you lose impressions is due to rank. When you lose an impression due to rank, it means that your ad rank was not high enough to be displayed on a page.

Ad rank is comprised of both quality score and bid. Therefore, when you see impressions are lost due to rank, you need to examine the quality scores. There is a simple way to view the quality scores across the account:

• Run a report that contains spend, quality score, keywords, etc
• Download the report to a spreadsheet program
• Create a pivot table that keys off quality score numbers
  • If you need help with pivot tables, please see Josh Dreller’s excellent column on pivot tables.

I added the “percent of keywords by QS” column myself by just dividing the number of keywords in each QS range by the total number of search keywords in the account.

In this case, the vast majority of the keywords are a 5 or lower quality score. Therefore, many of these keywords are not being displayed due to low quality score or low ad rank that is caused due to low quality scores.

You can now be confident that this account needs to increase its quality score to be able to efficiently increase its exposure.

There will be times when most of your keywords have excellent quality scores:

In this case, there is some quality score work that can be done but as the majority of their keywords are a quality score 7 or higher; the main reason the account is lowing impressions is due to bids.

You can now be confident that this account needs to increase its bids to be able to efficiently increase its exposure.

There are many reasons your average position can be less than 3 and you still lose impressions due to ad rank. The two most common are:

• No ads were shown on the page
• Only a limited number of ads were displayed on the page, and you were below that

Usually when your impression share is above 90% – 95%, you are in great shape and you need to find new keywords before you can drive more traffic.

Conclusion

When you want to see account data at a very high level, the impression share report is a fantastic starting place.

It is common for accounts to see increases and decreases in overall traffic due to the natural changes in search patterns. Therefore, looking at overall traffic can sometimes give you an inaccurate picture of your search share. As the impression share report is a relative number, and not absolute, it is a good place to examine your account for changes to trends in your search share.

When examining how to increase your exposure, it comes down to: budget, bids, and/or quality score. What is your weak link? To increase your overall exposure, one (or more) of these items needs to grow larger.

This simple one minute analysis can quickly give you a starting place to determine where you should focus your time.

The One Minute AdWords Account Diagnosis is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Using it is quite straight forward. When you have figured out the main benefit that resonates with your customers, you navigate through the diagram brainstorming new ways to express the same idea – supplying you with an almost endless repository of test ads.

An example would be most suitable to help you fully understand how it works. Let’s say I had a business that sold a tool to help Adwords advertisers lower their adwords costs, here’s how I’d use the diagram to brainstorm new adwords ads to test…

I. Two Different Ways To Express The Same Benefit

We are always trying to go towards something or away from something. Every benefit you find can be written in the form of going towards a solution (gain) or going away from a situation (pain). Tenscores.com, for example, sells the benefit of lower Adwords costs. That can be thought of as getting lower costs or going away from high advertising costs. And here’s how that would translate in 2 different ads:

Going towards a gain or away from a pain

Notice how each variation can be said differently with synonyms. For instance lower costs can be called cheaper traffic and too expensive can be replaced by too pricey (or anything similar) thus creating new ad variations to test. Some words are far more powerful than others, up to you to find them through testing. But we’re just scratching the surface.

II. Compounding It With 7+ Different Ad Themes

Once you’ve decided in which direction you want to phrase your ad (going towards a gain vs going away from a pain), you can put a twist on them by putting the spotlight on what you offer instead of what the searcher gets.

Focus on you vs focus on searcher

In doing so you can then choose where to fall among 5 ad themes that have proven to be effective:

Informational Ad

Informational Ads
Searchers are looking for information – most of the time. Give them information that will lead them to buying your products or services. This theme is for ads that promise to teach about something.

Ad with numbers

Ads With Numbers
People are conscious about details. Numbers that convey specific details about the benefits you can provide can turn clicks and conversions in your favor.

Curiosity ad

Ads That Peek Curiosity
Can you present your product in an unusual way? Is there something uncommon about your product? Even if there isn’t, you can find something that peeks curiosity and makes people want to learn more…

As you can see, these themes can also (actually they should) be mixed together to create multiple variations of ads to test and always keep improving performance.

More curiosity

Talking about curiosity, here’s one you may have seen everywhere on the web, I didn’t come up with it but I have used variations of it and it works impressively well in the weight loss niche.

Testimonial ad

Testimonial Ads
Trust is a major factor in the decision making process. Knowing that someone else has tried what you have to offer and got results helps customers trust that what you have works. It also puts a human being’s voice in the conversation rather than the formal tone of a company.

Review ad

Review Ads
Review ads are almost like testimonials, only they invite users to read other users (or influential individuals) testimonials on the landing page. These might be easily mixed with the other types.

Ad with credentials

Ads With Awards & Credentials
Third party endorsements are very powerful especially at the end of the buying funnel where it matters most for the consumer. So are credentials in certain fields.

Do you have other themes that can be added to the list? Let me know in the comments.

In case you were wondering, I do own a business that sells a tool that does help Adwords advertisers lower their costs and it does bear the name of Tenscores.com. We open the beta platform to the public about once a week, sign up here to be notified next time registrations are open or get the login details to our demo account here.

An Endless Supply Of Adwords Ads For Your Split-Test Experiments is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Google. Ex Wife.

You Can’t Live With Her. You Can’t Live Without Her.

This morning I saw a post about Google testing display of click counts under ads. In other words, under your ad, Google displays “156,000 clicks for this advertiser.”

Or, if you’re new, “12 clicks for this advertiser.”

Gee, thanks.

Today is as good a day as any to tell you *exactly* what I think about Google.

Most of you know that I’ve made the majority of my dinero for the last 8 years as a Google AdWords evangelist, educator, #1 author, seminar promoter, consultant and gadfly. I’ll be the first to confess that hitching my wagon to the Big G in the spring of 2003 was one of the smartest things I could have possibly done.

Actually I chalk it up more to Providence than smarts. But in any case, it’s been a super great ride.

Google has rightfully become the most desired, most sophisticated, greatest advertising machine in the history of man. I figured that out in about 3 hours back in 2002 and I’ve been addicted ever since.

There is not even a close second. One can only hope that Facebook wakes up from their intoxicated stupor and builds something even remotely as good. (Eventually they will, but they’ll have to get spanked by Wall Street before they do it. Meanwhile if you can hack your way through their circa-1998 user interface you’ll find huge opportunities and cheap clicks. Sheryl Sandberg and Emily White, I have no doubt you’re trying to penetrate your management’s thick skulls. Please, for the sake of all of us, keep trying.)

If you have a geek orientation and you love human psychology, then AdWords is an endless universe of experimental bliss. When you master it, it’s like a video game that spits out 100 dollar bills every hour on the hour. It’s crack cocaine.

The dark side is, Google IS Big Brother. Make no mistake about it. Nameless, faceless people control the world’s information. Drones in India who make $5 an hour decide whether the business you invested $1 million building is legitimate or not. They kill you dead with impunity.

(Their shareholders will have Sergey’s head on a stick when they find out how abysmally they treat most of their customers. Eventually the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times or the Economist will run a big story about it. I’ll be happy to give them a few thousand people they can interview. But I digress.)

Six months ago in the midst of wrangling with their incompetent staff, a Google rep in India concluded her email to me with these words: “. . . and please stop scams.”

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Do not ever, ever, allow yourself to think that sexy technology mitigates human nature. It doesn’t and it never will. Every empire that has ever grown unchecked has become a dictatorship.

It’s true: Ex-spouses sometimes need a hookup. And realistically, most online advertisers need to work with Google. It was true in 2003 and it’s true now: Google is still the best anvil for perfecting your sales funnel.

But I have ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS told people – as long as I’ve been teaching ANYTHING about Google AdWords – buddy, don’t you dare build a business that DEPENDS on Google because if you do, you’ve got a Glock pointed right at your head. And eventually somebody’s going to pull the trigger and your brains are going to splatter against the wall.

Does Google hate affiliates?

Girl spreads her legs for the first guy she meets at a Rave party. He slips out of her bed at 6am, pulls on his jeans, exits silently and never calls her back.

Is it because he hates her?

Oh, no, not at all. It’s just that he has zero respect for her. She’s easy. Free market research.

If you’re a thin affiliate, you don’t have a business. You have an unpaid market research internship at Google where you take all the risk and they gather all the intelligence. And store it permanently on redundant servers.

If you think Google is your Messiah, you’re just like the guy who thinks they built Vegas so he can make a fast thousand bucks this weekend. He’s gonna get screwed.

If you understand that Google is a TOOL, and only a tool – if you understand that it’s YOUR job to build a business that’s so irresistible that publishers everywhere are going to want to sell you traffic – then you’re going to be just fine.

Funny aside: People often assume that at my 4-Man Intensive and Roundtable meetings, we sit around and analyze Google campaigns. I totally get why people think that. But I’ve had many Roundtable meetings where Google barely got a mention in 2 days of brainstorming.

Why? Because REAL business building is not about the nuances of buying advertising. It’s about:

• Crafting irresistible offers
• Building great relationships with customers
• Gaining a cult following
• Developing groundbreaking products that scratch peoples’ itches in clever ways
• Creating experiences that customers rave about
• Cultivating powerful relationships with other players in your industry
• Making yourself an authority
• Putting yourself in the “Toll Booth” position for whoever wants access to your crowd
• Taking advantage of all forms of profitable advertising media and PR
• Building systems that make you money
• Putting that money in the bank
• Cranking out new, exciting innovations
• Harnessing your dysfunctions and making them productive
• Inspiring a culture where people will climb over brick walls to be on your team
• Being an alchemist

That’s the kind of stuff we talk about behind closed doors. And Google can’t do any of that for you.

If you think they can, you just end up being their whore. Thank you for playing at Harrah’s Casino, please come again soon.

Google has done their job. Very competently, thank you very much. YOUR mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring a LOT more value to your niche than Google does.

Become the alchemist that everybody in your corner of the world can’t stop talking about. Then and only then are you in charge of your future.

Perry Marshall

P.S.: Google your ex-wife. I bet you’ll find out something you didn’t know before.

With the amount of work required for building and managing PPC campaigns, it's easy to forget the importance of optimized targeting.

If I ask you what you need to do in order to increase your ads’ click-through-rates (CTR) for higher quality scores, your immediate answer might be: write a better ad.

And you’d be right.

But it’s not the only way and too often advertisers rely on ad spit-testing when trying to achieve a higher CTR.

If you’ve read a little about quality score (QS), you know that the biggest factor that influences it is CTR. When we plan about increasing CTR, new ads in more focused ad groups come to mind, sometimes we even remember to include and keep expanding a good list of negative keywords (although we know that that has no direct impact on QS).

What we often forget is that ads have varying performances depending on the hour of the day or the geographical region in which they are displayed. Two things that Google takes into account when calculating quality score but are rarely talked about.

If you’ve hit a brick wall and can’t improve your CTR no matter how hard you try, these are the 2 targeting settings that might get you the results you want.

Day-Part Targeting

Ad performance can vary greatly depending on the hour of the day. Although the data above has not reached statistical significance, it may suggest 9pm (21h00) to be bad hour.

You may be getting lots of impressions at 2 in the morning but very little clicks and conversions without even knowing it. If that’s the case, it would be very beneficial to prevent your ads from showing at those times of the day.

To find out how your ads are performing by the hour of the day:

1. Choose a campaign in your adwords account.
2. Click on  the “dimensions” tab (or make the dimensions tab viewable in the sub menu).
3. Click the “view” sub-menu and select “hour of day”.

You should now be able to see at what times of the day your ad group is under performing.

The next thing to do is to exclude your ads from showing at those times  by changing your campaigns settings: Advanced Settings > Ad Scheduling. Make sure your data has reached statistical significance.

When you do that, the average CTR recorded for your keywords will start to increase and your quality scores will slowly rise.

Geo-Targeting

Ad performance may also vary by specific geographical regions. Notice the difference between Texas and Ohio.

If you’re like most advertisers, your adwords campaigns are probably set to show on the whole territory of your chosen country right now (or even many countries at once). If you run a geographic report in adwords, you will find that your ads perform better in some specific regions than others.

You need to find the regions where your ads perform really poorly and exclude your ads from showing there.

To find out how your ads are performing by specific regions in the country you’re targeting:

1. Choose a campaign or an ad group in your adwords account.
2. Go to the “dimensions” tab once again.
3. Click on the “view” sub-menu and select “Geographic”.

Now you can see the specific regions where you might be receiving lots of impressions but low clicks and conversions compared to others.

Exclude those areas in your campaigns settings: Under Locations and Languages>Locations click edit.

A window will pop up, look for the Exclude areas within selected locations link at the bottom of that window and exclude the areas that are poorly performing for you.

If you don’t want to completely exclude those areas, you might consider creating a separate campaign for them.

When you do that, your average CTR will also slowly rise since it won’t be affected by low performing locations and it will result in better scores.

Those are two quick but very rewarding actions that you can take right now to achieve higher CTR’s and better scores.

In case you’re wondering how effective these two little techniques can be, here’s what Brad confided to me in email conversation (don’t tell him that I told you):

“I can’t agree more with your two points – I do it all the time – in fact I have an account that just by changing the geo settings and splitting up the ads by their geo CTRs, the accounts CTR almost doubled.” ~ Brad Geddes

If you want to track how these actions affect your keyword’s quality scores and your first page minimum bids, I’d like to invite to you to try our Quality Score tracking tool… sign up here and I’ll send you a quick email the next time we open doors.

Warning

• Before excluding your ads from showing at a certain time of day, make sure you have enough data to make the right decision. Use splittester.com to see if your data has reached statistical significance.
• DO NOT use CTR as your only measure of performance. Google uses CTR to increase or lower your scores and as a result, increase or lower your CPCs… however, it is not a measure of your profitability. Learn about Profit Per Impression and use it as the final verdict.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

2 Little Known Ways To Increasing CTR And Quality Score is a post from: Certified Knowledge

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