Kerstin Baker-Ash

Display And Search: Integration

An article I wrote on the importance of integrating Search and Display has been featured on ClickZ. Rather than pushing duplicate content around the internet, have a read and let me know what you think.

Google's Buggy Floating Maps

Google's annoying floating map issue could've started out life as an engineering bug, quickly snowballing into a real pain for paid search marketers. Not familiar with the issue? Basically, scrolling down any page with map results past the imaginary fold results in the non-premium ads on the right hand side of the page to disappear underneath the map.

It's annoying from a UI point of view - Google Maps follows you down the page, but weren't you scrolling down because the top half wasn't necessarily relevant to you? It's also very frustrating from a paid search marketing point of view. Some SEM folks have commented that their best conversion rates or ROI result in clicks on ads in position four - that disappears when the map disappears the ad. Suddenly, your SERPs go from this:

Turns into this:

At the bottom of the page, bloomsnroses.com completely disappears.

It's a head scratcher, only because it clearly isn't designed to help with UI - it's more of a revenue blocker. I can't see how that makes any commercial sense, but it's been going on for a while. Oversight, unfixable bug or buggy revelation?

Direct Online Marketing recorded a video of this back in October that shows the buggy floating maps results in real time:

 

New Look to the Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool

Woke up this morning to do some regional PPC sleuthing, and it looks like Google has finally rolled out a new look Ad Preview Tool. I'm happy to be corrected, but I don't think Google's Ad Preview Tool has been updated since about 2006. I really dig the new look - it's cleaner, it's more intuitive and it has a fantastic feature that allows you to input coordinates instead of a place name for added accuracy.

Even more helpful for a new wave of mobile marketers, you can preview the look and feel of SERPs by mobile device (with a full internet browser only). That means you can see how your ad looks to an iPhone/iPod Touch user, Android, Palm webOS or an iPad. You can further refine to carrier in a host of countries - I checked the usual UK, USA, Canada and then expanded to the rest of Europe, and even some locations in the Middle East. 

Thanks for the long overdue update to the Ad Preview Tool, Google. It's fabulous and quite possibly worth the wait.

URL Estate

I've not written about search stuff for a while, mostly because I had a baby, moved countries and started a new job. Now that I'm in the swing of things, I wanted to start the year off fresh by offering some helpful advice to search marketers both new and old. Something has been bothering me. It's SEMs that claim to write amazing and cutting edge ads for clients, yet don't test or refine anything in their campaigns for goodness knows how long. The ads are stale, uninspiring and less likely (at least in my mind) to result in a click or conversion. 

Sure, we know we have a limited amount of time and space to write PPC ads - 25/35/35/35 is a line I'm oft-repeating - but it's what you do within those confines that separates satisfactory marketers from talented ones. With that in mind, let's focus on turning you from a competent SEM to a great one in 2011. We'll start with the most forgotten component of a PPC ad - the display URL. Just because I'm cheesy, I'm calling it URL Estate. It kinda rolls off the tongue, no?

35 characters. It doesn't seem like a lot, given the following sentence is 47 characters. It certainly is a heckuva lot of space, though. Gaebler.com ran an average URL length study in Q1 last year that came up with an average 10.1 character domain URL length. Their research omitted the .com portion of the URL, but even with the .com that only adds up to an extra four characters, bringing the total to 14.1. Why is average length important? Your domain, your client's domain, is likely to be around that number - you're using it in your display URL, maybe even adding www. to the start (18.1 characters) - and you have so much unused URL Estate.

In short, you're squirreling away 35% of your available character limit for no apparent reason. There's no PPC bank - you can't use up the unused URL character limit on another ad. Your ads aren't less expensive if you don't use it. Let's not go crazy and insert any old BS into your URL though.

Keywords

Keyword lengths are a great deterrent to use them in the actual ad text. If you're a piano merchant who also sells harpsichords, harmonichords or electric organs, you might be tempted to write "All Types of Pianos in Stock" rather than expanding on your offering. I get it. You're a busy piano merchant who hasn't got a lot of time to create all sorts of fancy ads on every type of instrument you sell. 

The thing is, it's easier than easy to create customized-looking ad copy without taking hours of time you could be spending debating the sound quality of a Wendel & Lung versus a Feurich. Go ahead and use your "All Types of Pianos in Stock" ad - just use those ad groups you've so tightly created (yes, I'll be making some organizational assumptions) and stick your ad group's main keyword at the back of your URL as a subfolder. The page doesn't need to exist; as long as the domain is there, you're golden. This works well as a subdomain, too; instead of www.PianosRUs.com/Harmonichords, you could also test Harmonichords.PianosRUs.com.

DKI

DKI doesn't stand for Dumb Kid is Indolent anymore (work with me, it's early and indolent apparently means lazy). While I absolutely hate to use and hate seeing lazy Dynamic Keyword Insertion, it works well when you have a tightly themed ad group with different variations on a theme (see how I brought that back to pianos? I'm a musical genius nerd). Moving slightly away from URL Estate, you can still use the subdomain or subfolder approach in the display URL and combine it with a dash of DKI to rise above stale competition.

Using DKI isn't an easy way out anymore. You have to think about it for a few minutes to make it work, but in a world where relevance is king, it makes a boat load of difference when you're able to display an ad which makes the searcher feel like you're really listening to what they're looking for. Obviously, one would have to ensure that you actually offer the product if you're using DKI, but we're again making assumptions that your loose ends are nicely tied up. DKI cleans up nicely when the ad is displayed, and the quick fix back end work you've been doing makes your ad sparkle and stand out in a sea of generic and dull SERPs.

There are a bunch of other ways to save time, use valuable URL Estate and have great ads, but that's another post for another day. Until then, shine on.

Google AdWords Interface Bugs

Why not start the year off right with a slew of bugs in Google's AdWords interface? The latest bug hit just during final year report times, and seems to not be able to show data on certain accounts prior to October 2010 in the Campaigns summary tab.

Whitewashed for privacy, there's absolutely no information (clicks, cost, impressions) available in the Campaigns Summary Tab prior to October 2010. The information isn't available when downloaded, either. Getting nervous, I went to the change history to see if the campaign had been modified in such a way that the information would no longer be available.

Like magic, campaign information appears (it's a seasonally relevant campaign for January - April, in case you were wondering). I've got clicks, impressions, cost and no idea why this information isn't available in the Campaigns summary tab. No quick answer today either, because it's a bank holiday.

If anyone has information on why this is occurring or how to rectify it, I would be eternally grateful.

Persistence and Spelling

Really. It's staring you right in the face.

Kerstin Baker-Ash

It's not a hard name to spell - especially the two parts of the last name. So why is it so hard for people to learn?

Someone in the Toronto area seems to disregard spelling my first and married name correctly rather consistently. I'm not one for outing people on my blog, but I find it fascinating that this person visits nearly every day, spends a minute and a half on the site and always arrives after searching "kersten baker ashe":

When you're using Google Analytics on any site, you tend to look at the wider picture rather than granular, minute details. But if a big traffic driver to your site is a misspelling, don't overlook it. Brand names are often misspelled - it could be a typo or genuine ignorance of the correct way to spell your brand, but you need to cover all of your bases. 

Google frequently uses the "did you mean" more popular spelling in search results, negating the need to fully optimize your site (SEO-wise, at least) for your less informed or typo-prone customers. It's a crutch that's easily and freely used to cover a persistent misspeller, and you can largely rely on Google to direct people in the right direction if it's a common enough mistake. What about when you can't rely on Google's auto-correct benevolence to make sure your brand is covered?

Paid search. Yes, you'll have to pay. No, it won't cost you that much. Take a look at the traffic being driven to your site on brand terms. How are they spelled? What's the typical dwell time of a misspeller (in my experience, it's more than someone who has spelled it correctly)? How much is that customer worth to you in terms of repeat visits? Your boss and their ROI will appreciate investing in a couple of cheap, low traffic spelling mistakes.

Chances are, you're the only one that's going to be bidding on your list of misspells. In a world of less than wonderful business ethics, competitors often overlook the lucrative and cheap misspells in favor of brand coverage. So, maximize your brand reach and "all eyes are on you" potential by compiling a list and bidding on it. One thing to reinforce however, is that your brand is spelled a specific way; do not use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) because it makes your ad look cheap and hurried. Your customers are important to you - don't cheapen your brand by being lazy.

If your misspellers tend to spend more or engage with your site for longer, offer a bit of an incentive to them. Put your misspellings in a separate ad group or campaign, and create custom ads for what I affectionately call "monkey fingers". It doesn't have to be much; if you're saving 20% on the cost per conversion, offer your monkey fingers 5% off or free shipping. You won't create more misspellers by offering this ad, but you take the opportunity to show the customer you care about your business while reinforcing your brand and brand image.

It's also possible that my mystery searcher uses autofill - yours could too. Their persistence could just be laziness, but you still want to make sure you're reaching them when they're trying to engage with you.

To my mystery monkey fingers, I'd love to know what you'd like to see out of this blog. Are you looking for more information on search engine marketing? On Kerstin Baker-Ash? I'm sorry you're not always finding what you're looking for, but I'd be happy to discuss with you what it is that keeps you coming back, day after day, looking for updates.

Ethical PPC, Part Two

Back in March, I wrote a post going over my opinion on ethical paid search. I had always meant to go back to the post for part two, but it's been on the back burner for a while because of my very busy but very enjoyable paying job. Now that I'm largely writing posts on the weekends and scheduling them for the week, I hope to revisit a couple of missing part twos - the first installment is Ethical PPC.

In Part One, I talked about Brand Bidding and Duplicate Display URLs, the bread and butter of an unethical PPC arsenal. The next two, while still relatively standard in cheating the system, are a little more advanced and take longer to set up and monitor.

Dayparting Tricks

You're an affiliate, let's again pick Argos for ease of reference, and you're not allowed to bid on their brand term. You don't want to use their display URL, that's too costly and you can run the huge risk of being caught once they've seen a dip in brand traffic. However, you still want desperately to get those easy brand conversions they talk about on your affiliate forums.

Dayparting, a technique that brands use to maximize spend and ROI, is used frequently by affiliate marketers to fly under the radar and still bring in those brand sales. How do they do it? Simply factor in working hours (weekdays, 8 to 6), and use your campaign settings to switch the campaign off during the day when you're most likely to be noticed bidding on a brand. The theory behind this is that brand monitors, whether they're working at the affiliate program or the brand partner, will normally perform checks during the day to make sure their brand is protected. In the evening and on weekends, when they're not thinking about the brand or work, the playing field is left wide open for affiliates to come in and bid on the brand terms they're not supposed to, with little perceived risk of being caught.

Of course, most affiliate programs nowadays have a system in place to check brand searches 24/7 - Snoopy from Affiliate Window being one of them - reducing the potential for getting away with brand bidding. If you run your own in-house affiliate program, tools like AdGooroo can also monitor which display URLs have shown up on your brand searches, even if you're on a beach in Thailand, sipping a margarita and not thinking about brand bidding affiliates.

Fooling Automated Editorial 

Back when Google removed brand protection from the UK, the playing field was wide open for competitors and affiliates alike to bid on previously fenced of brand terms. Google assured us that we were still protected; our competitors couldn't have our brand names in the title because Automated Editorial would pick it up and reject it right away. It didn't, and doesn't, work like that.

Take Direct Line Insurance for an example. A brand search on "DirectLine" (no spaces) serves up ads aplenty from competitors and affiliates. How do they skirt the automatons from Google? Fairly simply. Misspellings, the absence of spaces and hyphens or plus signs don't flag automatically in Google's automated review system. So, if you want to grab a quick listing for a couple of hours or days before a human reviewer notices, look no further than leaving out a space between a two-word brand term or missing off a letter in the display URL. 

Since Google doesn't prevent competitors or affiliates from bidding on trademarked brand terms anymore, it's relatively simple for their ads to appear against your brand search. Combine that with a very easy workaround for highlighting your brand term (even when it's not the brand), and you've got a recipe for cheap and easy success for affiliates and competitors.

I hope the four classic tactics of unethical PPC campaigns are useful; hopefully, armed with this new information you can further protect your brand and your bottom line. Turn the tables, and let's get some integrity in the SEM industry.

Paid Search Sitelinks - The Inside Story, Part II

Yesterday, in Paid Search Sitelinks - The Inside Story, Part I, we discussed the issues surrounding Google's new beta platform for PPC sitelinks. Today, let's talk about workarounds to the problems, and what this new system can add to your site's ROI potential.

The Workarounds

You've got your four links appearing below your main ads - links that Google has picked for optimization heaven. However, your highest sale volume link isn't appearing because it's CTR is half a percentage point lower than another. The fix is relatively easy - you simply need to work around the system instead of going through it like good boys and girls. In your campaign settings, select the six ads you don't want appearing and delete them. That's it - by removing Google's say over your sitelinks, you remove the need to optimize the titles of the links and the pages they go to. After all, you know best pages within your site for conversion, so you should be able to make a very educated decision about how your site's PPC campaign is displayed in Google.

Campaign settings mean that you're up a certain creek without a paddle if you've structured your account with many ad groups within a single campaign. Firstly, you need to do a bit of restructuring to get the sitelinks for the right campaigns; this may mean building out a campaign with a single ad group, just to make it more tightly targeted. Also, consider this: brand searches are, for the most part, the results that pop up with sitelinks in the natural search results. Your brand results in the natural SERPs are going to be pushed down if you're using paid search sitelinks, so you need to act like a consumer and focus primarily on your brand terms initially. This isn't to say that generic terms (like "insurance", "vacations", "clothes", etc) couldn't be optimized for paid search sitelinks - über-generics are perfect for this beta - it's just good to get a feel for the way searchers interact with your new campaign setup on a safe term first.

Finally, keyword tracking. Honestly, there isn't much of a workaround here. As my confidential informant told me, "the idea here is to increase overall sales." Although tracking results at a keyword level is great and very much recommended in any PPC campaign, treat it like the cherry on your sundae instead of the nuts and track your paid search sitelink results at a campaign level. You should have already split your campaigns out very granularly already, so this tracking will act as close as possible to tracking at the keyword level anyway.

In the Future

How cool would it be if Google came out with a heatmap of SERPs with paid search sitelinks? If they want to keep pushing SEO down (and let's be honest, it's not a money maker by any stretch of the imagination for them), this would be a great case study to analyze eyeball dwell time on PPC sitelinks.

Overall, putting two and two together (more links, more prominence) should make your campaign tick along very nicely. Presumably, the more prominence given to five links from a single advertiser should push it well over the edge in terms of campaign expectations and ROI on brand terms and über-generics.

Are you considering opting in to Google's paid search sitelink beta? Have you already been doing it and found a way to track more granularly than campaign level? If you have, or have any questions about the program, let me know by filling in the comment form below - I'll see if myself or my secret Google snitch can answer them for you.

Paid Search Sitelinks - The Inside Story, Part I

After writing my initial post on paid search sitelinks, I was contacted by someone who is testing sitelinks in the field for a retail client. This person, while wishing to remain anonymous (I've always wanted to say that), has gone through the interface, what the benefits are and why it's not a perfect system yet. 

The Basics

This only works on ads in premium; ads that appear above the natural search results, not alongside them on the left. You can choose up to ten links to appear underneath your main ad - Google will automatically choose four and the settings are applied at campaign level.

The Issues

Since only four links are displayed at one time, you need to find a way to optimize for the best performing links out of the ten you've chosen. Google determines this much like they determine ad rotation - the best CTR wins the game. Even if you want to have all the traffic driving to your biggest money maker, you might be forced to use other links because of a lower CTR. Pants.

Also, these choices are applied at campaign level. So, all the sitelinks will apply to all of the ads eligible in the campaign itself, regardless of ad group. This can result in irrelevant links showing up for your ads.

Presumably, if you're willing to pay top dollar for a premium ad listing (i.e. top position), you'll also have a fancy tracking system in place to track the campaign's effectiveness down to keyword level. Well, scrap it. The sitelink URL usurps the keyword URL - you're no longer tracking at keyword level. 

Tomorrow in Paid Search Sitelinks - The Inside Story, Part II, I'll discuss potential workarounds and optimization techniques to the issues mentioned above. Also, we'll look at the benefits of using sitelinks in your paid search account.

Paid Search Sitelinks

First reported in August and September by Darrin Ward (USA) and iCrossing (UK) respectively, Google are now allowing some advertisers additional real estate at the top of the pops in paid SERPs. While this is largely a helpful step for PPC advertisers, what isn't discussed at length is the implications on natural listings, and the impact that has on SEO.

 

It's important to note that there are negative implications for brands invited to participate in the test. Firstly, the tracking needs four new layers added to a campaign to test the efficacy of sitelinks off one brand term. This can be a pain if you set it up with older tracking software which then requires individual tracking tags on the four different pages. A headache, but not an insurmountable obstacle. 

You can't measure brand engagement on a home page when you deeplink searchers to a microsite within the main homepage. The advertiser provides Google with a list of ten possible sitelinks; while they respect the order you give those sitelinks in, Google reserves the right to change your list without notice depending on performance. These are brand searches, not additional query strings with pets, motors or business tacked on to the back - it's also possible that searchers will not feel like their particular query (let's say content insurance) is being met, even though they searched on the pure brand term. Let's not discuss additional revenue generation methods by Google, it's something akin to beating a dead animal with a nuclear weapon.

On the positive side of the argument, you have the potential to give your brand extra prominence (in paid SERPs at least, more on SEO later). More users can engage with different strands of your brand - pets, motors, business, etc - without having to search or navigate through different parts of your site. Let's also not discuss the conversion potential for pure brand queries in paid search without additional sitelink help, either - see dead animal/nuclear weapon reference above.

Does this hurt traffic to natural listings? Potentially. When pages in the natural part of SERPs are pushed further and further down, this can't help with a case for SEO and brand optimization. Forget about outranking on key generic terms, either - if there are three paid ads at the top of the SERP and one of them has sitelinks, you can pretty much forget about appearing above the fold on most computer screens. To be fair, paid sitelinks are largely within the domain of brand terms, not generics. However, the rollout potential is dangerous when you consider the work that goes in to jumping even a one place above a competitor in natural rankings.

It's far too early to comment on the efficacy of Google's newest PPC beta test, but it will be very interesting to see if it increases brand engagement on different areas of a site or drives searchers to exactly the same place they wanted to go in the first place - the home page.