Alessandro Canova

Profit by impression (PBI) and Profit by Click (PBC) are the best metrics to determine when split testing ad copy or landing pages. One can determine profit by impression/click numbers by individual line of an ad copy, by the entire ad copy, by landing page, etc.

When split testing, think about the actual goal: sales. By understanding how each line of an ad interacts with a landing page and with a search query, by understanding how a landing page is affected by a keyword, by understanding how a keyword interacts with a specific ad, by understanding all of your metrics you can finally determine which is the proper combination to be running.

First, experts generally agree that SEO firms are most worthwhile at the development stage of a website. For example, for $225 an hour, Kent will take a spin around your site, looking for the elements that will get you to the top of a search—clean URLs, site maps, heading tags, page titles. Ideally, he says, someone like him helps lay a solid, searchable foundation for a site as it’s being constructed. Beyond that, Kent and other experts don’t see much value in contracting with an SEO firm. “Once you optimize the website and everyone on the team understands what needs to be done, there should be no cost moving forward,” he says.

Algorithms and math can drive your marketing campaign to optimal performance, but it can’t create an interesting and compelling campaign for you. In other words, an algorithm could have found the best way to advertise the Old Spice campaign on Facebook, but it still needed some very creative people to come up with the concept and then execute it. One should view math and algorithmic technologies as extremely effective productivity tools that free time for us to do even more creative marketing.

Custom combinations allow you to use multiple GDN criteria to ensure that your ads are shown only to the exact visitors you want! Examples of possible custom combinations are people who:

* Visited a specific shopping cart page but not the purchase confirmation page, or
* Visited any shopping cart page but not the purchase confirmation page, or
* Visited any shopping cart page and the contact form

The possibilities are theoretically endless! You can set as many custom combination criteria as you’d like.

Remarketing is great because the traffic quality is so much better than everything else on the content network. This mean that you can afford to raise your bids and show your ads even more often. From a users point of view this can mean that they see your advert everywhere they go on the web.

The results of our eye tracking study and the other two tests show that display URLs are an important component of PPC ads. Modifying display URLs as a test poses a danger of reducing the branding value of a PPC ad by cluttering up the display of the domain name. However, the potential long-term benefit of acting upon a successful test can easily outweigh the short-term cost of a failed one. Thus, for many PPC advertisers, a closely monitored display URL test is likely a worthwhile effort. 

Quality score is actually calculated at three different levels. These are: the account level, the ad level and the keyword level. It’s useful to note Google’s new way of describing this now, which is “the CTR on the keyword and the matched ad”.

So, it’s actually now a combination of the keyword level and the specific ad we are considering showing. All this says to me is that the keyword CTR is still paramount. A secondary concern is that changing ads will “reset” Quality Score to the default. And a minor factor is account wide Quality Score.

The data shows that keywords with three or greater words in them convert at least two times better. It’s also consistently better with additional keywords being added into the phrase. This means a better ROI for your program.

By simply adding a “+” to the beginning of any word in a keyword phrase, that word or its very close relatives becomes a required element in the user search string. BMM can be used on multiple words within a keyword phrase, and using BMM on all words in a phrase gets us back to good old broad match from 2004/early 2005.

When you have two or more keywords that can be triggered in your AdWords account from a search query, Google tries to show the most restrictive option. The constraints go beyond just match type to include geography, time of day, etc.

However, Google does not always show exact match over phrase match and phrase match over broad match. They also look at ad rank (max CPC x Quality Score). If you have an exact match term bid at $0.25 and the broad match bid at $1, Google will generally show the broad match term.

As an advertiser, you will likely find that your exact match converts higher than your phrase or broad match. You should control the ad serving so you know which ad copy and keyword will be displayed for any search query. You can control the ad serving through the use of bids or negative keywords.

There are several ways your can organize your match types within your paid search account. None of the strategies are better or worse than each other – they are just different. In today’s column, we will examine the three most common match type organizational techniques and show the pros and cons of each.

The most important part of your Google Adwords ad copy is the headline. A poor headline can make or break an adwords campaign and leave you way out of pocket. Five times as many people read the headline than they do the description lines and display URL, so unless your headline captures the browser, your adwords ad won’t get clicked on.