Your landing page load time now affects your Adwords Quality Score

March 5, 2008 at 12:18 pm · Filed under PPC Campaigns, Internet Marketing, Adwords, Adwords Quality Score

Yes, we now have yet another metrix that we have to keep tabs on in order to make the most out of our Adwords campaign while trying to keep the costs low. While I understand some of the reasoning behind the move I think it will have a negative impact on legitimate campaigns that may be using video, flash, an online spokesperson and other very effective methods of marketing to the buyer once they have landed on the landing page.

How is your load time graded? From Google Adwords support:

Each of your keywords will receive a load time ‘grade’ depending on the destination URL associated with that keyword:

• If you assigned a keyword-level destination URL to a particular keyword, then the keyword’s load time grade will be based on that URL.
• If you didn’t assign a keyword-level destination URL, then the keyword’s load time grade will reflect the slowest load time among the ads in the ad group.

Note that we evaluate your load time relative to the average in your geographical region.

How can you determine your grade?

You can see a keyword’s load time grade on the Keyword Analysis page. The following information will be available:

• The load time will receive one of two grades. If it’s graded This page loads slowly, your landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected. If it’s graded No problems found, your landing page quality and Quality Score will not be affected.
• You’ll see the number of redirects the user is taken through after clicking your ad. Typically, the more redirects there are, the slower the load time.
• We’ll report the site’s average load time.
• We’ll provide a comparison of the load time for your site versus other sites in the geographic area. Note that your load time grade is determined relative to the average in your geographical area.

How can you improve it?

The AdWords system re-evaluates landing pages on a regular basis (approximately once a month). If you make significant improvements to your website’s load time, you should see an improved Quality Score and lower minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids. Note that your Quality Score may update incrementally over two to three months after you improve your load time.

Here are some tips for improving load time.

• Use fewer redirects.
• Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
• Do not use interstitial pages.
• Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.
• Contact your webmaster or webhosting provider to discuss other ways of improving your website’s load time.

You can also use Google’s Webmaster Tools (not available in all languages) to graph the average download time for your site. To do so:

1. Sign in to Webmaster Tools with your Google Account login at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview .
2. Click your site if you see it on the page. If not, type in the URL of your website in the Sites field and click Add Site.
3. Select Tools in the sidebar.
4. Click Set crawl rate. Note that you’ll need to have verified your site before you can do so.
5. The third graph will show your site’s average load time.

How big of a problem will this be for those using video and flash on the landing page? Only time will tell.

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Beta Testing Adwords Demographic Bidding

February 19, 2008 at 1:00 pm · Filed under PPC Campaigns, Internet Marketing, Adwords, Search Engine Marketing

Do you know your customer demographics? If so then you could benefit from Google’s new Demographic Bidding campaign setting. Google began beta testing demographic bidding at end of January.

What exactly is the demographic bidding?

Demographic bidding is a way to choose your audience by age and gender. If you want your ads to reach women aged 18-24, or people over 55, demographic bidding can help.

Some publishers on the Google content network know certain individual details about their users. Social networking sites, for instance, often ask users to identify themselves by age and gender. For sites that provide this type of information about their users, Google AdSense can display your AdWords ads to the demographic groups that you prefer, or prevent your ads from displaying to groups you don’t want to reach. You also can bid more for your preferred demographic groups.

Some Google content network sites offer demographic bidding, but many don’t. Your campaign is likely to have a mix of sites that do and do not offer demographic bidding.

How can you optimize your campaigns?

Here are some typical ways that advertisers use demographic bidding reports to optimize their accounts. Remember that increasing your bid for a demographic will likely increase the frequency with which that particular demographic sees your message. Generally, the greater the increase in the bid, the greater the increase in traffic. We recommend that you run each campaign for at least a week and check the data provided by the demographic bidding report before enabling bid modifiers or restricts.

Increase bids for groups that provide good value. If your conversion rate for men is four times higher than it is for women, you may want to bid more for those male viewers. Increasing your bid should make your ad appear more often to that audience. Additionally, if reaching a particular segment is very important for your campaign, raise your bids to increase the frequency with which that segment is seeing your message. To raise your bids this way, click the ‘Edit’ button in the ‘Make Adjustments’ column of the appropriate age or gender row. You can bid up to “bid + 500%” for any one demographic group.

Hide ads from groups with significant traffic and poor value. If your conversion rate is very low for the 18-24 age range, and they account for 50% or more of your traffic, you might use the ‘Make Adjustments’ feature to restrict your ads from appearing to that group.

As with all AdWords features, we encourage you to experiment, track results (with conversion tracking, if possible), and then make changes based on what you learn. The demographic bidding report is one more way to focus your ad spending on the users that give you the very best results.

Here are some screen shots of the new feature.

Here is what it looks like after you have made your demographic choices. Notice the color match bids that give you a total additional percentage you want to bid for that demographic.

I will update this post as results start coming in. I do expect to see an improvement in some of my clients campaigns especially those that know what their customer demographics are.

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Hearst-Argyle Television and Google Agree on Reseller Agreement

November 29, 2007 at 10:31 am · Filed under PPC Campaigns, Internet Marketing, Adwords, Search Engine Marketing

Hearst-Argyle Television and Google Strike Reseller Agreement

This deal as of yet hasn’t caught a lot of peoples attention. It did catch mine though and I expect to see a lot more deals in 2008. In order for Google to expand it’s reach as fast as the predicted local search spending is expected to grow then it is going to have to rely on resellers to connect local companies that do not have the manpower, skills or time required to advertise online.

The press release points out:

“Boston, MA-based research firm Yankee Group recently projected that local search and Internet ad spending will grow from $1.9 billion this year to $9.3 billion in 2010. According to research by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc., more than 50% of U.S. small businesses believe they can use the Internet for sales, marketing and customer support.”

And to think I am busy now… 9.3 billion in two years is mind boggling considering the amount of work that is required to reach your market effectively using PPC advertising. Running a PPC campaign is not a set it and forget process. You have to do just as much leg work as you do with any other type of advertising sometimes more. But the payoff (ROI) can be huge if you do it correctly.

A lot of accounts that I see waste a lot of ad spend by not managing the accounts correctly. Bidding on terms that they think are relevant when there in fact they hardly ever bring in a conversion. I always take the position of let’s see what is working now and improve upon it. That gives me an idea of the campaign is performing and what should or shouldn’t be looked at in the clients other campaigns.

Back to the press release. Of the 2010 projected spending over 25% of that will be wasted. Yes you read correctly, WASTED. Why ? Simply too fast of growth to keep up with the learning process in order to stay competitive. Especially when you take Google’s ad quality score algorithms that seem to be changing on a monthly basis now. Example, one client I have just witnessed his campaign minimum bids increase and his conversion rates drop drastically. Why? It seems Google didn’t like the landing page we were using. Even though it had a good CTR ratio, and excellent conversion ratio. We used this page for several months after having the exact same problems just a couple of months earlier. We are now faced with having to make new landing pages again for the third time in six months. The saddest part is every time we abide and make the necessary changes we are forced to do it again.

To get back to my point, do you think that all these new small businesses that are not web savvy (remember I have been online marketing for 10 years) are going to be able to keep up? That is why I know a VERY LARGE percentage of that projected growth will be wasted. It simply isn’t feasible.

There is a silver lining though. Those that do not have their campaigns fine tuned will still see a better ROI than what they get with traditional advertising. I just hate to see all that money go down the drain on poor performing campaigns.

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Google AdWords Help Center: What is the One-Page Campaign Setup option?

November 7, 2007 at 9:01 am · Filed under PPC Campaigns, Internet Marketing, Adwords

Google AdWords Help Center: What is the One-Page Campaign Setup option?

I logged in this morning to create a new campaign for one of my clients and noticed a new feature in the campaign creation process. It is called the One Page Campaign Setup option. Basically it will allow you to copy an existing campaign and edit it on one page. Very useful indeed.

From the Google Help Center: “The advanced one-page setup wizard was created for AdWords advertisers who often use similar settings in many campaigns and asked to have a simpler way to create new campaigns. Once created, the campaigns look and function exactly like other AdWords campaigns created by the standard multi-page wizard option. (One-page setup is available only for keyword-targeted campaigns, not for site-targeted campaigns, at this time.) As always with AdWords, you can edit your settings or pause the campaign at any time.”

Thank you Google. I wished you would have done this a couple hundred campaigns earlier.

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