While Enhanced Campaigns aims to offer advertisers more bidding options and metrics for smartphone targeting, many are mourning the loss of control over tablet-targeted campaigns. Who will this affect most and what workarounds exist?

Who will miss tablet targeting

Advertisers with tablet-specific products Yes, this is a Captain Obvious point, but paid content, software, gaming and other products (like accessories) intended for download or use with specific devices are going to suffer most.

Here’s what previous targeting options were like, including OS, manufacturer, device and even wireless carrier:

Though operating system targeting generally will no longer be available, Google is making an exception for click-to-download ads. A Google spokesperson says “the advertiser would tell us which app they want to promote and then we’ll make sure to only show it on the devices that can download it.”

Any marketer who wants to segment

Search and click through may be similar between tablets and desktop, but landing pages are what make money for advertisers. Responsive design is great, but what if you could craft the optimal iPad landing page that doesn’t require scrolling, or even takes advantage of gestures for touch screens? This change forces marketers to use the same landing page for desktop and tablet users, or employ device detection and dynamic content to serve a tablet optimized landing page.

Some advertisers recognize iPad owners as a unique segment with different spending habits, for example Orbitz ranked pricier hotels for Mac and iPad users. Though some may question the ethics of the merchandising strategy, it’s possible iPad users are more satisfied seeing more premium accommodation suggested (not everyone only cares for lowest price). This is just one example of how the iPad user segment might be romanced. Enhanced Campaigns doesn’t allow for tablet-specific ad groups, but with device detection and redirection on the advertiser’s end, targeted landing page content can still be served.

Advertisers with strong tablet ROI

Several studies show tablets convert higher from paid search than desktop, and smartphones lower. For example, Adobe found 20% higher conversion for tablets, and 42% poorer for smartphones vs. desktop, with tablets also enjoying 30% lower cost per click (thanks to less competition). With tablets lumped in with desktop, up goes the ad competition, and likely CPCs as well as click through rates dilute.

Advertisers without optimized tablet experiences

Responsive design or device targeting / serving landing pages is more important than ever — now you can’t exclude tablets from your campaigns, and a poor experience on tablets (bounces) will drag your campaign performance down, hurt your ad positions and drive your cost per click up. Get on it.

In Marketing Experiments’ web clinic Headline Optimization: How testing 10 headlines revealed a 3-letter word that improved conversion more than major changes features a case study that tested — you guessed it — 10 headlines with various wording:

The top converting headline began with the word “get”:

And when arranged by conversion improvement, you can identify the top of the crop as headlines which emphasize what the user “gets” (value-centric), and the second tier focuses on taking action.

This is critical, because we may tend to think of affirmative verbs, or “commands” as more psychologically powerful.

Another example comes from paid search expert Mona Elesseily’s post 5 Tips To Fine Tune PPC Ad Copy. Mona advises to incorporate “power words” into copy.

Some examples of words I like to try in PPC testing are try, get, fast, online, etc. Here are some examples (altered to protect client confidentiality) of headlines with and without power words, along with their associated cost per conversion. This is based on a large sample size.

Get Eagle Talons – $7.75

Eagle Talons Fast – $10.24

Eagle Talons – OEM – $7.81

Parts of Birds Online – $12.10

What did we learn? Either “Get” or “OEM” were strong performers as opposed to mentioning speed. While fast shipping may be a benefit, we assume it looks cheesy in a headline or causes a few more hasty clicks than it should.

Is it as simple as start every headline with “get”?

Nope. But consider testing headlines that begin with this three-letter power word against similar value-centric words, and versus your action-centric headlines you’re already using. The point is value-centric words are more persuasive than action-centric. “Get” happens to be a good word to use, according to these two examples.

The infographic below (source) breaks down Google’s top spenders in Google Adwords, but also highlights how CPCs (cost per click) vary across industries.

While some of these click prices are not surprising, like for health insurance or wireless Internet deals (high ticket value and/or recurring revenue), others like ‘zumba dance dvd’ are considerably high relative to retail prices. According to Google Shopping, these vids sell between $18 and $90. An average CPC of $5.18, even at the high end of margin, is an alarming cost.

It’s also interesting to note Lowe’s and Home Depot spend more on paid search per year than Amazon and eBay, with smaller catalogs. Without making assumptions about campaign efficiency, hypothetically speaking, it’s possible to advertise on more keywords and drive more traffic at lower campaign spend than your competition if you run a tighter ship.

Click infographic to enlarge

So how do you run a tighter PPC ship? Here are 5 things to keep in mind.

1. Know your limit, bid within it.

Your bidding strategy requires an understanding of what you can afford to pay per click (max CPC). Very simply, if your profit margin on a Zumba Dance DVD is $20, and you can achieve a 3% conversion rate through paid search, your maxiumum CPC is $20*0.03 or $0.60. Anything higher than this and you are hemorrhaging money.

However, you often need to bid even lower than your max CPC to cover the overhead of running your paid search campaign. For this you want to estimate a target ROI percentage. This calculator can help you determine your max CPC with this in mind.

Bidding strategies are complex and beyond the scope of this article, but the key is to ensure you are not bidding based on Google’s Traffic Estimator or first page bid estimates alone.

2. Always be negative.

Keyword match types have their trade-offs. Exact match is great for control, but limits your long-tail opportunity. If you go broad, you may pull in a lot of seaweed with your catch. Negative keyword research is essential when using broad match types to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant keyword matches.

For example, a text-to-speech product bidding on “French speaking software” may be triggered for the keyword “learn to speak French.” Adding “learn” to a list of negative keywords can prevent unnecessary impressions (which dilute click through rate) and irrelevant clicks.

Negative keyword research is an ongoing practice. You can discover negative keywords with the Google Keyword Tool, Google Suggest, Google Search (visit pages returned in search results for the keyword) and my personal favorite, the Search Query Performance Report.

3. Be structured.

Certain keywords deserve their own Ad Groups, negative keywords, ad text and landing pages. This allows you to optimize messaging for better click through. For example, “Zumba DVD box set” could be separated from the general “Zumba DVD” group, and “box set” added as a negative keyword to the general “Zumba DVD” group. In addition to higher click through, the more focused landing page will likely boost your Quality Score as well. Both can reduce what you pay per click.

4. Always be testing.

Testing landing pages to improve conversion helps raise the ceiling on your max CPCs.

5. Consider search retargeting

In very competitive and expensive search categories, one little-known way to work get in front of eyeballs without paying astronomical CPCs is to use search retargeting with a service like Chango, Retargeter, Magnetic or Simpli.fi. Unlike site retargeting which follows visitors who have abandoned your site, search retargeting can display your ad around the web to visitors that have not seen your site yet.

For example, let’s say someone searches for “video conferencing software.” She does not see your ad (you do not need to use Adwords to use search retargeting), rather she clicks an organic listing which is in the data pool used by the retargeting network. A cookie is placed on her machine including the search referral keyword. Later in the week, she checks the forecast on the Weather Network, and your ad appears. The CPM or CPC through the retargeting network could be much lower than the $35 per click charged in Google.

Paid search is an important marketing activity but it’s not the only way to drive traffic. Know what you can afford to spend, keep optimizing your campaign and landing pages to improve efficiency, and look for other opportunities when costs per click exceed what is reasonable for your business.

Also coined “remarketing” (by Google Adwords) or “remessaging” (by Microsoft AdCenter), retargeting gives you an opportunity to re-engage site visitors with targeted messages and offers that appear when site abandoners surf other sites around the Web.

This “get started guide” explores how retargeting works, what you need to know to shape your strategy and some campaign management tips.

How it Works

Top players in this space are Google Remarketing, Microsoft AdCenter, Criteo and Retargeter. For simplicity, we’re going to look at Google Remarketing specifically, though the strategy principles apply to all three.

Tags and Audiences

Retargeting relies on tags and cookies. Create tags for the various customer segments or “audiences” based on where in your site the abandonment occurs, what content was viewed or actions were taken, and place them on the appropriate pages on your site.

For example, create a “customer” tag for visitors who have completed a purchase, or a “subscriber” tag for those who have joined your site (free or paid). Or, tag with category or product names. Of course, tagging shopping cart and checkout abandonders is a no brainer.

The system places cookies on visitors’ machines to identify which audiences they belong to, and serves ads corresponding around the Content Network, matching them to the audiences you configure in Adwords.

Cookie Duration

Cookie length can be set so campaigns expire after a short window (such as with checkout abandonment) or longer, up to 180 days. Long windows are helpful for products that may have new releases or upgrades such as software, or require replenishment after a period, like consumable office supplies.

Here’s the catch – each remarketing list requires 500 cookied visitors before ads can be displayed. This is important, as timing is a big factor with remarketing. Lists can grow stale before the first ad is triggered. Abandoned carts should be retargeted relatively quickly. If it takes 30 days to build a list of 500 abandoned carts, your campaign will already by moldy. You may find your traffic only supports more general behaviors such as site or category visits.

Getting Started

Google Help has a straightforward guide for getting started, so I won’t reinvent the wheel by outlining the technical steps. But before you even think about setting up your campaign, you need to work out your strategy.

Crafting Your Remarketing Strategy

Begin with an understanding of who you want to target, after what actions are taken on your site. Jot down a few scenarios. Here’s a sample format:

SCENARIO A (General Campaign)

Objective: Keep brand top-of-mind for visitors who abandon the site and communicate our value proposition
Site pages (to tag): All
Audience (Positive List): General site visitors
Exclude (Negative List): Visitors who viewed Affiliates or Careers pages
Cookie duration: 180 days (maximum allowed)
Maximum exposures: 11
Creative: TBD, A/B test
Notes: (If any)

SCENARIO B (Flagship Product Campaign)

Objective: Retarget visitors who view our flagship product
Site pages: Amazing Product 1.0 product page, “amazing product 1.0” search results
Audience: Visitors to these pages
Exclude: Completed purchasers
Cookie duration: 14 days
Maximum exposures: 11
Creative: TBD
Notes: (If any)

A good understanding of your own industry and customer behavior is valuable. What is the average days to purchase (or average visits to purchase) for your entire site? For product categories? Do you have many competitors and is comparison shopping common? Are your customers motivated by discounts or value-added features and services? Do your customers shop for merchandise across departments? The answers to these questions will shape your scenarios so you’re not mis-targeting customers with the wrong strategies.

Things to keep in mind:

• You need enough traffic to get your campaign off the ground, so don’t get too granular. Use your analytics and start with your highest traffic areas.
• Certain leads “go cold” as time passes. Plan shorter windows for actions like abandoned carts.
• Don’t be too desperate. Targeting offers immediately after site abandonment may cannibalize your margin for customers who were going to come back to pay full price. Consider A/B testing offers against non-offers, or staggering your creative to kick in offers after X days or X exposures.
• Consider excluding geographies that typically convert less or that you can’t ship your full product line to.

Remarketing Creative

There are many styles of display ads that can work for you, for example:

• Branding
• Last category viewed
• Last product viewed
• Abandoned cart reminder
• Sale and promotional messaging (general)
• New product awareness
• Post-purchase events (replenish consumables, submit review for chance to win gift card, etc)

As with all online advertising, it’s important that “scent” is maintained. This means your ad creative matches the behavior that triggered the ad, and the landing page delivers on the promise made in the ad. And as with email, make sure your creative has a clear call to action, even if it’s just for “branding” purposes.

You’ve heard of “banner blindness” but are you familiar with “banner burnout”? After a certain threshold of exposures, seeing your ad everywhere may be more annoying than admired, so you should consider mixing up your creative (showing a different design after X days or X impressions), or use frequency caps in your campaign set up. Experts believe 7-11 exposures is ideal before burnout kicks in, however only experimentation with your own campaigns can tell you what works best for your own context.

Remember also to design for various ad formats for maximum placement (skyscraper, sidebar, etc).

Examples:

Up high

Along the side

Campaign Management Tips

Once you’ve nailed your strategy and designed your ads, it’s time to set ‘em up. Here are some tips to remember:

• Start fresh. It is recommended to create display advertising Ad Groups in brand new Campaigns. You’re building Ad Groups around customer segments, rather than keywords, which requires a different structure.
• Block wisely. You may choose not to initially block domains from the Content Network that you find convert poorly with your other text and display ads. Because retargeted ads are more relevant, they may perform much better on these domains. If they prove to still convert poorly, remove them after you’ve collected enough data.
• Be negative. Leverage “negative audiences” to ensure your ads don’t appear when they shouldn’t. For example, visitors who convert should be placed in a list that is added as a negative to your other targeted campaigns. You may also wish to exclude visitors referred by other ad networks like Bing ads or affiliate campaigns.
• Bid smart. Naturally, some visitors will be tagged multiple times. For example, a cart abandoner likely has a “general visitor” tag. Bid higher for behaviors further down the conversion trail to ensure they override the other Ad Groups you may have running.
• Rotate evenly. Like with text ads, you can test a few versions of your creative (great idea, by the way). AdWords has a tendency to default your ad rotation to optimize for clicks (show your winning ad more often). But as you know, for good A/B split testing, your creative should be shown evenly. I recommend you change it to “show ads more evenly.”

If retargeting looks enticing to you, tag your pages as soon as possible to build your audience memberships before you work on strategy, creative and account set up. This makes it much quicker to reach the 500 member mark, take advantage of the holiday traffic surge!

Post-script

While this post was geared more towards Google’s solution, Criteo is another player to investigate if you want harder-core targeting than what’s currently available with Adwords. Criteo provides dynamic ads that merchandise with the products a customer last viewed on your site. Customers include Zappos and Overstock.

The Zappos example above also links to an opt-out page that explains the ads and enables the customer to “turn them off” and provide feedback on how the ads made them feel.

Looking for help with ecommerce strategy? Contact the Elastic Path Research & Strategy team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy services can improve your business results.

Video previews in search results with previews

Google somewhat-recently launched Instant Previews in its SERPs (search engine results pages), where you can hover over a magnifying glass to preview a landing page before committing to a click. It now supports previews for video content, showing not only a few thumbnail images but also very short clips of the video, with or without sound.

Hat tip to Xavier Casanova from VideoRetailer.org for the screenshot.

This means video SEO is all the more important, to ensure your video assets have the best chance of appearing in blended search results. Check out the 7 Deadly Sins of Video SEO and 5 Heavenly Acts of Righteousness for tips.

Google Adwords’ appended URLs

Adwords announced a global change to the way your text ads are displayed. Ads are now appended with the display URL automatically.

My observation – this only happens when the ad is in the magic blue purple green yellow box and when there’s enough room.

My concern with this tactic is stuffed headlines are actually harder to read and scan. While I suppose they can give a branding boost by showing the URL, they may make the headlines ignored altogether. Making some brands more prominent than others also seems a bit unfair. If it does impact click through positively, the “rich get richer” (the highest CTR ads that win the top spots will stay there).

Nevertheless, it’s important that you understand your headlines have been changed without your consent, and this change can impact your campaign performance for the good or the bad. It’s a good idea to annotate the date of this change so you can see the changes in your web analytics. Ideally, Adwords would have provided advertisers with the ability to split-test with and without the display URL in the headline, and an option to turn the feature off.

Google Analytics Site Speed Report

While there’s been a whole whack of adjustments in the new Google Analytics (version 5), perhaps the most exciting is the site speed report.

This report will tell you which landing pages load the slowest, which campaigns correspond to faster page loads and how geography and browser type differ in performance.

Once you identify where the issues are, you can take measures to optimize these pages. Here’s a tip – pay the most attention to the pages in your checkout, not just “landing pages.” Many carts are not abandoned because a button was the wrong color, but because tables, graphics and other objects were…taking…too…long…to…load…

Whether you decide to leverage this new targeting option, or opt-out of ad serving on tablets depends on the nature your product, target market and budget.

• Consider the demographics of tablet users – they tend to skew to male, 35-44, higher than average income, early adopters of technology. If your product is not typically purchased by this demographic, it may be most efficient to block ad serving on tablet PCs.
• Think about tablet usage – do you sell digital goods that can be consumed on a tablet? Do you offer an iPad app for your ecommerce site that you can create a custom campaign for?
• Does your digital product not work with tablet computers? (e.g. desktop software direct downloads) A good idea to prevent your ads from appearing to tablet users.
• Is your site Flash-heavy? Flash is currently not supported on the iPad, and has limited support from Android and others. Google will detect Flash or other rendering problems at the domain level and will not serve your ads on mobile devices with full browsers. If you want to target tablets, it’s best to look into providing mobile versions of your site with device detection/redirection. (Make sure you’ve configured your redirects properly).
• Are you on a tight budget? It’s better to save your clicks for the web for the sake of simplicity and efficiency of analysis

How to change device platform settings in Google Adwords

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. On the Campaigns tab, on either the left side or in the center of the screen, click the name of the campaign you want to change.
3. Select the Settings tab.
4. In the “Networks and devices” section, click “Edit” next to “Devices.”
5. Select “Let me choose…”
6. Check or uncheck the box next to “Tablets with full browsers.”
7. Click “Save” when you’ve made your selection.

Source: Google Adwords Help

Getting Granular

If you want to target iPad specifically, navigate to Settings Tab > Tablets with full browsers > Target only selected operating systems > iOS. What about other devices like BlackBerry Playbook? Hold tight, Google’s workin’ on it.

Looking for help with ecommerce? Contact the Elastic Path consulting team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our ecommerce strategy and conversion optimization services can improve your business results.

What is a unique value proposition?

A value prop is what it sounds – it’s anything that communicates why a customer should desire a product or service. When you sell products available elsewhere from competitors, your company value proposition is all the more important. You must give the customer a compelling reason to buy from you, today.

A unique value proposition is what your product or company does better than any other competitor. It must be exclusive to your shop, and preferably backed up by quantitative evidence.

Poor value propositions are pandemic. MECLabs (Marketing Experiments) went in search of a value proposition – literally. It asked 275 businesses to send in their value propositions on a small card, like the back of a napkin. MECLabs found only 2% actually had a strong, unique value proposition! 86% scored a 2 or lower on a scale of 0 to 5.

Why do marketers fair so poorly at value props?

Businesses are average.

Let’s face it. Value propositions are hard, because it’s tough to be remarkable and offer something above and beyond what any other company can do. Competitors can also offer free shipping, even free return shipping if it’s willing to take the profit cut to be competitive. It’s easy for product manufacturers to copy features. It’s easy for competitors to copy customer service practices. (Perhaps Zappos is an exception – is anyone else crazy enough to offer 365 day returns and free return shipping?)

Marketers confuse UVP with the marketing slogan/tagline or mission/vision statement.

Ideally the tagline reinforces and conveys the UVP clearly, but often the tagline is just catchy marketing. Drs. Foster and Smith actually have a wonderful tagline that reflects the value proposition: “Because we’re vets we love pets.”

This gives an instant sense of credibility for the business, but does it go far enough? Are they just figureheads? The tagline should be backed up with reasons to trust your pet care to Drs. Foster and Smith. Does the website give you the most complete information available? Am I able to ask the Vet a question? Does this site carry exclusive product? The About page says it’s the largest cataloger in the pet space, but does that make it better? What if it carries the full range including inferior product? What if the site is unweildy to use by too much choice? What does this online store offer that no other pet site can?

UVP is not articulated.

Others have a UVP, but it’s not articulated clearly or in a way that compels the customer to buy from that company and not consider anyone else.

CanadaFlowers.ca’s ad text includes a very strong value prop – the site has been rated #1 in Canada by FTD.

Unfortunately, that “scent” is broken as it is not mentioned on the landing page.

The welcome text is halfway there – it gives the visitors some (non-unique) value props:

“Send Flowers with Canada Flowers, Canada’s National Florist. Shop for flowers online for any occasion, from birthday to sympathy. Now featuring Spring Flowers. Upfront prices in Canadian dollars include same day flower delivery across Canada. No extra service fees at checkout!”

It’s strength is buried under “About.” It was rated number one by FTD in Canada – there’s a very compelling reason to stay! Same day delivery is a strong support (part of why it was ranked number one?), shopping in Canadian dollars is good, the range of product it carries and no service fees. These all support the main statement that it is THE highest rated flower site in Canada, according to an authoritative industry body.

When you don’t have a UVP

In some situations, you can’t help it. You simply can’t offer anything that your competitors don’t (more common with re-sellers of widely available items than manufacturers). In that case, communicate your value propositions as a collective, showing a number of reasons why to shop with you. The combination of value propositions may itself be unique. Even if you don’t have anything unique, because so many businesses neglect communicating their selling propositions, simply incorporating value props into landing pages can go a long way.

Chatr is an example.

Unfortunately, Chatr also makes the mistake of burying this information behind a tiny link in the FOOTER MENU!!

How about some good examples?

Netsuite and ProFlowers are examples of landing pages that are on the right track.

Exhibit A: Netsuite

In the uber-competitive CRM market, Netsuite claims it is the only on-demand CRM solution that gives you a 360 degree view of your customers. Particularly, it states it’s better than Salesforce. Now the onus is on the rest of the landing page to support that value prop, as many will be thinking – oh yeah? Prove it!

I’m am not saying this a strong value prop for Netsuite or any CRM software. With enterprise software, more features doesn’t mean more user friendly or better support and service. It also may mean paying a premium for features you don’t need. I am concerned that the copy doesn’t appear to have been proof-read, there is a duplicated sentence – and the eWeek award is 5 years old, a century ago in software years. But the point is Netsuite has picked a value proposition that claims it does something better than anyone else, and attempts to support it with the rest of the page content.

Exhibit B: ProFlowers

ProFlowers is smart on many levels. Its paid search ads include value propositions (thank you, and Amen!) which are reinforced on the landing page.

It doesn’t matter whether you clicked the “free vase” or the “we’re loved by the Wall Street Journal” ad. The landing page includes both value props, and boasts its NPS (net promoter score) vis-a-vis its competition.

The takeaway

Let’s all admit that value propositions are hard to create and hard to communicate. Let’s also agree that it’s fundamental to articulate them and bake them into every single landing page. Remember, paid search traffic arrives directly to the landing page, not your home page (unless your landing page is always the home page, in which I have to pull you into the Principal’s office). You have few seconds to convince a person to stay on your site and a bit longer to convince them to buy. The value proposition aims to convince the search visitor he/she needs not look elsewhere.

And remember the importance of scent! Use those value props in your ad text. It will help click through rates, which will in turn reward you with higher positions, more impression share and lower cost per click.

Testing value props

Once you’ve fixed scent and established your value props, test them against the “control” version of your “old” landing page to quantify the difference in conversion between them. Create only 2 ads, 1 to each landing page and drive 50 percent traffic to each by selecting “show ads more evenly” in your campaign settings.

After you’ve found your winning landing page, begin to test various ways of presenting and wording your value proposition. Don’t worry about button color until you’ve nailed your messaging!

Interested in improving your ROI from paid search? Contact consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how a pay-per-click audit can help improve your business results.

Today’s topic: maintaining “scent” of the intent – both the shopper’s intent when she searched for a certain keyword, and the promise you made in the ad she clicked. The scent must be maintained from search engine keyword to ad to landing page.

A good example is BusinessWeek’s ad for the term “business magazine subscription.” The ad promises 85% off the newsstand price, or 26 issues for $20.

What you see is what you get on the landing page. No surprises here.

However, scent fades on Verizon Wireless’ landing page for the keyword term “cell phone plan for seniors.”

The landing page is the generic Friends and Family content they’d show to any B2C customer. A true senior citizen calling plan would certainly include the word “senior” somewhere on the page to maintain scent (preferrably in the headline) and a package for this segment (with stripped-down features like voice only (no text or data plans) and simplified phones.

The CARP.ca landing page creates an entirely different scent (no fish jokes here).

Landing pages should not have competing calls to action, display ads for other sites (gasp!), nor should it be so confusing for a new visitor to figure out what the website is and where to find the relevant content. The ad suggests there is a calling plan to sign up for. This is not apparent on the landing page.

Another common mistake is choosing the wrong URL for the keyword intent.

For the search “cell phone plan,” Chatr landed me on the Phones page, rather than Plans. There is no reference to the ad’s offer on the Phones page.

I could go on and on with examples, but I’m sure you get the gist. Instead, let’s look at how you can get started optimizing your own campaign for scent. (If you have delegated PPC to an internal team or a third party, you still want to do this as a check to see things are being done properly.)

Step 1 – Determine Your Hot Keywords

Start by finding the top 10 keywords that drive a lot of traffic, yet are converting poorly. (The weighted sort feature in your analytics helps). We start with 10 because this is a reasonable amount, but you don’t have to stop there. This also doesn’t mean you will optimize all 10 landing pages, we’re simply looking for a consistent scent-trail from keyword to ad text to landing page.

Alternatively, you could start with the keywords with the lowest Quality Score.

Step 2 – Snoop Out Your Scent

Next, we’re going to make sure scent is fragrant between these keywords, their served ads and landing pages.

There are 2 ways to check out your keyword-ad-landing page mix – you can use your Adwords account or use Google Search. The advantage of using the Adwords account is, it’s free. You won’t be charged or clicks or influence your account stats in any way. The downside is it’s tricky to know for sure which ad Google will select for the keyword. If you’re not taking advantage of Broad Match Modifiers, Adwords may be serving different ads than the ones you assigned because of Expanded Broad Match and differences in bid price. (Using Broad Match Modifiers gives you more control over what ads show for what keywords without the restrictions of Exact Match).

Tip for using Google Search: If you find your ads aren’t appearing, make sure they are not currently day-parted or geo-targeted outside your region, and that you have not reached your maximum budget for that day. Otherwise, refresh a few times or search through an alternate browser. Another culprit for ad no-shows is low quality score, which can impact your “impression share” or percentage of impressions where your ad is shown.

Step 3 – Fix Issues

If you’ve found any disconnect, consider your campaign structure. The keyword may be lumped into an AdGroup when it would be better off in its own group. For example, “family cell phone plans” with “cell phone plan for seniors.” These should have their own ad text and landing pages.

Otherwise, the error is simply sloppiness in copywriting and landing page selection (URL). These are easy corrections to make.

Next post we’ll kick it up a notch and look at the next level of PPC landing page optimization. Stay tuned…

Interested in improving your ROI from paid search? Contact consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how a pay-per-click audit can help improve your business results.

“But Linda, didn’t you say you should test checkout first?”

Sounds like something I’d say. I believe you should absolutely test your checkout before home page, category pages etc. (in most cases). I would vouch for testing a bit of everything all at once, but there are limitations to A/B and multivariate testing platforms that prevent us from doing so. You can usually only test one thing at a time.

However, you can test an unlimited number of PPC landing pages at the same time, as they do not require special tracking code. You can create custom URLs that are tied only to your individual paid search ads. These URLs will be inaccessible from your main site.

So they answer is, you can test both checkout and PPC landing pages *first.*

Why test PPC pages first?

1. You’re paying for this traffic. Pages that don’t convert are sucking money on a constant basis. For competitive keywords (high search volume, high competition, high click through and high cost-per-click) the cost can be astronomical.

2. You can predict purchase intent by referring keyword. (This is not possible in Google Website Optimizers and some other testing platforms). When you can control for what the purchase intent is (e.g. “accounting software for small business” vs “accounting software for non-profit”), you can better craft messaging. Both searches may point to the same product, but the highlighted features, headline, messaging and testimonials can all be laser-targeted to the end-user.

3. You can optimize for the medium. Paid search lands directly on the product or offer page, which means the visitor has not navigated through your site and may not be familiar with your value proposition, offering, etc. You can apply the learnings you’ve gleaned from web analytics about paid search vs. rest of site traffic to these pages (use your Advanced Segments in Google Analytics or other platform).

4. When you optimize for the most popular product pages, you’ll drive more traffic to your checkout (and your checkout test, which may speed test completion there as well).

5. You can run unlimited tests concurrently (I’ve said it once before but it bears repeating). Plus, your learnings may be applicable to the rest of your site (e.g. headline A converts better than headline B across a number of tested keywords). This is efficient!

Where to start? Start with the keyword(s) / AdGroup(s) that cost you the most money for the least reward, of course! It’s important you look for the combination of high traffic and low conversion. (Hint: use weighted sort if you’re using Google Analytics, or similar feature in the analytics package of your choice).

Interested in improving your ROI from paid search? Contact consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how a pay-per-click audit can help improve your business results.

To answer this question, I commissioned my friend George Michie from the Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG), one of the most respected paid search agencies in the SEM world, working with many advertisers of this size. George very graciously gave such an in-depth answer, we decided to turn it into a blog post and share it with you all. Thank you, George!

Question: “How do you maintain a keyword list when the SKU count is large and the product turnover is high?”

The answer is: “Very carefully.”

We manage campaigns for a number of companies with over 100,000 SKUs and huge product turnover rates. These folks end up with programs with millions of unique keywords and it is incumbent upon the paid search manager to make sure that the keyword list:

1. Has coverage of new products;
2. Ties keywords to the optimal landing pages;
3. Has targeted ad copy; and
4. Is purged of keywords as the products they reference drop out of stock

This is no small feat and requires smart tools. We’ve developed our own tools and systems for helping RKG’s analysts do some of the heavy lifting using a clean product feed.

Core Keywords: category, subcategory, non-product specific head, torso and tail.

The first and most pressing order of business is to make sure coverage of the head, torso and the top of the tail is well done.* We advocate a careful, machine-aided but human-driven process that starts with landing pages and works backwards. Building out keywords, assigning landing pages and writing copy for these core terms is of paramount importance and this piece needs to be separate from, and to an extent protected from, the ongoing product-level keyword process that follows.

*Linda’s note: Head, torso and tail refer to the pieces of the bell curve. In the context of paid search, the “head” consists of the keywords that send the highest volume of PPC traffic to your site, individually. The “tail” is made up of less popular terms that might occur only a few times per year but collectively can add up to a big chunk of your keyword referrals. The “torso” is all the good stuff in between. For example, Nike might have the head term “nike shox,” the tail term “D width mens cross trainer gray suede upper” and the torso term “mens d width cross trainer.”

Product-Level Keywords: SKUs, product names with and without manufacturer names, etc.

Building out huge lists of permutations on product names, SKUs, manufacturer names, feature lists, etc. is trivially easy, but doing it well requires a more sophisticated tool set than most folks can easily access. The tools must:

• Control for requiring modifiers. Imagine you sell Halloween costumes. If you bid on keywords like Harry Potter, Mickey Mouse and Playboy Bunny without key modifiers like “costume,” “suit,” “outfit” etc. would be disastrous – your ads would show whenever these keywords are searched, regardless of the context, diluting your click through rate and attracting irrelevant clicks. The tool must provide the ability to automatically weed out dangerous phrases that are missing those modifiers.
• De-dupe against core keywords. Because we’ve put more time and oversight into building the core keyword list than a simple machine can match, we should give preference to those keyword-landing page-copy combinations than to phrases generated by a product feed. Keywords generated through this process that match existing keywords should be discarded.
• Make smart landing page choices. Most product specific search terms should land on product specific pages, however the process described above will create many keywords that aren’t product specific. Because similar products may have like feature sets, keyword development tools will create many duplicate phrases. Most of the tools on the market will de-dupe internally but will simply grab one of the product URLs at random for the landing page. This is a problem. It tells the user that you only have one product that responds to their search when in fact you have many. By not showing the user the full-range of choices you lose opportunity every time. Whether the search results page on the advertiser’s site or a category or sub-category page is better will depend, but a process needs to exist for a smart analyst to provide guidance. A machine will get this wrong every single time.
• Assign copy, and cluster appropriately. A dynamic process for clustering related phrases and gluing on appropriate ad copy is also important. More targeted ad copy yields better Quality Scores (which is largely influenced by click-through rate), and smart clustering provides important clues for a sophisticated bid management system.
• Identify other potentially high-traffic, ergo dangerous, keywords. The system should output potential new ads in a format that ranks the terms by likely traffic volume. This helps prevent overly broad keywords, studiously avoided in the core buildout, from creeping in through the back door.

Hygiene: Now the keywords are out there, how do we know when they should be dropped?

First, it’s important to note that in some categories, advertising on out-of-date models can actually be quite profitable, provided that the landing pages handle those “upgrades” well. If products have been replaced by newer models, you may benefit from advertising on both as long as the user ends up on a page with a good alternative product. Testing can reveal whether this works for your business.

Second, recognize that because the process for generating keywords generates both product specific and more general keywords the connection between products that drop out of inventory and the keywords generated from those products isn’t an exact match.

Finally: consider whether “Out of Stock” is generally a temporary condition or a more permanent reality. If the process pauses keywords that are out of stock, but two days later the products are back in stock, is there a way to identify those and flip them back “on”?

RKG uses a system to flag products that drop out of stock or out of the product feed. We also have built custom flags for certain clients where inventory becomes thin in ways that impact conversion rates, e.g.: “we still have men’s swimsuits but only for waist sizes less than 24″ and greater than 52″.” Much depends on the quality of data provided by the advertiser in the feed.

We couple this with a URL-checking system that flags landing pages tied to search keywords that contain page-load error messages or “out of stock” messages.

What to do with the output.

This is tricky business. It is tempting to automate the whole process from keyword creation to posted ads to paused or deleted ads as the products drop out of inventory, but experience has taught us the value of human review.

We recommend baking in some level of analyst oversight before any ads go live and before any ads are paused. While this does create a lag time between inventory shifts and keyword list changes, the cost of a single big mistake can greatly overshadow lost opportunities in the deepest regions of the “tail.”

What if we don’t have these kinds of tools?

Doing all of this work manually adds greatly to the cost of the keyword list maintenance. This can change the cost/benefit calculation quite a bit and may mean that this level of housekeeping can only be done every other month, or quarterly. Much depends on how important the tail is to your business.

High product turnover is a paid search management challenge, which, through well-regulated use of smart tools can be handled effectively.

You can read more of George’s blog posts on the Rimm-Kaufman Blog.