Last Halloween we actually commissioned a local caricaturist to cook up something out of his Doodle Labs, and the result was “Ghoulgle!”

Since we have about 5,000 more subscribers this year than last, I figured we could get away with posting this one again. (If you caught this in your feed reader the first time around, we thank you for pulling through an entire year with us, and if you email your physical address to linda.bustos @ elasticpath.com, I’ll pull a Rackspace and send you a hand-written note).

Although today’s posts are a departure from our usual content here, don’t worry - we’ll be back tomorrow with regularly scheduled programming (Friday’s Blogger Digest) and ecommerce tips, tricks and treats (I mean, trends) on Monday.

When was the last time you did a “vanity search” on your branded terms? Did you like what you found?

You’d be surprised what kind of things appear in Google’s top 10 results for Internet Retailer 500 companies. Not to add to any e-tailers’ reputation management issues, but here’s an example. There’s an online petition out there to boycott a toy retailer for carrying a George W. Bush action figure.

Love Bush or not-love him (non partisan Canadian, here) words like “petition” and “boycott” in search listing title tags are never something you want to see, and something you’d like to push down in results if possible.

What would you do if the public revolted against a product you carry, and singled you out in an online petition? Or a YouTube video? Blog post? Facebook Group?

A dedicated online reputation manager’s job is to monitor the web for new occurrences of your brand name in real-time, and ideally come up with a “damage control” plan. In this case, because there may be as many Bush supporters as passionate opponents (and judging by over 100 5-star reviews on the sold-out item it’s likely), the retailer didn’t pull the product (perhaps the retailer is even unaware of the petition). But in your case, a quick response and pulling of a product that customers react to may be a good move - or a public statement regarding the matter on your blog - or a clarification of misinformation…

Of course, this is only one example of a reputation management issue.

Depending on the size of your business and consumer propensity to search for your name, you may require a PR/social media marketing firm or in-house professional to handle your reputation management needs, serving as a community evangelist and corporate spokesperson full-time. Many companies have this and a search on any job board for “Public Relations Manager” or “Community Manager” may include reputation management in the list of responsibilities.

But it may be sufficient for you to hire someone to own your reputation management department on a part-time, contract basis. Like a good web analyst, if you hire the right person, that person can learn the tools and processes quickly and apply creativity, finesse and personality to the job.

I just finished reading Andy Beal’s Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online. For about $20, this book would be the perfect training manual for your reputation manager - it does a fantastic job of framing the “rules of engagment” (with your audience, that is) - explaining how to write for the web, the importance of SEO, common social sites and a range of reputation monitoring tools (among other things).

So whether you hire a savvy or a newbie, the book will guide you step by step to create:

• An online pressroom
• Conduct effective (non-spammy) blogger outreach
• Leverage multimedia content
• Choose the style of corporate blog that’s right for you and establish wise policies
• Measure your blog’s success
• Repair your online reputation
• Measure your reputation management program effectiveness

Alright, maybe you don’t want a complete newbie — here are some basic skills / traits a person should possess to tackle this role:

• An understanding of the social web, including blogs, forums, social networks, microblogs, photo/video sharing, ratings and reviews, RSS etc.
• An ability to manage several social media profiles (an organized person!)
• Exceptional communication skills, fluent in English with proper grammar and spelling
• Someone who comes across as pleasant, positive and polite in online communications
• Attention to detail - not someone who might send a sloppy email reply to all or cut-and-paste without triple checking the recipient email and name
• A ninja at using search engines for research (an understanding of SEO a plus!)
• Experience with web analytics is nice, but someone who can learn new software quickly is essential
• An insanely curious person who keeps up with all the Internet marketing and social media blogs on a weekly basis, and always thinks outside the box

Now, if you’re not sure how many hours your reputation management project will take, you may consider hiring a virtual assistant or Internet savvy work-at-home-mom. Many work at home moms are avid networkers and bloggers and you can find them on WAHM (Work At Home Mom) forums like WAHM.com. You can read their archived posts and their blogs linked in signatures to get a feel for their tone, positivity, manners and English skills also. You can find virtual assistants in the VA Networking Forum.

Another idea is to post a listing on the SEOmoz Job Board and post under the Public Relations / Reputation Management category. SEOmoz readers are typically up-to-speed with Internet marketing and reputation management already, so you can just get them to apply the do-it-yourself steps in Radically Transparent.

I also want to extend the invitation to any Get Elastic readers who provide these services to leave a comment with a link to your site so those looking for online reputation consultants can check you out.

Don’t forget to read Radically Transparent yourself so you know what your business should be doing so you can gage the effectiveness of your Reputation Manager.

Not only that, but this book should be read by everybody, as it goes into depth about your personal reputation, and how you can manage that. All will find Radically Transparent a helpful guide to creating and maintaining a positive and authentic personal brand presence online.

The clock is winding down for our upcoming webinar and book giveaway for Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. Every registrant for this Thursday’s (September 11, 2008) webinar with Bryan Eisenberg: I Know I Should Be Testing, But… will be entered to win one of 5 signed copies of Always Be Testing.

Sign up here

Bryan’s worked with online retailers like Overstock and Cafepress to dramatically increase their conversion rates. “The Eisenbergs are #1 in this game, and there is no #2,” says Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com. We’re privileged to have Bryan join us for a full hour and take live attendee questions. This is a webinar you don’t want to miss. (September 11, 2008 9 am PST, 12 pm EST)

What will you take away from this webinar?

Improving your conversion rate is really the key to boosting your profitability online - NOT buying more traffic. Most marketers use the “gut feel” approach to conversion rate optimization, or even worse, go along with what the Highest Paid Person in the Organization (HiPPO) says, or what the web designer thinks looks coolest. How much money is left on the table because nobody holds opinions to the fire? How much could you learn about your customers by actually testing your site elements?

But testing sounds complicated. It sounds time consuming. Where do you start? How can you get the boss on board - especially when he thinks things are just fine the way they are?

You’ll learn from Bryan:

• Where and how companies should begin testing
• How do you get corporate buy-in
• What exactly you should test
• Secrets to maximize returns on testing investment (tools, people and process)

Learn how you go from a culture of having to “always be right” to “always be testing!” Sign up for I Know I Should Be Testing, But… today!

We all want to know which sites, search engines and keywords are sending us traffic. But what about direct type in traffic? When people access your site URL by typing it in from memory, it can be a great indicator of your brand preference, success of your offline and online marketing efforts and customer satisfaction.

If you’re smart and lucky, you named your site your main-keyword-dot-com and you get search traffic from visitors who use their address bars as search engines. For example, a search on “reusable bags” sends you automatically to “reusablebags.com” which sells…you got it, reusable bags.

Other types of type-in visitors could be:

• Loyal, repeat customers

• Late stage buyers who’ve already visited your site through search, PPC, email or affiliate link but needed time to make the purchase decision or comparison shop
• First time shoppers pre-sold from a newspaper article, blog post, social media reviews or word-of-mouth

Type in traffic may even be your highest converting traffic. This post will cover how to create a direct traffic report in Google Analytics, and how to compare direct traffic conversion against your site average. Plus, you’ll learn how to exclude IP addresses for non-customer visits.

How to Access Direct Traffic Reports in Google Analytics

We’re interested in looking at trends in direct traffic to see if the strength and awareness of your brand is increasing over time. Here’s how you get the trend data:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account and click on “Traffic Sources” and “Direct Traffic” in the left hand menu.

You’ll want to make sure you change the default date range to your last quarter, or the past year:

After you change the first date box, don’t forget to click in the second date box once to make the “Apply” button live, then click “Apply.”

2. Changing your graph to “Month” will show you an average figure per month, rather than each daily or weekly record. Believe me, this is much easier to work with. Just remember the figures are monthly averages:

Rolling over any point will show you the month average. The above image is Photoshopped to show you the year over year growth in type-ins for Get Elastic. Comparing this July’s traffic over 2007, I see the blog’s direct visits grew 330%, from 2152 per month to 7142.

3. Compare your direct visit conversion rates to your site average. If you click the little arrow beside “Visits,” you can make some pretty useful graphs.

In this case, we’re going to compare the type in segment to overall Goal 1 conversions for the past year. (Stay in “Month” mode)

The graph will even show you the spread between site and segment (not just for type in, you can use this for other segments of traffic like search engine and keyword):

Don’t Forget IP Filters

But there’s likely another type of visitor you’re tracking - yourself! One thing that can really mess up this metric is tracking your own IP address and the IPs of others who frequent your site but are not customers. These visits could represent SEO, PPC, web design and IT consultants, employees’ home computers, the office IP block, SEOs and other web consultants, ecommerce bloggers (wink) and even competitors.

Direct traffic is not the only stat that suffers when you neglect to filter IP addresses. As mentioned in 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics, it also:

• Understates your conversion rates. Your direct type-ins could be your highest converting traffic source, but tracking visits from employees, stakeholders and consultants dilutes your real conversion rate for this segment.

• Overstates average time on page. You think your visitors are reading every jot and tittle of your copy, when it’s really your marketing team.
• Messes up your Content stats. Your “Top Content,” “Landing Pages” and “Exit Pages” will may be skewed by tracking the wrong visitors.

How to Filter IPs in Google Analytics

Once you’ve gathered all the IP addresses you need to exclude, go into your Analytics Settings, and find the Filter Manager in the bottom right:

You can also filter a range of IPs or use an advanced, cookies-based filter in your office which will compensate for dynamic IPs.

Then add each filter, naming each one intuitively so it’s easy to make edits in the future.

If you add a filter after reading this post, keep that in mind when you create reports in the future. Your direct traffic could drop significantly after creating the filter, and you can’t apply the filter today and change yesterday’s data.

Your trends may not show an upward trend, either. They may spike seasonally or after certain promotions you ran, help wanted ads or other “buzz” about your company. It really depends on you and your business.

Because the AdWords system rewards keywords with high click-through history (relative to competitors) with better ad positions and lower cost-per-click, click through rate is considered an important performance metric. Along with a keyword’s relevance to ad text and landing page copy, click through rate influences a keyword’s “Quality Score.”

Every PPC campaign is bound to have a few (or few thousand) keywords with low click through rates. You can identify them easily enough with web analytics and campaign reports, but what do you do with them?

You have at least 6 options:

1. Do nothing. You’re always going to have stinkers, why major on the minors?
2. Try to improve your Quality Score, which should improve ad position, which may positively affect click through rates.
3. Add negative keywords if you’re using broad or phrase matching.
4. Create a new Ad Group. Pull poor performers out of your current Ad Group and start over with better ad text and landing page.
5. Create an AdGroup for branding purposes. You don’t expect clicks, but using your company name in the headline is free exposure.
6. Pause or delete them. Either way, you stop bidding.

But before you take action based on click through stats alone, it’s important to dig deeper as to why the click through rate stinks.

Potential Reasons for Low Click Through Rate

If your average ad position is high (1-3), it’s probably not a Quality Score issue. It’s more likely one of the following:

• Your organic rankings for the keyword are so good, people aren’t clicking on your PPC ads, and the “double listing” of your PPC ad improves your organic click through rate! You pay nothing for the additional branding, and removing the keyword may even slightly hurt you. Do nothing, except maybe “do a little dance.”

• Your keyword has low commercial intent - meaning people aren’t interested in a purchase, they want information. Are you bidding on “wii news” because it got 22,000 searches in June? Kill the keyword phrase, and consider adding “news” as a negative keyword.

• Your keyword is broad or phrase matched with insufficient negative keywords in your campaign. Use yesterday’s Google Analytics hack to expose the actual search queries that triggered your ad, and add negative keywords as necessary.

If your average ad position is medium (4-10), you may have any of the above problems, plus:

• You’re in the Automatic Match beta. You have been automatically included and your ad is showing up for synonyms to your broad matched terms, while your competitors are not. If you are part of the beta, you will see a checkbox to opt out of Automatic Match from your Campaign Settings. Just opt out, don’t be a guinea pig for Automatic Match.

• Your ad copy stinks compared to your competitors. They have tested and found winning headlines, calls to action and display URLs. They display prices that are lower than yours. They offer guarantees and free shipping in their ad copy. Customers trust their domain names more than yours. Go to the SERPs and see for yourself. And test out different ad versions.

If your average ad position is low (10+)

• You may be bidding too low vs. your competition or for the Quality Score Google has assigned you. You may have set an initial CPC that was low and performed fine, but competition has entered the picture. Or Google simply decided to raise minimum bids for whatever reason. Increase bid as long as it makes sense to, and within what you can afford.

• Your Quality Score stinks because your keyword is in the wrong AdGroup. For example, putting “learning toys” in the “educational toys” AdGroup, means your ad might display with “Educational Toys” in the headline, pointing to a landing page that never references “learning toys”. The searcher is more likely to click on results that use “Learning Toys” - it’s more relevant, though it describes the same thing. And, your Quality Score suffers when your ad text is not as relevant to the keyword. Create new Ad Group, but don’t delete similar keywords like “early learning toys” unless they also have poor history. Otherwise, you lose that history.

• Your keyword is irrelevant to your products. Perhaps you’re a victim of sloppy outsourced keyword research, or a consultant that didn’t fully understand your business. Nix that keyword, and any others that don’t belong.

Can low CTR% be a good thing?

There may be instances you want to lower click through rates. For example, if you sell high end furniture, adding “From $2999″ to your ad for “teak outdoor patio set” will weed out the shoppers looking for Ikea-grade, who are thinking frugal but not expressing it in their search query. Plus, you’ll likely increase click through from luxury buyers. Your conversion rate, cost per conversion and ROI will improve. (It would make sense that Google factor conversion rates into Quality Score, since it is a better indicator of relevance than click through rate. Perhaps it’s one of the “other relevance factors” Google keeps to itself.)

What About Keywords With Low Conversion Rate or Negative ROI?

That’s a bit trickier.

Low conversion rate

Why spend money on keywords that don’t convert, right? The problem is, a keyword may have a 0% conversion rate but still be responsible for many sales. According to a 2005 comScore study, searchers who ultimately purchased online performed an average of 13 searches before converting, resulting in 12 non-converting searches for every sale. If the sales cycle exceeds your cookie expiration dates, some keywords may never get the conversion credit they’re due. (Great article on non-converting keywords by Frederick Marckini at Clickz)

What’s more, online searches can result in telephone orders, or even offline sales - which are even harder to reconcile, since there’s no cookie that tracks those.

Negative ROI

Keywords with negative ROI should be investigated. Are bids too high? Can landing pages be improved? Is broad match burning your budget and could keyword research help? They can even be a blessing. Lessons you learn from attempting to salvage negative ROI keywords may even benefit your campaign as a whole if you can apply “better practices” across the board.

If margin on the products or overall sales are low, you may decide to kill the keyword based on negative ROI to allocate budget for clearly profitable keywords and products.

The takeaway is to never kill a keyword simply because of a low metric. Always investigate the possible reasons for the low metric.

Our last post covered tips on using Google’s free Keyword Tool and how to apply your keyword discoveries to various aspects of marketing: SEO, PPC, site usability and even email marketing.

As promised, today we’re going to dig deeper into negative keyword research. The tools we’ll cover are the Google Keyword Tool, Google Suggest, Google Product Search and some surprises.

Negative keywords explained

If the term “negative keywords” is new to you, it refers to irrelevant or low converting keywords that you add to a pay-per-click campaign which tell the ad system not to show your ad when that keyword appears in a search.

To take advantage of the “long tail of search” (longer query combinations and product searches that are performed infrequently but can convert like crazy), marketers will bid on broad keywords using “broad matching” or “phrase matching.” If you phrase match “learning toys” your ad would appear for “learning toys for 3 year old toddlers.” Broad match would include even more searches like “best toys for motor learning.” The problem is, often times these match types cause you to show up for searches that have nothing to do with your products, or that don’t have a high “commercial intent” behind them. This hurts your overall campaign performance.

Why Google wants you to research negative keywords!

It’s in everyone’s best interest to prevent results like this:

Google makes more money if ads are relevant and searchers click on them instead of organic results, retailer can attract more clicks when there are less competing ads (especially from high budget software companies), and customers don’t get so confused.

Here’s how you use various Google tools to build out your negative keyword list to avoid your ad from appearing for irrelevant searches when using broad or phrase matching.

Google Keyword Tool

When using AdWords, you can access the Keyword Tool from inside your account.

This section assumes you understand how the Keyword Tool works. Yesterday’s post advised you to switch your match type to “Exact” to see exact search counts. Today we don’t care about keyword popularity. We just want to find as many negative keywords as we can.

If you switch the match type to “Negative,” all that changes is the square brackets from exact match are changed to the “-” sign before the keyword, so you can build your shortlist of negative keywords and import right into an AdGroup or Campaign, or save in text or .CSV format. This doesn’t change the keyword suggestions,

But remember that Google’s Keyword Tool does not give you enough negative keyword data, you still have to go digging further. You can manually add additional keywords, and then create one text file or .CSV

(Note that if you add “wooden” once, your ad will not appear for “wooden puzzles,” “wooden blocks,” etc. You don’t need to add “wooden + keyword” to your list. If you do carry some wooden toys, you should consider creating separate AdGroups for only the wooden toys you carry (better landing page selection, higher quality score, better ad text), for which you would add negative keywords for the wooden products you don’t sell - “blocks,” “puzzles” etc).

Google Suggest

Type in your keyword, e.g. “learning games” and Google will drop down suggestions.

Keep in mind 2 things:

1. The numbers that show are not keyword counts, but results of pages in Google’s index. The higher the number, the more competitive the keyword is, actually. But, because Google suggest shows long tail search terms, you can use this tool to pick out additional negative keywords the Keyword Tool didn’t bother to show.

2. You can’t see all the suggestions when typing in your broad match. You’ll need to go through the alphabet, first typing a space and then “a” - if no results, you continue until you hit a letter with suggestions:

Sometimes you have to apply this going-through-the-alphabet system on top of a suggestion, like “learning toys for a…, b…”

You’ll have to make notes on which keywords to add, maybe on a notepad. Make sure you add them to the appropriate campaigns - and you may discover new keywords to bid on in the process.

Google Shopping

Google Product Search is the shopping engine formerly known as Froogle, and confusingly labeled as “Shopping” from the links across the top of Google’s home page, or when you’re in Google Reader, or Gmail…

You can use Google Product Search to find negative keywords in a couple ways. Perform any keyword search, and scroll to the bottom to see more links, and check out the “Brand” and “Related Searches” links.

Clicking “More” expands the lists:

Adding brand names you don’t carry as negative keywords is very important. When a search query involves a brand name, it’s a strong signal that someone is looking to research or purchase a specific item, not check out other brands. So your general ad will have lower click through, which lowers the click through rate of your entire AdGroup, hurting all your keywords’ ad positions and possibly raising your cost-per-click.

Not to mention your landing page quality score will be lower if it doesn’t reference that brand. And, even if you do attract clicks, there a much smaller chance of conversion, though you still pay for the click. And if your broad matched keyword is very competitive, it could be an expensive click!

You can also turn to a review site like Buzzillions to glean brand names. Buzzillions aggregates reviews from retailers using Power Reviews, so there’s a good chance most if not all brands are represented. Simply go to Buzzillions, type in your keyword, and check out the brands listed in the left hand navigation:

(Numbers indicate the number of branded items with customer reviews, not number of customer reviews or keyword popularity.)

Or, use eBay for negative keyword research, as I wrote about for SEOmoz’ YouMoz Blog last year.

Google Analytics

Of course, using your Referring Keywords report, you can mine your Google Analytics data to weed out referral keywords that don’t relate to your business. And you can segment out non-paid and paid searches from your reports.

But wouldn’t you like to know which “long tail” terms your broad match and phrase match terms are bringing in? You can identify them with this Google Analytics hack.

This is the final installment of our PPC copywriting series. Part one discussed the importance of unique selling propositions in ad copy to communicate why a customer should buy from you rather than competitors. We followed this up with strategies for continual ad copy split testing. Today’s post assumes you’ve found a clear winning ad by testing one variable at a time, and you now want to test it against radically different copy.

I learned of this tip through a fantastic free video from Stompernet explaining the AdWords Triangulation Method (38:50 minutes through the video).

Here’s the danger in testing a winning ad (as your control) against experimental copy - if your new creative is a dud, you could lose 25-50% of your click through rate potential if your ads are showing evenly, depending on how many ads you’re testing.

A smarter approach recommended by Stompernet is to create 4 identical copies of your control ad, and one test ad. This ensures that your “safe” ad will show 80% of the time, and your test ad only 20%. Plus, the control ad’s solid click through history will cause it to rank at higher positions than brand new ads, so creating new copies reduces this bias.

I think you could also pause the control ad, and create 4 new copies to eliminate the bias altogether. But it’s nice to have one copy that’s going to achieve better positions at lower click through rates, especially if you’re continually testing. If you can tolerate more risk, you could create just one copy of your control so you’re running 3 ads - 66% of the time you’re running your control copy, 33% of the time you’re getting higher positions and lower CPC from the click through history of the established ad, and 33% is your experimental ad. Then you can segment out the control ad with the history to compare performance of your control copy vs. new copy, without the ranking bias.

Yesterday we talked about persuasive copywriting for PPC ads, and as promised, today we’re going to talk about strategies for split testing ads.

I’ve heard most PPC experts recommend you test headlines first, because they are most visible and are believed to influence click through rate more than body copy (because people have a tendency not to read things if they don’t have to). But I’m going to go against the gurus and suggest how you could test offers and value propositions first, using a hypothetical campaign for “wireless headphones.”

The Strategy

This approach uses Dynamic Keyword Insertion in headlines for your first few rounds of testing. You have more room to market yourself in ad copy than in the headline. You can test offers, calls to action, value propositions — copy that answers the question “why should I buy from your site?”

Dynamic Keyword Insertion means Google will match your headline to the searcher’s query. If Jimmy searches for “wireless head phones” or “cordless headphones” the ad would adjust itself accordingly for maximum relevance so long as that keyword is in your Ad Group and fits in the headline. If Jimmy searches “I’m looking for killer wireless headphones” (a long tail term), as long as “wireless headphones” is broad or phrase matched, a default keyword would display as the headline. In this case, simply “wireless headphones.” You’ll see an example of how to use this feature in the first screenshot, or read more in Google’s DKI tutorial.

But we’re not going to use keyword insertion in the ad text - there’s no need to keyword stuff. We want as much space for testing compelling offers, not redundant keywords. It’s not SEO, it’s not the year 2001 and we speak English here. Here’s an example of totally useless keyword repetition (real ad):

Alright, let’s get started with a hypothetical example of 5 rounds of PPC ad testing:

Round 1

First you’re going to pick 2-4 versions of an ad to run evenly against each other.

Headline: Use DKI for your headline

Ad Copy Line 2: Make sure you have your best unique value proposition included in the ad. I recommend using it as your second line, and using the top line as your testing line. A unique value proposition is the most compelling strength or offer you as a retailer have that sets you apart. If you offer free shipping, free returns, flat-rate shipping, no hassle returns, money back guarantees, have won awards, or anything else that builds trust or adds value - use it!

Ad Copy Line 1: Here’s where you microtest your ad. Many tests have found including numbers - whether a price, percentage or otherwise makes your ad stand out and improves click through. If you offer low prices, it may make your ad more attractive than others. If you want to deter bargain shoppers, a higher price can save you money on clicks and improve your conversion rate. You could here test price vs. non-price, but for this example, we’re going to test variations of showing a price.

Display URL: Some advertisers use dynamic keyword insertion at the end of the display URL (so long as it fits) to boost the keyword relevance, and it may or may not improve click through. An argument could be made that shorter URLs have higher click through. Also, www and non-www URLs may be tested. You really need to test this yourself, but not in round one. If you have too many variables in your testing, you won’t know whether it’s the ad text or the display URL that’s performing better.

In round one, we’re going to use www URLs for every ad variation, with capitalization, as there has been many studies that do suggest this gets higher click through. Since I want to play it safe here, we’re going to always use capitalization in every round.

Okay, here are the ads we’re starting off with - but there’s an error, can you spot it?

Answer: We’re testing pricing offers, so we want all else to be identical. We can test “name brands” in a later round.

Don’t forget to edit your campaign settings and select “show ads more evenly” so you can properly split-test.

Now we get to make up some results. Let’s say that “$29.99 and Up” had low click through rate of 0.41%, but the other two versions had 3.0% and 3.72%. And let’s assume a quick check with SplitTester.com’s confidence tool declared “From $29.99″ the statistical winner. Before you decide it’s a winner, make sure that it also has a good conversion rate - that these clicks end up buying. You don’t want to pick an ad only costs you money and doesn’t make you any.

If you have an ad that rocks click through rate AND conversion rate, you can move on to round 2.

Round 2

Pause the ads that didn’t “win,” and let’s ad new ads to test. If you delete your ads, you’ll never be able to see their history again.

Now I want to know the impact of URL versions as follows:

I’m going to pretend that the non-www, non-trailing keyword version performed best. On to round 3…

Round 3

I’m trying out more creative copy in the first line. I want to know what seems to be most compelling about wireless headphones. Is it range and clarity of sound? Is it better bass? Is it cool styles? Are name brands important?

OK, again, totally arbitrary - let’s assume the test resulted in “Stylish, Wicked Bass” as the winning creative. Can this be further tweaked?

Round 4

At this point (or in any round), there might not be a clear winner. You might want to keep testing different micro-variations until you get a definite star ad before you move onto the next round - testing headlines. Or, you might decide that they’re all performing decent and you can choose one you like best and move on to the next stage.

Round 5

Now I’m ready to test headlines. There are common modifiers PPC advertisers will use in headlines - the ones I’ve seen most are:

• unique

• discount
• cool
• cheap
• find
• buy
• compare
• on sale
• sale
• save on
• for less
• get
• need [keyword]?
• reviews
• [brand] [keyword]
• [keyword] [country]

You might want to try these, but remember that once you add the bargain hunter modifiers, you could attract clicks you don’t want (that’s why including price, even if higher than competitors helps). But definitely avoid testing different brand names. Unless they are doing specific branded search, you don’t want to use brand names in your headline. It makes your selection seem too restricted like you only offer one brand (less selection) or you have made a decision for them. Unless the searcher is familiar with the brand, it’s not effective. Your branded products should have their own Ad Groups, anyway.

If you’ve had a clear winning ad copy in previous rounds, you might want to inject these words into your headline, or try your unique value proposition in the headline, like “$0 Shipping” to stand out. Just make sure you’re not wasting ad copy by repeating your offer again in the lines of text. And use your dynamic keyword insertion headline as the “control” version - you want to see if headline variations outperform it.

Here’s an example test, can you spot the error?

If you noticed that one of the ads does not have “wireless headphones” in the ad text or headline, you’re correct. You don’t want to sacrifice keyword relevance for catchy headlines. Double check your ad text, it’s easy to forget the details.

Conclusion

Again, there are many ways you can approach your testing, this is just an example of how you could go about it. This strategy involves testing micro-changes. You can also test really different copy against each other. Tomorrow we’re going to show you how to reduce your risk when doing such tests.

Until tomorrow, here are the key points:

1. Keep testing. You can always “beat the control” - so long as you keep trying.
2. Don’t test more than one variable at a time.
3. Use your unique value propositions whenever you can.
4. Use prices when it makes sense, or other numbers.
5. Use SplitTester.com to check if your test has produced a winner or not.
6. Don’t make your decision based on click through rate alone. Make sure the ad converts.
7. Capitalize The First Letters of Your Words And URLs, It Is A Proven Strategy.
8. Avoid using brand names in headlines unless your ad group and landing page are targeted to only that brand.
9. Triple check your work for spelling and other errors. Make sure your landing pages are tied up correctly.
10. Keep reading Get Elastic for more tips for online marketing. Subscribe if you haven’t already!

Just a heads up for Google Analytics users, your data may not be accurate for April 30 - May 5, 2008:

“System Message: Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th

Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.

We sincerely apologize for this processing issue and are taking every precaution to prevent such disruptions from occurring again in the future. For more information, please read through our common questions.

The Google Analytics Team”

With PPC, unless you’ve tapped into niche long-tail keywords your search ads compete with 20 other links per search result page (organic and paid ads) - or even more if you count Google Maps or Google Shopping results.

And often the products and offers are so similar between retailers, what makes a shopper ultimately buy is which retailer he or she prefers.

That’s why you should include some statement that explains why someone should buy from you in your ad copy. You’re not just selling the product, you are selling yourself as a retailer. Most ads don’t do this at all, they just focus on the product.

What if Ads Were Ranked By Persuasion?

Let’s have a look at search ads for “coffee mugs.” If you search for this and refresh the page a few times, you’ll notice results bounce around quite a bit (we’ll explain why this is later). The left screenshot is how Google really ranked the ads when I performed the search, and the right side how I would rank the ads by effectiveness.

Now let’s deconstruct the ads:

Continue Reading:
PPC Advertising: Are You Selling Yourself In Your Ads? »