Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

Whilst Google Analytics will allow you to isolate paid/unpaid traffic sources within core reports, there are a number of reports where you won’t be able to see your PPC traffic as a separate source. One important report is to be able to isolate goal conversions by hour for PPC traffic only. This will allow you to manage your bidding strategy according to the most productive hours for conversions (a function not offered in Adwords itself).

In order to be able to isolate your PPC traffic from other sources and determine information such as goal conversions for PPC, you will need to create an additional website profile in your Analytics account for your domain, and then filter out all traffic that isn’t PPC.

Creating the PPC only filter is relatively straightforward. Click on ‘Analytics Settings’ then on ‘+ Add New Profile’. Then choose the second option ‘Add a Profile for an existing domain’. Locate the name of your new profile and click on ‘Edit’ and go to the ‘Filters Applied to Profile’ section and click on ‘Add filter’ option.

Choose ‘Add new Filter for Profile’ and give your filter a name such as ‘PPC Traffic Filter’. Then select ‘Custom Filter’ from the drop-down list and make sure that the second radio button is marked (this option is called: ‘include’). The ‘Filter Field’ drop down should have ‘Campaign Medium’ option selected and in the ‘Filter Pattern’ box enter: cpc|ppc. ‘Case sensitive’ should be selected as ‘No’. Then click ‘Save changes’ and that’s it!

Before you’ve finished, don’t forget to recreate the goals you had set up in your regular Analytics profile – this will allow you to track goal conversions for just PPC as well as the regular performance metrics from Adwords and Analytics. Google Analytics will now collect the same data as before, but discount every other source apart from PPC data. When you go to ‘Goals’ and ‘Total Conversions’ you can select the ‘Graph by Hour’ option and data you see will be for PPC traffic only. You can then manage your day-scheduling and bidding strategy around these

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Inclusion of your keyword phrase in both the title and body text of a PPC advert has been proven to be more effective than generic ad-copy. The fact that Google Adwords highlight search query keywords in PPC ads by making them bold is reassurance of this.

But how do you anticipate every keyword phrase that users might enter and do you create hundreds if not thousands of ad-groups with specific adverts to ensure there is a keyword-rich advert for each variation? You could do this, but fortunately there is a dynamic method of inserting specific keyword phrases into ad-copy saving you a lot of time – dynamic keyword inclusion.

Let’s suppose you sell t-shirts in a variety of styles and colours. You could create a separate ad group for each possible colour variation and group relevant keywords into this group. Alternative you could create a single advert with dynamic fields for specific keyword inclusion. Regardless of which colour a user enters, your advert will highlight the fact that you sell that colour and be more likely to receive their click.

The syntax for dynamic keyword inclusion is: {keyword:Cotton T-Shirts} with ‘Cotton T-Shirts’ being default text. Why include default text? When you have included broad-match keywords which include words other than your keyword phrase, Google will replace this with the default phrase. In our t-shirt example the search query ‘red coloured cotton t-shirts’ would show the ‘Cotton T-Shirt’ default if our target keyword on a phrase/exact match was ‘red t-shirt’. If the keyword was ‘red t-shirt’ then the dynamic advert would show ’red t-shirt’ as the title. Dynamic keyword inclusion isn’t a well known technique and dynamic inclusion within the body copy of a PPC ad is even less known. Our experience of using dynamic keyword insertion has been very successful, although it shouldn’t totally replace manual ad-copy completely but run as an integrated element to your campaign. We typically test a number of static creatives proportionally served alongside a dynamic creative to ascertain effectiveness.

There are also a number of refinements you can make to the dynamic insertion of the keyword into your advert. For example, by changing the first ‘k’ of ‘keyword’ to upper-case, this will make the first letter of the first keyword appear in upper case. By also making the ‘W’ of ‘keyword’ upper-case, this makes ALL first letters of keyword phrases upper case (i.e. modify to write as KeyWord). To make all characters appear in upper-case modify ‘keyword’ to ‘KEYWORD’ or for every character in just the first word modify ‘keyword’ to ‘KEYword’.

Using dynamic keyword insertion doesn’t direct improve your quality score, but through creating a more targeted advert for the user, this should improve your CTR and therefore indirectly the quality score (in turn lowering your bid).

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

On March 4th 2009 Google updated how Google Analytics imports AdWords data to improve security and provide greater control and convenience. If you’ve not already ‘linked’ your Adwords and Analytics accounts – you should do so to benefit from the additional information that is combined with the regular Adwords data.

Whilst Adwords will provide you with a range or reports relating to the immediate click activity such as word, advert and placement performance, click-through rates, cost-per-click etc. it doesn’t provide information about the subsequent visit to the target website (what happened next). Adwords takes up the baton and provides this information by adding additional metrics as well as combining the core Adwords metrics along with the on-site data.

Linking the two accounts is relatively easy. To do this go to the ‘my account’ tab in Google Adwords and in the ‘Account Preferences’ section, ensure that ‘Auto-Tagging’ is checked. Now click on the ‘Analytics’ tab in Google Adwords and click on ‘Analytics Settings’. Next to your account name, click on the link ‘edit account settings’ and on the following page check the box to ‘Share my Google Analytics data with other Google Products’ (in this case Google Analytics). Your account will now communicate with Google Analytics and share information to enrich Analytics reports’

To view your Adwords data in Google Analytics, click on the ‘Traffic Sources’ tab then ‘Adwords’ option. This will expand to show two further options ‘Adwords Campaigns’ and ‘Keyword Positions’. The keyword position option is very useful at evaluating the most effective advertising positions on a number of user-defined metrics and we covered this in an earlier blog entry Analysing Adwords Positions in Google Analytics.

The Adwords Campaigns tab initially shows the campaigns you have in your Adwords account. The default metrics shown are visits, pages-per-visit, average time-on-site, percentage of new visitors and bounce rate. Note the three tabs above the table containing the campaign names, the default data you are looking at is ‘site usage’. Clicking on the ‘goal conversion’ tab will show you the results for your Analytics defined conversions (not to be confused with Adwords conversions). You will be able to see which campaign drives the best performance on 1-4 goals defined in Analytics as a percentage as well as a per-goal-value if you defined goal values at set-up. Clicking on the ‘clicks tab’ shows you the familiar Adwords metrics such as impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, revenue-per-click and margins if you have this configured in Adwords. You can also assess the hourly breakdown for Goal Conversions such as sales or lead generation (details in our earlier blog entry: Analysing Hourly Traffic and Google Adwords Conversions)

Clicking on a ‘campaign’ will drill down to the ‘ad groups’ within that campaign, showing the same default metrics and again, the goal and click data is available at an ad-group level. Clicking on an ad-group drills down to the individual keywords, again with the default metrics plus goal conversions and click data from Adwords.

As you can see, combining the data from both Google Adwords and Google Analytics provides a very powerful picture of the effectiveness of your PPC activity allowing you to not only determine the most effective words for driving quality traffic to your site, but also for determining which is the optimal position for advertising and the times too.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

It was once argued that the content network on Google Adwords was unfocused and would simply burn budget whilst skewing your CTR figures with high impression counts and low click activity. Until relatively recently we rarely used the content network for our client PPC campaigns, preferring to direct our attention to Google search and search partner channels. But things have changed for the better and Google have introduced content network Placements giving the advertiser the ability to hand-pick specific sites that have signed up to the content network for advertising.

To begin using the Placement option, click on the ‘Placements’ tab that is located between the ‘Keywords’ and ‘Ad Variations’ tabs. There you will see a brief explanation of the Placement process. Click on the ‘Find and add Placements’ button. Placements work on your existing campaign keyword and phrase portfolio, although you can vary the CPC for the placements separate from your primary search and content network bids.

There are three ways to locate appropriate placements for your requirements – ‘browse categories’, ‘describe topics’ and ‘list URLs’. The browse categories option allows you to select a broad topic such as ‘animals’ or ‘automotive’ and then it drills down to a number of sub-sets with corresponding placements. There are in total 361 topics listed. With the ‘List URLs’ option you enter a URL to see if it is participating in the Adsense programme. Describe topics is our favourite option, as this allows you to immediately narrow the search to your chosen keyword phrases.

As an example if we were running a campaign for a client that sold model railway products we would enter keyword phrases such as ‘model railway’ and ’model trains’. This returns a number of placement options that sound perfect for our campaign such as ‘newrailwaymodellers.co.uk’, ‘ukmodelshops.co.uk’ and ‘modelr.co.uk’. Next to the URL of the placement you can see the ad formats available. It should be noted here that you aren’t limited to just text adverts, on many sites you can also choose display advertising formats or even video ads. You can also see the impressions per day figure for each site so you can gauge traffic volumes. When you have selected the placements most appropriate to your product or service, click ‘add’ for each site and then click ‘save and continue’. In our case we are just planning to show text adverts and we are asked to set a CPC for the placement portfolio. At this stage you just enter a single figure and can change this site-by-site later. Then return to the campaign and click on the ‘Placements’ tab and you will see your chosen sites displayed in alphabetical order.

To change the bid amount and also the destination URL for your placements click on ‘edit placements and bids’ and then modify your campaigns to the following format shown with our three model train sites. We have assumed a £1 generic bid for placements but we want to modify two Placements above this and change the landing page for the third site:

modelr.co.uk ** 1.20
newrailwaymodellers.co.uk ** 1.35
ukmodelshops.co.uk ** http:// www.youdomain.co.uk/yourpage.htm

The bid is changed by entering a space followed by two asterisks then another space and then bid amount without a currency symbol. The destination URL also follows a space and then the full http prefixed URL.

You can run placements as well as general content network sites determined automatically by the Adwords system. However, if you want to limit your content network exposure to just those sites that you have selected as Placements then go to the Campaigns screen and select Edit campaign settings near the top of the screen and go to the ‘Network and Bidding’ section and ‘Content’ subsection where you can select the radio button for ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target’.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Many advertisers who use Google Adwords as their PPC tool are unaware that there is more than one bidding strategy that they can take advantage of within the system. Currently there are three types:

• > manual bidding
• > conversion optimised bidding
• > budget optimised bidding

For the purpose of this blog entry, we’ll be concentrating on the conversion optimised option.

With manual bidding it is the responsibility of the advertiser to determine their maximum cost-per-click according to their required marketing ROI (return on investment). For example, if you make £30 profit on a £100 transaction and require £20 after marketing costs, then you cannot afford to spend more than £10 on acquiring a customer through PPC. If your conversion rate is 20% of click-throughs then this means that you cannot afford to bid higher than £2 per click on average as this will take your costs above the £10 limit and eat into your profit margin.

With a portfolio of active keywords into the hundreds or thousands, this can become a very time consuming task to constantly monitor your conversion rates and tune your CPC to ensure you remain profitable. The CPA bidding tool takes away this headache by managing per-keyword bids according to historical data from your campaign, thereby saving you time and ensures you limit your acquisition costs.

When conversion optimiser was launched there was an initial requirement for 300 goal conversions to be registered within 30-days which was a tall-order for many smaller advertisers. Currently the UK account management interface states a requirement of 50 conversions in the last 30-days. Whilst this reduction in the required conversion total means more advertisers will be able to take advantage of this feature, there is also a school-of-thought that says the more data collected – the more accurate the Adwords system will be at meeting your requirements. In your Google Adwords account the system will have already determined if you meet the minimum conversion threshold and will either show the strategy as an active option or greyed out.

If you are eligible, the Adwords system will provide recommendations as to what the CPA should be (based on the historical data it has). The system then calculates a maximum CPA for your keyword phrase by dividing the maximum CPC by the conversion rate. One criticism that has been made against this feature is that it can’t factor in ROAS (return on advertising spend) at a product level. For example, If you have a lower converting product with a high profit margin and a higher converting product with a lower profit margin, the system would most likely select the higher converting product over the lower one, despite your business realising a better return on the lower converting product. If your account determines you are eligible to use conversion optimised bidding you might want try it and see if it can save you time and effort managing your account.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements.

There are four match types in Google Adwords campaigns which dictate how inclusive or exclusive the keyword matching is. This provides a useful way of further targeting your user traffic, especially on short-tail, higher traffic phrases and determining further keywords. The four match types are: broad match, phrase match, exact match and negative match. The default match type in Google Adwords is broad match.

Broad match is the most inclusive match-type and allows your ad to show if the keyword phrase words are entered by the user in any and with any other words before or after the keyword phrase. For example, if the keyword is ‘broadband modems’ then the search phrase ‘cheap broadband modems’ and ‘buy broadband computer modems’ would trigger the advert.

Phrase match is a more targeted and restrictive match type than broad match and requires the search query to contain the keyword phrase in specific order. although it does allow for additional words to appear before and after the keyword phrase. With our example of ‘broadband modems’ as  a keyword, phrase match typing means that the search query ‘broadband computer modems’ will not display the advert because ‘broadband’ and ‘modem’ do not appear directly together as in the keyword phrase. Phrase matched keywords are denoted in Google Adwords with quotation marks either side of the keyword phrase. Our example keyword would appear as “broadband modems” to be a phrase match type.

Exact match is the most targeted and restrictive match type in Google Adwords. It requires the keyword phrase and only the keyword phrase to be the search query and in that exact order. The example keyword would only be triggered if the search query was nothing more than ‘broadband modems’. The ad would not show for ‘cheap broadband modems’, ‘modems broadband’ or ‘broadband computer modems’. Exact match keywords are denoted in Google Adwords with brackets either side of the keyword phrase. Our example keyword would appear as [broadband modems] to be an exact match type.

The forth match type is negative matching. A negative keyword is applied at the ad group level and applies to all keyword phrases in that group. For example if your ad group used the keyword ‘cheap flights’ but you didn’t offer flights to france and spain then the negative match inclusion of france and spain would exclude your advert being displayed if the search phrase included your primary keyword phrase plus the negative phrase (e.g. cheap flights to spain). You could then keep the primary phrase on a broad or phrase match type without generating traffic for the countries you couldn’t offer flights to.

In practice many campaigns begin with keywords using broad or phrase match to ascertain impression volumes and effectiveness, then they are narrowed to an exact match by running search query reports and determining more targeted phrases that you haven’t initially included. Google Analytics data can further help by identifying search phrases.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements.

All too often, user testing is carried out pre-build on a site development project then forgotten about. Successful Internet marketing relies on the marketer’s ability to continually test, modify and re-test campaigns in order to optimise for best results. But in addition to functionality within the online promotional tools, this requires flexibility in the site structure (including content management system environments).

For example, standard user testing will confirm vital information such as the optimal pixel resolution for development in order to ensure that promotional copy is visible without unnecessary scrolling. However, variations in promotional messages, welcome pages, special offers etc. require the flexibility to create multiple pages for testing and this is sometimes a tall-order with developer time at a premium.

If you’re lucky enough to either have a flexible CMS or friendly developer sitting nearby, there are a great many AB tests that can be carried out through almost every digital marcomms channel and provides essential data in order to optimise campaigns. Some can be divorced from the website itself (such as subject line testing in emails or ad-copy testing in PPC) whilst others rely on custom website pages being created as landing-pages tailored to the user.

• > PPC – Google Adwords provide rotation ad-serving where you can create two similar adverts with different landing pages (denoted in the full-path URL). This allows you to differentiate the conversion rates to an assigned call-to-action
• > Email marketing – most ASP broadcasting solutions provide excellent potential for AB testing. Subject lines, ‘from’ names as well as image/copy positioning and click-through URLs can all be varied then tracked to determine the optimal output on test segments prior to a full list mailing
• > Display advertising – multiple creatives served proportionally on an ad-server can yield vital data on performance from CTR to completion of a call-to-action

AB testing should be a continual process and allows you to get best return on your marketing investment – without trying to second-guess your users preferences.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a range of campaign planning and implementation services including testing and refinement with AB testing. To discuss your requirements contact us  and see how we can help you realise your online business potential.