ClickEquations Blog

Last week’s announcement of AdWords Search Funnels is an imporant milestone, legitimizing and expanding the visibility, role, and in many cases capabilities of PPC revenue attribution.

Reviewing the basic features and watching the introductory video, it’s clear that the Google folks really thought about this and put a lot of time into the development of these features. They’ve brought and advanced topics to the masses of AdWords advertisers, and included new capabilities that do more – in some ways – than any other attribution system I’ve seen.

But in reviewing the basic announcement information, an issue came to mind worth thinking about before and separate from a detailed feature review.

Search Funnels Require AdWords Conversion Tracking

You can’t use Search Funnels unless your site is tagged for AdWords Conversion Tracking. This is also true of the Content Network View-Through Conversions, AdWords Conversion Optimizer, and other features.

Obviously, this is a reasonable technical requirement – they need to know about the conversion to make calculations related to the conversion.

But let’s say in public what everyone talks about in private – do you really want Google to see your conversion information? Does it hurt us collectively as advertisers every time someone shares their conversion information with Google?

Certainly they are using this data for good purposes in terms of these features.

But are they also using this data against you and all of us?

The Fear

I often refer to AdWords as a game. It’s a game we play on Google’s board and against both other competitors and against Google.

And Google makes up the rules. They share whatever portion of the rules that they choose, and hide many others. They also get to see, in large part, your hand. They have tons of data that you don’t have. Don’t ever get the idea that anything about what is happening is fair. It’s unfair.

But you agreed to the rules and realities when you ‘decided’ to play.

So given that Google is making up the rules, taking your money, seeing your bids and clicks, setting your Quality Score, deciding when your ads are shown and when your competitors ads are shown, seeing when you make budget shifts, watching your CTRs raise or drop, and everthing else, do you really want them – your dealer and competitor – to know how many items you sell, and the amount of money you sell them for?

Here’s one fear: If they know you make a lot of money off of certain keywords, isn’t it possible that they decide you’re not paying enough for the clicks on those keywords? Might the minimum bid or quality score required to be on top instead of right suddenly or slowly rise?

We don’t know anything about how they decide how many ads to show on a specific keyword (some get none, some get 3, some get 8). We don’t know all the factors of quality score which drive our costs. We don’t know how they set the minimum prices for either eligibility for the auction, or positioning on top.

Do you really believe that directly or indirectly, all the ways they’ll study and process the info they learn from tracking conversions and revenue won’t impact the formulas that decide these things in the future?

Google: want to categorically state that it’ll never have any impact?

Here’s another fear: If they see that you really are making a ton of sales and revenue from certain keywords, might there not someday be a Google branded business that becomes a direct competitor to you?

The absolute fact is that as Google ads features and enters markets, there is less reason for searchers to leave Google and the creep of that progression makes it easy to envision Google Travel or Google Autos or Google Real Estate or Google Movie Tickets or Google Cell-Phones (oops, too late), or Google (paid) videos or Google e-books, or Google anything else. And if you’re Google, why not go into businesses you know are profitable? And for which you even know which keywords lead to profit.

About 80% of that seems highly unlikely. But you can’t look at the natural progression and expansion of the company and believe that all of it is. I’m clearly stating that most of that is a very paranoid view and one I don’t hold, but I can’t say exactly which sliver isn’t.

Anyone want to assure or guarentee what business segments Google won’t move into for the next 10 years?

Yes, We Benefit Too

Of course, each of us get great benefit from sharing the conversion data with Google. All of the conversion dependant features mentioned above are fantastic. This is the rub. This is why it is, or at least may be, a deal with the devil but a deal none-the-less.

The point of this post is to at least make you aware of the risk, of the issue, so you can include that information in your thinking and decision making process. It’s not a no-brainer.

In fact, the truth is it’s pretty darn hard to resist what they’re offering. But it’s easy to see why you should. I really think it’s a very tough decision.

The cards are stacked in Google’s favor. In many ways the features they’re providing with Search Funnels and Conversion Optimizer and View Through Conversions, and many more to come I’m sure are almost necessary to play the expensive game we’re playing.

And the fact is that as soon as one of your competitors opts-in, and Google has the data, they essentially may as well have yours. Being the last hold-out probably doesn’t accomplish very much.

On the other hand, I’ll make a highly charged and sensationalistic analogy in the interest of controversy that may drive blog traffic – it’s a little like buying oil that we all know finances our enemies. You don’t want to do that, but you don’t want to walk to work either. Tough call.

The Way Out

As a final thought, I’ll offer a solution. Google could share via their API all the info that third parties (like ClickEquations) need to provide these same capabilities using our non-Google conversion tracking. Today they use proprietary and secret data that we don’t have, so we can’t offer fully competitive features.

For example, ClickEquations already includes powerful attribution and many of the capabilities just released in Search Funnels. But they can show funnels based on impressions and we can’t. If they would just kindly make keyword-level impression view data trackable by us and our competitors, we’ll be happy to offer similar functionality. The same is true for view through conversions – we can’t offer it because they don’t make it technically possible.

Google has a history of addressing these issues via increased openness. Slowly but surely. Their opt-out tracking capabilities for users, and the Google Analytics opt-out plug-ins currently being tested come to mind. These aren’t exactly the same kind of requests, but I’m writing this realizing that Google probably would consider and eventually will share this data with us.

They Have The Right

And given the way this post could be read, I’ll also clarify that I don’t think or mean to imply that Google is doing anything that isn’t legitimate, aggressive, and appropriately self-serving business practice. They’re supposed to grow their company and revenues, offer new features to clients, improve their competitive position, and even find what they believe to be the balance in using the power they obviously have. I think they do all of these things extraordinarily well.

But those of us on the advertiser side of the table should at least make our decisions equally thoughtfully.

The AdWords auction is not a purely economic auction. If it were the high bidder would always win.

But in the AdWords auction the high bidder can wind up in 1st, 3rd, or 5th position – or even wind up out of the game with nothing.

Imagine a new kind of eBay auction; one where you could browse for a searcher or search query you wanted to have see your ad, and enter a bid. The auction would go on for a while – maybe a few hours – and you would even be notified when you were or were not the high bidder.

Like many eBay auctions there would be some jockying for position as the end nears. First you’re you’re the high bidder, then you aren’t, and then you are again.

Now pretend that as time expires, it turns out you were in fact the high bidder. But just before the display updates to say ‘You’ve Won’, a funny thing happens: eBay applies a secret multiplier to everyone’s bid. Some bids are multipled by 3, while others are multiplied by .3. The ranking order of the results is completely transformed.

You – the ‘high bidder’ – winds up in 3rd place. Someone with a rather low bid vaults to the top and they’re declared the winner. They pay only a fraction of what you had offered and yet win the auction and claim the prize.

If you were bidding in these kinds of ebay auctions, once you understood the game, would you focus purely on your bid?

Wouldn’t you want to learn all you could about the secret multipier and try in influence that? Wouldn’t you feel a little silly just bidding in earnest as if there were a direct relationship between your bid and the result?

Ignoring The Secret Number

Yet make no mistake, this is how the AdWords auction works. Everyone bids in the same currency (effectively) but that bid is then transformed by a secret number before the winner (or rankings in this case) is declared.

The secret number, in this case, is quality score.

Your bid is not multiplied by quality score, but quality score transforms the results of your bid none-the-less.

To see the actual way bids are calculated, read Secret Truth #10 in the book.
(Note: the download sign-up will have some downtime today, 3/27, sorry)

Bids impact, but don’t drive, CPC. Repeat that to yourself a few times. “My bid does not drive my CPC – My bid is only one factor that impacts my CPC.”

My View of Bidding

I’ll admit it. I kinda have a chip on my shoulder about bidding.

I’m not a big fan of over-simplification to begin with (hence the whole ‘high-resolution’ thing) and with bidding there are only two modes – over-simplified and mind-bendingly complicated. Guess which one most everyone chooses?

As described earlier, the idea of bidding-for-position is obsolete and inaccurate. And now we see that bidding does not directly define CPC.

Bids indicate the maximum amount you want to pay for any single click. But they’re only one factor in the determination of your ad position, and beyond that they’re not a factor in the calculation of CPC.

None of this is to say that bids don’t matter. They matter a lot. They have an impact – changing them has an impact and not changing them has an impact.

Plus, bids are concrete. Bids are accessible. Bids are easy to understand, even if they summarize or stand for something that on further inspection isn’t entirely true.

What Bids Do and Don’t Do

There are four key steps in the AdWords Auction. Let’s examine the role your bid plays in each:

1. When someone executes a search, quality score is calculated for the keywords in your account which may be eligible for the auction. Bid plays no role in the calculation.
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2. AdWords determines whether or not your ad (via your keyword) is eligible to be in the auction. Bids are a direct factor, because there is (despite the retirement last year of the Minimum Bid metric) a minimum bid to trigger display for any particular query. This is by no means the only eligibility requirement.
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3. AdWords calculates Ad Rank to determine your position in the results. Bid is direct factor, as discussed in Secret Truth #9.
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4. CPC is calculated to define how much you’ll pay if the ad is clicked. Bid isn’t involved beyond via the role it played in the deciding your Ad Rank. Really this is a Quality Score driven issue.

Putting Bids In Their Place

The punchline is that bid management and quality score management should, at worst, get equal attention in the process of managing paid search.

A year or two ago, almost nobody was talking about let alone working on quality score. Now the topic gets a lot of attention, but the confusion remains thick and the specific action steps are often not well defined. Quality score reporting has improved dramatically, but there still is a lot of information that we’re missing. We’re making progress, but there remains a long way to go.

There are two more Secret Truths concerning quality score, and two more concerning bidding, so we’ll cover more specific ground in those sections of the book and in future posts in this series.

Earlier I asked you to stop thinking about position purely as a result of bidding. Here I’m suggesting that you also stop thinking about cost-per-click as a direct bid result as well. These shifts will help you to have reasonable expectations for bidding, and to remember to consider and pay appropriate attention to qualty score in order achieve your position and cost related goals.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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Another great misconception, or over-simplification, of paid search is the idea that you bid for position.

This is a deeply held belief. It seems hard to shake even for those who know better.

But as many people know, position is determined by both bid and quality score. Yet how many thousands of discussions, presentations, webinars, books, blog posts, software interfaces, and tweets talk about bidding for position as if it were the only factor?

How can you discuss bidding and position and not mention quality score? Ignorance and denial account for a lot of it. A yearning for simplicity is no doubt another factor. But saying it does not make it so.

• Position is determed by a number called Ad Rank
• Ad Rank is = bid x quality score
• Most keywords display at a huge range of positions in any given day or time period
• The quality score used in the calculation is unique to the query and go of the searcher
• Quality score is ONLY calculated when the query is identical to the keyword (match types and negatives don’t matter)
• The impact of landing page quality score is not considered AT ALL in calculating position
• There are special rules and requirements to jump to the ‘top’ from the ‘right’ (link)

These just some of the facts.

Yet today and every day, tens of thousands of paid search advertisers will look at their average positions, and their bids, and on those facts alone decide to change their bids. Or they’ll let algorithms that don’t consider quality score do the same.

In many cases it’s like filling the bucket faster instead of filling the hole.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Know This?

Many of the ‘Secret Truths’ make me wonder if the engines intentionally mislead advertisers. That probably could be the subject of a couple of good posts someday. Most of the time I come to the conclusion that they just tell a an over-simplified version of the truth, like most marketers do, and let everyone run with it in the wrong direction.

It’s easy to see why the engines like all the misconceptions about bidding, and position, and quality score. Every time you don’t understand they make more money. The fact that they didn’t intentionally mislead you is an awfully nice coincidence.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Act Accordingly?

What gets measured gets done. That’s a useful old saying for anyone in online marketing. Ad rank is not measured, or reported. That’s probably reason #1 that more PPC managers don’t obsess about it.

Bids are concrete and easy to change. It’s easy to understand spending more and spending less, and accepting that one buys more and the other buys less. Quality Score is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. We’ll visit those waters again in the next few posts.

The whole thing reminds me of the joke about looking for your keys where the light is rather than where you lost them. Bidding is clear and simple. Quality Score is confusing and hard. So lots of time is devoted to bidding.

The truth is that bid management and quality score management should have equal billing, and Position/CPC management should be recognized as being the result of doing both.

It starts with a new mindset: You don’t bid for position. You Ad Rank for position.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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We’ll be at SES New York next week in full force.

If you haven’t had a chance to see ClickEquations V2 this is a great chance for an in-depth demo.

Or just to say hello.

• Come visit the ClickEquations Booth.
• Get your free printed copy of The 21 Secrets of High Resolution PPC (at the booth, you have to ask…)
• I’m speaking on the ‘PPC Super Tools‘ session on Weds at 2:15pm
• We’ll be behind a glass at all the best parties.

See you in New York.

Match types are deceptively simple controls. They’re relatively easy to understand, and almost everyone takes advantage of their basic capabilities.

But the difference between using match types and mastering match types is enormous.

Match types can be used like a machete – to clear large areas while making sure that nothing is missed, or they can be used like a scalpel – to target very specific queries while leaving adjacent queries undisturbed. The best paid search managers use them as both.

Match Types Decide Who’s In Control

The great simplification of a keyword-biased view of paid search is the suggestion that adding keywords to your account determines the people who will see your ads and be attracted to your landing page or website. Keywords determine who might see your ads, but match types decide who will see them.

Keywords without match types are indescriminate. Keywords without match types give the search engines free rein to show your ads, and attract clicks, from just about anyone they want to.

This is because by default keywords are set on broad match. Broad match means that you want the search engine to match your keyword to any related search query. Deciding what is ‘related’ is the job of the search engine, and from a pure semantic and contextual point of view, they do a remarkable job of it.

But for broad really is broad. Most keywords have a massive range of related search queries. And without suggesting malice, the engines have a vested interest in making that range as wide as possible.

As advertisers, we have exactly the opposite goal. We want to show our ads, and pay for clicks, from the narrowest possible range of related queries – just wide enough to include the folks who actually want what we’re offering. If nobody else saw our ads it would be fine with us.

Therein lies the rub. Broad match keywords are huge nets designed to catch everything in their targeted areas – the good, the bad, and the ugly. So they’ll usually deliver some great visitors mixed in with a lot of not-great visitors.

The non-broad match types, by contrast, create focus. When used properly, they exclude the unrelated and inappropriate.

The bottom line is this: broad match puts the engine in control. Phrase and exact match take control back.

Three Rules of Broad Match

Broad match keywords serve an important purpose, and you should use them. But I’d suggest three rules:

1. Use broad match keywords as much as you have to, and no more.
2. Use any specific broad match keyword only as long as you have to and no longer.
3. While using any broad match keyword, try to continually drive down its volume (and probably its cost)

Broad match keywords exist because as a starting point it’s hard to know which search queries people use to express a specific intent. Without this knowledge you have no way of directing search ads towards those people. Broad match keywords give you a way of advertising to them.

The cost is imprecision and therefore waste. Sometimes the good will outweigh the bad, othertimes it won’t. But in either case, the use of broad match should be a starting point and nothing more.

Once you see the search queries that broad match attracts, it’s time to start query-mining:

• Add negative keywords
• Add new phrase and exact match keywords
• Adjust bids on all three match types to reflect their relative importance and returns

Every step along the way, you catch less queries by accident and more queries on purpose.

The Match Type Keyword Trap

Some time ago I wrote a lot about match type and a strategy for using multiple match types together for the same keywords. If you haven’t yet, get our Match Type Keyword Trap whitepaper for details of how to use match types properly.

This work is perhaps the most important campaign optimization a paid search manager can perform. The benefits are extensive:

• You stop paying for bad queries
• You catch a higher percentage of the good queries
• You can pay (bid) appropriately for both the good ones (with high exact match bids) and the bad ones (with lower broad match bids.
• Your new keywords will raise impression share
• Your new keywords will increase impression and click volume
• Your new keywords should earn better quality scores (long story that, we’ll get to it in an upcoming post) which drives position up, cost down, and therefore profits higher.

Alternatively, you can just leave those broad matches alone and hope the people doing unrelated queries just stop searching…

Measuring Progress

The proper use of match types is so important that all paid search managers should measure use and progress over time. Keep track of the percentage of revenue coming from broad match in each of your campaigns. If it’s over 50%, chances are you have a lot of work to do. The right number varies by business but around 30% is probably a good general target.

In ClickEquations you can use Best Practices to warn you when a campaign has over a specified percentage of broad match revenue. You can also see cost, revenue, and clicks by match type using the Match Type analysis report in ClickEquations Analyst.

Summary

Broad match is a powerful tool, but like many others needs to be used wisely and not over-used.

For too long in PPC the assumption was that keywords should be on broad match unless it was perfectly clear or proven that they or versions of them should be promoted or duplicated to the more specific match types. It’s time to start turning that thinking around, and require keywords to prove that they should be on broad match instead.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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A few weeks ago I sat down with Avinash to discuss the ideas behind the new Best Practices features in ClickEquations.

In this 5 minute video Avinash shares his thoughts on the benefits of having your paid search software find risk and opportunity within your account, and have those alerts waiting for you when you’re ready to go to work in your account.

Does your paid search management platform offer best practices? Shouldn’t you sign up for a ClickEquations Demo?

As all the navel gazing that occurs on this blog about quality score and match types suggests, it’s hard to deny that I’m a search geek.

I’m not particularly proud of it, but it’s part of my job.

Another element of my job is creating awareness for ClickEquations, as a product and a brand.

So when our friends and competitors at Marin Software held their 2nd Annual ‘Search Geek’ contest, it seemed a great opportunity.

The plan was simple: I would slip into the contest, win, and then enjoy the humor and publicity of having been the founder of a competitive product and the winner of the Marin Software contest.

It didn’t turn out that way.

The Contest

With about 30 minutes to spare in the month-long event, taking a few minute break from Olympic Bobsledding, I sat down and signed in.

Now I’ll admit that the part of the plan about winning was based on pure ego and really was more of a belief that I had at least had a shot at winning.

Objectively, I know a tremendous amount about paid search, with an emphasis on the trivial and esoteric elements of how the systems and options work. I clearly have my areas of weakness – I focus mostly on Google, don’t have a ton of experience managing international campaigns, have some mathematical limits based on a childhood trauma, and only dabble in the content and placement networks.

I know there are at least one or two dozen folks out there (maybe way more) who would likely cream me on a real comprehensive test. Geddes, Szetela, Conner, Michie, and others come quickly to mind and there are certainly many others that I haven’t met. But I figured most of them aren’t likely to enter, and this is just a little game, so why not. I could win.

And then the questions started.

• The test was hard.
• It was well conceived.
• It was diverse in scope.
• And it was fun.

But 3 or 4 minutes in, my delusion of winning was gone. I was guessing here and there, straining to figure out answers in what seemed like way too much time, and generally being humbled as a search geek.

My downfall wasn’t what I’d consider the core paid search stuff, but the history of Google, questions about tags from display and analytics vendors I’d never used, some international stuff, etc. All fair questions for the way the contest was designed and promoted.

Oh Well. I emailed news of my failure to the few folks who knew of my plan.

The Results

So I was surprised yesterday to get the email.

It said that I’d made the top 50 out of 1200 participants. It turns out I came in 31st. Better than most but below 30 others.

My hearty congratulations to Tim Ossmo (the winner), and other 30 who showed me that I really need to spend more time learning about search

And thanks to Marin Software + SearchEngineLand for designing and running a fun event.

PS: I am geek enough to have written an ebook about paid search.
Download Your Free Copy Today

Managing paid search accounts is in many ways an exercise in prioritization. There are endless opportunities to expand and refine your account, run reports and analyze data, or make changes and conduct tests.

The only limits are hours in the day, and days in the week.

But not everything you might spend time on is equally valuable, or even has equal potential. So we thought ClickEquations should make it easy to find and focus on critical aspects of your PPC accounts.

That’s why we’ve added four new ‘One-Click Segmentation’ features to ClickEquations V2 which went live last week:

• One-Click Brand Keyword Segmentation
• One-Click Head Keyword Segmentation
• One-Click Content Network Segmentation
• One-Click Custom-User-Defined Segmentation

Each of these enables you to quickly isolate the performance history and then take action on important subsets of your account.

Brand Keywords Are Special

As discussed in our ‘Success Through Negative Brand Keywords‘ post last week, keywords that contain your brand terms and phrases are distinct from your non-brand keywords, and in many ways they should be managed differently.

But many accounts still have brand keywords scattered across many ad groups and campaigns. Wouldn’t it be great to see them all (and nothing else) with just a click?

Now you can. Just choose ‘Brand Keywords Only’ from the Filters and Views menu.

You’ll near-instantly be presented with a list of all the brand keywords in your account. You can review their performance and make any necessary changes. You can even create and apply additional custom filters to run on your brand-only keywords.

Head Keywords Are Special Too

The concept of ‘head’ and ‘tail’ has got a lot of press in the last year. And we all know that a relatively small percentage of our keywords earn the lion’s share of our revenue and consume the lions share of our cost.

This has lots of implications for paid search, but most important is the fact that most of us don’t allocate our relatively precious resource, time, in proportion to the results various keywords produce. In other words, we don’t spend enough time fishing where the fish are.

Wouldn’t it be great to click that mouse of yours and see only that small segment of keywords that are driving the vast majority of your revenue? Or clicks? Or costs?

Now you can. Just choose ‘Head Keywords Only’ from the Filters and Views menu.

You even get to control the definition of ‘Head Keyword’ that you wish to use. You set the target percentage, the key metric, and the lookback period.

The results are amazing. For the account we use for demonstrations – which is a real working paid search account with about 170K keywords in AdWords, just 281 drive 80% of the revenue. Those are an important 281 keywords to focus on, which is the point of this feature.

Content is not Search

We’ve also recently discussed on this blog the distinctions between search advertising and content network advertising. Given those thoughts, it makes sense that we’d support easy segmentation of search and content within ClickEquations.

So now we do. Just choose Search Network or Content Network from the Filters and Views menu.

Any campaigns that aren’t in the group you’ve chosen, will disappear. You can review results, navigate freely, and make any additions or changes.

Most importantly, you can focus. You can think about the campaigns in terms of the distribution network. And not get confused or distracted by the entirely different numbers that come from other network type.

Custom Saved Filters

The one-click access to brand keywords, head keywords, and search or content campaigns is a great start towards making it easier to focus on what’s important within your paid search accounts.

But in the complication of paid search, there are many other segments you may also want to access quickly.

So we’ve also added very powerful named and saved filters. You can define nearly any combination of account structural elements (like ad group or keyword attributes) plus performance results (such as click-through rates or quality scores) and status flags (including paused or disapproved) and even timeframes within which elements were modified. Then just enter a name and save it for easy future application.

These filters can be used anywhere in the account – they’re smart enough to ignore irrelivant settings – so if you define CPC as one of the factors and you’re viewing ad groups, the ‘CPC’ will be ignored but the other aspects will still apply.

We all have many ways we like to slice and dice our campaigns or keywords – and now you can do so quickly and easily.

Intelligent Paid Search Management

We think there are many ways that paid search management software can transform the process of managing ppc accounts. The tools have to evolve beyond simply offering option-after-option and begin shaping the way the work is done.

We think both our best practices and the one-click segmentation features of ClickEquations V2 are great steps in that direction. Both start the shift towards ‘what you should do’ and ‘how you could do it’. For practitioners who take advantage of them, we believe they’re both time savers and clear ways to improve results.

Avinash has said that “Segmenting your data is the fastest way to finding actionable insights from your web analytics data.” You can read some of his thoughts on it here and here. We think segmenting your data is one of the best ways to prioritize too.

Spend some time in ClickEquations V2, and we think you’ll agree.

Google wants to make advertising easy. They describe AdWords in simple terms, they make setup quick and easy, and they provide simple reporting on the stuff that suggests progress.

But the gun has no safety.

AdWords makes it remarkably easy to do insanely stupid and wasteful things. Things they could easily prevent at the cost of simplicity for you and revenue for them.

Take content network advertising, for example.

The idea of bundled, co-mingled search network and content network advertising is crazy. The two have almost nothing in common. Mixing them assures poor and confusing results. And yet bundling is the system default.

So you should un-bundle.

Why Search is Not Content and Content Is Not Search

Google search and the search partners are search query based. Ad show when people execute specific searches matched to your ads via keywords and match types and quality scores and bids.

The content network is site targeted or contextual. Ads show when people are visiting a specific site or type of content, based on keywords and quality score and bids.

They keywords are different (one is an attempt to match queries, the other content), match types are different (content doesn’t have them), quality scores are calculated separately using different formulas, performance is wildly different (much lower CTRs on content networds in most cases), the types of ad copy that is effective is different, and on and on.

The fact that AdWords opts you into an automatically inappropriately managed advertising channel is astounding. It’s as if there were a ‘Waste 25% of my budget’ option. And they checked it for you by default.

Do not accept their kind offer.

The Content Network Is A Good Place To Advertise

None of this is to say that there is anything wrong with the content network. There was a few years ago, and Google has done a great job of improving it to the point where it is a viable and valuable advertising channel if appropriately managed.

But it has to be managed on its own terms, independantly of the search networks.

It works differently, had different options, and different success metrics. It’s a different advertising channel.

You should learn about the content network, allocate time to exploit it, and profit from it. But don’t get fooled into thinking that if you don’t have the time or knowledge to do so you can just tag it onto your search campaigns and get even marginal results. Do it right or don’t do it.

NOTE: Other than this one, the 21 Secrets of High-Resolution PPC are focused on the search networks. To learn more about the content networks, we recommend the book ‘Customers Now’ by David Szetela. (You can get a free ebook download, or order a hardcopy version.)

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

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