ClickEquations Blog

The idea of creating highly targeted ad groups, so that all of the attracted search queries are well aligned with the included text ad copy, is one we’ve written about often.

One of the drivers is the fact that better alignment drives up click-through-rates and thereby quality score.

A number of recent conversations have suggested that this good idea, like many others, is being taken to absurd extremes.

I’m talking about the practice or ‘recommendation’ of limiting ad groups to a single keyword.

Single Keyword Ad Groups Have No Quality Score Advantage

The primary reason I’ve heard for this practice is improved quality score. But it won’t work.

The quality score of a keyword in AdWords is based primarily on the CTR, from a specific geography, of search queries that exactly matches a that keyword. There is an impact from the historical CTR of the entire account, of the relevance of the query-keyword-ad, and the potential of penalties from the landing page. There is no factor in that definition that would favor a single keyword alone in an ad group.

There is no ad group quality score. There is no benefit from keyword loneliness. There is no ‘lots of ad groups’ bonus.

Isolating keywords in-and-of-itself does not help quality score. There is really no way any keyword can impact, positively or negatively, another keyword in terms of quality score.

The Right Number of Keyword Per Ad Group Is…

So how many keywords should be in an ad group?

Assuming we want to maximize quality score and overall results, the answer is: as many as will attract search queries that are directly addressed by your text ads. You may recall that we want to work from the text ad (or text ads) backwards. So the number of keywords really isn’t important. What matters is the alignment of the search queries (and the intents they represent) with the text ads.

If there are a lot of different keywords needed to match and attract all the different search queries that people use to say essentially exactly the same thing, then your ad group should have a lot of keywords. If there is only one keyword that is needed to match and attract to every search query that is directly addressed by the text ads in your ad group, then your ad group should have one keyword.

But the one keyword situation is likely to be very rare.

You don’t want single keyword ad groups, you want single-minded ad groups. If they attract synonymous queries, the more keywords the better.

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FACEBOOK

Keywords are one of the false gods of PPC. There’s really no reason to get to hung up on keywords.

The goal of our campaigns is to have our text-ads matched with the most appropriate search queries. Keywords are just the tool we use to get to the most qualified queries.

With that in mind, it’s my opinion that the world of keyword selection and expansion is quite broken.

Keyword selection in PPC – broadly and generally as I’ve seen it practiced and promoted by both ‘experts’ and tools providers – is about finding every possible word and phrase related to the category or topic at hand.

This is a great strategy if you’re a paid search engine looking to make money from way too many clicks with way too little targeting.

It’s not really to your advantage if you’re an advertiser looking to maximize returns.

Waiting For Your Keywords To Bark
Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg wrote ‘Waiting For Your Cat To Bark‘ several years ago, as one of several books covering their Persuasion Architecture process (now built into their OnTarget offering), and it remains a book I don’t think any online marketer should miss.

Among the many brain-tingling discussions in ‘Bark’ is the idea that people come to the web with a very specific idea in mind, a personality all their own (but categorically like a lot of other people), and a situation that they’re in along with a goal they’re trying to achieve.

This bundle makes up their buying process. I’m a massively geeky tech freak with a strong need to fit in and a brother whose birthday is Saturday so I MUST order something for him today.

You’re online trying to sell stuff. Your mind is on the great price you offer on the new ‘Widget9000′ and the free shipping program you just launched.

I’ll let the Eisen-brothers tell you how to solve this mis-match (ok, a clue: align your selling with their buying, the other way around isn’t going to happen.)

But what does this have to do with keywords?

Up With People
Traditional keyword development and expansion is all about saturation bombing a category or topic. The suggestion tools and brainstorming techniques we’ve all relied on toss in (or try to) anything contextually relevant.

This is too low resolution and comes at the problem from the wrong direction.

Let’s think about it the other way. (IOW: What would Bryan do?)

Imagine a specific person, in their full psychological glory, in a specific situation who wants/needs/is curious about your product or offering. What are they likely to search for? Build the list of words and phrases that capture their needs given the details you’ve assumed.

Start with the most specific and detailed versions of what they might ask, and then slowly narrow it to queries that at least lean in their general direction.

Break down the components of the query – how might they reflect their product desires? How might they reference their urgency? What clues might appear to show that they prefer well-liked and popular products?

Stepping through the range of queries you can imagine, from deeply personal and unique out towards general queries that anyone might do. Taking this deliberate step adds another layer of clarity to each keyword. Some are deeply targeted and precise. Others are vague and broad. Shouldn’t your measurement, bidding, expectations, and text-ads align with these attributes?

Repeat this process for other kinds of people, or other reasons people might have, for visiting your site or buying your products/services. (By now you’ve gone and read the book and have built a full set of user persona’s right?)

Of course, most users won’t load their query with clues to every aspect of their needs, personality, and situation. But some will and more importantly this exercise creates the beginning of an intelligently tiered keyword list we can use to evaluate our campaigns and keywords with a new level of precision.

SEO your PPC
The idea of really thinking hard about the specific queries people are likely to execute is central to good organic paid search optimization.

In the organic world, where broad-match doesn’t exist, a page can only rank for a limited number of keywords, and there is a content+effort cost for each rank, the spray-and-pray approach isn’t practiced and certainly isn’t effective.

Never thought I’d say it, but when it comes to keywords, PPC folks can learn a lot from the SEOs.

A number of people followed up to last week’s ‘Bidding on Brand Terms‘ post and asked how the logic applied to the broader world of buying PPC keywords where you already have organic rankings.

Generally I think the logic does apply, but with a slightly different set of rules and conditions:

• If an organic keyword is highly profitable, I would assume the paid keyword would be profitable and incremental unless proven otherwise. There certainly could and will be exceptions – if it’s a highly competitive keyword with insanely high prices for example – the competitive PPC bidders may be acting irrationally and you may be better off to take the free traffic and let them kill each other. Another example might be broad terms with a lot of organic clicks and just a few conversions. But determine this via tests not assumptions.
• Cannibalization should be more than offset by incremental traffic. Yes some people who click your paid ad would have clicked your organic ad. But many who click your paid ad would not have clicked your organic ad. I firmly believe that there are paid clickers and organic clickers and a smaller minority who’ll go either way.
• Marginal Net Revenue is all that matters. If you’re making $1000/day with organic alone, and make $1200/day (net profit not gross revenue) with organic plus paid, then organic plus paid is better. The internal fact that some of that revenue could have been had at a lower acquisition cost is irrelevant.

And More Importantly
Organic results are all exact match. When you rank highly for an organic search, in most cases you don’t rank equally well for any/many of the thousands of variants of that query. Every organic result is computed independently.

But when you buy that same organic keyword as a paid keyword, you get to use match types to cover hundreds or thousands of queries – the vast majority of which you’d never win – or perhaps even appear on the first page for organically.

So when you find a winning organic keyword and transfer it to paid, you’re not only buying space on that results page, but if done correctly (by expanding the word or phrase and using match types fully) you can leverage that winning word 1000:1 or more.

Average Position occupies an important place in the mythology of paid search.

Many people covet or chase higher positions, and there are several possible reasons:

1. The assumption that ads in higher positions get more clicks simply because they’re in higher positions.
2. As we all know ‘higher is always better’ – especially when it costs more.
3. And of course, eye tracking studies prove, um, er, that people look higher more often.

(The empirical and anecdotal evidence I’ve seen suggests that the power of higher positions is much less than most people seem to imagine. In a future post I’ll go into this in great detail. This is not the real subject of this post.)

As a result, there is a lot of attention paid to the Average Position metric. And a LOT of money is spent on upward bid changes made because of the number this metric reports.

So how good is this number? Probably not very good.

Let’s take one tiny little case study to demonstrate.

The keyword is ‘cat treatment’. And on Saturday Jan 3rd it produced about 25 clicks in one of our accounts. The average position for the term (in broad match) was listed as 4.55. This is the average of all the positions in which it appeared during the 1543 impressions it enjoyed that day.

Now be honest, despite all you know about averages (including the fact that it could have appeared in position #1 760 times, and in position 8 783 times) when you see that 4.55 was the average it makes you think it spent the day bouncing between position 4 and position 5. Right?

But did it?

Let’s look at Google Analytics’ handy Keyword Position report for this keyword on that day. This shows the position the keyword was in when it earned its 25 clicks.

Yowza!  This keyword covered more ground than Paris Hilton in NYC on Saturday night. (I always wanted to see how much Google traffic a single Paris Hilton reference caused.)

It was in all three top positions, and everywhere on the right side from position 1 to position 6.

Keep in mind that this is a map of clicks, not impressions. So maybe the impressions did cluster closely around the 4.55 average and the few stray impressions way up to top 1 and down to position 6 just all got clicks. Or maybe the actual impression distribution was extremely broad and the 4.55 average, while it is true, is really not useful to us in terms of analyzing keyword performance or making bidding decisions.

At this point only two things are really clear;

1. We really need better information. If the search engines won’t provide the actual impression and click position distributions, and/or make the the position-at-time-of-click a macro that can be delivered in the target URL, they should at least provide the standard deviation for the average position so we have some idea of what it really means.
2. We should resist the urge to put much faith, or make too serious of decisions, based on the reported Average Position of any keyword.

Each time someone executes a search, they’re asking a question.

They search because they want to learn about something. Or find out where something is. Or discover who has it or knows about it.

They may just be curious, or the question may have been provoked by some urgent problem.

The question could be simple or complex and the searcher might be sophisticated or incredibly naive.

Search Engines answer questions. That’s pretty much all they do.

Search results offer an ordered list of answers to the question the search engine thinks you’re asking.

Paid search advertising is your chance to raise your hand and let the searcher know that you think you have the answer to their question too.

In the next post we’ll discuss what it means to the organization of your campaigns to think of yourself as a professional answer provider.

This post is part of a series on High Resolution PPC, a framework for understanding and managing paid search advertising.

Since the dawn of time, paid search has been conceived of and managed based on four key components and common perceptions of their roles:

1. Keywords. Keywords define when your ads run. Choose keywords and phrases that people looking for your product or service would use.
2. Bids. Bids define how much you’re willing to pay when your ad appears for any particular keyword. Higher bids can help position your ads higher on the page and appear more frequently.
3. Text-Ads. Text-ads give you a headline and two lines of copy to attract and persuade searches to click and view your website.
4. Click/Conversion Reports. Basic reporting tells you how each keyword is doing, both individually and within campaigns, and ad-groups, in terms of clicks, conversion rates, and ROAS.

These four items remain important aspects of paid search today, but they’re not the most important variables, nor the best way to think about PPC.

We’re not operating in the same technical, competitive, or business environment as four or five years ago:

• In a world where changing definitions for match-type determine which queries cause your ads to run, worrying solely about keywords is inadequate.
• In a world where quality score has such a huge impact on where your ads run and how much you pay for them, worrying largely about bids is inadequate.
• In a world where a majority of your buyers visit your site multiple times before purchasing, text-ads remain important but must be considered in context of all user touchpoints.
• In a world where profitability is the real goal, then measuring intermediate metrics while ignoring the one that really matters – ROI – is illogical.

We’ve got a name for this old ‘keywords & bids’ view of the paid search world: ‘Low Resolution PPC’.

It was fine five or six years ago when the engines were simpler and the budgets smaller. It’s not fine anymore.

• Today you have to think about your user targeting based on the interaction of keywords, match types, and search queries.
• Today you have to think about your costs based on how quality scores and bids interact with match type keyword traps and negative keywords.
• Today you have to think about persuasion and conversion as a chain of events that starts with your text ad and continues through your landing page, your site, and the experience users have in your shopping cart.
• Today you have to think about analytics as a way to understand all of these variables and more.

It’s a high-def world, even in paid search marketing.

Introducing High Resolution PPC
But there’s more to High Resolution PPC than just a deeper consideration of the core mechanics of paid search.

We also want to shift the focus away from the mechanics of running paid ads and onto our relationship with the people to whom we’re advertising and how we manage that relationship.

We want to know who the people are conducting these searches, clarify why we want to talk to them, understand what will get their attention, and make sure to learn from our interactions with them so we can perform better in the future.

The Cornerstones of High Resolution PPC
In High Resolution PPC we manage our campaigns by using the options and controls in paid search to move clients through the marketing acquisition cycle.

Accordingly, we no longer think of search in terms of the four old cornerstones of paid search – keywords, bids, text ads, and operating reports – but instead in terms of the four stages of customer acquisition and management:

1. Target - To begin you define the focus of your efforts, using campaigns, ad-groups, and keywords to target specific groups of people who are asking the kinds of questions you want to answer with your paid search ads.
2. Value - Next you refine this focus within your target groups, using bids and match types and keyword negatives to properly value the different people who you want to attract to your website or landing pages.
3. Satisfy - With clearly targeted and properly valued searchers identified, the goal becomes delivering text ads, landing pages, and offers which satisfy user desires and advance them toward and through conversion.
4. Understand - Throughout this process we capture, analyze, and present meaningful and actionable information about each specific phase and the overall. Here you’ll apply improved reporting standards and metrics.

Each of these corresponds to specific tasks in the management of your paid search campaign, certain options that control your campaigns, and reports that provide metrics which guide the way or measure progress. (Watch future posts for details.)

Why the Change
The driving factor in moving to a High Resolution PPC approach is a desire for better returns on our investment of both time and money.

As with any other investment, we control risk by increasing the depth of our visibility and understanding, and then manipulating the options we have at our disposal.

With a High Resolution PPC approach, you regain control over your paid search campaigns, both in terms of having vastly better visibility into what is happening but also by understanding why specific results occur and how you can fix or improve them.

Next Time
In the next post on High Resolution PPC, I’ll dive a level or two deeper on the target-value-satisfy-understand process. This mental shift is the cornerstone, and once you start thinking about this logical flow in your paid search marketing, it becomes a lot easier to use the options in the engines more strategically.

{If you’re at shop.org in Las Vegas this week, stop by and say hello – we’re in Booth 115.}

What one piece of advice would I give to help improve a paid search campaign?

That was a question asked of our panel as SES in San Jose last week.

My answer: Make sure your brand keywords are fully segregated from all others.

Brand keywords – any keyword with your company name or variations in them – have completely different cost and performance characteristics than category or other other generic or product specific keywords.

These differences completely confuse the reporting for any campaigns and Ad-Groups if they’re co-mingled.

Separating Keywords and Queries
The first step is easy – every keyword you buy, regardless of its Match Type, should be in an Ad-Group if not a Campaign with only other keywords that contain the Brand name too.

Preferably, the brand terms are bucketed, with the ‘Pure’ Brand keywords in one group (those that represent just the name and variations itself), the navigational versions in another (www.brand.com, brand homepage, etc.) and the Brand-Plus keywords (Brand Sweatpants, Brand Coupons, etc.) in yet another, and so on.

In these brand focused Ad-Groups, you have to use Broad and Advanced match very sparingly and carefully, and eventually almost entirely eliminate them. If you leave them, you’ll get too many non-brand queries matching and diluting the intent of these highly focused Ad-Groups.

The other side of this Broad/Advanced Match coin is that you’ll also want to add your brand as a negative in all the remaining non-branded Campaigns and Ad-Groups. Otherwise the engines will match brand-inclusive queries against your non-brand targeted keywords.

This can be and feel dangerous, if you’re not completely sure that your Brand campaigns are complete, bid properly, running the full range of Match-Types (with of course the Match Type Keyword Traps fully configured and loaded.)

It’s probably a good idea to skip this step of adding the brand as negatives in the non-branded campaigns for a few days to ensure that there aren’t certain query formulations that your new Brand targeted Campaigns are missing.

Watch the query reports carefully, and add variations to the brand campaigns, and ultimately more negatives to both the brand the non-brand campaigns.

The Payoff
Immediately upon starting this process, especially if your campaigns had brand terms and lots of broad match scattered throughout, you’ll see radical shifts in your search reports.

• You may be amazed how much revenue is coming from and and how little cost is going into your pure brand campaigns. That’s the good news.
• You may be shocked at how much money and how little revenue is coming from your now-strictly-non-brand ad-groups. That’s the bad news. Or the opportunity, depending on how you look at it.

In any case, you’ll have a new level of clarity about the performance and activity in your PPC campaigns.

Coming Up
I’ll share more thoughts on the execution of full brand segregation, and the implications of the changes it makes to your reported results, in future posts. This is another one that may take 3-4 posts to just scratch the surface of.

In the meantime, questions and comments are encouraged. Are your brand terms separated into ad-groups? Does that help you better understand the way your PPC budgets are spent? What problems have you seen trying to control brand via Match Types? Any other ideas?

Thus far in this series we’ve talked about the difficulty of getting a clear view of paid search performance, of deciding the most urgent risks and opportunities amidst the volumes of data that you do have.

Now we come to the third issue: the productivity (or lack thereof) in making changes or improvements to your paid search account.

Possible Changes To Improve Search Campaigns

There are a limited number of things you might want/need to do to your paid search campaigns. Most of them aren’t too difficult when required on a small scale. But there’s not much in PPC campaigns that really happens on a small scale, which is where the frustration begins.

You might want to add keywords. It’s not hard to generate a large list of incremental keywords, and there are tools to help you do it. You can even harvest search queries, scape competitor websites, or get lists from Compete or Hitwise of terms driving traffic for others.

But to effectively apply a list of keywords they need to be expanded and parsed into versions and phrases and synonyms and layered across match types and segregated into ad-groups and campaigns and matched with bids and text-ads. The ideal environment for this would both facilitate the process as a whole and provide suggestions based on a learning algorithm which watched your style of division and targeting.

You could see the need to modify match types based on your search queries to build more effective match type keyword traps. This requires versioning keywords, segregating them into Ad-groups, pyramiding bids, and making sure the net is wide and lacks gaps or overlaps. Software could visualize this process and make it ‘drag and drop’ and even ‘bionic’ if someone put a little effort in.

Your bids may need to be changed, and of course this is the one task to which some substantial software automation development effort has been placed. This is a big topic I’ll save for a future series of in-depth posts.

You might need to substantially reorganize your campaigns. This happens for all kinds of reasons, many having to do with the impact of organization on the roll-up summary numbers as presented, some having to do with quality score management, the issue of match-type control and reporting, issues of geo-segmentation, and of course good old logical segmentation.

The technology provided for campaign reorganization today – cut and paste – is getting a little dated and I feel confident that a more elegant and productive solution could be conceived and developed.

The text-ads you’re running may need to be altered. While the idea of presenting four blank boxes and allowing unlimited freedom (with the constraints of available character limits) is powerful, perhaps there would be some advantage in tracking and analyzing the different ‘recipes’ used in various ads, building up repositories of different synonyms for important concepts and then making it easy to re-use effective ones and tracking how they perform both individually and as groups based on their relative position in the ad, in the ad as it runs at different positions or on different days, etc.

Lastly there is a chance that you’ll need to test different landing pages (leaving alone for now the implications of testing various designs within a single landing page). From the typical home page vs category page vs item page variances, it may be wise to consider user personas based on the keywords and queries and other factors as well.

Here again the current ‘type-anything-you-want’ technology could be enhanced by allowing simple meta data to be entered and tracked (how are item pages doing in terms of conversion vs category pages vs the home page) and enabling automated testing of these variations. And it doesn’t have to be limited to just a simple ‘which page’ consideration – performance may vary by the length of the query or number of works in the keyword phrase?, time of day, day of week, visit number, or many other factors. Software could track and optimize this.

Working In A Coal Mine

The common element in the current state of paid search management is that only one of the steps in even the most simplified version of the process has progressed even one iota in the last five or more years in terms of automation.

Tens of thousands of people are being treated as migrant-search-workers standing in the hot sun every day harvesting keywords and clicks.

And for the moment we’re not talking about the chisels and stones they’re given to bang out reports and dashboards.

Where is the Eli Whitney of PPC?

(Upcoming Events: I’ll be at the Semphonic XChange Conference in San Francisco on Aug 17-19, and am Speaking on “Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers” at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose on August 19th)

In my ‘Three Challenges’ Post I wrote the following to describe one of the fundamental reasons why I think the process of managing paid search needs to be improved:

There is a lack of clarity. It is amazingly difficult to get accurate and complete data on campaign performance and results. Much of the data you need to see is scattered across three to five different tools and interfaces. Other data is presented in formats or based on calculations that just aren’t right. (they’re wrong.) Still other information is seemingly unavailable. There is no quick and accurate way to get reports which are satisfying.

Since then I’ve written four posts in an attempt to explain and expand. But I’m not sure I captured it.

To manage something effectively it’s necessary to see cause and effect. The paid search networks use such complicated rules and hide certain key data elements which make this impossible.

Search queries, which are the primary driver of search success, are a key example. But it’s really the full relationship between queries and keywords and match types and quality score and text-ads and landing pages. The truth lies in that matrix somewhere, but nobody is letting you see it.

You see a pile of queries over here (partially, sometimes). A bunch of keywords over there. Some ads further off in the distance. Want to understand the relationships? Put them together in your own head.

Clues are great in a mystery. Not in a business transaction.