PPC Without Pity

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Inbound Marketing Rules, Cold-Calling Drools

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Shawn Livengood

Allow me to rant for just a second here. As both the manager of a high-spending online marketing department and a semi-popular blogger in the PPC space, I get a lot of random contacts. Some of these are good. People working on interesting projects ask me questions, and I either reply with some quick answers or refer them on to someone who can take them the rest of the way. Fellow online marketers reach out to me to get my opinion on something, and I value the chance to talk shop with someone working on the same problems. But then there are the salesmen. I really hate the salesmen.

Consider this. I have devoted my entire career to making marketing more efficient. Someone asks a question on a search engine, and I make sure there’s an ad there to answer that question. The user gets an answer to their problem via a non-invasive text ad, and I get a sale by providing a valuable experience. Everybody leaves happy. Compare this path to the one where you get stalked, harassed, and generally inconvenienced by someone blowing up your phone all day trying to sell you crap from a company you’ve never heard of. I have been waging a holy jihad against this kind of marketing from the day I wrote my first PPC ad. What makes you think I’m going to be affected by this kind of marketing?

In fact, I have made it my personal mission to eliminate cold-calling from the face of the earth. After working for a boiler-room PPC agency that engaged in some pretty shady tactics to get clients, I am extremely skeptical of any online marketing agency out there that I haven’t heard of. If your company is worth a damn, then you’re showing up at conferences, writing guest blogs, and participating in the PPC and SEO community. Anybody with an AdWords certification and a website can start an agency, so buyer beware.

It’s my general rule that if a product has to be sold via cold-calling, then it’s not worth buying. I have yet to be proven wrong in this regard. So please, if you have never personally interacted with me in any way, and your first correspondence with me is to sell me your crappy product, please stop. Just stop. I get enough cold calls enough as it is, and I can personally guarantee you that you will not get money from me. So stop wasting your time and mine.

Is anyone else getting this kind of crap too? Feel free to leave your own rant in the comments.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Google’s Ad Rotation Changes Suck. Here’s Why.

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Shawn Livengood

Hey Google:

There has certainly been no lack of words written about Google’s announcement last week that the ability to rotate ads evenly, indefinitely, is going away. But what the hell, I need to add in my two cents anyway. This is a ridiculously bad change that came without asking the PPC community for feedback, and there deserves to be a backlash.

In case you missed this week’s top story, Google has announced that starting this week, the “rotate” setting in text ads will rotate your ads evenly for 30 days, then optimize each ad for clicks. This is a huge departure from PPC best practices, since you need to rotate your ads evenly to get a valid statistical test. With most accounts, it’s going to take a lot longer than 30 days of even rotation to get enough traffic to make sure you have a valid result.

This change sucks because it eliminates any possibility of long-term manual ad testing. I’ve worked in PPC accounts with daily budgets from $50/day to $50,000/day over the last four years, and I’ve only seen a valid ad split test in 30 days happen a handful of times. When you’re properly segmenting your ad groups into segments of sufficient granularity, it takes some time to see results. With this update, Google has said that they really don’t care about PPC specialists managing accounts for better results – they would much rather just take your money via amping up your click-through rate without considering the fact that most advertisers are optimizing for conversions, not clicks.

This is different than your run-of-the mill bitching about SEO. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land recently wrote an excellent article about the recent Penguin algorithm updates titled Google Doesn’t Owe You A Living, So Don’t Depend On It. And he’s absolutely right, at least in the SEO world. But this isn’t SEO. This is paid search, which is the big cash cow that allows Google to pursue all those other neat projects that lose a hell of a lot of money for them. If you do PPC, Google does owe you a living, and they should act like it. PPC advertisers are their customers, and to make a huge, impactful change like this without at least consulting some experts in the field is inexcusable.

There’s no telling if this change will be rolled back. But if you want your voice to be heard about this, I recommend that you sign the Google Ad Rotation petition. Maybe if we get enough people talking about this, Google might actually listen to their customers.

Posted in Google AdWords, Search Engines, Text Ads | Leave a comment

AdWords Search Funnel Reporting – Part 4: Paths

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Shawn Livengood

Welcome to the final chapter in my four-part series on AdWords Search Funnel reporting. This week we’ll be covering the three path reports: Top Paths, Time Lag, and Path Length.

Path reports are helpful because they indicate how many search queries and ad impressions a user took to complete a conversion. They also detail each campaign, ad group, or keyword along the way so that you can see how your account elements interact. This is useful for identifying the search funnels that your users go through, so you can better understand their research process. You can use this information to build out your campaigns to reach users earlier in the research process, or stop yourself from pausing campaign elements that drive conversions further on down the line.

Now without further ado, let’s get on to the reports:

Top Paths

This report allows you to view paths that users took to complete a conversion. You can break down this information by Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, or Query:

Breaking this report down by campaign can illustrate how often users switch between your broad categories (for example, if they go from searching in a product campaign to one of your brand name campaigns). The Ad Group Path dimension gives you the same information at the ad group level. The keyword and query dimensions is where it gets really interesting. Here, you can see the actual keyword click paths that a visitor used on either the keywords you were bidding on, or the actual queries they used to trigger your ads.

If you click on the “Other” option, you’ll see a few more advanced dimensions:

The Impression Paths dimensions allows you to see similar path data, only this is for users who saw your ad multiple times but didn’t necessarily click on each one. The Transition paths reports condense repeated keyword searches, so you’ll only see data on people who switched from one campaign, ad group, or keyword to another. This helps reduce the noise of data in the reports – a lot of the time you’ll see a path that’s just 2-4 instances of the same keyword repeated. That’s not all that useful if you want to get a handle on how your users are researching your products.

You should also take note of the filtering options at the top right of the chart:

Using these options, you can filter your data to view exactly what you’re looking for. You can limit your data to paths of a certain number of steps or more, view data for a specific type of conversion, expand your history window to 30, 60, or 90 days, and choose to only show complete conversion paths. All of these settings are useful for reducing the noise in your report and getting down to what really matters.

Time Lag

For many accounts, a click doesn’t immediately lead to a conversion. Users quite often delay their purchase decision, choosing to do more research or consult with someone else before they actually complete a transaction. This report helps you visualize how long it takes for your users to make those conversions.

On the Time Lag report, you get metrics on how many days (on average) it takes for a user to complete a conversion. You can choose your starting point as the first impression, first click, or last click:

Not only do you get the total conversions for each time segment, but you also get how much of a percentage of the total is represented in each segment of days to conversion.

Path Length

This final report gives you a more quantitative data set regarding the number of clicks or impressions it takes to convert. This report aggregates your entire account’s data, so it’s not all that useful for quantifying user paths at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level. However, it does give you an idea of the macro trends in your account so you can get an idea of the average amount of searches it takes for you to close on a user.

With this report, you can look at total clicks or impressions per conversion. This has a similar breakdown to the Time Lag report, telling you the total and the percentage of conversions at each level of clicks or impressions.

That just about covers it for the Search Funnel reporting. These are highly useful and highly under-utilized reports that can really aid in analysis. If you’re a little more advanced in the PPC game, I highly recommend that you look in to how these reports might work for your account. You can see some significant returns in your account performance with the knowledge you gain from analyzing your search funnels.

Posted in Analytics, Google AdWords | Leave a comment

AdWords Search Funnel Reporting – Part 3: First and Last Click

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Shawn Livengood

In part three of my ongoing series on AdWords search funnel reporting, I’ll be going over the first-click and last-click attribution reports. For those not familiar with first/last click attribution, here’s how it works. In most search situations, a user might use multiple queries and click on multiple ads before they actually complete a conversion. For example, they may search on a broad keyword like “signs,” then narrow their search down to “yard signs” and click on an ad, then find out about BuildASign.com. A few days later, they forget the URL in the ad, but type in “build a sign” into their query box, click on a brand name ad, and complete a conversion. In this example, “yard signs” would get the conversion if we were measuring first clicks, but “build a sign” would get the conversion if we were measuring last clicks.

First click and last click reports are important because they allow you to find out the first and last steps users are taking when they enter your search funnel. It’s just as important to know where they began as where they end. If you pause keywords that get a lot of first-click conversions but not a lot of last-clicks, you’ll reduce awareness of your company and you could lose a lot of conversions as a result. Conversions are measured as “last click” by default, so it’s important to run first-click conversion reports every once in a while to get a fuller picture of your conversion events.

To see your first-click conversion info, go to the “First Click Analysis” link in your Search Funnels report menu:

On this report, you can do many of the same viewing options as the other search funnel reports: change the date range, look at a line or plot graph, or compare metrics. You can also filter down your data to first clicked campaign, ad group, or keyword. These reports will tell you which of your account elements are the introduction to your company: the ones that bring that crucial first impression to your website.

The Last Click Analysis report doesn’t offer all that much in addition to your regular conversion reports. After all, conversions are last-click by default, so you’ll probably be looking at the same data that’s in your regular reporting. But this report works well in tandem with the first-click analysis to give you a complete view of the search funnel. Run both reports at once with identical settings to see how your account elements are interacting.

That wraps up this week. Next week, we’ll finish up the series with the final three reports: Top Paths, Time Lag, and Path Length.

Posted in Analytics, Google AdWords | Leave a comment

Inbound Marketing Rules, Cold-Calling Drools

Google’s Ad Rotation Changes Suck. Here’s Why.

AdWords Search Funnel Reporting – Part 4: Paths

AdWords Search Funnel Reporting – Part 3: First and Last Click

AdWords Search Funnel Reporting – Part 2: Assists

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