Many Per Click versus One Per Click

Google Adwords — with the new interface, as well as in reports, you can now evaluate conversion results according to Many Per Click or One Per Click.  Over the past couple weeks, the issue of which metric is most important has come up repeatedly.  Here we define the terms and clarify the usefulness of the metrics.

Cookies & Conversions

If you click on an Adwords ad, as long as you don’t lose your cookies for their normal life of 30 days, then Google associates any conversion triggers to that initial event (clicking on the ad).  If you convert several times during a 30-day period, are the marginal conversions and the data about the marginal conversions valuable to the advertiser?  It depends . . .

Many Per Click for Online Stores

For an online store, there is generally marginal revenue associated with each additional conversion.  So, for most online stores, many per click is the most important metric.  For online stores, it makes sense to tune the account for the conversion metric,  many per click.  If someone makes a purchase, and then returns to the store and makes another purchase, that is important information.  Of course, the most important information for online stores, revenue per order, is not yet captured by Adwords.

One Per Click for Attorneys

Advertisers, like Attorneys, who harvest leads, not sales, generally don’t benefit from additional conversions per click.  Once an attorney harvests the lead information for a visitor, it’s unlikely that additional conversions associated with that click will result in additional revenue opportunities for the Advertiser.  Accordingly, for advertisers like attorneys who define conversions as leads via an online form, then the One Per Click conversion metric is most meaningful.

Reporting Standards

Previously, our reports included conversion data based on One Per Click.  Effectively immediately, we will begin displaying data in the summary section of our reports (first table in our reports) based on that metric which is most meaningful for each respective Advertiser.  If the one per click and many per click results are significantly different, then we will mention those stats in our discussion and analysis.

The reporting standard for each client as it relates to conversion metrics is explained and documented in each client’s respective Road Map.

For questions about Road Maps, Conversion Metrics, and Reports, please phone Hanna in Denver at 720 377 8431.

Identifying Long Tail Duds – Old Method

We love long tail keywords, because they generally outperform shorter less specific keywords.  However, if a keyword is too obscure, then it will generate no traffic.  Google labels such keywords, “Long Tail Duds.”   If Google decides that a keyword isn’t worth it’s own weight in hard drive space, then Google labels it a Dud, ignores it, and then it can never earn even one impression.  In the past, Google didn’t tell us that a keyword had been labeled a Long Tail Dud, we just had to infer it.

If you have accounts with thousands of keywords, then you’d better check for Long Tail Duds.  If the account is mature, then you can be sure that any with zero impressions have been labeled Long Tail Duds by Google.

When we setup new campaigns, we often create keywords by concatenating a suggested term which has reasonable traffic with a place name, for example:  speeding ticket attorney houston.  In such cases, we would create the keywords, include them in the account, and then wait two to four weeks to learn which ones were labeled Long Tail Duds by Google.  For some larger metro areas, like Houston, the term has reasonble traffic, but for locations like Little Rock, it might be labeled a dud.  We could infer this by seeing which received zero impressions after a period of time.  For such keywords, waiting longer won’t change the result.  Once a keyword has been categorized as a Long Tail Dud by Google, it can never earn an impression.

Identifying Long Tail Duds Using Diagnose Keywords Tool

With the release of the Diagnose Keywords Tool, an SEM Professional can now create a campaign and immediately run the tool to identify Long Tail Duds.  Access the tool from the online interface, from inside the campaign screen, at the top of the page.  Just click the link, wait a minute or two, and Google clearly states which keywords won’t earn any impressions.  Those are your Long Tail Duds.  If the account is downloaded to your Desktop Editor, flip back and forth between the two screens to delete the Long Tail Duds immediately before activating the campaign.

Delete Long Tail Duds for Higher Quality Score

Don’t leave Long Tail Duds in your account!  Delete them as soon as you learn about them–they damage your Quality score!!  Google penalizes your abuse of their hard drives by zapping your quality score.  They’ll reward you for deleting them.  So if you’re setting up a new campaign, for immediate better results, use the Diagnose Keyword Tool to cull out the Long Tail Duds before your Quality Score is zapped.

Long Tail Duds are Not Free

A drag on quality score is not the only cost associated with Long Tail Duds.  After years of managing Adwords accounts, I’m coming to appreciate the true economic cost of bloated accounts. Long Tail Duds are costly. Adwords has great tools and the Desktop Editor is a life saver–even so, bloated accounts sap time and bandwidth with every upload, download, page view, edit, replication, and monthly performance analysis.  And if this is true for Adwords accounts, it’s true by a factor of 10x for Yahoo accounts (I want to send Yahoo a bill each month for all that post-back time).  

An SEM Professional can improve her life by deleting Long Tail Duds.

No Lazy Ads

One of our policies about writing ad text relates to “Lazy Ads.”  There really are so many selling points to be made about a client’s products / services, that they simply cannot all be captured in three lines comprised of a total 90 characters.  So we generally refer to ads which waste character opportunity space as “Lazy Ads.” You’ve got 35 characters on the description lines, so use them!!

Ok, Just One Lazy Ad

Turns out, for some products, some services, some ad spaces, sometimes . . . lazy ads work! WHAAAT???!!!!!  OK, OK, so now we have this new policy about writing ads:  Try one Lazy Ad per ad group.

Winning Formats for Display URL’s

There is a lot written about the best use and format for Adwords display URL’s.  Our company policy is generally to try to exploit the display URL to the fullest extent of the law.  We found out a long time ago that Google doesn’t even enforce it’s lamest of trademark policies for display URL’s so we use and abuse them for anything we can, including calls to action, etc, by formatting them as subdomains.  

Example – Old Standard: Visit-Huge-Sale-At.BigJoeTire.com

So, for a recent campaign, our friends at Google recommended a different format for our display URL’s.  My response was, “Unless you got stats from your wambo jambo Googe database to back this up, don’t mess with us.”  Ask and ye shall recieve!  They gave us facts based on their database stats!  Turns out, subdomains are not the way to go.  Too many people mistake them for redirects, and avoid them like the plague.  Furthermore, Google has data which indicates that shorter display URL’s most often outperform longer ones.  

Example – New Standard:  BigJoeTire.com/Sale

Jump Out of The Box

Last week, I had a web designer ask for changes to some of the client’s ads.  She recommended that we change the formatting, by adding bold text to words in the description, and that we put the URL in italics, in order to make the “labels” stand out. Luckily, I took the request by phone, even so, it was all I could to do disguise the smirk in my voice.  No doubt it was a difficult request to manage.  Still, she had the right idea.

Sometimes when we’re buried up to our eyeballs in the wonderful statistics of Adwords, it’s easy to forget that we’re in advertising!!  If this is you, then it’s time to JUMP out of the box.  Study competitors’ ads, and find a way to stand out.  Try something new, something unusual.  Sometimes that’s writing a short ad.  Sometimes that’s including humor, puns, slang in an ad.  Will it work?  Maybe it won’t . . . but what if it does?  A great ad really can make all the difference, so shake it up!!

Diversify Ads

Finally, don’t forget the importance of diversifying your ads within each ad group.  How often do you finish writing four ads per ad group, then look back on the ads, and see them all blurring together??  You can’t tell where one ends and the next one begins–they all look the same.  That’s what we strive to avoid, especially for new setups.  People can only guess what is going to work when it comes to ad text, but if you diversify your ads from the outset, then you have a better chance of quickly discovering better ads.

He went on to explain that when a keyword has such low search volume so as to be designated by Google as not worth it’s weight in disk drive space, then Google flags the word and it can then never earn an Adwords impression.

My response was, oh well, so what?  So I have 120 keywords in an ad group, and 20 will never produce even one impression.  That’s life, right?  Wrong.  He went on to explain that such keywords have a negative impact on quality scores.

New Policy for Zero Impression Keywords

So, now we have a new policy:  if a keyword has zero impressions after one month, DELETE IT.  Don’t pause it, DELETE IT.

Consider this for all future setups.  In the future I would expect initial client reports to include a recommendation about this matter, as applicable.

What’s up with Agencies advising clients to create special landing pages for PPC?  When we find a gap in an existing website, in almost all cases, the deficiency applies to the website and should be corrected for the website, not just for PPC.   We advise clients to integrate landing pages into their existing sites.

Forms Drive Conversions for PPC & Organic Visits

A form can significantly improve conversion rates, and makes sense for visits sourced from pay per click ads as well as those from organic search.  No form?  You need one!!!  Put it on every page!!  This represents best practices for a website, not just best practices for PPC landing pages.  So why would you advise a company to create landing pages to solve a “no-form” problem?  We advise Advertisers to fix their website, not just tack on a PPC landing page!

LiveBall — Just say no!

In most cases, creating new web pages can be classified as an investment.  Not with Liveball–their fees have to be classified as an expense.

Liveball is clever at designing landing pages that convert.  However, the landing pages sit on the Liveball server, which means they are designed to create a dependency.  Think of going to Macy’s and jogging up the down escalator.  Why not just pay a fantastic designer to build a page on your existing site, for a one-time fee, then own the page, instead of paying month after month?

Conclusion – Improve Websites

We never advise clients to create Frankenstein, tack on pages to their websites.  We help our clients improve their existing websites by integrating new pages and improving existing pages, so as to optimize the conversions by visitors from all sources, not just from Pay Per Click.

The success of a new Adwords account depends significantly on decisions about keyword selection. Choosing the right keywords and negative keywords, understanding the traffic potential of the keywords you select, and making the right choices, during the selection process, about ad groups and campaigns are all critical factors for the successful launch of any pay per click advertising campaign.

Especially for new SEM Analysts, I’m often asked about how to develop keyword lists. This post is for you.

We’ve written a lot about How to Setup an Adwords account, and have also written a separate posting about the criteria for choosing keywords, but this posting discusses exactly how we go about developing a keyword list from scratch for a new client.

The Process of Choosing Keywords

The process is somewhat iterative. It goes like this:

1. Study the website to identify potential landing pages (as well as opportunities for improvement).
2. Get the keywords seeds; in the process start to sketch out some preliminary ad groups.
3. Run the keywords in some tool to generate more keyword ideas; in the process identify negatives.
4. Calculate the traffic potential & preliminary bids for keywords; refine keyword groupings.
5. Check your work & concatenate shorter keywords with likely relevant modifiers.

Step 1: Study Website

Studying a client’s website is too often overlooked as the first step in an effective keyword selection process. Your keywords might generate plenty of traffic, and you can draft compelling relevant ads to gain a great click through rate, but if you don’t have a related landing page to convert those clicks, then we would classify such keywords as orphans.  For such keywords, the clicks and your compelling ad text will all add up to bounces. Better never to have purchased the keywords in the first place!

So if you don’t have an appropriate landing page to convert the keywords, and unless you’re absolutely certain that the Advertiser is going to spring for new landing pages before your launch, then go ahead and make a recommendation about the landing pages, but in the mean time give the orphan keywords a miss.

Step 2: Keyword Seeds

If you’ve harvested your keyword seeds from the website, then you can generate derivatives of those with perfect confidence that your keywords are relevant to Advertiser’s web offers.

Don’t start generating new keywords from the seeds until you’ve sorted them into some preliminary ad groups. At this point, you’ve probably got only 100 to 200 keyword candidates and it won’t take you so long to sort them, but if you wait to sort them until you’ve turned the seeds into thousands of keywords, then it’s going to take you literally hours to sort them.

Efficiency Hint: Sometimes clients or client’s SEO consultants give us the keyword seeds or a preliminary list which is significantly longer than 100 keywords. When we have a lot of keywords to sort into ad groups, we use the editor for this. We upload all the keywords into the editor under a single “Test” ad group. Then scan the keywords until we find a likely candidate for an ad group name, type it into the search bar at the top of the desktop editor, cut and paste the results into excel. Then we rename the ad group name on the excel sheet. We keep doing this until there are no keywords remaining in the Test ad group, then delete Test, and paste our excel results back into the editor to create our new ad groups.

Super Efficiency Hint: Furthermore, if the keyword list includes traffic numbers, then we upload the traffic number as the keyword bid value, and sort the keywords high to low by bid. This provides a convenient basis for validating ad group names.

At this point, be sure the keywords are sorted firstly, precisely according to landing pages, and secondly, within common textual phrases within those groups. Typically, (aside from an online store) a single landing page will have two to four ad groups each. So if you’re targeting 5 separate landing pages, you might expect your keywords to be grouped into about 15 ad groups.

Caution: The number one mistake in setting up new accounts is in ad group selection–the temptation is to sort the keywords according to their meanings instead of sorting them according to common textual themes. If you are going to tailor ads to include keywords in the ad text, then to do so, the keywords must contain common terms which can be included in the ad text.

One thing you can do to resist falling into the trap of selecting ad groups on the basis of meaning instead of text is to name the ad group according to the common textual element of the individual keywords. This textual element is that part of the keyword phrase which distinguishes it from other ad groups. Then make sure you don’t include any keyword term in that ad group which doesn’t include the ad group name. Often a keyword will qualify for more than one ad group. At this preliminary stage, just put it into whichever one seems to best represent it (think of relationship of search query to ad text), and move on.

At this point, we have the keywords in the desktop editor, organized into preliminary ad groups under a temporary campaign.

Early on, we prefer to err in favor of having too many ad groups, rather than not enough, because it’s often easier to combine ad groups, than divide them. Don’t fall in love with these ad groups now, since you don’t yet know the search values which can be generated from the keyword seeds.

Our goal at this point is to upload the preliminary ad groups into the actual Adwords account. To do this, we have to buff the settings out so the editor will accept the posting. Set the campaign settings to a daily budget amount which is likely to exceed your max keyword bid, say $20 / day, PAUSE THE CAMPAIGN, set Google Search Only, and set geo targets to the final destinations. Next write a dummy ad, which might plausibly work for the site as a whole, and propagate this dummy ad across every ad group. Then set the ad group default setting to some plausibly reasonable highish number, like $4.11, and set all the keyword match types to our default phrase match setting.

Voila!! Upload the seeds and preliminary settings into Advertiser’s Adwords account (or a dummy account if necessary), and you’re ready to get down to the real business of keyword discovery!

Step 3: From Seeds to List of Long-tail keywords

From the online Adwords interface, open each ad group and use the keyword tool to select relevant phrases with terms common to your ad group name. In the process of doing so, you might identify other groups of phrases for an alternative ad group name, and it’s also at this point that you will create your first list of negative keywords, so remain alert and keep an open mind in this part of the process.

In this step of the selection process, you’re sorting every keyword suggested by Google according to four possibilities:

1. the keyword is highly relevant to advertiser’s web offers, and includes text associated with the ad group name (select it!!).
2. the keyword is relevant to advertiser’s web offers, but does not include text associated with ad group name (don’t select it, but copy it into a “other” notepad for now).
3. the keyword is not relevant, and you wouldn’t want somebody to see your ad if one were to use it in a search query (don’t select it, but copy it into a “negatives” notepad for now).
4. the keyword is not highly relevant or is too vague; someone using it in a search query may or may not be looking for Advertiser’s web offer (ignore it).

Aside from naive errors in judgment, the most common mistake made in this step of the process is failing to identify negative keywords as you develop the keyword list. However, if you’ve followed the sorting procedures above, you will have a nice list of negatives. Generally, we try to use campaign level negatives where possible. Copy the negatives from your notepad into the online interface at the campaign level, reconcile any remnants from your “other” notepad, and we’re ready to move on to the next step.

Step 4: Traffic, Bids & Final Ad Groups

Ad groups are never final. We improve them continuously, but in this step, you have to settle on the ad groups which will be used for launch, and you can’t do so without understanding the aggregate traffic potential of each proposed keyword group. You can use Google’s traffic estimator for this. In the process, you can also come up with some preliminary bids for ad groups. If you find that some of your proposed ad groups do not generate significant traffic, then fold them into the most closely associated ad group. We subscribe to an online service to generate keyword traffic numbers.

If you find that a few keywords are accounting for a significant amount of traffic, then you might consider busting one of your preliminary ad groups in two. Also, if you find that some of your core keywords will generate 10% or more of your traffic, then you should immediately place them into a High Traffic campaign and stand alone ad group. So keep your eyes open for this situation, while you are finalizing your ad groupings.

Step 5: Checking and Concatenating Short Keywords

It’s easy to make mistakes throughout the process of keyword generation. While a mistake or two in a long keyword isn’t likely to affect the account (if a word is misspelled in an improbable manner, the keyword simply won’t attract impressions), a mistake in a short keyword can have a devastating effect on an account.
So I check my keywords by sorting them short to long. Do this by downloading them from excel via the desktop editor. Use “=len()” function; sort ascending. Your most critical mistakes will pop right out on the top of the list (check for the keyword, “keyword,” which, with the advent of the desktop editor, has become one of the most commonly purchased keywords).

Generally, we are highly suspicious of any keyword which is shorter than 10 characters, and all less than 15 to 20 characters should be carefully scrutinized. It doesn’t mean we never bid on them, just that we are bias against them. When in doubt, apply a term as a search query and study the results;ask yourself a couple questions: “Is this really the Advertiser’s ad space?” and “What risks exist for tangential searches?” If you identify tangential searches, then sometimes they can be mitigated by adding some negative keywords, but more often than not, you will maximize ROAS by simply sacrificing the term.

Once you’ve eliminated any garbage, then consider concatenating terms by applying likely modifiers against relatively short keywords [hint: "=concatenate("irs", b3)]. This relates not just to place names (which are special modifiers), but also to other adjectives. If you’re bidding on “tax attorney,” for example, then try words like: irs, top, and best. Often the best clues for modifiers already exist throughout your keyword list.

All gargantuan keyword lists are developed through concatenation, and there is no limit to the possibilities. So while you should use your imagination, you must stay within the realm of plausibility or you will risk looking ridiculous to the Advertiser. Aside from that, you must also follow our guidelines for keyword length.

One final word about concatenation: keywords which don’t earn impressions are not free. They will tax you forever, on every account download, every page load, every report generated. So while we love long-tail keywords, even long-tail keywords must earn their keep: minimum average one impression per month, or we delete them.

Ready for Launch!

Once you complete this final step, you probably think you have a final keyword list, but you don’t. You may be ready for launch, but remember:

Keyword lists are never final – Kaizen PPC.

Improve them . . . forever!

One of the things I love about Yahoo is that they aren’t afraid to trash the reputation of their search engine by turning their organic search results into spicy jambalaya. Yahoo Paid Inclusion (also called Yahoo Search Submit, and Yahoo Search Submit Pro) allow almost anyone to purchase listings in Yahoo organic search results.

Pay Per Click . . . by any other name

With Yahoo Paid Inclusion, you get to advertise in search results, without having to actually write your ad text, or manage your CPC bids. It’s sort of like going to the supermarket and handing your wallet to the lad at the checkout, “Just fill my cart, please.”

Of course, if you want to write your own organic search descriptions, that’s allowed too. If not, then Yahoo does all this for you, and then mixes your ads in with their organic search engine results based on relevancy . . . ahem . . . combined with a boost for those who have paid to be a little more relevant than the average Joe, of course.

Regardless of whether you qualify just for Yahoo Search Submit Basic, or Yahoo Search Submit Pro (typically requires a minimum budget of $5,000 per month), you’ll have to meet Yahoo’s Search Submit Content Guidelines (not a big deal for most commercial advertisers).

Desperate for Yahoo Organic Listings?

If you’ve tried every SEO technique, and just don’t seem to be able to achieve any success with Yahoo Organic listings, then Yahoo Search Submit or Search Submit Pro may represent an alternative. If you are a major advertiser with a huge monthly budget, and have some horrible aversion to allocating a portion of it to an SEO firm to get you listed in Yahoo Organic Listings, then Yahoo Search Submit Pro may be the next best solution for getting listed in Yahoo organic search results (would be a rather ironic choice for any major SEO firm, yes?).

How Much Will You Pay?

For Search Submit Basic, you pay $49 per URL, plus a per click fee. For the per click fees, seems you’ll pay whatever Yahoo thinks a click is worth; it used to be $0.15 or $0.30, but Yahoo no longer publishes a comprehensive list of their per click fees, so this may have changed. Pricing regarding Paid Search Inclusion is generally opaque. Consider using your Yahoo CPC for related terms as a benchmark sort of preliminary estimate. Once your listings are accepted, Yahoo will inform you of the CPC for your search space, and send you a monthly report informing you of what you’ve spent.

What are the Terms?

Sign on for a year–same as the Yellow Pages. With Yahoo Paid Inclusion, there is no need to rethink advertising budgets and mediums between annual budget meetings. Yahoo Paid Inclusion is great for chimpanzees.

Will somebody please buy this company and fire the bright spot who developed Yahoo Paid Inclusion?

Yesterday I was involved in another debate about whether Amazon should be buying hot keywords, like its own name, and the word, “books.”

Buying Your Name

Your business name is highly relevant, very essential, and extremely specific. On that basis, in terms of our Framework for Selecting Keywords, it would be considered an obvious pay per click buy. Many paid search Advertisers buy their own names, on the basis that one’s name is most often associated with the highest conversion rates.

Conversely, many an SEO Guru would advise a client to drop keywords for PPC, once such client registers its keywords for organic search, and this generally would includes one’s name. Should you buy your name or not, and why am I so reticent to categorically pick a side in such a debate?

It’s not that I don’t have an opinion on the matter, but rather that I don’t believe the question deserves a simple yes or no answer. My opinion is that, “It depends” (such opinions are never popular in straw votes). If you dominate your search results the way Amazon does, then the left SER are more compelling than if you occupied only SER position 3, for example. That notwithstanding, any Advertiser can resolve the matter algebraically as follows:

For [Name} if the following is true, then buy [Name]:

(Actual acquisition cost for [Name]) < (Targeted Acquisition Cost – ((probability R clicker clicks on L) x (targeted acquisition costs))

A Right Clicker is someone who has the tendency to click on ads, regardless of organic search results.  Say one out of six people are Right Clickers.  It varies by company.  You can find your ratio of right clickers by looking in your analytics.

This brings me to a final point of caution on the matter. If you’re taking over the management of a PPC budget and decide to cull keywords which include the client’s name, even though these keywords are converting at 4x the rate of all other keywords, then you must be prepared to defend your inferior results three months hence, when your ROAS results don’t stack up against those of the previous manager.

Your name may be the closest you’ll find to a sure thing. Should you buy your company name? Do the ROAS math, then decide.

Purchasing High Traffic General Keywords

Should Amazon buy the keyword, “books?” In fact, I find Amazon first in the paid search results for that term today. Amazon is one of the kings of internet retailing, so the fact that they are buying “books” supports the notion of purchasing general relevant search phrases, right?

Well, that depends. If you’re Amazon, then I agree. By all means, buy the word “books.” If Amazon can’t convert that term, then who can? However, if you’re “Bob’s Books,” then you may not have the ad budget to go head to head against Amazon for the word. Even if you have the ad budget, if you can’t convert the keyword at the same rate that Amazon converts it, then you’ll find that while the term may meet Amazon’s ROAS hurdle, it can never meet yours.

If you’re Bob Books, and you’re purchasing only 14% of impressions for relevant keyword phrases, then you are a bargain hunter, in which case you want to allocate your limited budget towards those keywords offering the highest return on your ad spending. Most often those are long-tail lower traffic keywords, not what for you would be an absurdly general keyword, like “books.”

Go, Amazon (don’t do it Bob).

Adwords’ Search Query Performance Report could be significantly improved. However, if you’re using Broad or Phrase Match Keywords, run the report in order to identify ways to improve performance, and calculate your Keyword Adequacy Quotient. Track your Keyword Adequacy Quotient over time, and you’ll find that your account performance will improve as your Score improves.

Background: Bias Against Broad Match Type

One of the reasons we are bias against using Broad match type is that Google does not disclose the precise search phrase query which triggers our ads. Furthermore, we find Google’s defintion of Broad Match to be too nebulous for our liking. Here is their definition:

If your ad group contained the keyword tennis shoes, your ad would be eligible to appear when a user’s search query contained tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads could also show for singular/plural forms, synonyms, and other relevant variations. For example, you ad might show on tennis shoe or tennis sneakers. Run a Search Query Performance Report to see what keyword variations trigger your ad.

” . . . and other relevant variations.” What’s that?? If we wanted to choose a keyword, then we would have chosen it during setup, right? Google wants to suggest a keyword? I love it!! In fact, we most often give Google an opportunity to do so when we use the Google Keyword tool in performing our keyword research, right? Using the tool allows one to develop a pretty good appreciation for how accurate Google’s suggestions might be, and that is no compliment. In fact, from our experiences, when we run Google’s keyword tool against a well-developed list of keywords, we are more likely to find candidates for negatives than relevant keywords.

We believe that Google’s unwillingness to disclose the precise search queries which triggered our ads implies that Google is taking Broad Match liberties which, if fully disclosed, no sensible advertiser would condone. This is not to say that we never apply Broad Match in the accounts we manage, but we do maintain a strong bias against it, in favor of our default for new accounts, which is Phrase match type.

As for Broad Match, if we’re going to appoint the Poacher as Game Warden by allowing Google to determine what qualifies as ” . . . other relevant variations,” then at least we’d like to have some disclosure about which precise terms Google allows. For this, Google offers the Search Query Performance Report.

Shortcomings of Search Query Performance Report

To fully appreciate the limitations of the Search Query Performance Report, you’ll have to actually run it. It clearly lists the “Exact” search phrases which matched our keywords, but such information could also have been derived more or less from running a keyword report. The Search Query Performance Report also displays some other queries which caused our ads to display, but for most other queries, which were not exact match, Google provides information like: “15 other unique queries” instead of disclosing the precise queries which triggered our ads. This is not trivial: out of 150 unique search queries which are not exact matches to those in our keyword lists, Google is unlikely to disclose more than 25, or about 1 out of 6 unique queries which triggered our ads. And that’s really our beef with Broad Match in general, and the Seach Query Performance Report specifically.

Search Query Performance Report is Mandatory

Is the report useless then? No! Review it every month for every account you manage!! If you do so, you will most certainly find opportunites for adding more negative keywords! It’s possible that you may also identify opportunities for improving your actual keyword lists.

Keyword Adequacy Quotient

If you want to understand how well developed your keyword and negative keyword lists are for a campaign including Phrase match or Broad match keywords (the results are not interesting for exact match keywords), then run a Search Query Performance Report to see what percent of clicks are coming from exactly matched search queries (those identical to the ones in your keyword list) versus Other search phrases not included in your keyword lists. Calculate this by sorting the report by Search Query Match Type and summing the clicks by match type. Divide the number of clicks from “Exact” by the total clicks to calculate the statistic which we call, “Keyword Adequacy Quotient.” A par Keyword Adequacy Quotient of 75% or more might indicate a thorough, well-developed list of keywords / negative keywords. Seems like an easy par? Run it against accounts which you consider to be well constructed, and you may be surprised at the results. In fact, our experience shows that most new accounts cannot achieve a par Keyword Adequacy Quotient until two or three months of continuous improvement. Obviously, a list of phrase match keywords is more likely to earn a higher percentage than a similar list of broad match keywords. We track the Keyword Adequacy Quotient for each Full Service account in the monthly summary included in each client’s PPC Road Map (if it’s not there, add it now!).

If you run the Search Query Performance Report monthly at the ad group level, to identify additional negative and relevant keywords, as well as those ad groups requiring further research, then over time you will find that your Keyword Adequacy Quotient will improve. This can significantly impact CTR, Quality Scores, and ROAS, and that’s what Kaizen PPC is all about.

Adwords Manager

Our system for managing Adwords is designed for use by professional Adwords Managers.  If you’re an experienced Adwords Manager, then many of the concepts we illuminate will make intuitive sense to you.  If you’re not an experienced Adwords Manager, and you find yourself lost, then drop us some questions in this Blog Post.

Framework for PPC Management

We’ve just published our framework for managing Pay Per Click Advertising. We’ve used this framework for the past several years to manage Adwords pay per click accounts (and Yahoo accounts too) and find that it is particularly helpful for our PPC Analysts.

Where to find PPC Management Framework

It’s built into our primary website under PPC & SEO Tools at How to Manage PPC Accounts. I look forward to receiving comments and questions on the framework.