A note about why you might not want to only use Google Analytics to report revenue: Google Analytics attributes a conversion to “last touch” while Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search attribute it to “first touch.” What that means is if someone came to your website on a Monday through a paid ad, and didn’t buy anything, then returned a week later (either through a bookmark and manually typing in your URL) and bought something, Google Analytics would count that conversion as a Direct referral (the last way they came to your site), while AdWords and Sponsored Search would attribute it to PPC (the first way they came to your site).

It’s not a big deal when the vast majority of your visitors order on their first visit, but becomes a big deal when a large percentage of them don’t. I have several clients where over 50% of their visitors don’t buy on that first visit, which makes PPC look like it doesn’t perform that well. Once you factor in those “first touch” conversions, PPC certainly is a much more important piece of the marketing puzzle.

So back to how you track revenue in Yahoo Sponsored Search… I have to give Yahoo credit – they beat Google on this by including revenue right in the normal screens you use to manage your Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns. Google only reports revenue on their actual reports, which makes it more of a pain to manage; Not impossible, just not as easy to analyze and then make quick changes.

To track Yahoo Sponsored Search revenue, you’ll just need to add one more tiny bit of code to your conversion tracking. Replace where I have ORDER.SUBTOTAL with your dynamically generated Order Subtotal field into this line of your Yahoo Sponsored Search Analytics code (You can also do Order Total, but I recommend doing the Subtotal which excludes tax and shipping, for a more accurate picture of your revenue.):

window.ysm_customData.conversion = “transId=,currency=,amount=ORDER.SUBTOTAL“;

That’s it. Pretty simple and pretty powerful. Now you can actually see what kind of revenue your Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns are actually generating, and then make better informed decisions about where your PPC advertising dollars should be spent.

A note on this: I attempted to do it for a client that uses a Volusion cart and processes credit cards offline (meaning they don’t actually process the credit card at the time of order, but do it manually at a later time), but this won’t work for them. I’m guessing that this will hold true for any shopping cart; if you don’t process credit cards in real-time, it won’t work. In fact, for this client, it also prevented the number of conversions from tracking.

One last note: Unfortunately, MSN AdCenter does not have the same functionality. Here’s hoping they get that solved before they take over supplying Yahoo’s paid ads.

If you need help getting Yahoo Sponsored Search Revenue Tracking implemented and/or analyzed, contact a reputable PPC management company for assistance.

It can actually be overwhelming when you first start to poke around your PPC advertising campaign or your Google Analytics account to figure out what the most valuable data really is, so let me point you in a couple key places.

The new interface has some really great ways to view, filter and analyze your Google AdWords campaign data quickly and efficiently.  These options used to only be available in the reports area, but now they can be seen for every campaign and ad group.

With the new Google AdWords interface, you now have a great new data reporting tool on the right hand side.  It is a graph that will show you the trend for the time period you have selected on several different data values.  You can change the date range to view as many days as you like – I prefer either 30 or 7 depending on the campaign.  The two data items I keep an eye on from this “30 thousand foot” view are Impressions and Cost.  Basically we are looking for any trends – up or down – of the number of impressions your ads are getting and the amount that is being spent on the entire account.  If either one has an unusual spike, there is going to be some digging to do to be sure everything is running as planned.

Also, while you are getting that overview perspective for your AdWords account, go ahead and sort campaigns and ad groups by Cost (descending). This way, your attention is focused on the highest spenders at a high level.  This will also alert you to situations where your highest spenders shouldn’t be your highest spenders and you can make changes accordingly. If you have PPC advertising questions, you might want to consider contacting a professional PPC management company with questions or to plan a consultation.

When Google initially introduced the new beta version of the AdWords User Interface (UI), I played around with it a few times in my few client accounts that had the option, but it looks like last week the new AdWords User Interface rolled out to a much wider audience and I decided I better get myself familiar with it. I’m not going to review every new part of the Adwords UI, but I will highlight a few new features that I’ve noticed in the past few days.

The Pros of the New Google AdWords Interface:

• The “Tree” Based Visuals: I can get to any campaign or AdGroup using the tree interface, instead of going back out to the campaign summary or AdGroup summary.
• Nice Graphical Representation: in each campaign and AdGroup you can view a graph based on criteria like CTR, Conversions, Impressions, CPC and more, for whatever time period you prefer. I love looking at graphs for trends – is CTR dropping or CPC rising, etc. I used to use this a lot on the account dashboard, but this is even better, and I can choose to hide the graph if I want.
• Query Report Built Into the Keyword Tab: Another new AdWords User Interface feature that I like is the “Show Query Report” button within the keyword tab. I can select a few broad and/or phrase match terms, then hit the Show Query Report button and it will give me a list of the search queries that were triggered by the keywords I selected.One caveat is that it appears you have to have quite a few impressions before it will show you data. A lot of the terms I tested kept giving me the error “Not enough data to show particular queries.” It still seems a bit “buggy”, because a number of times the report would generate partially, but without the search queries, and trying to refresh would cause a bright red error bar to come up. This one is also a Con because once you’ve generated the list, it’s a bit kludge to put the actual terms into the AdGroup, but I’m hoping that will approve.
• One last pro: you can still switch back to the original interface if the new UI gets a bit confusing.

And now on to my new Google AdWords User Interface Con List:

• Ads Showing in the UI May Not Be Active: this one is a big problem for me, because I almost lost a client last week because of it. When you are in the keyword tab of an AdGroup in the new AdWords User Interface, one ad will be showing on the top left, just like in the original UI. Unfortunately, that ad may not be an active ad (in fact, I have YET to see where the ad that shows is going to an Active ad, unless only active ads are in that AdGroup – it almost seems to default to a Paused ad which is terribly annoying). I had a client who went into the new interface and was clicking around. He clicked the ad that was showing and was stunned to see it was going to a dead page of his site. He went through a bunch of the AdGroups and saw the same thing, and then called us, completely irate, because this was a change that had happened in January, and that I had told him was taken care of. He demanded a refund of several thousand dollars and was very close to quitting before I got him calmed down enough to understand what was happening and explain to him that the changes were made, and the only ad that was actually active in those AdGroups were all going to a live page in his site.
• Quick Add Tool is Missing: one of my favorite tools in the original interface is on the keyword tab and it’s the Quick Add link. Click it and Google lets you manually enter your keywords, AND generates a very specific list of keywords that you are missing that are all based around the existing keywords in that AdGroup. I use it a lot to see what keywords I might be missing in an AdGroup AND what negatives I should include. The Keyword Tool just generates too much “noise” to be used effectively in this same manner. And now it’s missing in the new AdWords User Interface, and the Show Query Report is not an effective substitute.
• Show Query Report: it’s on my pro list too, but most of the time it either doesn’t give results because it doesn’t have enough data or it keeps having errors.
• The MCC Drop-Down List is Not Alphabetical: this is a con for PPC management agencies like ourselves who use an MCC to manage our clients – the Drop-Down Client list isn’t alphabetical, so it can be hard to find a client in the list.
• The Next/Previous Links on the AdGroup Level Are Gone: in the original interface, I could sort my AdGroups by some criteria, like Cost or Impressions, and go into the first one, then hit the next link to move to the next one. That link is gone, so I have to keep going back to the Campaign level to see what the next AdGroup is that I need to go into.

Now this certainly isn’t a comprehensive list of Pros and Cons but just the first ones that have come to me over the last four or five days of continually using the new AdWords User interface. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more in the days and weeks to come. There’s no set switch date that I could find when they are moving from Beta to the new UI permanently, but I recommend getting used to it now, when you still have the ability to switch back and forth between the beta and original Google AdWords User Interface.

More about Nikki

Google Image ads appear on select Google Content Network sites. By integrating the proven targeting of AdWords and the appeal of graphical images, image ads can help you reach an entirely new audience for your product or service. The key difference between the old banner ads and Google Image Ads is that the Image Ads can be matched to a website page’s content. This added level of targeting helps focus the Image Ads on the audience you want to reach, allowing you to better spend your advertising dollars on the customers you want to attract. Some Content Sites only show Image Ads, so the only way to reach some of this audience is by adding Image Ads into your marketing mix. You can even use Flash ads, giving your product or service a little bit of extra pizzaz.

JumpFly is happy to announce that we are now offering high quality image ad production for PPC management clients. There are eight different sizes of Image Ads you can run, so there is a nice variety of potential ads you can create. You can advertise with a large 728 x 90 Leaderboard Ad, or use a smaller 200 x 200 Small Square Ad. One can only wonder if graphical ads are the next evolution in the PPC marketplace. You may want to venture into those waters now while they are still shallow. You may reap the benefits much quicker than those who wait timidly on the shore.

More about Jack

1) A company YouTube “Channel”
2) Video ad/ads production
3) YouTube campaign development, implementation & management

The newness of this platform provides early adopters an exciting opportunity to capitalize on YouTube’s massive user population as well as the current lack of advertisers and resulting very low cost-per-clicks (CPCs).

Founded in February 2005, YouTube was purchased by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock roughly 1-½ years later. Today, YouTube is the #2 search engine and the #3 most visited website in the world. YouTube serves close to 1 billion videos every day and its users upload 13 hours of video every minute. According to HitWise, YouTube’s market share in the U.S. video sector is 73.18%.

Right now, advertisers can get started with really low CPCs before the advertising at YouTube gets competitive. I created a simple campaign for JumpFly as a test and was able to attain impressive first page results for as little as $0.15 per click. As YouTube’s growth continues and video becomes more mainstream, YouTube will likely represent a valuable advertising avenue for many advertisers who properly go after this new marketplace. Learn more about YouTube Sponsored Videos or consider having a professional PPC Management firm assist you in developing your YouTube Sponsored Video campaign.

More about Brad
JumpFly YouTube Channel

Yes, MSN does indeed have a search engine.  I’ll be the first to admit that the volume isn’t huge and the management interface for their PPC platform can be quite tedious to work with, but it can deliver some incremental traffic for your business. 

One valuable change they just made in the Microsft Avertising adCenter is that they now allow you to pause keywords or ad copy (learn how here).  Prior to this change, you had to actually delete keywords or ads to stop them from running.  This made it difficult to keep track of which keywords or ads you had tried that were not working as well as you had hoped they would.  Before this change, you had to go in and delete the keyword itself instead of just pausing it.  This would also remove any history that the keyword might have had in the account from the keyword tab screen.

The biggest advantage of all this is just the increased flexibility you now have in how you can manage your keywords and ads in adCenter.  To me, that’s the best part about this.  Sure, you will always be deleting keywords and ads that you don’t want, but it’s nice to have the flexibility to pause keywords or ads that are seasonal or might see the light of day in the future.  You might run a new sale perhaps, or revise a landing page to make it a stronger converter.  Again, it’s just nice to have more flexibility in your PPC advertising strategies than to always have to use the final axe chop.

More about Jack

To access this new tool, simply go to your content campaign. You do have separate campaigns for content don’t you? Then click the “Ad Variations” tab. Next to “Create new ad:” you will find the usual selections of: Text ad, Image ad, Local business ad, Mobile ad, Click-to-play video ad and the new Display Ad Builder. You really can’t miss it since it has NEW! in large red letters right next to it.

Once inside the Display Ad Builder Tool you will find dozens of unique animated templates to use as your starting point. There are several pre-designed ad formats based on different industries like; travel, finance, automotive, ecommerce, etc. These all make excellent starting points for your new display ad, and Google promises to be releasing many more as the feature moves out of beta.

After you pick your new template you will be taken to the page that allows you to customize the ad with all of your own information. There are text fields for headlines and descriptions, and you can easily change the font colors if you wish. As you proceed, there is a button labeled “update preview” located underneath the ad, and you will want to periodically click this button to see the results of your modifications.

Tip* Depending on the template, you may need to have some custom logos and product images available. If your logo’s file size is too large, you may need to reduce it to the maximum size shown. Usually this is about 50k. If this seems too daunting of a task, simply choose one of the other templates that does not display a logo. There are plenty to choose from.

So, you have customized your new display ad. The next step is to click “Continue” located at the bottom of the page.

You are now on the preview and ad variations page. As you will see, the Display Ad Builder Tool automatically generates your new ad into several of the common sizes including medium and large rectangles, leader boards, as well as the popular skyscraper formats. Different templates are automatically converted to different sizes, so depending on the template you have chosen, you may or may not see all of the formats mentioned.

If something doesn’t look correct, you will want to click back and adjust as needed. If it looks good, click “save ad” and you now have impressive new animated display ads running in your content campaign.

Many AdSense websites do not have layouts that accommodate these display ad formats, so you will always want to have text ad versions available in your campaign. I have found that in some of the AdWords accounts that I manage, display ads perform very well with higher CTRs than the text ads. In some of my accounts they simply do not see enough volume. Give the Display Ad Builder a try and see how it works for you. You may want to monitor results using Placement Performance Reports.

Creating Google AdWords Content Network Campaigns requires a unique strategy and keyword list. Contact a qualified PPC Account Manager to discuss your content campaign.

Google has an interesting new report called the Geographic Performance Report.  You will find it as a new report type you can create in the Report Center.  The Geographic Performance report allows you to view performance data broken down by geographic origin.  Here at JumpFly, we feel this report can occassionally provide some valuable detail.

You can run the report on a Country/Territory level to really see whether or not various countries are peforming at an acceptable level.  For example, if you have a campaign running that has the USA lumped together with Canada, you can run a report that separates out your Canada costs/clicks/conversions from your USA data.  By doing so, you can get some interesting insight into whether or not other countries are truly bringing you the traffic you want, or if they are bringing you traffic at an acceptable cost.

You can also use the Google AdWords Geographic Report to further break down the geographic area into Regions, Metros and even down to the City level.  Let’s say you have the Los Angeles Metro area targeted in your AdWords geographic parameters.  You can dig deeper into that area by utilizing the Geographic Report and see if Beverly Hills is bringing more or better qualified traffic than Anaheim.  Or maybe you’ll discover Huntington Beach is where most of your conversions are coming from.  You could then take this data and tailor your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising ads to speak to that city that is performing the best, or perhaps create a new campaign just for that city with a very tight geographic focus and very specific ad copy that speaks to the residents of that city.

However you want to use it, the Geographic Report can provide some very interesting data for you to take action on, especially if you are a local service provider, or have numerous local brick and mortar locations.

Learn more about Jack

View recent Google AdWords articles

Several of my clients have been notified that they will be included in the new Google AdWords BETA test called “Smart Positioning” which started October 1st.

The goal of Smart Positioning is to place an ad in the most cost-effective position each time it is displayed on Google and the search network, with the end goal of achieving more clicks for the same total cost. Now, it is based on an auction model that does differ slightly from the current auction model, and this is one of the reasons why it is still a BETA feature that is only open to a limited number of accounts.

At first glance, Google AdWords Smart Positioning may seem very much like the position preference settings already found in the Google AdWords campaign settings, however there is a big difference. Smart Positioning calculates incremental CPCs to evaluate the effects on cost and click through rate that would be associated with a higher position for your ad. Once the system determines the incremental CPC for placing your ad in a higher position, it compares the incremental CPC to your maximum CPC bid. Your ad is then placed in the highest position possible, as long as both the actual CPC for that position and incremental CPC are less than your maximum CPC bid. Position Preference simply limits the positions where your ad is displayed without any evaluation as to traffic, incremental cost, and/or benefit.

If you choose to enable Smart Positioning in an existing Google AdWords campaign, Google suggests a one-time increase of your maximum CPC bids that is based on the historical performance of your campaign. New campaigns with Smart Positioning can be launched with whatever bid desired, however Google recommends setting a slightly higher bid than you would otherwise use. It sounds like the extra headroom helps the feature perform better.

Even though Smart Positioning does seem like a great way to test a more automated method to control and optimize bids, I am recommending that my eligible clients do so only on a limited basis. BETA tests are notorious for having difficulties and issues and I would never suggest jumping into this situation with a campaign that is already performing well. It would be best to create a new campaign with a limited budget designed specifically to test this feature in your account.

If you’re interested in learning more about Smart Position and how it may impact your Google AdWords Campaigns, contact a PPC Management specialist today.

The way Quality Score worked in the past is that Google would take a combination of the keyword, the Ad Copy and Landing page and other “historical” information from the account and the industry and would assign a quality score to the keyword.   Just recently, they added landing page load time to the quality score calculation as well.

This quality score would impact the CPC (Cost Per Click), the position of the ad and the minimum bid required to show your ad on that keyword.  One of the biggest impacts of the quality score algorithm was that Google could make your keyword “Inactive for Search” by increasing the minimum bid based on this score.  If an advertiser does not look at their account often or does not have a PPC management firm overseeing their account, they could have very important terms inactivated with little notice (Google tells you about the keywords that are inactive only when you display Ad Group in a campaign).

The New Quality Score Changes
As with everything, Google’s goal is to improve the quality and relevance of advertisements displayed to their visitor.

In order to improve relevance, Google is moving to a real-time calculation of quality score.  The new per-query Quality Score will use more accurate performance information and will take into consideration the account location, the language and timing.

No More Inactive Keywords!
Google is getting rid of the minimum bid and the “Inactive for Search” status.  This will definitely have a positive impact on accounts that struggle with improving their quality score and getting their ads to show up for certain keywords.

More Data
They are replacing “minimum bid” with a “first page bid” which will tell us what we need to bid to appear on the first page.  This may help in managing our campaigns and predicting performance. However, there is also a chance it could create artificial bidding wars as inexperienced PPC users bid for position instead of bidding for ROI.  Of course, as with anything, we’ll need to see how accurate this new “tool” is among all of our accounts.

When? Where? Who?
Google’s announcement was vague as to how they plan to implement this change across all accounts.  For now, they are saying that “select” advertisers will have this feature enabled so that they can receive and process feedback.  The Google API and Google AdWords Editor will be updated “in the future”.

With all of our accounts here at JumpFly, we will certainly see this feature very soon and will report on our experience.

More From Google
To find out more on this new feature see their blog post on Quality Score Improvements.

Facebook knows a lot about its users and offers fairly impressive targeted PPC advertising opportunities. The traffic is certainly not as targeted as search engine marketing traffic, but is likely comparable to that which is provided by Content Match at Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing. For the right companies, Facebook can potentially target ideal new prospects. For example, one question Facebook asks is about political views. I initially chose “Democratic Party”, which I later changed to blank, as I am actually more undecided. Regardless, as a result, I quickly started seeing ads for a Free Obama Sticker Give-away. I thought that was fairly well targeted.

I then decided to setup an account for JumpFly to get more familiar with the interface and see how it works. I initially targeted advertising and marketing groups as well as business owners. So far, with limited effort, this account is providing about 20,000 impressions & 10 clicks per day for about $5 per day. It certainly provides significant exposure at a very reasonable CPC and CPM. We’ll see if it proves to provide conversions over time.

Facebook also allows you to setup a free page for a business, artist, band or public figure. For example, you can view the page I created for JumpFly, or even Michael Phelps’s page, but you have to be a member. Facebook represents one piece of the increasingly popular social-media-marketing marketplace. Joining is free. See you there.
 

Google also unveiled a potentially valuable new tool for advertisers called Google Insights. This update to Google Trends enables advertisers to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories, geographic regions, or specific time ranges. It also features related search terms and “Rising Searches,” which features similar terms that have been experiencing a significant traffic increase.

A search for “ppc advertising” yields a few interesting results. First, I can see that the majority of traffic for this particular term is from outside of the U.S. Interesting data if I am running or intend to run a global campaign. The related terms and the rising terms were not of great value in this instance, but certainly could be depending on the term searched for.

Another point of interest to me was the provided news headlines. While searching “ppc advertising” at Google Insights, I was delighted to find the top News Headline was from JumpFly. This was made possible via press distribution at PRWeb, another great resource for increasing business exposure and improving search engine rankings. Have a great week and enjoy the Olympics.

With the release of version 6.0 and now 6.0.1, there were a couple of changes that are already making our lives even easier.  The changes that had the most impact on my productivity were the performance statistics updates.

Performance Statistics

One of the most important aspects in managing accounts is analyzing the performance statistics at many different levels – campaign, ad group and keyword.  And at several different date intervals – daily, weekly, monthly.

We can now download those statistics to a CSV file which makes it very easy to create reports and to analyze the data.

We are also able to refresh the minimum CPC bids which helps when you are managing an account that has keywords that are inactive due to minimum bid requirements.

But my favorite is the fact that when you change the interval (the date range of the stats), Editor now gives you a progress bar.  I know this may seem small to some, but in the past, you would change the date range and could never really be sure when Editor was done downloading the new data.  Now you know how long you will have to wait (do I sit here or go get a cup of coffee?) and when it’s done, they tell you!  Terrific!

Last week we were pleasantly surprised with another change that allows us to download the performance statistics for smaller portions of the account thus saving quite a bit of time if you are only looking to analyze a single campaign or even a single ad group.

Next week, I’ll take a look at the new editing features.

Not even using the Editor yet? Download it today or click here to review ten additional great benefits of using AdWords Editor - Wow, are you in for a treat!

Per Google, AdWords Editor enables you to make changes to your account quickly and conveniently, whether you’re editing one keyword or adding hundreds of text ads. Among other benefits, you can:

• Work offline on your Mac or PC.
• Upload changes to AdWords any time.
• Store and navigate accounts.
• Add, edit, and delete campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, and placements.
• Make large-scale changes quickly.
• Perform advanced searches and edits.
• Sort and view performance statistics.
• Copy or move items between campaigns, ad groups, and accounts.
• Export a snapshot of your account for archiving or sharing.
• Import an archive or share file and review the proposed changes.

This is just a small sampling of the valuable benefits provided by AdWords Editor. If you are managing your own PPC advertising accounts, then you should certainly consider learning how to use AdWords Editor. Everyone here at JumpFly uses AdWords Editor every day.