Have you looked at your PPC ad copy lately? Now is the time to take a look at your ad copy and make changes. If you have multiple ads running, is there a clear loser that you can pause? Is one of them performing really well? Can you test a variation of it to see if you can beat it, or use it in other AdGroups to improve performance elsewhere? If you are planning a Winter Sale, go ahead and do new ads to highlight it.

One thing I really wish the search engines had was start and end dates for ad copy. It would be wonderful to know a client was going to start a sale on a certain date, create the ad to start running on that date (instead of creating it and pausing it, then going in to make it live when the sale starts) and then having it end when the sale ends (instead of manually having to remember to pause the ads). In fact, Google is usually so far ahead of the curve on things like this, that I’m amazed they don’t have that feature already.

But until the search engines add this functionality, you’ll just have to remember to end your holiday ads and start and end your sale ads.

Another thing to check is your PPC advertising budget. Did you raise it for the holidays? Do you need to bring it back down to a lower level? That’s another thing you can look at. Did you do a new marketing budget for 2009? Now is the time to make changes to your PPC budget to be in line with your overall marketing strategy.

I wish you much success in your PPC marketing in 2009. If you are managing your own PPC accounts and spending over $1,000 per month, you should definitely consider starting the new year with a free PPC account review from a qualified PPC management agency. Many advertisers needlessly and unknowingly waste a large portion of their budgets by improperly using the constantly changing PPC platforms. Don’t be one of them.

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1. Researching Starts Early: 31% of consumers planned to start shopping before Halloween, and 57% are researching right now, before Thanksgiving.

2. Research is Increased Due to Economy: 43% of consumers say they plan to spend more time this year shopping and researching gifts because of the state of the economy.

3. Online Research is King:54% of people go online to research than go to the store to buy, 49% research online and purchase online and another 28% research online, go to the store to check out the products and then go back online to actually buy the products.

4. The Internet is Key Influencer of Holiday Purchases: 86% of users will use the Internet to plan their holiday shopping and 63% of users plan on paying attention to advertising while planning or doing holiday shopping.

5. Post Holiday Sales Are Important: 63% of consumers say they plan on taking advantage of holiday sales.

A few other key nuggets of information, online shopping will gear up right on Cyber Monday, which is the first Monday after Thanksgiving, or December 1st for 2008. It continues to climb until right before Christmas.

And what are consumers looking for when they are online? 86% of users are looking for and plan on taking advantage of price discounts and sales, while another 75% of consumers are looking to taking advantage of free shipping. What does that mean for you? Unless you are the only player in your market, you better be offering some kind of special like a discount or free shipping or you are going to miss out on customers, plain and simple. Now is a great time to adjust your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising ad copy to reflect any available incentives.

The holidays are coming, so be ready. Plan now because waiting even a bit longer will be too late.

About Nikki

As you might know, click through rate (CTR) is arguably the most significant component of Quality Score, and ads in higher positions tend to earn better CTR than ads that display in lower positions. Google decided that to accurately calculate the Quality Scores, the “influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.”

As a result, Google has now updated the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounted for ad position. It is their belief that this new adjustment will result in a more accurate Quality Score and ensure that ads compete fairly for position based on their quality and bid, while rewarding high-quality advertisers with better ad positions.

In the past, here at JumpFly, we have certainly seen the advantage of placing some clients’ new keywords in prominent positions to start, and then pull them down later based on performance. The advantage of the increased CTR from the higher initial positioning would work to their advantage down the road. From the sound of this latest update, this particular strategy may no longer be necessary. It will be interesting to see.

The second update going live today is an “improvement” in the way Google determines which ads show in the prominent yellow region directly above the search results. Google believes that given the prominence of these positions that it is especially important for ads to be high quality. Therefore, to appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold.

You may have noticed that sometimes Google chooses not to display any ads in this position. Previously, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the necessary quality threshold, they would not show any ads in these positions. With the new update, Google will now allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to actually jump over an ad in a higher position and be displayed in this prominent position. Again, quality plays a very important roll in being able to show in higher positions.

There is no doubt that these new algorithm changes by Google will cause some ads to experience a change in position, spend, and/or performance. Changes in Google’s ranking algorithms can affect even the most stable Google AdWords PPC account. Talk to a professional PPC Management Company today about how this recent update might affect your Google AdWords account.

Here at JumpFly, we frequently hear from advertisers who share examples of successfully running Google AdWords ads that were modified for one reason or another, and could then never recapture the results previously achieved. I am sure this can be incredibly frustrating, but fortunately it can be easily avoided!

Secret #1: Never initially delete successful ads in Google AdWords accounts!
If ad changes are needed, initially pausing successful ads and creating new ones, rather than deleting ads, is a really good idea so you can just turn them back on later if desired. Unused ads can always be permanently deleted later.

Secret #2: Change destination URLs at the keyword level to prevent disrupting ad performance
This is a critical concept to be familiar with and understand. Ads can be redirected to a different destination URL at the keyword level without changing the destination URL in the ad itself. This feature enables advertisers to change destination URLs without losing the ad’s performance history. This is a valuable tool, but depending on the size of the AdWords account, might seem like an overwhelming task. Fortunatley, AdWords Editor is here to the rescue.

Secret #3: Use AdWords Editor to update destination URLs
Once again, Google AdWords Editor enables advertisers to manage accounts much more efficiently. In AdWords Editor, users can easily upload a new destination URL to all the terms in an account in an instant. Amazing. Time saving. Powerful. Using AdWords Editor for managing Google AdWords accounts is a must.

Now go download AdWords Editor today! You won’t regret it.

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The Case for Rotating Evenly
If you are going to truly Split Test your ads, you must show them evenly and randomly to a wide range of visitors.  The ability to rotate two ads with only one small difference allows you to run a true Split Test.

Additionally, Google’s optimize feature works on CTR and not your conversion rate.  So you could have an ad that is “winning” the split test on CTR but not converting nearly as well as the other ad.  Since Google’s optimization doesn’t consider the conversion rate, the true winner starts showing less and less.

The Case for Optimizing to Performance
When you rotate your ads evenly, you could be adversely affecting your business.  Showing an ad that does not pull Visitors to Your Site – even for a little while – is causing missed traffic and missed opportunity.

Google’s Optimize feature allows you to automatically show a winning ad more often to your visitor.  This increases overall CTR which we know increases the performance while decreasing the cost of a campaign.

So what is one to do?  You need to look at your business goals and decide between the two based on both your goals and your time available to monitor ad group progress.

One option we use quite often is to start out a new campaign using rotate while we closely monitor the performance over a short period of time.  Once we are sure we have strong, pulling ads, we turn it over to optimize to be sure those ads are doing their job.  Most of our customers want to focus on the most targeted traffic at the lowest cost which is achieved through the optimize feature.

Don’t assume that your current finely tuned bids and positions are going to get you the business you want for the holiday buying season. Take a look at last year’s holiday data if you were running campaigns last holiday and compare where your bids and positions were then in relation to where they are now. There is often room, and often a need, to get a bit more aggressive during the peak buying season.

Check your old ad copy. Did you have a special ad running during the holiday that drove good conversions? You may want to re-visit those ads and run the same kind of holiday special with an even more aggressive call to action. If you didn’t do anything special last holiday season for your ad copy, you may want to consider trying some holiday-flavored ad copy this year. One word of caution, though. If you are trying out some new ad copy, I highly recommend PAUSING your existing ad copy instead of re-writing it and losing all of its click-thru history. Then, once the holiday season is over, you can resume your existing ad copy with its history preserved.

Here are last years Holiday tips from Google AdWords.

Santa Clause is coming. Are you ready?

However, if your prices are very similar to your competitors, you may want to try some pricing in your ad copy. You could very well bring in a higher converting crowd by letting them know upfront what their cost is going to be. You may get a lower CTR on the ad because the price might scare some folks off, but those people probably would not turn into buyers anyway, so you could say you have successfully screened out some of the “tire kickers.”

Now if your pricing is clearly the lowest on the net, then by all means you should consider shouting it to the heavens and letting everybody know it. So many buyers are price sensitive these days that your lower price proclamation may be your saving grace. Your competitors might take notice and could try to undercut you, so that is definitely a risk you take, but if you truly believe that they cannot last as long as you can at your price point, then let them try and take you on.

Tough economic times sometimes require bold moves.  To learn more about using your pricing within your ad copy, read what Google has to say in their blog on ad copywriting tips.

For example, your AdGroup is Blue Widgets, your keywords focus on variations of “blue widget,” “blue widgets” and your URL is www.WidgetWorld.com. Your display URL could then be www.WidgetWorld.com/BlueWidgets or www.WidgetWorld.com/BestBlueWidgets. Or What about WidgetWorld.com/FreeBlueWidgets – there’s no rule that says you have to include the www (but you do have to use an extension like .com, .net or .org).

In fact, there are just a few rules to follow with your display URL:
1. You have a maximum of 35 characters.
2. The display URL has to agree with your ‘host domain’ destination URL. You can’t have the Display URL of www.BestBlueWidgets.com and the destination URL of www.WidgetWorld.com.
3. There cannot be an automatic redirect on the destination URL. You can’t have www.BestBlueWidgets.com as the display and destination URL, with a redirect to www.widgetworld.com.

Use the display URL to your best advantage. When used properly, they can give you a little more edge over your competitors. In fact, display URLs are a great thing to test. Take your best performing ad, copy it and try out one or two different display URLs. We do this frequently for our customers at , with very good effect.

In addition to the Ad Words performance statistics that I wrote about, they have made some changes to the Editing features available.

Spell Checker
By far, my favorite new editing feature is the spell checker.

This one is a huge timesaver.

We all know that correct spelling is crucial to your ad’s success, but before this change you needed to rely on manual verification.  I would go one step further and download the ad copy into Word to be sure the spelling was 100% error free.

Now this step can be eliminated, still knowing you have error free ad copy.

Drag & Drop
Another useful feature is the ability to drag and drop ad groups within the tree view.

There are many situations when you want to move or copy an ad group between campaigns or into new campaigns.

There are several settings that are available at the campaign level that would lead you to put an ad group in its own campaign.  For example you may want to control the daily budget of a particular ad group separately.  You can also control geo targeting or ad scheduling at the campaign level.  There are other settings as well, but these are the settings I use the most.

As an example, I just had a situation with a client where we noticed their campaigns were maxing out budget on a daily basis.  We were working to manage the ad groups and keywords to maximize their traffic without raising the budget, but there was one Ad Group that converted so well that it didn’t make sense to limit the daily budget in the same way.  We were able to quickly break the Ad Group out into its own campaign with its own daily budget separate from the rest of the groups.

We’ve been able to copy and paste or cut and paste ad groups between campaigns, but this just got even easier with drag and drop.

If you’d like more information or training on using Ad Words Editor, check out this release announcement from Google.

Correctly targeting the different audiences is the key to success.

Rather than having just one catch-all PPC Advertising campaign for all of the European countries; I recommend a different campaign for each individual country or language.

While many of our European friends are well versed in the English language, it’s important to remember that many are not. With this in mind, it’s always a great idea to set the campaign’s “Target Audience Languages:” to both English and the countries native language. For example, if I was to create a PPC Advertising campaign targeting Germany, I would set the Target Audience Languages setting to show ads to both English and German.

I also recommend placing versions of your ad copy in both English and the native language. I have personally found that while the English ads receive a surprisingly decent response, by adding the foreign language versions the response increased 10 fold. As you might expect, the foreign language ads often out perform the English equivalent.

There are plenty of companies and individuals who offer translation services at reasonable rates, and this course of action would most likely provide the best possible translation for your ad copy. If your looking for a quick and free solution, Google Translate offers the ability to translate English phrases into several other languages. I suggest using small phrases and double checking the translation results prior to launching the ad copy. Different languages have unique terms and phrases that are often missed when using textual translation tools, so be careful.

Besides the usual ad copy requirements, I suggest that your ads address the fact that you ship or service that specific country, as well as promote the potential for great savings and value. Including the line, “We Ship Daily To Germany” will confirm to your customer that you are experienced and capable of sending merchandise to their location. “Save up to 50%” will certainly help get their attention.

Marketing your business to European customers can open the doorway to a whole new audience of potential clients and customers. JumpFly account managers are experts at correctly setting up Google Adwords campaigns. Which country does your next customer live in?

Case in point: I have a long-time client who has a new web consultant that is cleaning up their site, improving the navigation, creating new pages, and really doing a nice job for my client. I got a message on Friday that some of the URLs were going to change over the weekend and that the webmaster would pause the AdGroups that were affected. Once the changes were made, on Monday I’d be able to go in and fix the URLs.

Unfortunately, this well-meaning web person caused a major negative impact without his knowing. He did the seemingly logical thing of changing every single ad in this client’s Google account instead of waiting for me to take care of things on Monday. See, the problem is if you change an ad, you lose that ad’s data, its CTR, its history – you basically wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Had he not done this, I would have been able to made the changes for the client so that the ads went to the correct, new landing page, but without changing the ad. He had no idea that this could be done. Now the client has to deal with potentially higher bids to maintain position in an already competitive marketplace with a small daily budget that’s already stretched thin; or be in a lower position until the ads rebound.

This isn’t an unrecoverable error, but it is one that did not have to happen.

When someone who doesn’t know the ramifications of what they are doing in a PPC account starts making changes, bad things can happen. Hiring a PPC management company like JumpFly, where the account managers know the best way to make a change without negatively impacting an account, can really pay off. The fastest or easiest change isn’t always what is the best, and an experienced PPC person can help you navigate the crazy, intricate nuances of the search engines.

Aggressively Market Overseas if Applicable:

Everything in America is cheap overseas. One benefit of the weakening U.S dollar is that it causes international prices of U.S. products to drop, allowing others around the world to purchase our products at a reduced price. Hey U.S. manufacturers, you guys are particularly well positioned to take advantage of this unique opportunity. If you are not marketing overseas, now is the time to start, and PPC advertising represents an incredibly powerful platform to reach international customers. Furthermore, international online users represent a significant and growing number of potential customers. Per Patrick’s recent blog, it may be wise to start by using Google AdWords in the European market.

Create New Targeted Ads:

Appeal to the public’s increased sense of urgency to save money. Offer a possible solution or consider ads focusing on new lower prices or special incentives. For example, a car dealer might want to create ads that focus on their hybrid cars that provide better fuel efficiency or a DVD rental business may mention the value of saving fuel and watching videos from home. Use your ads to make the most of a bad situation and call attention to the fact that you are doing something to help, like reducing prices or offering free shipping.

Shift Advertising Budget to Mediums that Can be Tracked:

Now is a great time to ditch costly and difficult to measure traditional advertising mediums in order to increase advertising where results can be measured, like PPC advertising, where advertisers can control their budget and track conversions. Many businesses are already headed down this path as TV and newspaper ad spending in the U.S. has been declining since 2005 while online advertising continues to rise.

Consider Professional Assistance:

Now, more than ever, it is critical to maximize advertising results. The only way to determine if you are properly managing your PPC campaigns is to let the professionals take a look. At JumpFly, a free analysis & consultation are readily available, and results are guaranteed. Letting the pros take a look at your PPC campaigns will likely yield some startling findings.

Now is NOT the time to turn off online advertising! In fact, various sources reveal that companies that increased marketing efforts during a recession realized dramatic long-term benefits. Additionally, rising fuel and food costs will likely translate into increasingly cost-conscious consumers searching for deals more frequently online.  

Survive today & thrive tomorrow.

First, we always recommend creating a separate campaign for content network advertising. This allows you the freedom of keyword selection and ad copy variations. It also keeps your analytics separate so you can manage both search and content easily.

Selecting the Right Keywords for Content Placement

Google decides which ads to place on a particular page based on the theme of the page (i.e., what is the article or site about?) and the keywords associated with the ad.

Using keywords, you are telling Google where you want your ad to appear based on the content or theme of a site.

So, the keywords you use to trigger your Ad placement need to be based on the type of content you feel would match your offer. Think about your target market and what they may be interested in at the time they would be open to your ad.  Start with the types of sites or articles you feel would be relevant and work backwards to figure out the keywords that you could use get placed on those sites.

Going back to the child-proofing example from last week, you might use keywords related to parenting, safety in the home or even expecting a baby.  Some keywords will overlap with the search campaign, but there are many keywords that would not be relevant in the search scenario that would be very useful getting you placed on a pertinent article.

Writing Ads for Content

In addition to using different keywords, you also need to write your ads differently when you are interrupting your reader as opposed to responding to a request.  Your ad needs to create a connection to what they are thinking about but also needs to have a call to action to encourage a response.  You have to convince them that they should stop what they are doing and take a detour that will benefit them instead of just sidetracking them.  Not an easy task, which is why you see such low CTRs in content network campaigns.

For example, if your ad is displayed next to an article about keeping children safe in the home, you want to use ad copy that identifies with the parents fears and guides them to visit your site to find products that will create a safe environment for their kids.  You are interrupting their line of thought and convincing them to take action but it’s all within the context of what they are thinking about at the time.

Find the Right Audience. Interrupt. Call to Action.

There are three main “take-aways” from understanding content network advertising:

1. You need to focus on your target market and the theme of target sites and articles in order to find your customer at the right time and the right place.
2. Your ad needs to meet the customer where they are mentally (i.e., thinking about the article they are reading) and be strong enough to interrupt them.
3. You need a strong call to action to convince them to take a detour from what they are doing.

Next week we’ll talk about some of the tools Google AdWords has in place to help you with your content network campaigns.

To be clear, A trademark is a word, phrase, logo, or symbol that identifies and distinguishes a product or service from others in the marketplace. Multiple trademark owners may claim the right to the same term, as long as each owner operates in a different industry. Trademark ownership is location-based, and therefore must be obtained on a country-by-country basis.

Often, advertisers are restricted from using certain trademarks as ad text per the request of the trademark owner. Often the trademarks are still allowed as keywords, however that depends on the owners rights to a term in countries outside the US and Canada, and their request filed with Google.

Recently, I had a client who was not able to receive clearance on a trademarked brand name for an item that she sold in her online store. Her ads were appropriately disapproved and the keywords in question quickly went offline. Instead of removing the trademarked term from her disapproved ad copy as required by Google, she tried to trick the system by using odd spaces and punctuation. While her hope was that these odd looking but similar variations would still help her falling click through rate, the result was far worse.

If you constantly try to work around the trademark system, your ads will quickly become disapproved and go offline. The result is inconsistent ad delivery and constant ad disapprovals. The flow of traffic to your website will quickly become disrupted and as a result sales will diminish. Not only can this become a management nightmare, it can also have legal implications.

Ironically, I had placed ads in the same AdGroup without the trademarked brand name causing the problems, and these ads actually had similar click through rates to the ads that previously contained the trademarked term.

The bottom line here is that you should never try to cheat the system. If you can not acquire the rights to use the trademarked term from the listed owner then use a generic alternative. Circumventing trademark policy can have far worse consequences than a simple reduction in click through rates.

One of the PPC advertising responsibilities of a JumpFly account manager is to create compelling ad copy appropriate for the marketed keywords. With a little imagination and creative copy writing, even ads for trademarked keywords can have successful results.

Google and Yahoo have some pretty significant ways in which they are different and the one I’m talking about today is the fact that in Google you can have search terms with misspelled words, plurals, word order variations, etc, which in fact you should do. On the Yahoo platform, there’s no need to add all these terms – in fact, they consider the correct and misspelled variation of the same word to be a duplicate, to the point that you can’t add them into the same AdGroup. If you’re bulk uploading a file from Google into Yahoo with misspelled and correct variations in it, I would bet that Yahoo, for some quirky and oh-so-annoying reason, would take the misspelled variation and delete the correct.

And there lies the pitfall when it comes to the KI tool in Yahoo. Let’s say you have the misspelled version of the term widget (wigdet) in your search terms. You’ve got “wigdet,” “blue wigdet,” “fast wigdet,” “cheap wigdet,” and “sale on wigdet” in one of your AdGroups. Your ad title reads {KEYWORD:Top-Quality Widgets} With Free Shipping.

POP QUIZ: What do you think the ad title would be if someone searched on the term “cheap widget”? Logically, you would think it would read: Cheap Widgets With Free Shipping, and that’s where you would be wrong! It actually reads Cheap Wigdets With Free Shipping (with Widgets spelled wrong) because the term that’s in your account is “cheap wigdets.”

In Google, it doesn’t matter because if someone searches the misspelled word and you have it in your account, that’s what they’ll put in the headline, the words will turn bold, everything will be fine. In Yahoo, you look like an idiot that doesn’t know how to spell. And to add insult to injury, since the word widget is spelled wrong, it doesn’t even turn bold!

The KI Tool: use with extreme caution. Or hire a PPC Advertising Management company and let THEM deal with all the little intricate details of the search engines.