The confidentiality of our clients is important so I am not revealing any names here, but I would like to share some actual numbers that we have seen here at JumpFly as a result of our efforts. I looked at some PPC advertising data samples from the first quarter of 2008 and compared them to the first quarter of 2009. Sure, I can make these numbers up, but it’s just much easier to show you the real numbers as they truthfully exist.

JumpFly Client #1

1st Quarter 2008 – 139 conversions at $351.55 each with a total spend of approx. $49,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 295 conversions at $125.51 each with a total spend of approx. $37,000.

Yes, they spent about $12,000 dollars LESS but more than DOUBLED their number of conversions. True story.

JumpFly Client #2

1st Quarter 2008 – 205 conversions at $62.82 each with a total spend of approx. $21,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 301 conversions at $32.47 each with a total spend of approx. $10,000.

Yes, they spent about $11,000 dollars LESS but increased conversions by nearly 100 more. True story.

JumpFly Client #3

1st Quarter 2008 – 252 conversions at $9.87 each with a total spend of approx. $2,500.
1st Quarter 2009 – 1,859 conversions at $5.91 each with a total spend of approx. $11,000.

Yes, the spend is greatly increased as we took their business to a whole new level, while bringing their conversion costs down. Huge sales growth with conversions growing over 1,500 compared to the same time period a year earlier. True story.

JumpFly Client #4

1st Quarter 2008 – 4,027 conversions at $9.04 each with a total spend of approx. $36,000.
1st Quarter 2009 – 5,204 conversions at $6.36 each with a total spend of approx. $33,000.

Yes, they spent about $3,000 LESS while growing conversions over 1,000 at a lower cost. True story.

And the numbers above don’t take into the account the time and worry these business owners took off their shoulders by outsourcing their PPC management.

I’m not saying that professional PPC management will produce the same results for every company, but very positive results certainly can come from having a professional pay per click management company like JumpFly assisting you along the way. During these tight economic times, can you afford not to?

More about Jack

We all know about Google’s Keyword Tool which provides traffic information for your terms but a limitation on the Keyword Tool data is that it is either global or country based (the column labeled “local” now, means U.S. or whatever country was selected at the top of the page). 

This traffic data is good if you are running a national campaign – but not as useful for geographically targeted campaigns.  It can be used to determine relative traffic between keywords (i.e., what gets more traffic? Car dealer or Auto dealer?), but it falls short if you are trying to figure out what to expect when you when you are running campaigns in just Dallas or Los Angeles.

So, what I use for local traffic data is the Google Traffic Estimator.  You enter your keywords (however many you want) and a specific region – anywhere from a country, to a state, to a city or even a zip code with a radius.  If you like, you may also enter your desired daily budget and your CPC. 

The results? The traffic you can expect in one day for each keyword in the region you selected!  Now, keep in mind, there are the same limitations to this data as there are with the Google Keyword Tool – I find the traffic data to be more accurate than the estimated CPC. But it’s a good starting point.

The Google AdWords Traffic Estimator provides extremely powerful data for your Google AdWords campaign efforts. You should use this data to decide where to spend the majority of your time.  Any reputable PPC management firm would always suggest the majority of your time should be spent on keywords that can drive the most targeted traffic to your site.  Don’t waste your valuable time on terms that don’t deliver direct benefit (because they just aren’t searched on very often). That doesn’t mean don’t have them in your account, just don’t spend the majority of your time on them. Focus your attention on the top terms.  Yes, you would have seen this data yourself once your campaign was running for awhile, but this gives you the boost to focus on the right terms from the very beginning. 

Google Analytics provides great information, but one issue that can arise is when Google Analytics transaction numbers and the Google AdWords conversion tracking numbers don’t jive. I know that different packages are not going to track exactly the same, but most of the time, they are close enough that it’s not a big deal. However, a big issue arises when you have an e-commerce site and a decent percentage of people don’t order on their first visit, but come back and order at a later date.

Here’s the problem: Google AdWords tracks “first touch” – if someone searches on a term, clicks on your ad and comes to your site, does not order at that moment, but comes back a week later, AdWords will log the conversion back that first date and attribute the sale to AdWords. Analytics on the other hand tracks “last touch.” In our same scenario, if someone were to search, click an ad, visit the site and leave, then come back a week later, Analytics would attribute that search to organic or other, unless they did a search and clicked on an ad again. Not a big deal if a majority of visitors order on the first visit, but if you have a large amount of people who order at a later date, this can be present a huge problem.

I have two clients who have this issue. For one of them, 40% of visitors don’t order on their first visit, and the other is 50%. And you guessed it, there’s a 40% and 50% difference in AdWords conversions and Analytics transactions. They can’t get a true picture of their PPC ROI with Google Analytics because they only see the revenue for anyone who ordered the first time they visited the site.

The big question is why is that? You would think that, both being Google products, they would track the same way, or at least have an option to track that way, but they don’t. Frustrating for both me and my clients!

But, I’ll explain how to get around this dilemma in my next Blog.

More about Nikki

This is especially silly, since any experienced pay-per-click (PPC) advertising manager knows that using the keyword that someone searches on in your ad helps increase CTR. I’ve never understood the fact that a company will allow someone to sell their product, but not allow them to use the product’s name to advertise it, but it happens all the time.

Under the existing Google Trademark Policy, you can contact the BrandX company and get written approval to use the trademark in your ad. But a lot of times it’s a time-consuming process – Google requires very specific language sent in an email to their trademark policy department, you can’t just use a blanket letter from the company or verbal permission. With some companies it was ridiculous in how long it took to get the required email. The bigger the company, the longer it seemed to take. I had one client that it took a month-and-a-half to get approved by legal – a four-line sentence took three lawyers and a month-and-a-half of time.

So I’m very glad to see Google has revisited their trademark policy, and the new policy seems pretty reasonable. There’s some pretty specific guidelines for the trademark use because we wouldn’t want anyone to be able to use any trademark as they saw fit. Here’s the new Google Trademark Policy, in a nut shell:

1. You can use a trademarked term at Google AdWords if you use it in a generic or descriptive way and not in reference to that specific trademark. I’m thinking Kleenex instead of tissue.

2. You can use the trademarked term at Google AdWords if you are a reseller of the trademarked product and your landing page and website clearly demonstrate that you can purchase that trademarked product. Since you are a reseller of BrandX cameras, you could now say that in your ad.

3. You can use the trademarked term at Google AdWords if you are a seller of replacement parts, components or compatible products and your landing page and website clearly demonstrate that you can purchase the trademarked product. If you sold camera bags and lens that were compatible with BrandX cameras, you could say so.

4. You can use the trademarked term at Google AdWords if your site is for “non-competitive and informative details”. The “advertiser may not sell or facilitate the sale” of a competing product of the trademarked term. Basically, you can’t advertise on BrandX, take them to an “informational” site that sings the praises of BrandY versus BrandX and then try to sell them on BrandY.

Some other things to keep in mind. This new trademark policy is for US ads served on Google.com, and US users for Search and Content networks. Google started accepting new ads with trademarked terms on Friday, May 15th, but will not begin running them until June 15th. If you currently have ads with trademarked terms that are disapproved, you’ll need to resubmit them.

I’m really pleased with this new change to the Google AdWords Trademark Policy. I think Google did a fine job of improving the results a search user gets, while still respecting the rights of the trademark owners. We’ll see how it plays out, but I think it will benefit everyone involved.

More about Nikki

Hello all,

Instead of asking for help this time, I hope that I can provide some.  If you are managing or responsible for pay per click (PPC) advertising accounts, you may be able to relate to my experience or be interested in feedback about different ways in which to manage PPC.  If so, read on.

In the past 5 years, I have tried numerous solutions for managing the Google, MSN and Yahoo Pay Per Click accounts we use as part of our online marketing strategy.  While all of the solutions have sufficed during the time period they were used, I think the one that I currently have is what we will stick with for a while.  As the market has become more competitive, new options have developed and I have tried a few.

To review the history, I started with a one person consulting firm who managed the pay per click accounts.  She did fairly well setting them up but after setup, was really only changing the bids rather than actively managing the accounts.  She had another job and this was a part time gig for her.  I was happy with her work at the time (she was used for 2.5 years), but changes in my company required that I cut costs and I had to learn the task of managing the pay per click accounts myself.  I managed the pay per click advertising accounts for about 2 years and because it was only one of many responsibilities I had, I am sure that I did not do it very well.  I learned enough to be informed, but not enough to be really good.  Maybe just enough to be able to hire someone else to do it.

In the middle of last year I started looking for a technology solution for my pay per click management.  There are many, many pay per click technology solutions out there and I checked into a few of them.  One was a firm called “Efficient Frontier”.  These folks use the same concepts used in portfolio management to find the most efficient spend for your pay per click dollars.  Although I have not used them, I received good feedback regarding their service during my research.  Problem is, you really need to be spending over $30 – $50K per month to even consider this and at last check they do take a big piece of the spend (10% – 15%).  They are well suited for large organizations that spend millions of dollars per month or year on pay per click but not really for small guys like my company.  The other issue with efficient frontier for my firm is that we do not have any conversions online, all of our sales are offline.  This is more challenging for a company like Efficient Frontier, but I am sure they have made strides in meeting this market need (offline conversions) since I evaluated them a year ago.

Because we did not manage enough monthly spend to use Efficient Frontier, I moved on to two smaller firms that work somewhat similarly to Efficient Frontier in that they have developed pay per click optimization technology.  The firms are Yodle and Reach Local.  The difference between these firms and Efficient Frontier is that they are able to work with smaller firms that manage less spend AND they use “reverse proxy” technology to link a phone call to a specific keyword search (using time of day, IP address matching and other proprietary tools).  In this way they have developed a way to better optimize pay per click spend for service companies like my own whose sales occur offline.  What was important to us with these companies was that their systems “learn” which keywords were driving the most calls and in this way bid higher for those keywords and lower for others that were not driving calls.

Unfortunately, my test pilot program for Yodle and Reach Local failed in both cases.  In both cases, I hired them to manage one small portion of our pay per click program (about 10% of monthly spend) to determine if they could succeed with it and from there add more spend to their management if they succeeded.  In both cases, the quality of service and communication were huge issues.  I was not able to speak directly to those persons that were managing the accounts day to day and for this reason, it seems that there was a lot lost in translation.  Some of the ads that were being used did not represent our brand well and that was not being communicated well by the intermediaries (sales folks).  In other cases, it did not seem that the sales team clearly communicated which keywords would be part of the program as the persons managing the account were bidding on keywords that were not in the contract and competed with our own current PPC bids.  The assurances that had been made before singing a contract about how much expertise the individuals who were managing the accounts had did not live up to expectations.  In other words, I was being told that I would have a PPC manager that had worked for companies in my industry and would therefore know many of the best practices for getting high conversion rates so that their technology systems did not have to work as hard to optimize our campaigns.  Things would happen more quickly for us in other words and lead to a quicker ROI.  None of the promises came true and I ended up cancelling both of these programs before they really got into the swing of things because of the host of problems that occurred in the three month contract periods.  This is not to say that either one of these companies does not have a viable (or valuable) model for managing pay per click.  It just didn’t work for me and what I needed.

This brings me to my current solution.  I am not even sure how I found JumpFly, Inc. but when I did, it struck me that they did not use any technology to manage their campaigns – they used real people.  Real people that I could talk to and e-mail.  I also started the month-tom-month contract with this company using only 10% of our monthly spend.  Within 1 month, I could tell that they were succeeding in vastly improving my ROI for PPC and I gave them all accounts (total of between $20K and $25K per month).  Prior to their management of the Google PPC account, I was paying approximately $16 for a conversion where a conversion was measured as the user reaching the “Contact Us” page where they can view our office locations.  This last month, the conversion cost was down to about $11.  During this time, the number of conversions has actually increased.  So, we are spending about 25% less than we were before, but getting just as many or more conversions.  Having started around $16K in spend per month for Google, we are now down to about $11K or $12K, and their service fees are much less than the associated cost savings.  I am very happy with this actively managed solution and wanted to recommend JumpFly, Inc. to any others in the Anderson network that are struggling with how to manage their pay per click advertising accounts. Finally, I sent out an e-mail last fall to the alumni group and one other alumnus had used them and gave them good marks as well. Check them out if PPC management has been a thorn in your side, like it was for me for five years.

Call me at 310-373-5000 if you would like to talk further about Jumpfly or PPC management.

Regards,
————————————-
Kevin DiCerbo
Celibre
23211 Hawthorne Blvd.
2nd Floor
Torrance, CA 90505
Office: (310) 373-5000
Fax: (310) 373-5012
www.celibre.com

Sometimes you do need to just cut your losses and run. Hope is a powerful thing, yes, but hoping a keyword will still convert after it’s received a hundred clicks with no sales attributed to it will only continue padding the coffers of the search engines, not yours. You need every extra penny you can get out of your marketing efforts these days.

Now is the time to perhaps be a little bit more ruthless in your treatment of your ill-performing keywords. You don’t have to be so vicious as to slit their throats (i.e. delete them), but you can certainly give them a healthy dose of chloroform (i.e. pause them). You can always revive those knocked out keywords later if you notice a big drop in your sales, but I’ll bet quite often the only thing you’ll notice is that you’ll actually start saving money.

Don’t give them a bail out, knock them out.

If you’re not sure what to do, you might want to consider a free consultation from a qualified PPC Management Company.

More about Jack

Case in point: I have a client who I’ve been working with for about three weeks, trying to get Analytics to properly track their site. They use NetSolutions storefront, so it’s easy to add the Analytics code to the site, as they have it built in to their store. We just added the client’s UA number to a field and the code is automatically added in the footer.

Of course, one of the first couple of things I did to try figure out why it wasn’t working was to verify the UA number (it was correct) and that it was populating the code on every page (it was). I called in JumpFly’s dedicated Google Account rep for help, since that about exhausted my troubleshooting options.

After some back and forth with Google and the Analytics team, they finally asked if there was a potential redirect on the site, since the “gclid=” portion of the URL was being stripped off of the destination URL from Google Search, and they couldn’t think of anything else that was wrong. (Basically the “=GCLID” holds all the visitor information for analytics to track; if it gets removed, Google Analytics attributes the visitor to no source or Google organics.) Sure enough, if I seached for the client’s ad, clicked on it, and checked the destination URL, there was no “=GLID”, therefore Analytics couldn’t attribute the source properly.

And that’s when I figured out that the client’s webmaster, in order to improve natural rankings, had changed the client’s site to use more search-engine friendly URLs – instead of a “category=##” URL, it was now using actual names, like military.asp or movie.asp. He had done the right thing in creating automatic redirects so old links didn’t go to dead pages, but it’s not something we were notified of, so we had no idea it was happening.

Now that we know, we can fix the URLs to the correct pages so the redirect stops happening, and Google Analytics can properly attribute traffic to the correct source. At least, that’s the hope.

More about Nikki

Every once in a while a new pay-per-click (PPC) advertising client will come in who considers their account CTR to be the benchmark by which their accounts performance is judged. Depending on the keyword strategy, it is most likely not a good idea to use CTR to judge an entire account’s performance.

True, we know that CTR has a big influence on the somewhat mysterious Google AdWords Quality Score(s). It is also a great indicator for comparing performance on your various AdGroups’ different ad copies. There are certainly many instances when Click Through Rate (CTR) is a very good indicator of performance.

Now, what about when low CTR is a good thing?

There are definitely times you want to eliminate a worthless click from a potential keyword, and while this would have a negative impact on the Click Through Rate (CTR) it would certainly have a positive effect on the account.

For example, a strategy that I recently adopted for a client really drives this point home.

One of my client’s competitors has a very common word for a company name. For the sake of confidentiality I will simply call it “widget.” Well, this competitor name “widget” is also the name of a very popular movie, an artist, a location overseas, a highway landmark, and dozens of other completely unrelated things. As you might imagine, the search volume for this popular term is through the roof, while the percentage of people actually using it for the company name we wished to target is extremely small. So small in fact, that it would almost certainly discourage anybody from even trying it as a keyword.

I thought it was worth trying, and to give it the best chance at success I used only the exact match version of “widget” in its own campaign, with a very specific ad designed to only solicit the searchers looking for my client’s services.

The results were surprisingly great. The campaign resulted in my client converting at half of his target conversion cost. The CTR for this keyword was a downright horrible 0.02%, however this was a good thing as it meant the ad was eliminating all of the unnecessary searchers and only targeting the exceptionally small amount of people looking for my clients competitor. In this case, the exceptionally low CTR was a good thing.

The low CTR also had a definite impact on the keyword’s quality score and forced my client’s minimum bid up to $10/click. Even with the the high minimum bid, the conversion cost was cheap and the quality of leads generated tens of thousands of dollars in new revenue for my client. Winner.

Now, the 0.02% CTR dramatically lowered the whole account’s CTR. If that figure had been used as a benchmark to judge performance, it would have been a huge mistake that would have cost my client a considerable amount of revenue. In this case, the actual conversion cost/rate was a far better benchmark than the pathetic CTR.

The bottom line here is that a low CTR can be a good thing in some strategies and is not always the best indicator of an entire account’s performance. Every account is different, just as every marketing strategy is different. Helping to determine the best strategy for your PPC marketing campaign is just one of the many unique skills that JumpFly PPC account manager brings to the table.

What’s your benchmark?

This is not something new to entrepreneurs and small business owners but I’ll say it anyway:  you can’t do everything and you can’t be great at everything.  If you try to excel at too many things, you will end up only mediocre in many things as opposed to strong in a handful of your core business skills.

Obviously, here at JumpFly, we believe strongly in the concept of outsourcing.  Our business is made up of clients that have chosen to outsource their PPC management.

But my belief in this philosophy goes beyond the services we offer.  I believe there are many places in your business where you should consider “letting go.”  It can be difficult to delegate, especially if you are an entrepreneur. But it is critical to your growth to understand that not only do you have limited time to perform these tasks, you also have limited capacity to learn them and become skilled in them.  

I have found this to be true in many aspects of businesses both online and off, including programming, graphic design, accounting management, just to name a few.  These are professions that, like PPC management, require fairly large learning curves and once mastered require constant use, practice and education to maintain the skill.

Always keep in mind what your time is worth on other tasks in your business and when deciding whether to hire out these important business roles, be sure to take the cost of your time – both in performing the task and becoming educated on the topic – into consideration.

More about Kristie

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.

 More about Nikki

So, what do you do with a member of your sales team who is performing under expectations? Well, for starters, you can “reduce his pay” by lowering his bid. Note: I’m using “he” just for simplicity sake. If a member of your sales team is underperforming, certainly you don’t want to keep paying him at his normal rate. Bring his pay down to a level that is acceptable to the performance he is delivering. Bring a keyword down in position if it’s not delivering in a high position.

What if you have already “reduced the pay” of an underperfomer? Then what? Well, ultimately you are going to have to fire him. There is no sense in keeping a sales person around if he has proven time and time again that he cannot deliver the results that are expected of him. So, fire him. Shut him down. Pause that stinker. Sometimes it’s hard to let go, but in the long run you’ll be glad you did.

Now, on a happier note, what do you do with a member of your sales team who is kicking butt? What do you do with the guy who’s outperforming expectations? Well, one obvious thing to do is give him a raise. Push that keyword position a bit higher if you have room to grow the position. This doesn’t always translate into more sales, but you should certainly give the keyword the opportunity to shine if it’s proven in the past that it can deliver results.

What if he is already at the top of the pay scale? Then what? Then you might need to start looking beyond raising his pay. Now you need to start looking to him for “referrals.” Does he have any trustworthy friends who need a job? Does that keyword have a few variations that you haven’t considered? Dig deeper into the keyword and see if you can find a few of its “friends” to come join your team. You might be surprised at what you find.

Happy Holidays to all.

More about Jack
JumpFly PPC Account Executive

When you open AdWords Editor you should be prompted with the upgrade screen automatically.

Now before you upgrade, there are some important things to consider. If you have comments or unposted changes, I would recommend you click “Backup then Update” when you see the automatic prompt to upgrade. This allows AdWords Editor to create a backup file that includes any unposted changes and/or comments. Once you have installed the new version you can simply import the backup file. Google Help has a great article on the steps needed to correctly import a backup file (AEA). Personally, I always recommend backing up any files before upgrading any software.

It’s also important to note that after you upgrade to AdWords Editor 7.0, you will need to download your account(s) again.

There are some notable improvements to AdWords Editor 7.0.

First page bid estimates are now shown for keywords. The first page bid estimate is the approximate max CPC bid it would allegedly take for your ad to be shown on the first page of Google results. Previously minimum cost-per-click bids were displayed.

Keyword Quality Scores are now displayed in the Keywords tab. This column will display a number from 1 through 10, with 1 through 4 being poor, 5 through 7 being OK, and 8 through 10 being Great. There is a great help article on how AdWords calculates Quality Score, for those interested in jumping down the rabbit hole.

The Keyword Opportunities Tool, still in BETA, now uses your AdWords Editor 7.0 language and location settings. You can change the Keyword Opportunities locale used for the results by clicking the very small blue “Edit” link that appears at the very upper right of the Keyword Opportunities tool window. The sentence will read “Results are tailored to…” There is also a great help article with more information on how to change the Keyword Opportunities Tool’s language and location targeting.

Speaking of Language and Location settings, you can now view your campaigns targeting settings on the Campaigns tab. Now, these columns are hidden by default, however you can select them with the column chooser.

The Keyword Expansion tab now shows “absolute numbers” instead of the odd scaled values previously seen. The numbers supposedly reflect the traffic for the last month.

Adwords Editor 7.0 now has optional usage tracking. This allows Google to collect completely anonymous statistics about how you use the different features. The statistics do not include personal information or any of the contents for your AdWords account. The idea here is that the information gathered will help the design team further understand what needs improvement. This feature is turned off by default, and can be enabled, or disabled, by going to Tools menu/Settings, and then select “improve AdWords Editor by enabling usage tracking.”

When it comes to PPC management, Adwords Editor 7.0 is truly a must have tool. It could very well be the most popular software on my machine. It’s great to see the AdWords Editor design team continue to release new improvements on a regular basis. In a recent meeting with Google, I also submitted my personal AdWords Editor wish list that included separate data for Content and Search, as well as the ability to compare data from different time periods, along with graphical representations, as seen in the Account Snapshot tool. Considering the recent improvements, perhaps my wish list is not too far off in the future.

I recommend you download AdWords Editor 7.0 today.

Prosecutors allege that Madoff, a decades-long veteran of Wall Street who previously served as chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, confessed to losing at least $50 billion in a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that involves paying abnormally high returns to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from the profit from any real business. As long as he could attract new investors, the alleged scheme worked. The plot appears to have unraveled when clients asked to withdraw their principal only to discover that Madoff’s coffers were empty.

Nobody was spared. Large investors, banks, charities and small investors alike were all impacted, leaving some people with nothing after they trusted this man with all their money. Another harsh reminder for the need to diversify. New details continue to emerge as this investigation intensifies.

What’s next? We’ve already seen Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich arrested for allegedly pimping out President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate Seat while he was already under investigation. Meanwhile, around the world there are pirates seizing ships on the open seas and just yesterday, an Iraqi protester threw his boot at President Bush while in Baghdad. The nerve of some people! The bottom line is that we continue to live in times of great instability. It is a really good time for individuals to re-assess their financial situations and take necessary actions to prepare for continued instability. Businesses must also do the same.

Here at JumpFly, we often review previously setup Google AdWords accounts where tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent very unwisely. To me, this is just as insane as the allegations against Madoff & Blagojevich. The pay-per-click (PPC) advertising marketplace is rapidly evolving, and not considering professional assistance may be a costly mistake. With the new year, constantly changing interfaces, increasing competition, the challenging economy and ongoing instability, now is a great time to consider professional PPC management. Why not at least get a free consultation?

More about Brad

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

In this article, I am addressing the Quality Score used during a Google Search. 

Google’s AdWords Quality Score is used to determine how relevant your ad is to a visitor searching on a given term.  Google has developed, over time, algorithms to help them present the most relevant results to visitors based on many historical performance factors and on existing relevance factors.

In their quest to present the most relevant results to their visitors, Google rewards high quality ad / keyword combinations with higher positions and lower costs.

When a search query is performed there are two steps. 

1. The first page bid + your keyword (including match type) are used to determine if you are eligible to be shown on a particular search phrase.  In other words – “Are you In the Game?” 
   • The “first page bid” is an estimated metric that exists in your account with each keyword and is only displayed if your particular bid does not equal or exceed the bid estimate.  When Quality Score is used to calculate the first page bid, it does not consider your ad copy or the search query itself. 
2. Once you are eligible, your Quality Score + your Max CPC are used to determine where your ad will be positioned on the page – “Ad Rank” and how much you will be charged for the click – “Actual Cost Per Click (CPC)”.

Quality score is calculated at the Keyword level and is affected by:

• The relevance of the keyword and the ad copy to the search phrase
• The Historical Click Through Rate (CTR)
  • CTR in your current account
  • CTR of the keyword throughout all accounts
  • CTR of any account using your URL in the ads
  • CTR in your account in the geographic region you are targeting
• The Quality of your Landing Page

The algorithm takes into consideration the effect ad position has on CTR and adjusts the importance accordingly.

It is important to note that quality score is used differently within placements on the content network and we will discuss that next week.

If you’d like more information on the Quality Score, check out Google’s Improvements to Ads Quality Post or contact a professional PPC Management Company.

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