In 2009 Google launched their bid simulator in Adwords, which made it much easier for advertisers to visualise what impact a bid change would make to their results.

Until last week however, this bid simulator was only available at the keyword and ad group level. On Friday 11^th May, Google unveiled the bid simulator at campaign level, allowing advertisers to make bid changes on a larger scale than was previously possible.

Using the campaign bid simulator

Accessing the new campaign bid simulator is fairly straightforward. Within your AdWords account navigate to the Opportunities tab and select the option on the left navigation pane (as illustrated below)

Once you see this page you can begin simulating the effects of increases in bids. Currently you have the option to reduce or increase bids by a percentage ranging from -50% to +300%. The above screen shows a quick overview of the effect on each campaign in your Adwords account, but to actually make the changes you will need to click the campaign you wish to change.

Once you do, you will see a more detailed view of what will occur including the graph traditionally seen within the bid simulator at keyword level.

Beware of the budget increases

A note of caution with this new feature, if you leave the box at the bottom of the form ticked, Adwords will automatically change your budget to accommodate the bid changes once you click “Apply Now”.

If you don’t want to increase your budget, then simply un tick the box, which will allow some increases in bids but any changes that Adwords thinks would cause your budget to be exceeded will be unavailable but still viewable. In the example above the budget is set to £50 per day so if I was to untick the box the +200% and +300% increases would become unavailable.

Previously, Exact match would be exact, Phrase match would allow for keywords added before and after as long as the keyword being bid on was present.

Google have now expanded both Exact and Phrase match to include very close variants :

Misspellings
Singular and plural variations
Acronyms (should be interesting)
Stemmings (…ing)
Abbreviations
Accents

This is from google’s page on this topic here

This could lead to some interesting variations on search terms like “Dick’s Hardware”, “BJ’s cafe”, and “Seaman’s furniture” etc. or anything that can have more than one interpretation.

Google are marketing this as an improvement for advertisers and it may help those with little or no time to keyword mine close variations for exact keywords.  Others may see this as another way for Google to spend your advertising budget and increase revenues further.

As with the majority of Google’s rollouts, you can switch it off for now at campaign level. But it won’t be long before it will be standard in all campaigns. I recommend experimenting to those who have the time to see if this option works better for you. I would just keep a look out for falling CTR as you gain greater impression.

Use the search query report to check the variations you are showing for and negative inappropriate keywords. If you have never used this report before and have very few negatives in your account brace yourself for one or two surprises the first time you run this.

All in all, this could be good for some and not for others, testing is always the order of the day.

Google define Quality Score as “ an estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad.”

PPC managers look at quality score as yet another figure to optimise as part of their ongoing efforts. They build targeted ad groups with their keywords in the ad copy and on landing pages and work their negative keywords to remove all the irrelevant traffic. This process goes on and on and while a high Quality score will help, other high impact stats are overlooked somewhat. Stats such as average cpc, cost per conversion, conversion rate etc are much more important for your bottom line than a high quality score.

Everyone loses, except Google:

There is a vicious cycle that you could become involved in should you choose to optimise for Quality score alone. The following is an example of something we see very often:

Someone sets out a plan for improving their quality scores from a 3 to a 7 and through consistent, determined work making full use of their account stats they achieve their goal and as a result they begin to win more auctions and get more clicks.

A competitor logs in to their own Adwords account and quickly sees they have been losing clicks. To overcome this quickly they increase bids to claw back the lost ground. After the initial shock, they take a few moments to find out why the clicks were being lost, and they discover that average position and CTR had dropped off leading to a slight drop in QS across their keywords. In an attempt to claw this back further, they go on a bit of an optimisation spree, adding new ads, goes to town on the negatives etc. After a while the spree is rewarded with extra clicks but now bids have been raised the clicks are costing more.

Back to the original account manager now; Being on the ball, they now realise they are once again losing clicks. This causes them to go on an optimisation spree of their own, raising bids, stuffing ads with keywords, adding in hundreds of negatives etc.

You see the cycle developing here? The common theme is that both account managers are raising their bids and the only winner in this game is Google. Speak to a rep at Google and they are likely to tell you that although Quality score is important, it is not something you should dedicate all of your time to.

Give your Adwords account some “Go Go Juice”

Quality score is definitely an indicator you should pay attention to, but it is just that, an indicator of how relevant your keywords are. It is simply another number in a long line of metrics that people have whizzing around their heads and it is easy to get caught in the cycle of chasing Quality score and often this is at the expense of account basics.

Instead of trying to play the system take a step back from your account and cast a thorough eye over your keywords and clear out the rubbish. Consider adding in negative keywords to help you do this. Then take a while to analyse your adverts, and try writing adverts that don’t just contain keywords. Focus on the benefits of your business as it is this which appeals to customers more than simply using your keyword 3 times in an advert.

Quality Score doesn’t bring you an ROI

The basics of optimisation don’t really change, you alter keywords, bids, ad copy, landing pages etc. What does change, however is your own focus; instead of focusing on your quality score you should focus your efforts on your ROI. Use your Quality scores as an overall indicator of account health and don’t lose sleep if a few keywords drop from a 6 to a 5. Focusing on winning auctions by standing out from the competition rather than just paying more money will see your Quality scores rise naturally and this will benefit the most important metric, your ROI.

1. Don’t change your campaign settings

When we carry out our account reviews we make a point of checking campaign settings as there are usually things we will suggest changing to aid performance. A recent one involved a client serving North London whose campaign was set to target the entire UK. This was obviously diluting his budget and wasting quite a bit of cash on traffic from outside of their area.

As with anything in your account there should be an element of fluidity in your campaign settings and you shouldn’t be afraid to make a change.

2. Use conversion optimizer on all your campaigns

We have seen a large number of accounts that use the conversion optimizer in all campaigns and many clients ask us why we don’t recommend using for some campaigns and not others.

As with anything in PPC the conversion optimizer will work well for some campaigns and poorly for others. The only way to find out is to test it. If you get good results, continue with it, if you don’t then don’t use it just because you’ve read an article telling you that you should.

It’s a great feature that can work well for you and it can take a lot of time out of your day, but make use of the feature with great care.

3. Have unique landing pages for all your campaigns

It is true that unique landing pages for your PPC can work wonders for conversion rates but not everyone has the time nor the resources to create landing pages for every single campaign they’re running. If you are running a number of landing pages you need to invest time and resources into testing them to get the very best from them.

4. Best Practices are always the best way to do things

Adhering to policies is a must for keeping your accounts running but this does not necessarily mean sticking to best practice. If you find a formula that works, stick to it. It may not be the how the experts would run their accounts but there is an old saying  “There is more than one way to skin a cat” (Do not skin any cats though), which is as true of PPC management a anything else.

5. Always set ads to rotate

Rotating your ads is a great way to test different copy, however this will only really work, if you have the time to proactively and consistently manage them. Ad testing is something we as an agency strongly recommend to everyone running a PPC account no matter how big or small, however if you don’t have the time to constantly write new ads you may benefit more from the optimise for clicks or conversions features.

6. Use daily budget to increase your spend

It’s a common assumption that increasing your daily budget will mean you will spend more, get more traffic and therefore more conversions. However, if your campaign is not limited by budget your campaign spend will not necessarily increase if you increase the budget. Make use of the impression share stats to determine if your budget is the issue, if you aren’t losing any impression share to budget you’ll need to look elsewhere for opportunities to increase your spend.

7. Always separate brand and non brand

Although we normally suggest separating brand and non brand, it is something we will test before making a decision on it as it has proved a better tactic to keep them together for some clients. If you have a small spend you may find your brand keywords cannot generate traffic/spend if placed in their own campaign, in which case it may be a good idea to incorporate them into another campaign.

8. Keep PC and Mobile separate

Often, costs on mobiles are less than on PC’s and in most cases they should be kept separate but sometimes there is no real need. Again this is one for testing but if your accounts are performing well, don’t just dive in the deep end, test it slowly and methodically.

9. Go super granular

We love structured accounts with targeted campaigns that allow us to target people with very specific messages. Sometimes we even go as far as one ad group = 2 or 3 keywords. However we only do this on larger accounts as it does require significant budget. If you go this granular, the budget of a campaign is likely to be fairly small which in turn can mean that 2 or 3 clicks could use up your entire budget.

Find what works then make mass changes

If you have a PPC account that is performing well, you shouldn’t really be making mass changes. It is a sure fire way to make your client or your boss ring you at 5pm in a state of panic as to why the account has gone from a steady number of sales to zero in the space of a few days.

If you do have an account that is ticking along, by all means make changes you feel will benefit the account but do them slowly and test results before making more changes.

The main thing to take from this post is that just because a tactic is a popular one doesn’t mean it will work for your account. Don’t be afraid to test different things out as this can and does  lead to fantastic results.

In Adwords you can view average position and cost per click, while in Analytics you have average such as time on site and page views. These metrics are fantastic for giving you a quick overview of how your accounts are performing across a given period but they shouldn’t be used to make key strategic decision regarding your campaigns.

So what should you look at instead of averages?

Depending on where you look online, you’ll find different advice on the Google Analytics metrics you should be looking at. (In fact for the search “What should I look at in Google Analytics” I was faced with 103 million results).  A lot of them do say that you can look at average this, and average that but the bottom line of this, is that averages can be misleading.

Quick Example

Take the average time on site metric; the following headline stat of 2 minutes 15 doesn’t look too bad at first glance:

However when you look beyond the average time, 75% of the visits are actually below 1 minute, which probably means your users aren’t engaging with your site as much as you think. The 1% of visits over 30 minutes are in fact skewing your results and hiding the fact that a lot of visitors are not engaging with your site for the 2 minutes 15 seconds.

In short I don’t recommend discrediting averages completely, but view them with caution and always look beyond them when making key decisions.

The same can be applied to your Adwords because an average position of 3 within your Adwords account doesn’t necessarily mean your advert has appeared there all of the time. It may have been in position 1 some of the time and position 5 some of the other time. Delve deeper and check out the keyword position report for more detailed data.

Currently Adwords advertisers have the luxury of being able to utilise three different ad rotation settings: optimise for clicks, optimise for conversions and rotate evenly.

The rotate setting allows advertisers to test their ads and make sure each one is shown for an equal amount of time as others. However Google have argued that leaving this setting on indefinitely can inhibit performance and deliver less relevant ads to users.

Therefore starting next week the “rotate” setting will still run, but will not run indefinitely, instead ads will now only rotate for a maximum of 30 days before reverting to the “optimise for clicks” setting.

The Inside Adwords blog states:

“This change will enable us to provide users with the most relevant ad experience and should help advertisers improve the performance of their AdWords accounts.”

This latest change is an effort from Google to continue to provide relevant ads for their users, but it needs to be viewed with caution. Google is interested in ads that receive the most clicks (as these make the most money), whereas advertisers should be interested in ads that receive the most conversions (as these make them the most money).

If you are an advertiser who doesn’t regularly test ad copy you may notice a change in performance, particularly if the ad that delivers most clicks doesn’t deliver the most conversions then you are likely to see increased costs. However if you are an advertiser who regularly tests their ads you will notice no difference, because if you make a change to an advert the 30 day period will be reset.

The main thing to note is that while currently an advert test can run indefinitely, this latest change forces advertisers to keep their tests to a regular interval otherwise they will lose the benefit of advert rotation after 30 days.

A recent study revealed that for every £92 spent on traffic generation; only £1, yes a measly one pound! was spent on trying to optimise the site to boost ROI, which is a mind boggling split! A few pounds spent on site can make a massive impact on the capital employed in PPC management.

If you are spending money on PPC traffic then you simply must do some ROI boosting conversion optimisation work on your campaign and site. Here are four great secrets, we’d say tips but frankly most people have no clue about them or really making them work properly so we think they qualify to be “secrets” as too many people focus on getting as much traffic as they can rather than getting good traffic and converting as much of that as possible.

1) Use Negative Keywords

What : Negative keywords help you save money by further refining who your adverts display to. Negative keywords can rescue an adgroup, e.g. when bidding on “ppc management” to advertise to potential clients we would ensure that we had negative keywords like these below:

Jobs, vacancies, vacancy, training, tutorial, salary, recruitment.. and so on

Why : ROI is boosted by cutting down on irrelevant advert impressions leading to wasted click costs, Click Through Ratio is boosted leading to an increase in Quality Score, which in turn leads to a decrease in Cost Per Click!

How : To find out how to implement negative keywords you can read the Google help article here

2) Use Call Tracking

What : Call tracking is THE second most importing thing after negative keywords, if you take calls as a result of buying traffic to your site you simply MUST know which keywords are earning you money and which keywords are losing it for you. Most people think that getting call tracking in place is an expensive and troublesome task but it’s become far easier and cheaper to implement.

It’s simple a case of pasting some coding script on your site wherever you wish your telephone number to display, then once a user lands on your site from SEO or PPC activity they are shown a unique telephone number. This number is linked to the keyword search term that they used and once dialed it’s recorded that that keyword triggered a call.

On some call tracking systems you can even add in if the call was a lead, or even the sale value if a sale was made once the user has hung up.

Why : ROI is boosted because call tracking allows you full PPC attribution value to the keyword level, it stops you from deleting keywords that don’t drive online sales, but deliver offline as well as being able to delete the keywords that don’t deliver any ROI with peace of mind without guessing if they are delivering offline leads or sales.

How : You can read more about call tracking here

3) Use Social Proof

What : The old sales phrase “people buy people” is true in a different way now with Social Media; What your friends like and how they interact with those preferences has a direct impact upon how you relate to brands, products and services, so ensure that you add social media markers to your site and product pages, but then ensure you make a concerted effort to get likes and positive interactions too, there’s nothing worse than having only a handful of people liking something, it can have the opposite effect, but when done right it can really boost conversions.

Also use testimonials and reviews as they too can really affect conversions in a positive way. Consider using external review sites like TrustPilot.com the stars you gain will be pulled through into your AdWords adverts, further boosting click through ratio as they display that you are socially approved, even if they don’t know those reviewing, Amazon has really focussed on getting reviews and star ratings on their product listings.

Why : ROI is boosted as conversion is increased due to trust and social proof being established, this group social proof can influence people into the “do as others do, it must be safe” mindset that leads to higher conversion rates.

How : Use social media plugins on site, get testimonials, reviews and likes on products or services, disply these prominently on the landing page near a strong call to action.

4) Use Trust And Security Seals

What : Trust indicators come in a variety of forms but usually it’s orientated around the shopping cart or site security, or business community security.

OrientalFurniture.com increased their conversion by 7.6% by using a BuySafe Inc. trust seal, you can read more about this here

Petco.com increase sales by 8.83% by adding a Hacker Safe seal to their site, you can read more about Petco here

Why : People are more inclined to buy if they feel they are in safe hands so display trust seals, relevant body awards to make.

How : Choose a relevant trust seal, or better yet 2 or more seals that cover data security, eCommerce security and business integrity, you may not sell products on your site but if you collect details then consider displaying a Hacker Safe seal or secure certificate.

If you keep spending money without looking at the landing page you are sending it to then you ARE throwing some money away for sure, you really need to test and monitor different elements of your landing page to really boost the conversion rate, you can effectively cut the cost of your Pay Per Click activity this way.

I’m sure you’ll agree that sounds awesome, you pay just £99 and a PPC Management Agency manages your pay per click account for you. We’ve seen other agencies offer ppc management for this super low fee and figured that we could too!

However it turns out that we can’t do that, there’s no way that we can manage an AdWords account properly for a client for just £99 per month, to provide the best ongoing account management for clients a percentage of spend model is best and is more cost effective in the long run as greater ROI is achieved, We could take £99 from businesses and firefight an account for them and by firefight I mean spend a couple of hours in there each month, tidy it up and then keep it from crashing and burning for as long as we could but £99 PPC management allows very little margin for actually managing PPC correctly and growing the account and increasing the ROI of it, with low fixed fee ppc it’s more a case of stopping an account from dying quickly by prolonging the spiral of decline over a longer timescale.

Realistically PPC agencies charging fixed fees like £99 (or less!!) per month for ppc management are probably spending less than 2 hours per month on a campaign or “white labelling” and farming work out to other agencies offshore and taking a fee for doing so, either that or their PPC managers are earning around minimum wage which makes one wonder how good they can be as quality ppc managers earn good money as the industry has a shortage of them.

The figures above would keep a ppc agency afloat assuming the ppc manager is a good one on a good salary, but agencies like this wouldn’t keep a good ppc account manager there for long as it’s just too many accounts to run properly, regardless of the salary, for a professional ppc manager as typically the really good ones (and why would you want anyone who isn’t really good working on your account!?) like to work with a smaller number of clients, typically between 5-20, where they can really get to know the client’s business and understand the issues that affect them and how best to achieve their business goals via PPC on AdWords, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook etc.

Consequently whilst there are many good account managers out there and no doubt some currently suffering/serving their time at low fixed price agencies, the really great ones tend to gravitate over time to ppc management agencies where a percentage of spend model is in place meaning that they can work in a more involved way with clients and really make a difference to their ppc results, for the really good ppc account managers the sense of job satisfaction comes from driving an account forward, boosting ROI and exceeding the clients expectations on an ongoing basis.

If you are offered fix fee PPC management for something like £99 or even less, then you need to really think about whether you’d like your ppc ‘managed’ by someone with just 2 hours to spare to do it each month or if a ppc management agency with resources to spend as much time as your account needs to generate the best ROI for your company is a better match.

As with most things in life cost is relative to results, paying £99 to stagnate is more expensive to your business than paying say £250 per month and having your ROI explode and with a percentage of spend payment model you’ll find that your ppc agency always has the time required to dedicate to moving your pay per click accounts forward every step of the way.

Some of our clients had never tried AdWords before and go search online or ask friends and colleagues they respect for a recommendation as to who’s good at PPC Management and thus we end up talking and take things from there.

I suspect many potential clients miss out on getting involved with AdWords as they don’t think it will work for them, they think this based on the metrics they currently see from their organic listings, they may have X visitors, Y Sales and Z Profit and assume that AdWords PPC will generate the same results but this isn’t always the case when stats are monitored, but many fail to monitor properly so they just don’t see what’s happening.

So the Million dollar /pound /Yen /Euro question if you don’t have an account or currently have a poorly performing one is will AdWords work for you? Well there is no clear cut yes or no answer here, it depends on factors such as your website and how well it can convert traffic, and where you are positioned in the supply chain for your product or service. An affiliate on 10% commission cannot really compete in terms of marketing spend at low ROI compared to a wholesaler, in turn the wholesaler can’t compete with country distributor, the distributor can’t really compete with the manufacturer, so if all four were advertising on AdWords they’d each have less margin to work with than the next guy/girl above them.

That’s not to say they can’t make AdWords work if the client is an affiliate or wholesaler or just battling with bigger competitors with very deep pockets, we often fight it out with huge brands for our clients and win through experience, skill, expertise and guile by finding new angles to exploit as well as plain and simply doing the hard work that many can’t be bothered to, we sometimes create hundreds of adgroups for a single product or service where competitors may only do a few with bland generic ads.

The main thing that potential AdWords PPC advertisers or those with an AdWords account which they feel may be under-performing is to establish clear metrics, for those who don’t have an account they can roughly use SEO metrics but with the best will in the world these will only be a very rough guide and the only real way to get good meaningful data is to take the plunge and get an account set up.

The one key, fundamental, absolute must is that CONVERSION TRACKING MUST BE INSTALLED !!!

We cannot emphasise this enough, we see many accounts without the slightest shred of conversion tracking, they’re using a cash in v cash out approach and this is where money can be saved in bulk if the conversion tracking is installed and the results acted upon.

The “proof of concept” phase is very important, new advertisers often try AdWords themselves and whilst many succeed in making a go of it, some will set up their accounts poorly, using broad match without any negative keywords, coupled with poor adverts and it will fail them, they’ll write off AdWords as something that just didn’t work for them so we would advise merchants to commit to finding out if AdWords is viable for them by enlisting a specialised PPC Management Agency to do the set up for them.

Obviously we would say that as we are one of the leading PPC Management Agencies but we often tell clients to actually lower their initial budget and concentrate on fewer product for proof of concept, before expanding out the campaign, we look for long term mutually rewarding relationships with client so we treat their money as if it were our money and approach a PPC campaign as we would do it if it were for ourselves.

For those people already getting sales from organic search listings don’t assume that the same results will happen from paid search listings even if a ppc management agency is at the helm, results can be better than organic but also worse.

Below is a screenshot from a client’s Analytics account highlighting the difference between paid and organic E-commerce results :

You can see that AdWords traffic generated 75% more revenue per basket than organic Google traffic, as well as E-commerce basket value being 7% or so higher too, the resulting Per visit value or EPC is a whopping 83% lift in value per visitor however we need to remember that AdWords needs paying for from this extra revenue so whilst the results are vastly improved we need to take the costs into account.

That being said most SEO costs money one way or another for most serious online companies now, some spend far more on SEO than PPC thinking that PPC wouldn’t generate a return, but they figure that on the current SEO metrics so we would advise every company to at least try PPC for themselves, preferably via an experienced and capable ppc management agency so as to get off to the best start.

Initially we anticipate it being an easy, cheap way to drive calls but before long we can see it becoming very widely used and expensive in some sectors, legal and high value service sales being two that spring to mind easily.

To enable the CCP option you need to use a Google forwarding number which you get when you set up Call Extensions, details >here< after this it's just a case of selecting the max CPP bid that you are willing to pay for each call and it will be activated.

New metrics to keep an eye on the CPP action include summaries of the calls, PTR (phone through rate!) as well as the all important call cost on the adgroup and campaign tabs. Each call will be detailed by call time (of day), duration, area code and the adgroup that generated the call (shown on the dimensions tab).

Currently CPP is only avalialable in the USA and UK, The max CPP bid is set at Adgroup level (not keyword!) and each adgroup must generate a minimum number of clicks first, for more information you can read up >here<

AdWords Cost per Phone Call will take a lot of the stress out of PPC management for some people as it will drive serious leads rather than tentative online enquiries although the Quality Score will still be a major factor as will the keyword selection so whilst the contact method is different to normal online activity the ppc account still needs managing properly by someone who knows what they are doing.

You can read more about undestanding CPP bidding >here.