Coming in Mid-May 2012, as seen by all who have logged into AdWords the past 2 days have seen, (https://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2537522) expect to the newest addition to the Google Match-Type menu:  “Phrase” & [Exact] match Close Variants.

“Your ad will be eligible to show when people search for close variants — yes, that includes misspellings — of your keywords. In addition to misspellings, other close variants include singular and plural forms, acronyms, stemmings (such as floor and flooring), abbreviations, and accents.”

According to Google’s example: [tennis shoes], you may receive impressions from the following search phrases.

• tennis shoes
• tenis shoe
• red tennis shoes
• buy tennis shoes
• buy tenis shoe
• etc…

As an account manager who has yet to see a change implemented in AdWords which has yielded a lower cost-per-click, I remain quite skeptical in this offering to advertisers.  This option clearly blurs the line between modified broad match and phrase match.

Most of the accounts I have managed demonstrated a higher CPC for exact match & phrase match over broad.  What I see this new feature causing is a funneling effect of competition onto mutual words which may not have been covered in all of their accounts.  So instead of 10 advertisers who are bidding on [Tennis Shoes] and one on [Tenis Shoe], there is now 10 advertisers on both.

I commend Google for allowing this feature to be activated or disabled at the campaign level, but it is yet to be seen whether or not this feature will default to active when new campaigns are created… like the display network.

What are your thoughts?

No tags

In the ever changing adwords system, we were made aware that “Demographic Bidding” is the latest feature to be buried in the adwords graveyard.  Though this feature was one of the first to allow marketers to use one of their finest tools of the trade to target their customer, it did not pan out for a number of reasons.  We assume that the network was not converting or it simply was not being used to it’s fullest potential.  The info that was provided by sites enrolled in it allowed display and content network ads to be displayed across demographic targets so businesses like wedding planner’s could target Females ages 20-35 so on so forth.

The addition of google + has been the assumed replacement for this type of bidding.  However we had not seen many clients utilizing this feature and now that retargeting is available in adwords and we are able to target behavior groups, we have a better alternative.  As demographic bidding falls victim to it’s own demise we look forward to increased targeting through new Google + features and increased retargeting abilities in the display network.  Remember if you are using Demographic Bidding, you will need to save you data by March 28th!  Thats Tomorrow!  if you save in csv form you can use software like strategy analyzer to analyze your results and compare to future data.  For more info from google on the demise of Demographic Bidding visit the Adwords Help page.

No tags

by: Kevin Fleming

The main questions we hear with any social media campaign reporting are,”What is the value?” and “Was it profitable?”.  Since attribution analytics are still evolving and the number of visits prior to a conversion is increasing, providing a concrete value for any social media campaign becomes more important.

The PPC advantage to Social Media Marketing:

In the CPC model we can see exactly what the cost of a visit is and the end value of the cumulative visits are.  We can definitively say that there is a minimum ROI of x percent and this is (or in some cases is not) profitable.  There are a few visitors who’s conversions may not be tracked accurately due to a few factors:

1. Call in sales (if call tracking isn’t utilized)

2. Purchase from a separate IP address

3.  Return customers that experienced a sales cycle which is longer than the duration of the PPC cookie.

4. Wrongful attribution.  Attributing a conversion that started with a sponsored click, to a different “last click” referrer.

Aside from these, there are not many questions in regards to where a PPC conversion came from.  Call Tracking is a solution for this first issue and some analytics software such as Yahoo web analytics (was Index tools) can show the behavior of past visits leading up to the final click and can answer many questions about keyword and referrer attribution.

However, in the case of social media a different set of questions go unanswered.  The main issues that exist in tracking social media efforts are:

1. What is the value of a visit driven by any social media source? This does not mean visitors or mentions.  It means actual value.

2. How do my visitor’s interact with my site, movie’s, apps or events?  Does this interaction correlate to conversions and sales?

3. Is my social media marketing driving direct sales or is it even assisting future sales?

4. What social media channel’s drive’s sales?

5. Are the behaviors of visitors from different channels unique?

6. What content works and what content fails?  How do we determine success and failure?

7. How are visitors reacting to this content away from the site?

Google Analytics is taking a shot to assist marketers in answering these questions by rolling out a Social Reporting platform.  With this platform you will be able to compare social behavior and it’s correlation to conversions to make inferences on the effect on the bottom line.  You will also be able to use a referrer string to find whether there are direct sales and assisted sales coming from your social media efforts.  The key to this reporting is the social report referral code from a particular social media channel, event tracking and the value of the conversion which is associated with the given goal.

While this report will not be available to everyone for another few weeks in Google’s estimation, you can get a head start by making sure all of your event tracking codes, social interaction analytics codes, goals and goal values are set up. It’s also important to recognize that this will not provide a complete detailed view of profit generated but should bring Social Media one step closer to having detailed profit and analytic reporting.  It’s no wonder that this was rolled out after Google+ has had a chance to grow a bit and we expect it to increase the ability for marketers to place a value on Social efforts.

Have you been placing a value on your social media efforts and results?  If so how did you determine success and failure of a given campaign?

Please let us know with your comments and give us a like, +1, RT or follow to help us test the new reports!

No tags

If you found this post it’s probably because you are searching for support and a solution to your problem:  When you get into your Google AdWords MCC account, the system crashes and you get booted back to your home screen.

The solution?  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mercury-web-browser-pro-most/id348701575?mt=8

The mercury browser has no issues logging into AdWords.

I do not know why Safari has this issue, but I’m happy that there is a cheap fix to prevent  AdWords from crashing on Apple hand-help devices.

No tags