A quick tidbit of information:

Engine Ready’s very own vice president, Brian Lewis, will be a guest speaker at Online Marketing Summit, an online marketing education conference being held this week in sunny San Diego.

Brian will be moderating the PPC vs. SEO: The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle panel, which seeks to finally answer one of the industry’s biggest (and toughest) questions: which is more effective, pay per click or search engine optimization? The panel will start at 10 a.m. on the 25th, the third and final day of the conference, and the debate is sure to be pretty lively, at the very least.

Online Marketing Summit runs from February 22nd to the 25th at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego. More information can be found at onlinemarketingsummit.com.

Finally, we’d like to send out a personal invitation to visit us if you attend OMS in San Diego–our offices are only ten minutes away.

Conferences, Engine Ready, Industry Events, OMS, Online Marketing, PPC, SEO, SES

Occasionally, AdWords likes to add in nifty new features to its interface that even the most on-the-ball search marketers never really notice until a few months later, when they suddenly ask themselves (or the entire office at large), “Has this always been here?”

Such is the story of the new Segments feature, which AdWords first implemented in November of 2009 under the Filter tab.

Now, though, it gets a tab of its very own, sandwiched between All but Deleted Keywords and the aforementioned Filter tabs. Just click on that handy dandy little Segments tab, and you can sort all your performance data by network, day, week, month, quarter, year, day of the week, click type, device, and… oh, that’s it?

I think you get the picture.

Needless to say, this is a really cool and versatile new feature, made even cooler by the fact that it saves a lot of time as well. Instead of going through and selecting one day or week or month at a time in the date range in order to view your data, you can view it all at once and, blessedly, compare numbers without having to lay a finger on Excel.

Of course, since the initial discovery and subsequent whoas, we here at Engine Ready have been putting the new Segments tab to use. So far, we’ve mostly been segmenting by week, so that we can get a really good picture of why performance increases or decreases week to week. To do this, select a month (or two or three) as your date range, then segment by week. You end up getting something that looks like this:

Each of the four weeks of data is broken down, so that you can easily take a look at the changes in cost per click, conversion rate, position, and anything else that might be affecting your account’s performance. Which makes it much simpler to answer the question: why?

Which makes it much, much simpler to go for the impossible: true optimization.

Adwords, Analytics, Google AdWords, PPC

If you’re not familiar with Engine Ready’s free software suite, Conversion Critic, you may want to take a moment to utilize some handy online marketing tools.  Conversion Critic can be used to evaluate your landing pages, check for broken destination URLs in your pay per click campaigns, and to forecast the performance of your PPC marketing efforts.

The calculator is perfect for computing expectations for a new campaign.  Many marketers and business owners want to calculate the risk associated with a new campaign.  Accurately forecasting return on ad spend is a challenge shared by all marketers, which the PPC Calculator attempts to relieve.

The free tool will also illustrate how slight changes in the conversion rate or cost per click can significantly impact your bottom line.  In the example below we can see that a 0.5% increase in conversion rate (everything else being equal) equates to thousands of more dollars in revenue.

Example:

Slide the button, or manually input your ad spend.

Forecast snapshot of performance.

conversion rate, cpa, EngineReady, internet marketing, Keyword Opportunities, Online Marketing, PPC, search marketing, Software, Tools

Does this look familiar?

Google First Page Bid Estimate and Actual Position

This inspiring sight is almost inevitable to anyone working in AdWords. Google takes care to inform you, in no uncertain terms, that your bid isn’t high enough to make the first page, and yet, when you look closer, your average position is still pretty good. Usually third or fourth. Definitely not on the second page.

Which just leaves all of us, search marketer and client alike, perplexed. What gives?

Anyone working in AdWords also figured out pretty quickly that it’s a mercurial creature, and often contradictory. Just because Google says something doesn’t necessarily mean that it means it, and the “below first page bid” situation is a prime example. In this case, a first page bid estimate does not equal the cost per click.

So just because Google says your bid is below the first page doesn’t mean that it actually is, and there are a few reasons why. Besides AdWords deciding to be contrary.

One, the first page bid estimate is just an estimate. That’s all. It’s an indication of how much you might have to pay to get on the first page, and not how much you actually will pay. In fact, you’ll often find that you pay less per click than your maximum CPC gives you room for. This is due to AdWord’s quality-based price system, which is a whole new beast of burden in and of itself.

Second, first page bid estimates only really work when a search query exactly matches the keywords that first page bid estimate is for. So if you’re using a broad or phrase match keyword, then forget about it; variations that trigger your exact keyword don’t make any difference in determining a first page bid estimate.

Third, Google search and the Google Search Network use different factors in determining pricing, ad position, and all that fun stuff. So that first page bid estimate you’re seeing? Only comes from Google search, not the Search Network, which is why you might be scratching your head at the huge disparity between the first page bid estimate that applies just to Google and the average CPC that applies to Google and the entire Search Network.

Finally, if you’re throwing your campaign around in more than one country, then the first page bid estimate comes from data from the country with the highest search volume for that specific keyword. Google does much better when you’re only targeting one country, so campaigns spanning multiple ones produce much less accurate first page bid estimates.

So the next time Google informs you that you’re below the first page bid in spite of all evidence on the contrary, that’s what gives.

Or AdWords just decided to be contrary.

Adwords, Bidding Strategies, Google, Google AdWords, Keyword Opportunities, PPC, search marketing