Clients first come to an agency for many reasons: no resources to manage it, completely new to PPC, an in-house account manager left the company, and so on.  More often than not, the #1 reason for coming to an agency is due to being burned, hurt & scared by Google.

And which aspect of Google do we hear most often caused thousands in wasted AdSpend?  Held in distain by most all who’ve opted-in, the Content Network is the most misused & misunderstood service that Google provides. 

At Engine Ready, we test everything regardless of how a client’s account may have performed in the past.  With that being said, we always test the Content Network.  As far as Google is concerned, these two separate marketing initiatives are just that.. Separate.  The only thing they can share in common is running simultaneously off of the same keywords in the same adgroup, campaign, account and even sometimes the same bid (the main reason most people get into trouble.)

By not setting up separate bids for the Content Network, you are opening up yourself for a world monetary pain.  In most cases, the Content Network bids should never exceed your Search Network bids.  By starting a Content Network bid low, at let’s say $0.10, you should be able to avoid Google erroneously spending $100′s of dollars/day.  Each day you can bump up this CPC by 10 cents until you start getting traffic.  If you do not specify this separate bid, Google will use your Keyword CPC which may have been set between $0.50 & $8.00 (or more!)  The Content Network gets thousands upon thousands of impressions a day and can deplete your budget before you even have a chance to get searched once on Google.com.  This is why the Content Network fails for so many people. 

As an agency we deal with a lot of clients who are well aware of performance metrics in PPC but may not understand the little idiosyncrasies of each search engine.  After conversion data, the most recognized metric which clients gauge our performance on is Click-Through-Rate.  CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of ad impressions.  This metric is most notably tied directly to our skills at writing compelling and effective ad creative. 

As an agency we are constantly defending our CTR performance to clients because Google aggregates both Content & Search Network activity. 

In one case, we increased CTR from 1.79% to 3.13% in one month.  This is a vast improvement over the client’s previous performance.  But when reporting on the entire month (including Content), the CTR actually looks like it decreased from 1.79% to 0.13%.  Even after explaining the reason, the client still felt that we were hurting the account.

A common question one might ask is: Does Content Network traffic affect Google’s Quality Score? And the answerer is No.  A common misunderstanding about CTR is that the impressions & clicks from the Google Content Network gets factored into the Ad or Keyword Search Network Quality score.  This is completely not true.

One way we as an agency have adapted to this is by providing separate Content & Search reports.  After all, as similar as it may seem, it’s two completely different ballgames.

Content Network, CTR, Google, Quality Score

One of my favorite movies growing up was Weird Science. I recall watching the film for the first time with my babysitter back in the 80s. Thanks to Netflix, I was reminded of this classic a few days ago and, as strange as it sounds, thoughts about the movie have popped into my head since. “What is the name of the actress who played the female lead?” “I was way too young to be watching a rated PG-13 movie” “I wonder if the premise of building a perfect woman from a computer infuriated 1980s feminists” and sitting at my desk today at work “what if I could build the perfect something”. And that last thought brought me to today’s posting idea: the perfect PPC Advertiser Platform.

Obviously there are other things I would like to make first if I could, such as my dream home or an amazing car, but an awesome PPC advertiser platform would diminish a lot of frustrations as far as my work is concerned.

A powerful Account Editor with Real-Time Stats

Don’t get me wrong, the Google Adwords editor is pretty great. Editing keywords, creating ad text, and just plain account organization is easy and efficient thanks to this desktop application. It is one of the main reasons I enjoy working with my Google accounts over other pay per click accounts. Although the Google editor is a huge time saver, what is the deal with the “Choose Stats Interval” feature? I hate it that I can only go back 30 days and the data hardly ever loads anyways. Basically, it’s a waste of space. In my perfect creation of an account editor, I would be able to pull live statistics for any date range.

Transparent Bidding

I remember the devastation that my colleagues and I felt the day transparent bidding died in Yahoo. That was always one thing we could all agree on: Yahoo’s bidding model exemplified a market that was reflected supply and demand principals. It was nice to know why my ad moved down in position and having the option of outbidding someone in order to get that position again. And unlike Quality Score, at least ad positioning and keyword pricing was straight forward. As long as Quality Score is determined in part by “other relevance factors”, I would prefer transparent bidding because at least I know exactly what is determining my minimum bid and ad position.

Phone Call Tracking

In general, conversion numbers are pretty dismal when it comes to selling high ticket items online. I think consumers continue to feel uncomfortable about using a credit card online to buy expensive goods and services. They also might have questions to ask the retailer before spending their last month’s paycheck. Although many ecommerce websites are now tracking lead forms or contact form submissions as separate actions, I am not aware of many websites that are tracking call-ins generated through PPC. Tracking this piece of information is important for keyword and advertisement evaluation because decreasing a bid for a keyword that doesn’t appear to be converting may not be the best move. That particular keyword could be generating a huge number of call-ins from interested customers. Having call-in information available in reporting would allow PPC marketers to see the true value of each keyword and advertisement.

Believe me, this list could go on. Quality scores column added to reports, customized cookie length and more precise ad scheduling would be great too. Clearly, there are numerous other elements that would make up a “perfect” PPC advertising platform, but these are the main three features I would personally love to see the next time I log in to an account.

Adwords, PPC, Quality Score