• Test Ad
  • Text ad Headline
  • Description line 1
  • Description line 2
  • Display URL
  • Destination URL
• Local business ad
  • Headline (try business name in the headline, this is one of the few times that’s very effective)
  • Description line 1
  • Description line 2
  • Display URL
  • Destination URL
  • Favicon
  • Business logo
• Image ad
  • Static
  • Flash ad
• Video ad
• Mobile
  • Phone only
  • Carriers
  • Mobile site only
  • Mobile + phone
• Keyword Match type
  • exact
  • phrase
  • broad
• Ad Groups (or campaigns)
  • negative
  • negative embedded
• Ad Position
  • Top
  • Right
• Max CPC
• Times
  • Time of day
  • Day of the week
  • Month of the year
• Bidding
  • Manual bidding
  • Auto bidding
  • Preferred bidding
• Landing Page
  • Homepage
  • Dedicated page
  • Microsite
  • Category page
  • Product specific page
• Websites
• Content network
  • CPC
  • CPM
  • Demographic
• Search network
• Google.com

My newest article at Search Engine Land came out last Monday. It’s about what the new Yahoo minimum bid means your PPC campaigns.

I spent more time writing this article that almost any I’ve done in the past year. I had access to Yahoo decks, Yahoo PDFs, and Yahoo employees when I wrote this, and really tried to check the accuracy of everything as this is such a new change.

What I found fascinating was that while this column only produced 3 Sphinns; I received 34 contacts via my blog about the story. I think that falls somewhere in the top 20 ever received by this blog from a single post within a week (and it wasn’t even linked to from my blog - the only way to find this blog from the article is in the author section at the bottom of the article).

Sometimes social media looks like one thing (3 Sphinns is very little), while the results can be far different (I consider 34 contacts exceptionally high). Normally when my stories end up on social media sites, I receive very little comments, so I found this quite fascinating as it’s far from the norm that I see.

Enjoy the article, it’s worth reading as this is a change to the philosophy of minimum bids.

When Google switched to using the minimum bids instead of disabled keywords, there was still one leftover item that was not fully transparent: A keyword that did not receive an impression for 90 days became disabled behind the scenes even if it showed as active within your account.

It seems Google has clarified when this happens, and ads the caveat that the word will go active again if people start searching for it.

Overall, I’m a fan of the keyword analysis info boxes within AdWords. I find the various alerts useful for a quick diagnosis inside an account. However, they would be very useful if you could run a report and see all of these alerts at a single time instead of having to view them one-by-one.

My newest article at Search Engine Land was published Monday which is a look into a legal case about an advertiser suing another advertiser directly without going through the typical Google exception process. It then goes on to look at ways the industry needs to think about copyright usage. Read it here.

There’s also an interesting interesting discussion going on at Sphinn over SemCompare.com a ratings and review site for SEM agencies that’s run by Search Marketing Standard. Definitely a topic that’s worthy of some attention.

I recently had a long conversation with Google (including the content PM) about the content network.

Here are a few suggestions from Google about the content network (most of these should not surprise anyone):

• Only the first 50 words in an AdGroup are used to determine its theme
• When an AdGroup has a large keyword list, Google’s matching isn’t as good and can get confused
• If an AdGroup is only shown on content, then it can be very useful to use more general words
• All keywords are treated as broadmatch when matching the AdGroup’s theme for content matching
• The Google recommended content bid is usually 75% of the search bid
• The typical content CPA (which I’m not sure if I can share so no numbers) is not significantly different (less than 10%) from search and content
• Of course, this is significantly impacted by bidding content and search differently
• It can be very useful to use site targeting with CPC bidding for ensuring your ads are shown on the highest converting content match websites

Content match resources:

• Search Ads & Contextual Ads Are Different! You Need To Treat Them Separately
• How to optimize a contextual search advertising campaign
• Block low quality traffic
• Peak behind the curtain to see to learn what AdSense sites are doing for you
• About smart pricing

On a side note, I finally responded to the comments about quality score and exact match impressions.

Microsoft has been testing their new free analytics program for a while and a new round of invites has recently gone out to those wishing to try out analytics.

A few important troubleshooting tips if you have an invite:

• You may have to visit the page a few times before the signup process runs smoothly. It looks like the initial errors where the pages were erroring out have been fixed.
• Ensure the email address of the invite is the exact same as the email address in your adCenter account
• Once you have the code and place it on your site, you have to wait for statistics to accrue before you can add advanced options such as:
  • Goal setting
  • Outbound link tracking
  • Event tracking
• Be patent. While trying to write this post, the system has been unavailable about half of the time I’ve clicked on a link within the analytics interface.

The most interesting feature is the ability to segment your analytics by age, gender, occupation, and geography. This is most likely associating website visits to passport accounts and other Microsoft data which is similar to how adCenter’s targeting works.

While Microsoft doesn’t know everyone’s information, and the ‘unknown’ category is by far the largest, the additional data can be quite useful for slicing and dicing data.

Screenshot of segmentation by Age. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Gender. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Occupation. (click image for full view)

Screenshot of segmentation by Geography. (click image for full view)

While the interface is still a bit basic and erratic, the above segmentation data is not available in any other free analytics service that I’m aware of.

Using Microsoft adCenter Analytics combined with Microsoft adLabs can give you some powerful analytics to help engage your audience in new and meaningful ways.

I had a long assumed thought confirmed by Google: Quality score is only based upon the exact match for a keyword.

Impressions and clicks that occur from expanded broad match do not affect your quality score.

While it is important to bid based upon conversion metrics; I often find it useful to use broad match combined with a search query report to help identify each keyword’s universe.

Matt has taken the best posts from his feed reader over the past year and organized them into categories for judging the best posts of 2007. It’s usually easier to judge a blog then individual posts, so this is a pretty ambitious endeavor.

Of course, the SEMMYS are highly controversial and generating its fair share of buzz.

Personally, I’m judging the Analytics and Local Search categories.

I also have two blog posts nominated for SEMMYS:

1. Understanding IP Targeting for PPC Campaigns
2. How to Lower Your AdWords Minimum Bid

which I find nice for someone who only blogs part-time (at best).

As the awards are based on Matt’s last year’s feed reader - you can see the problems:

• Matt can’t read every blog post
• Matt’s reader could be skewed away / towards certain types of blogs
• How can you nominate blog posts in the future
• How can a panel share and collaborate on next year’s posts

Regardless of the complications of the first year beta-SEMMYS; Matt has put in quite a bit of work, and he does read a significant number of blogs. Kudos for trying to pull off an ambitious project that involves the actual post over the entire blog.

I’ve already given Matt a few additional blogs (especially in analytics) to read for the upcoming year to expand the SEMMYS for 2009.

I find very few good analytics blogs. What I’ve seen is that more and more analytics blogs are focusing on Google Analytics. While there is a need for GA blogs, there is also a need for non-GA blogs as well.

If you’re looking for analytics blogs, here’s a list to start with:

• Occam’s Razor
• Google Analytics Blog
• Web Analytics World
• Web Metrics Guru
• Unofficial Google Analytics Blog
• Luna Metrics
• Web Analytics Association
• Web Analytics Association RSS feeds (I also like the articles)
• Optimize and Prophesize (some metrics plus other commentary)

I’m looking for more blogs that really talk about A/B, multivariate, focus, and other testing areas (as well as good non GA blogs) if anyone has suggestions. I’m sure there is also a good blog about Google’s website optimizer, I just haven’t found it yet.

My latest Search Engine Land column is out entitled: New Year’s Resolutions For Your PPC Campaigns.

Some questions to think about for your PPC campaigns:

• Have your goals changed?
• Are you using the correct keywords?
• Has the site changed?
• Do your ad copies contain items that change over time?
• Do you have old tests still running?
• What do you want to learn about PPC this year?

enjoy.

Google Trends is now updated daily.

In addition, Google made some changes to their traffic estimator tool to update that data more frequently, and give more accurate projection data.