save your pennies

Many advertisers are losing money or significantly hindering their performance when it comes to using Adwords, leading some companies to abandon Adwords completely. An Adwords account can be tough to manage but there are here are a few ways to keep your campaigns profitable and the cash rolling in. Here are ten ways to cut costs and quickly get back up and making money.

1) Focus only on relevant keywords

When advertisers first start in Adwords they are told to do keyword research and bid on every term that could potentially result in a sale. This is a good strategy when you have a bigger budget and can afford to test a large set of keywords but if you're a budget conscious advertiser you will first want to focus strictly on highly relevant keywords and leave out anything you're not sure about, even if it has potential. Once your highly relevant keywords are converting and making money then you can go back and expand your list and add all the keywords that you weren't sure about.

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Who gets credit for the Goal

You're getting AdWords traffic. You're sure that some of those visitors are converting. But Google Analytics is not giving your Campaigns the credit they are due. Could Sub-domain tracking be the problem?

All sub-domain tracking problems lead to _setDomainName() and _initData(). _initData()? Just when you thought it was deprecated, dropped, kaput, gone and forgotten !!!

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Direct Traffic - Top of the List

Direct visitors may be your most valuable. Keeping track of them makes sense. Advertisers, for example, may be more interested in your direct traffic than your paid traffic. And then there are the New Direct Visitors. That requires some expensive advertising or valuable word-of-mouth. If you are doing any off-line marketing, direct traffic KPIs rule (along with some fellow megalomaniacs).

So it makes sense to identify direct visits, to segment direct visitors and to track conversions within that segment.

Post #4, GA User Defined Variables (UDVs) Revisited described the Scenario "Improved Attribution" requiring that direct visitors status be recorded so as not to be overwritten by subsequent traffic sources. We delve more deeply here, distinguishing between direct and "external" visits and between direct visits and direct visitors. We also provide two code snippets below.

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A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to Seattle and attend SMX Advanced. I sat in on all the PPC sessions and couldn't wait to learn something new. Unfortunately there were only a few bits of information worth blogging about, the rest was general knowledge, ranting or shameless promotion. That being said, listed here are the top 3 PPC tips from SMX Advanced: how you can control ad copy impression share; reset your quality score; and use dynamic keyword insertions for all-caps titles.

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new great changes to Google Adwords

The new AdWords interface has been in the works for some time and is now available to advertisers (optional right now). At first I was hesitant about switching over to a new "beta"—interface especially since I've become so comfortable with the old interface—but once I switched I noticed that this wasn't just a simple graphical update, it was a new interface with a bunch of new and improved features.

The features include things like "rollup tabs" (for easier navigation between tabs), quicker editing of bids, quicker editing of ad copy, a bunch of minor updates, and most importantly: the search query performance and placement performance displays.

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Yahoo still misses on many points

Yahoo Panama (the pay-per-click platform) has recently released some updates to their system. Some of the changes include day time parting, demographic bidding and a "new" and updated content network. If you've been using AdWords then you know these features are not exactly revolutionary.

On the surface this may seem great. Yahoo Panama has been in need of updates, but this update hasn't done much for Yahoo advertisers and the major problems that plague their paid search marketing platform still exist.

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So far a lot of the talk has been about how powerful Google Analytics is as a result of its tight integration with your Google AdWords campaigns. If you are like most online businesses AdWords is an important advertising channel, but definitely not your only one. You will likely also be managing email campaigns, other paid search vendors (MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing, or links within documents such as PDFs, Word, Excel...), display ad campaigns... To help manage all of these campaigns there is a great deal of data that can be found in the "Traffic Sources" section of Google Analytics in "Campaigns".

Properly tracking your online campaigns depends on tagging of your landing page URLs. The process of doing this is simple; you just need to add the Google Analytics campaign parameters to the end of your landing page URL. The process is simple, but it can be a lot of work as you need to tag all of the links that you direct to your site (except AdWords and organic traffic). If you don't tag it you won't be able to attribute the visit to a campaign (that visit will appear to be an organic campaign if you have untagged MSN or Yahoo paid traffic, direct if you have untagged emails or documents or none). As a general rule of thumb, if you are paying for the traffic to arrive at your site you want to have the referring link tagged.

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I recently came across some great examples of how computer-generated content can deliver bizarre, confusing and even hilarious results.

First up is a CAPTCHA that co-worker Kent Clark encountered on a Twitter account sign-up. (Thanks for sharing, Kent.) Check out the "word" on the right:

Even assuming I know where to find the "pounds" symbol on my North American keyboard, I'm still going to have a heck of a time finding what appears to be a "7/8" character.

My other examples come from Adwords. And whom can we credit for supplying these classic Adwords groaners, but that most venerable of Adwords advertisers, eBay.

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If you are purchasing AdWords and using Google Analytics, connecting the two of them together during the implementation or setup process is absolutely necessary. Once you have done this, the reports that become available are extremely powerful for those people within your organization who are responsible for managing/optimizing the performance of your AdWords spend. These reports provide specific information on the ROI or margin of your investment, the performance of your investment based on the position that your ads are being displayed, as well as the performance of different ad versions. The later, the Ad Versions report will be the focus of this post.

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Since AdWords and Google Analytics are both Google products there is some information that can be provided when they are linked together that other analytics platforms don't provide. One of these items is the Keyword Position Report. For those marketers who are responsible for the performance of their firms AdWords performance this report is extremely powerful.

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