This got us thinking about other ways crowdsourcing has crept into PPC. In another post, we likened PPC to a Stereo System, describing how each stereo component is equally important to delivering good sound, with the speakers at the end playing a crucial role similar to landing pages. We suspect crowdsourcing will soon find its way into landing page creation, but for now we’re happy to see companies like Unbounce tackling the ever-important issue of landing page design and hosting.

Then there’s the crowdsourced PPC platform, Trada, which seems to be a good entry into PPC for smaller advertisers without a lot of time and resources. They might not get the strategy they’d receive working with a dedicated agency or bringing it in-house, but they’ll have a portfolio of optimization experts working hard on their behalf.

As a PPC agency, we welcome innovation in a field where there are a lot of levers to be pulled. We hope to come across more opportunities to leverage experts who may not physically be in our office but are still definitely on our team.

Know any more examples of crowdsourcing in PPC? Let us know!

• Hitting your budget and losing out on available impressions
• Missing CPA targets
• Not realizing an account has been paused or is no longer getting traffic
• Failing to install a conversion tag on new landing page
• … and more

The first step in setting up alerts in Google AdWords is to dream up some worst-case scenarios. In our agency, for example, we need to know when a campaign spends 95% of its budget because if we hit up against budgets on a consistent basis, we are likely losing impression share and have some bidding work to do. That might throw up a big red flag to our client. So… red flags = alerts!

We might set up this alert like the following: 

Other worst-case scenarios might be:

• a website going down
• conversion rates dropping below a target
• cost per conversion going above a target
• someone forgetting to un-pause a campaign

Using alerts to signal problems early on can be a real savior for any advertiser. Make sure to do these at the MCC level (if possible) and alert more than one team member for redundancy.

Once you have some alerts set up, let them run for a few days and tweak as needed. But keep in mind, you cannot Edit an existing alert in Google Adwords! Instead, you’ll need to create it over from scratch. Another good practice is to advise your team on how to handle alerts that signal problems. Put together a contingency plan and assign responsibilities accordingly. Worst-case scenarios can and should be managed as long as someone with authority is paying attention!

Just a week after their public launch, Asana quickly became the hot new thing at our agency. We had been searching for a simple solution to manage client emails, and so far Asana has delivered that and more.

What Asana Does

A project management tool with emphasis on task tracking, Asana allows us to create multiple projects for free (unlike Basecamp) with unlimited team members in each project. This means our whole team can follow a project and its various tasks and be notified via email when something is updated in that project.

For our hypothetical client ACME, we created a new project called ACME, added each team member as a follower, then setup an outlook email contact for the project itself which looks something like “ACME – CPC Search” x+12345678@mail.asana.com. You see, the cool thing about Asana is the ability to create a new task via email. Just put that address in the To, CC, or BCC fields, hit Send, and a your whole team is notified (as long as they’re following the project).

We repeated this process for each of our clients and now have a nice list-serve-meets-project-manager with a few other bells and whistles tossed in. One suggestion for the Asana product team would be a one-click V-card export to Outlook. Otherwise, each member of your team needs to create a new contact for each project. (At least we realized we could have one person do this and email all the V-cards to everyone else.)

Put It In Practice

Getting this to work for us took some experimentation. Since we wanted to copy Asana on all client-related emails (reports or  account updates) we figured we would put the client in the To field and Asana in the CC field. This caused problems though. When our clients hit Reply All to our emails they received an error message back from Asana saying: “You are not a follower or user of this Asana account.” So, putting Asana in the To or CC would not work.

By putting Asana in the BCC field, we eliminated those error messages, but what if our client had an excellent reply? How could we add that to the thread? It’s not perfect, but in those cases we will just forward meaningful replies to the Asana contact.

What Asana Does Not Do

Great technical support does not yet flow from Asana. In two cases we asked for some hand-holding and were denied both times — once in the form of a rejected LinkedIn message — doh! Well, I guess that’s life in the fast-lane!

As a task/project management tool that aims to be well integrated with email, they could take it further and let us do other relevant things via email: adding tags and due dates, for starters.

Speaking of email, there is no way to adjust your notification settings. So if you don’t want to receive an email for this or for that, too bad — you are going to be notified on EVERYTHING, like it or not. In the era of (over)engineered notification settings (Facebook, Twitter) these guys have some catching up to do.

But all in all, we seem to have put this free tool to good use and regardless of the lack of this or that, it has simplified our approach to client management in a way that is virtually invisible to our clients (if not overly visible to us).

Does ad position affect click-through rates (CTR)? Yes.

Does ad position affect your campaign’s cost? Yes.

Do ads in the top ad position get more conversions? Yes.

Does ad position affect conversion rates? No.

Can you guess the most important question above? Yes, it’s the one answered No. This also happens to be one of the most misunderstood points about ad position. Listen to what Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, has to say:

“We have used a statistical model to account for these effects and found that, on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad.”

That’s pretty straightforward, and you should trust Hal. To be more accurate, it’s totally possible that for any given account ad position may actually correlate with differences in conversion rates. But in aggregate – and in virtually all of the PPC accounts we have managed over the years – we have not found this to be the case.

So, to recap: if you want more clicks, put your ad at the top. If you want more conversions, go for the top. But if you do that, you’re going to spend proportionately more money. Just don’t expect those clicks from the top to convert at a higher rate.

It’s all the same when it comes to ad position and conversion rates.

In the past, when we’d run Dimensions reports by Day, the date would appear but the actual “day” would not. We’d see something like: Oct 11, 2011… Oct 12, 2011… etc. Not very helpful if you want to analyze weeks of data to look for similaries across, say, Saturdays and Sundays.

Now what we see (screenshot below) is the day just before its date: Tue, Oct 11, 2011… Wed, Oct 12, 2011… etc. When we download this report, we find it much easier now that we don’t have to whip out the calendar to make additional notes on what day falls on which date. (Note: We did find ourselves doing some quick excel magic to extract the day from the string, allowing our pivot table to show the right stuff.]

We’d like to thank the AdWords team for not only listening, but also for helping us save time and improve our day-to-day workflow. Hey agencies, did you notice this, too?

We stumbled upon one of those improvements and thought we’d share it with you.

In adCenter Desktop, when you have a large group of broad match keywords that you would like to create phrase and exact match versions for, the long method to do this is to select your keywords, copy and paste into your ad group, change their match types, and repeat the process until you have what you need.

A much faster way to accomplish this, thanks to a nice shortcut in adCenter Desktop — which Google’s AdWords Editor cannot boast — is to right-click on a keyword or group of keywords, choose Add Match Type, and click All. The result is pretty slick: instant keyword match type expansion! But wait… it gets better.

adCenter was keeping track of search queries, categorizing them as broad, phrase or exact, and assigning data to each match type without you even knowing it. Now you can view performance statistics to see data for each of the new match types. For example, splitting out a broad match keyword that earned 100 conversions last month could reveal 45 conversions came from the exact match version, 25 from the phrase match, and the rest from broad. This is great information to have, and all you needed to do was “unhide” it.

Before you call it a day, you need to do one more thing. Since AdCenter automatically assigns the ad group’s default bid to these new match types, you’ll need to set new bids accordingly. It’s a bit tedious, but well worth the time — your account will love you!

Client: My understanding is that in general, exact match keywords are the most efficient match types in terms of average CPCs and impression share. Thus, in general, to gain the same ad position you need a higher CPC bid on broad match keywords than exact match keywords; and/or at a given CPC, Google is more likely to serve your ad if it’s an exact match vs a broad match if the search term is that exact keyword.

CPC Search:  The keyword match type does not change the economics of the AdWords auction or the CPC. The auction economics are still determined on a query-by-query basis by query-level quality score and bid.

Get granular with keyword match types

What does make a difference is that with more keywords, including more exact-match (and phrase-match, and broad-match-modified (BMM)) keywords, you have more granularity and visibility. So, if a search query does well, then your exact-match bid is likely to be higher than the broad-match bid, since that broad-match keyword is probably getting matched up to queries that are less relevant and perform less well than does the good query; so, you would likely have a lower bid on that broad-matched keyword.

Client: And the way to think about phrase and broad match types is that you are matching more search queries and thereby gaining more overall impressions.  Would that be about right?

CPC Search:  Yes – phrase, broad and BMM are useful because they widen the net, and the net is almost always going to have some good search queries.  Another way to think about it – if you never had broad-match keywords in your account, you’d be a huge sucker since you’d never be able to capture all the conversions available from search queries that may appear only once or twice each month or year.

I think it’s worth mentioning that the client added some analysis of their own regarding exact-match keywords we were missing, and we took action on that. It’s great to have clients that are engaged and eager to collaborate!

-Terry