Now that I have been been working in the PPC space for almost a year and a half now I’ve seen my fair share of good and bad landing pages. Here at SEER, when we analyze potential landing pages for our clients one of the main things we look for (and won’t go live without) is that there is a link to the client’s privacy policy on the page. The reason being is because it is one of the AdWords policies that could cause your ads to be disapproved.
One day this fall I learned the hard way another addition of this rule I had never heard of. I went into AdWords to do my usual checks on one of my clients’ accounts. I had seen volume drop down since the previous week and wanted to figure out what was going on. After digging I saw a lot of my ads were “suspended” due to landing page violations. The status notice pointed me to this link.
Once I looked around a bit more I realized our violation was specifically for “information harvesting” (See the AdWords help article here). Basically, this policy prohibits “websites that don’t have a clear privacy policy and solicit personal information from users in circumstances where it’s unclear how the information will be used.”
Well that was nothing new… Except I didn’t see how this applied to my ads. I was running ads that sent users to landing pages and had a link to the privacy policy at the bottom of the page. I was also sending traffic to the advertiser’s actual domain, but the pages on the domain where users were sent didn’t have a form or collect any personal information.
After a few calls to AdWords General Support, it turns out if you are sending traffic to a website’s main domain (i.e., not a landing page), anywhere on that domain that asks for personal information needs to have a link to a privacy policy. Not just anywhere on the page either (there was a privacy policy in the footer when I was suspended), but it needs to be connected to the form in some way. Or, in Google’s words, “easily accessible and prominent on the site before users enter their details.” While my landing pages did have a privacy policy; just like the pages on the main domain, the link to the privacy policy was in the footer. Below is the landing page I was using and where the privacy policy was when we got suspended.
I should point out it isn’t just the link on the headline that is reviewed for privacy policy compliance. When Google’s team reviews your ads they will follow every link in an ad for possible pages a user could end up at, this includes pages that sitelinks direct to. So even if your headline is sending traffic to a landing page that has a privacy policy in the correct place, if your sitelinks are sending traffic to the main domain that collects personal information, without a privacy policy in the right place you could be at risk.
To fix this (and be sure it didn’t happen again) I did an audit of the entire domain to be sure anywhere we collected personal data- even just a simple email address- there was a privacy policy next to the form. Once everything was updated with a simply call to AdWords General Support I was submitted for re-review within a day of submitting my ads my ads were up and running again.
None of us on the PPC team had ever heard about how far this “information harvesting” rule could potentially be taken and result in negative (and not easy to fix) consequences. We have all checked our clients’ domains and landing pages to make sure we are proactive with this policy moving forward. Has anyone ever run into any issues with AdWords privacy policies they weren’t aware of? What were the results?
I was extremely lazy about holiday shopping this year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always lazy about holiday shopping but this year I had an unusual number of gifts to ship which meant that by the time I got around to thinking about shopping (December 17th), I had very few purchasing options.
I became one of the hoards of shoppers who needed to do everything online. It’s almost cliché to point out that mobile shopping, or m-commerce, is becoming larger and larger. The research site eMarkerter has a great graph that shows exactly HOW large m-commerce is getting, projecting $11.6 billion in spend for 2012, up 73.1% over 2011.
So as I sat there eagerly ready to contribute my portion of those billions I ran into the same problem over and over again— subpar website experiences.
They were creative, they were good, but they were not optimal for viewing on a mobile device.
Since SEM is well, my job, I saw a great opportunity to dig in further to something that is already affecting search.
Google announced late last year that mobile site optimization would become a factor in quality scores for campaigns that were targeting mobile devices. It makes sense! If a consumer is just going to get frustrated by your website anyway, why would Google reward you with a top spot in the paid search results?
Google put together the site www.howtogomo.com which has a lot of ways you can test your website for mobile usability, design tips, and even build your own. For now, I zeroed in on five of their ten mobile top practices!
1. Keep It Quick
This is for the impatient among us – which is all of us. Personally, if my little status bar takes more than three seconds I’m already hitting the back button and going to another site.
The Tip to Implement: compress images, use bullet points, and make it easy for your page to load
2. Simplify Navigation
Your mobile site is the place for your most succinct writing. Only put on the page what you really feel is important because here people will get lost in the details.
The Tip to Implement: Google’s recommendation is 7 links or fewer so make them count! Adding a search box for a complex site is ideal!
3. Be Thumb Friendly
Two words: Fat fingers. High on the list of annoying things about mobile sites is clicking a too small link and ending up somewhere I didn’t want to go because my fingers were too large!
Tip to Implement: Use large centered buttons and pad them!
4. Design for Visibility
SEER doesn’t give design tips. We won’t tell you what colors to use or which general images work best, but we can let you know that how you use your space is important for conversions. Do make use of size and color for the button that leads to your call to action. Don’t ask people to fill out long forms, mobile is not the place to get their entire consumer profile, and Do make sure that they are not having to surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it (Technologic!) in order to read your page. They may leave first!
Tip to Implement: Make it easy for your customers to read and eliminate the need to pinch and zoom to view content.
5. Make it Easy to Convert
This is important for all websites but where could it be more important than PPC? If someone comes to your site through a PPC ad tell them what you need them to do and allow them to complete this step in as few actions as possible. You can make it even easier on your customer by trying a function like click to call!
Tip to Implement: Make it as easy as possible for consumers to complete your desired call to action.
With so many tips and tools it doesn’t have to be time intensive to revamp your mobile site for success. When you are all done fixing it up, learn about Creating a Mobile Profile in Google Analytics.
Speak with any consultant, SEO, PPC or otherwise and you’ll hear at some point a ‘complaint’ they just can’t get their clients to say yes to their strategy ideas and recommendations.
It’s inevitable that clients will not be able to carry out every recommendation you may have. And let’s be honest, sometimes after looking back the idea isn’t always as earth shattering as we initially thought.
Part of being a great consultant is being able to pivot and take the project in a new direction when this happens. However, there are certain instances where a proposed strategy is critical to the success of the project and therefore to the client’s business (ALWAYS the ultimate goal).
When you get a “No” to a strategy idea that falls into this bucket, you shouldn’t just pivot in a new direction; you should sit back and analyze where the disconnect occurred and how you can get your client to understand the impact.
As I’ve been working in the Search space for over 6 years now, I’ve been challenged with this type of situation hundreds of times. Each time I’ve gotten a “we can’t do that” response, I’ve taken it as a learning opportunity to step back, evaluate and analyze my approach, and revise my next attempt to better connect with the client, often times re-proposing the same strategy idea!
By using the “No’s” as a learning opportunity and understanding how to better connect with clients to get them to approve my strategy idea it’s not by my mistake that I’ve been able to create account growth across PPC accounts for multiple years with increases of 1000+%, 800+%, 300+%, etc. And years ago, to get my SEO recommendations implemented, from linking strategies to content generation.
Growing the PPC accounts I am proud of, but what I am even more proud of is that by growing the accounts, I’ve helped my clients businesses grow as well – This is what the ultimate goal of getting your clients to being ‘Yes Men’ (& women) should always be!
So while this list is exhaustive, here are 10 tips that I’ve found to help connect with clients and get them to be Yes Men (& women).
Tip #1 – Honesty is the best policy
The age old idiom rings true in any partnership.
Start off a client relationship hiding the truth and you’ll find yourself covering your tracks instead of working on what matters to the clients business.
I’ve always found that by being an open book, from having clients own accounts (& therefore having the ability to login and see how things are going at any time) to being completely open about what exactly I am working on and all the details of the strategy, clients value the transparency.
Transparency builds a relationship.
A relationship builds trust.
Trust builds Yes men.
Tip #2 – Be Proactive
No one bats 100% all of the time.
As such, not every single strategy idea will result in success.
The key is to always be proactive in setting expectations, reporting on results and calling out failures FIRST.
If you notice your Adwords conversions take a dreadful downward trend for a few days after you implemented a change or the linking strategy you executed is not leading to the expected outcome – Be the FIRST to call this out.
It’s always better to be the one to call out a failed test and have a game plan ready for how to turn things around!
Tip #3 – Say “I’ll look into it”
Don’t answer questions on the fly if you don’t know the answer with 100% confidence.
When I first started at SEER 5 years ago, I knew little to nothing about SEO, my focus had always been Media & PPC. I used the phrase “Let me check with the team” more times than not and I never once had a client demand an answer on the spot.
Do your homework, tap your resources, get the accurate answer for your clients.
They will always appreciate the correct answer versus the fast answer (Check out Rand Fishkin’s take on this).
Tip #4 – Always do what is best for the client
Agencies overall have an unfortunately nasty reputation for doing what is best for THEM, not what is best for the client.
Our focus at SEER has been the complete opposite – ALWAYS do what is best for the client, even if that means it may decrease budgets for you or cause a pause in a project.
Check out Wil’s post where we outlined strategies for slowing down payments, or pausing projects when it benefits the client.
Tip #5 – Know what resources are available, or aren’t
Resources to carry out recommendations when it comes to things like developing content for example, can be a hindrance for driving clients toward success.
Without understanding resource situations for your clients, your strategy recommendation may have been shot down for a simple reason that you can offer help on or better yet build directly into your recommendation!
Tip #6 – Track your results
Nothing is worse than hearing a really great idea, hear it was implemented, and then hear crickets.
Before you propose any great strategy, be sure you have a plan to track and report on results throughout the execution phase. This is key to how SEER has developed our processes.
Tip #7 – Prove it
Nothing helps a client see the benefit to their business quite like showing them real results.
Do you want your client to buck up for a linking strategy? Show them what success you’ve had with a similar strategy for another client!
Share blogs (like this and this ), case studies, share real examples, create scenarios that show them the potential success.
Tip #8 – Understand the BUSINESS
Even if you are the PPC consultant, or SEO consultant, you need to understand your clients’ business, not just the small slice of the pie you focus on.
What are the overall goals for the company? What future initiatives are they focusing on?
By understanding the business, you can tie how your PPC strategy recommendation or SEO strategy recommendation ties back to the overall business goals, which ultimately is why they are investing in PPC or SEO. Check our Ryan’s Post on Talking Revenue With Your Clients.
Tip #9 – Be a student
You should always be pushing yourself to learn more – about the clients business, industry, about your own industry, about competitors, etc.
The more knowledge you bring to the table, the better strategy recommendations you can propose that tie back to the clients business.
Tip #10 – Be persistent
Hearing “No” to a strategy idea that you really believe will drive success for the client can make you feel defeated and feel intimated to bring up future “great” ideas.
However, it’s important that each time you hear a “No” you don’t give up or get frustrated that you have a “No” client.
Instead, evaluate the situation – it’s likely that there was a miscommunication in how you presented your idea, how it ties into the clients overall business goals or even who you presented the strategy to.
Analyze what you can do differently the next time to help get your strategies approved that will drive success for the clients business!
Overall Takeaway
You can only understand the overall business and goals by becoming a true partner and become engrained in the clients business and industry. To get your ideas and strategies approved by clients consistently, you need to earn the trust & clearly tie everything back to driving success, not just for PPC or SEO (for example), but for the overall business!
In journalism – and writing in general –, the five Ws (and one H) are basic tenants of a complete report or analysis. If you’re missing any one of these elements, you don’t have a complete picture of what has transpired. The same applies to us in the PPC industry. If we can’t answer these six basic questions, we can’t say that we have the most solid grasp on our accounts and that our performance is as good as it could be. Fortunately, we have the tools at our disposal to answer these questions, so let’s take a look at the questions you should be answering to make the most of your PPC accounts:
WHO – Demographic Report
In an ideal world, we’d know who we are trying to reach as well as who we are actually reaching. Your client should be able to answer the former, but the latter we have to figure out ourselves. For standard search campaigns, this can be difficult (if not impossible) to figure out. But if you’re running on the Display Network, you’ve got the help of the Demographics report under the dimensions tab. Here you can see information about the domains to which your ads have been served, as well as information such as age and gender of users that saw your ad. This data is limited because it is pulled from websites that collect member data and elect to provide it for Google, but can still be useful to get an idea of whose eyes are seeing your ads. If you’re running on Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ve got even greater control over who sees your ads through their very targeted demographic bidding options.
WHAT – Search Queries
Knowing exactly what users are searching for is one of the greatest assets we could have. We can figure this out using regular search query reports, which provide the exact words users typed into the search box that triggered your ad. Use these reports to create a negative keyword list of words that don’t apply to your client AND to come up with new ideas for terms on which you should bid! Another way to answer the “What” question is paying attention to auto-complete. Start typing some of your terms into the search box and see what it suggests to complete it. Use Soovle to test this out on multiple engines simultaneously!
WHERE – Geographic Analysis
Where are all these clicks, impressions and (hopefully!) conversions coming from anyway? You can figure it out by utilizing the geographic reports available to you in AdWords and Google Analytics. You can look as broadly as country-level or as narrowly as city-level. Use the information to figure out where your ads perform best and take the opportunity to separate those locations out into their own campaign so you can bid higher on them. Conversely, look for locations where performance is poor and separate them out so you can lower bids; all without affecting overall campaign performance everywhere else!
WHEN – Day-Parting Analysis
Knowing when users are searching for your clients’ products or services is another one of the most valuable pieces of information we’re lucky enough to be able to find out. Using AdWords or Analytics, you can pull reports showing performance on each day of the week. You can go even further and pull a report that shows performance during each hour of the day. That’s pretty huge! If your analysis shows that performance drops way off over the weekends, you can set your campaigns to only run during the work week. Similarly, if you’re losing money by showing ads during the overnight, you can set your campaigns to pause nightly and resume in the morning. This can help you save money and improve overall performance metrics.
WHY – Google Insights
“Why” is one of the harder questions to answer, mostly because we’re not privy to exactly what is going on in the heads of our audiences. Fortunately we have ways of making informed guesses as to why our performance fluctuates as it does. If you notice a big spike or dip in performance, ask yourself what’s going on in the world that may have caused it. Saw a spike and your client provides clinical services? Well, if it’s flu season, you can probably guess that’s why your search volume jumped up. Use Google Insights to figure out less obvious causes by searching for some of your search terms where you saw jumps in volume. News outlets can also be a valuable tool on figuring out what may have caused a performance spike, particularly when it’s concerning local campaigns.
HOW – Visitors (In Analytics)
Knowing how users visited and interacted with your landing can be very helpful in improving conversion rate. Using the Visitors tab in Google Analytics can help you in crafting your landing page. Here you can see which browsers, screen resolutions, flash versions, operating systems, languages and more visitors are using when they get to your landing page. Using this data you might find that a large number of visitors are using a screen resolution that puts your form below the fold! Or you could find out that a lot of your potential converters are using a browser in which your landing page is not optimized! Put this information to good use to help refine and improve your landing page, and hopefully help encourage additional conversions!
So those are the six big questions you should be asking yourself whenever you’re looking at your account’s performance. If you can answer all six, you have the keys to optimizing your campaigns to help drive more clicks and conversions. But these are just the basic questions you should be asking, what other questions do you find yourself asking when you’re optimizing your accounts? Let us know in a comment!
As we draw 2011 to a close I thought it would be fun to highlight Seer’s top 50 blog posts for the year. Which post got the most attention? (Hint, it wasn’t Wil Reynolds!) Who got retweeted the most? Who had the longest title?
I thought I would mention: Adam beat Wil by 5 tweets!! He got a grand total of 905 tweets and Wil got 900 tweets. This was as of Dec 21st around 4pm EST when I hit the Twitter API across all the URLs. I’m just glad I made it on the list :)
Count em’… 96 characters! It’s OK, you can still Tweet it You still got 3 characters if you used the entire title in a tweet, shortened it with Bit.ly, and added “RT @bonnieschwartz:(space)”
How I collected and calculated the data:
(Because I know the entire Seer team is going to grill me after I post this. LOL)
The top 50 blog posts were ranked by the total number of landing page visits between Jan 1st and Dec 21. I used Google Analytic’s API. I chose landing page visits because I wanted to have it be the first thing they went to from an external link.
Posts made at the beginning of the year had a clear advantage: they had more time to accumulate visits. To compensate, each post’s visits was multiplied by a weight to normalize them. The weight was simply the date it was posted divided by the number of days to 12/19 to eliminate the bias of age – ie: the post received less advantage the earlier in the year it was posted.
Tweets were from the Twitter API for that particular URL. URL shorteners probably make the numbers do funny things. I’m sure there are a million different ways to slice and dice the data. I thought this method was simple and straight forward. Eh. For this blog post it’s close enough :)
I think most people who have managed AdWords campaigns for an agency or in-house have been approached with the following question: “Why is our Impression Share so low? “ My response mostof the time is “Who cares?!”
To me, this is one of the most overvalued, but also one of the most undervalued, metrics in PPC.
Impression Share
Now don’t get me wrong, Impression Share (IS) metrics can be very insightful once you fully understand how to use it. First, you need to know what IS is reporting. Google defines this as “the percentage of impressions where your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting.” In other words, if you’re bidding on broad match keywords, you will likely have a much lower IS than if you were only bidding on exact match. That is because broad match keywords are available for more impressions versus phrase match or exact match keywords. Hence Google’s ‘Exact match IS’ metric.
Exact match IS
‘Exact match IS’ shows how often your ad could have shown when the query matches your keywords exactly. As Google puts it, it is the IS if your keywords were all set to exact match. I believe this is more insightful than regular IS. It may be useful to see how many total impressions you can get, but once you start reviewing your search query reports and realize what the “available impressions” actually are, you may think twice about increasing your bids. However, knowing your ‘Exact Match IS’ can be very useful. A high ‘Exact match IS’ says you’re receiving quality impressions – your ads are showing when users are searching for keywords you obviously find relevant since you’re bidding on them!
Lost IS (rank)
Similar to regular IS, I don’t spend much time focusing on the ’Lost IS (rank)’ metric. This can be useful for determining whether you need to increase your bids, revise your ads, or adjust your match type; yet I’m not alarmed when I see a high percentage. I may receive a higher ‘Lost IS (rank)’ due to losing an auction that Google thought was “relevant” for some broad match keyword I’m bidding on. If I sell cat food and I’m bidding on the broad match keyword ‘buy cat food’, I don’t care if I lost an impression for someone searching ‘cat vidz’. Believe me, we’ve seen worse . As long as my keywords are profitable, I’m feeling alright.
Lost IS (budget)
Last, but not least – ‘Lost IS (budget)’. This is a great metric. This allows you to easily assess your campaigns and understand their value if you just add additional funds. You can tell how many impressions were lost from ad rank, but how can you act on that as quickly as adding budget? If your campaigns are profitable and are reporting a high ‘Lost IS (budget)’ percentage, why are you still reading this? INCREASE YOUR BUDGETS NOW!
I have used this before when preparing budget recommendations for clients. Sure, Google will recommend a budget every now and then, but here you can truly calculate what your performance could have been once you know how many impressions were lost… and here’s how!
Calculating Missed Performance
With ‘Lost IS (budget)’, you can calculate what the total amount of impressions would have been using the following formula:
Total Available Impressions = Reported Impressions / [1 – ‘Lost IS (budget)’]
This was derived by understanding that your reported impressions are the total impressions available minus what you lost. In other words:
Reported Impressions = Total Impressions – Lost Impressions,
where Lost Impressions is your Total Impressions × ‘Lost IS (budget)’.
Once you determine your Total Available Impressions, you can estimate the rest of your metrics based on your account’s performance.
For example, if you had 800 impressions and a 20% ‘Lost IS (budget)’. This means there were 1,000 available impressions, and you missed out on 200 of them. Now you can calculate your clicks based on your Average CTR, your cost based on your Average CPC, and so on.
After all is said and done, you have a nice report to show your clients their missed opportunity – potential clicks, potential cost, and most importantly, potential conversions:
Clients are more likely to increase their budgets if you show them a campaign is missing potential leads and/or profits vs. just ‘having a feeling’.
So now that you have a better understanding of Impression Share, what it means and how to use it, next time someone asks, “Why is our Impression Share so low?” make sure to take the time to explain what they really should focus on and why.
How have you used Google’s Impression Share metrics to optimize your account?
Making the leap from traditional media to PPC is little like moving from your hometown to a new city. All your life you’ve been in one place, and you know it well. You never had to think twice about where to go and how to operate. Now in this new city, you have to get used to a new norm. You know the basic things, but the little nuances are something you will have to figure out.
So if you are making that switch (or you need to explain it to someone else) here are three quick concepts to grasp when translating your traditional knowledge into PPC expertise.
Say Goodbye Rating Points. The basic goal for most traditional media buys is to get your advertising on the highest rated Arbitron/Neilson channel or station in the highest possible ranked DMA for the lowest CPM. Part of this is for branding, you want as many people as possible exposed to your product (hence CPM’s instead of CPA.) These rankings/numbers don’t mean quite the same thing in their PPC counterpoints however. Impressions and Clicks measurements matter, but generally only to the extent that they mean there is volume around your term. To break it down further there may be a term that gets tons of volume, let’s say “insurance.” Chances are however you aren’t going to bid on that super high volume term because your CPA will likely be extremely high. In the PPC world you aren’t purchasing based on eyeballs you are focusing on conversions.
Targeting Occurs, (but not the way you are used to it.) Media agencies spend tons on various services; Claritas, TNS, Strata’s etc. to find out who they plan to target. “What is the demo?” is a phrase engrained in pretty much any type of traditional media buy. When you move to PPC however you have to let go of that concept. While you should have an idea of who to target, you definitely shouldn’t (and in some ways can’t completely) segment people into who should or shouldn’t be searching your term. I would argue that more so than any other media PPC consumers find you. It doesn’t really matter if they are 18 or 45 in New York or Quad Cities if they give you a qualified conversion, then you are on the right track when it comes to PPC.
Think of creative differently. I don’t want to make the point that creative isn’t tricky no matter how you are advertising. It is a very nuanced part of marketing and it always will be. Most non-brand advertising is tracked, using unique phone numbers in a newspaper FSI, or promo codes in a radio ad is nothing new. But in both those examples there is a cost involved with those creative, effectively shortening either the amount of time it takes to find out statistical significance of one or another ads, and limiting the number of creative variations you can try. The branding creative process tends to be long and drawn out and discovering ROI usually comes when ratings posts are done or sales revenues have come in. What makes PPC so interesting is the speed at which you get your quantitative information and how quickly (compared to most media) you can implement changes. Depending on the volume around your term, you could gain insights about your creative, you could make a change while the campaign is live, instead of waiting until it is done for results.
Making that mental switch from traditional advertising to PPC understanding as complicated as it may seem, with a little patience you’ll understand the nuances and be ready to roll.
