Sure, SEO is “free” and should be addressed for any website. But once you have optimized the on page and started driving backlinks, you really need to have patience as it all starts to pick up momentum.

Most businesses don’t have time to simply sit and wait. That’s when PPC needs to be taken more seriously.

Keyword Match Types: What Are They?

Google allows you to set the targeting you prefer for your keywords. Targeting is managed using match types. These designate the keywords you want to go after and how tightly you want to focus your ads within the SERPs. Here are the four top-level match types they offer:

Broad Match

Broad match is set by simply entering the keyword into the AdWords interface as a target keyword. If you do not add any modifiers to indicate it should be Phrase or Exact, it defaults to Broad.

Broad allows you to not only show up for verbatim searches of a keyword, but to also show up for variants, misspellings, and terms with similar meanings. While this sounds great in terms of ad impressions to those of us who were brought up in the mass advertising age, it is often the wrong choice.

Since you pay for every click, relevance is crucial. If you show up on a badly targeted SERP, you are guaranteed to pay for bad clicks. And to make matters worse, Google charges more for the same ranking on pages with high competition (meaning a lot of other people are bidding on the same terms), so a broad click is typically the most expensive of all.

Broad is useful for researching new variants of a keyword, but proceed with caution. I recommend you partition off a test budget of maybe 10% of your overall spend to find those new variants. Then go after those keywords using one of the below better targeted match types.

Phrase Match

Phrase Match looks for searches that include a pre-specified phrase, but also include other words around the phrase. You can set a keyword to phrase by putting quotation symbols around it.

For example, if you use “SEO services” as the keyword, your ad would appear on SERPs for “SEO Services in Memphis”, “Best SEO Services in Texas”, or “What to expect from SEO services firms”. As you may have noticed, the order of the words in the phrase must be the same, so “what services should an SEO offer” would not match.

This is useful for tighter targeting overall, perhaps based on location as shown above. Phrase match tends to be less expensive on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, as compared to broad match. At the same time, it also delivers significantly reduced impressions but is more likely to be relevant to a larger percent of the results on which the ad will appear.

Exact Match

Exact Match, designated by using brackets such as [SEO Services], will only serve up your ad on SERPs for verbatim searches of that term. No other words can appear in the search, which is why it is called exact match.

This is the tightest targeting, most likely to be relevant, and least expensive bidding option. If you know for a fact that a keyword has a lot of volume, is relevant as an exact match, and has low competition (based on number of advertisers bidding for the term), you’ve found yourself a bargain.

The best way to find what terms to target with exact is to start with broad or phrase match and see what searches drive results. You may have a very relevant keyword that never drives conversions or quality visits to your site. On the other hand, you will sometimes be surprised to see what words drive the best results. Target those with exact match to get more clicks with higher potential for success.

Negative Match

Another match type you need to know about is Negative Match. This is how you specify all the words you DO NOT want to match for.

At a previous company, we sold a product that attached to a device called a Network TAP (Test Access Point). Unfortunately, the IT community rarely included the word “Network” when searching.

We started out on broad match and found that a huge portion of our spend was on irrelevant terms! There are kitchen taps, beer taps, tap dance shoes, the song “Taps”, the list goes on and on. So we used negative match types on our TAPs ad group to remove any search including the words kitchen, beer, dance, shoes, song, etc.

More on Match Types

This is just a brief introduction. There is much more to figure out when working with PPC advertising.You can use modified broad match, which allows for more wide variants and misspellings to match. You can now use modified exact or phrase match, which allows for close synonyms to match. And once you get all that down, it will be time to learn about bid stacking to optimize your spend across the various keywords and match types.

Even after managing PPC for nearly10 years, I still learn something new almost every week. Just be creative and willing to learn, and you’ll see the massive potential of PPC to drive results for your business or cause.

Read more about Google’s take on these Match Types at http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6100

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Search vs. Display: What Are They?

In Google Adwords, there are two primary “venues” on which you can display ads, the first being Google Search, the second being the Google Display Network (GDN).

Google Search and their search partners, such as search.aol.com, allow the display of text  ads along with organic results (unpaid) that are triggered by keywords. You type in a keyword or phrase, Google displays the most relevant ads.  When you click on the ad, the advertiser is charged based on an auction price and you are re-directed to the advertiser’s website.

GDN on the other hand are “contextually” targeted ads based on content, interests, or topics. Publishers of content use Google Adsense as the vehicle for displaying ads. In addition, Google uses your demographic data and interests to display ads you might be interested in.

You can view your Ad Preferences at: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/

So if, for example, you are reading an article about Tiger Woods skipping the US Open and see an ad for the new Nike 20XI golf ball, the ad is there.  Nike recognizes that, if you are reading an article on golfchannel.com, you probably have an interest in Golf. So you might buy golf balls.

On the other hand, if you are reading an article on nytimes.com, you might see the same Nike 20XI Golf ball ad.  Most likely, this ad was displayed because your Ad Preferences indicate “Golf” as an interest.

How to Find a Good Site Where You Can Advertise

There are a variety of ways to find relevant/high quality sites to target.  Generally speaking, I look for them in this order:

1. Search Google using the most valuable keywords I am trying to target.  I prefer using Google Search initially to find sites to advertise on, since those that show up on the first page are presumably more relevant. From the organic search results, I look at the websites on page one to see if they are running ads from either Google or Double Click. I also check the depth and content of the site for quality. If you see display ads on the site, check the link of the ad by either hovering over it, or look for the “Ads by Google” logo. (Hint: If you are a publisher, invest in SEO so we can find your site. [Double Hint from editorial team: Return On Now can help you])
2. Next step is to use the Google Adplanner.  Adplanner allows me to more specifically target websites running Adsense based on audience parameters such as geography, language, demographics, online activity, and interests.  Adplanner also provides filtering based on Google Ranking method, inventory, category, ad specific, and domain suffix.
3. I’ll use the “Placement Tool” in Adwords, even though the results are typically comparable to those found in Adplanner.
4. I look at the sites referring traffic in Google Analytics to find sites that are sending some traffic, but would be good prospect for sending more.

From the research above, I will add sites as “Managed Placements,” in addition to a list of standard sites I always target such as mail.google.com, ehow.com, about.com. and nytimes.com

Managed placements are my highest value group of websites, as opposed to automatic placements, which are those that Google is determining as relevant and then displaying my ads accordingly.

Think of the difference between Automatic and Managed placements as if they were baseball teams.  Managed placements are the players on the team that have made it to a Major League Team. I hand picked them, and if they don’t play well, I kick them off them team. In the past, they have performed well and are of above average quality.

Automatic placements are those that are still in the farm system working extremely hard to perform well enough to make it to the Major League. Automatic placements, like a Baseball Scout,  are also always on the lookout for new sites to target or new players to add to the team.

Search Pros

1. Simple to set up and manage

Search Cons

1. It’s the first thing everyone thinks of when launching a paid search campaign, so the competition for a keyword may be high resulting in poor ROI / Return-on-Investment.
2. In order to have an effective search campaign, a large amount of emphasis needs to be on targeting high Quality Score keywords
3. It is available as “Cost-Per-Click” Pricing Only (also referred to as PPC / Pay-per-click pricing)
4. Text ads are the only format allowed

Display Pros

1. Lower Cost per click and conversion. On average the CPC is 30% less for display than search.
2. Remarketing – This is the practice of displaying an ads on GDN  to someone that visited a particular page on your web site
3. Measuring “view-through-conversion”, which is a metric of the number of conversions that happened within 30 days of someone seeing the ad
4. Casts a much wider net (better reach) across content that is related to your keywords
5. Pricing flexibility: Cost per Click or Cost per thousand (CPM pricing)
6. Better targeting to content-rich and relevant sites
7. More visually appealing ad options rather than just text
8. Behavioral, demographic, and geographic targeting capabilities

Display Cons

1. Getting your boss or client to understand why such a low Click Through Rate (CTR) is a good thing can be challenging
2. Initial set up is more complicated that search
3. Initial cost to set up is higher than search as you may incur a cost for advertisement design
4. Less control can mean lower quality traffic if you are using automatic placement. Automatic placements require increased maintenance to exclude sites that are of poor quality (i.e. one page websites running Adsense on what is essentially nothing more than a doorway page)

So how do you sell this to your metrics-driven Boss or Client?

First, focus on what the key metrics are as follows:

• Impressions:  Depending on a number of factors, including your overall budget and how much of it is allocated to display, you can see 10-20 times as many impressions as you can in search
• Cost per click: As a general rule of thumb, your cost per click on display should be 30% less than Search
• Cost per conversion:  The metric I personally manage to for display conversions is 20% less than search

If you are a newbie to display advertising, here is where to start:

• Have five non-animated banner ads designed. The sizes I recommend are 300×250, 160×600, 200×200, 468×60, and 728×90. You should be able to get a decent graphics designer to design these ads for less than $400. The GDN ad specs are located at: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&topic=28431&guide=28427&page=guide.cs
• Create a separate campaign for “Managed Placements.” This will allow you to control the budget separately from search campaigns.
• Limit that campaign to one of your ad groups so that you are testing a small group of keywords and phrases.
• Allocate a small amount of your search budget to managed placements. I’d start with 10%.
• Only use a handful of managed placements, i.e. less than ten. Make sure mail.google.com is on that list.
• Cap your CPC at 30% less than your search CPC.

The biggest advantage of display versus search is it’s reach and the ability to give a product context through the use of images. As they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. So maybe a text ad is worth only one hundred words?

Think beyond just Search.

The following is actually an excerpt from a post he authored back in November. This hits on the high points of the original post. Thanks again to Gary for sharing his excellent work with Return On Now.

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In today’s post, I’m going to briefly compare and contrast two types of automated platforms: bid management platforms and budget based platforms. We’re going to stick to how they work and what they do (and don’t do), and [we will] avoid using company names [in the process].

What a bid management platform does

At the most basic level, a bid management platform helps automate bidding and some routine optimization and reporting tasks across multiple pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platforms. Think of these as tools that can help a person who already knows how search engine advertising works do it faster and save time on creating reports. While they can save time on routine tasks and reporting, however, bid management platforms do not perform the most complicated, but essential tasks: design robust campaigns and ad groups that align user intent with your company offering, write multiple versions of text ads, analyze and help fix conversion issues with your website, etc.

Further, some of these platforms will take a sizable bite out your budget, and require up to 5% of total spend every month just for using their online tool.

What a budget-based platform is all about

In contrast, on a budget-based platform, you tell the sales rep for the platform (or the many companies that use a private-label platform) how much money/budget you have to spend. This number is then plugged into your business category in their automated platform, and it combines traffic from multiple sources. At the end of the reporting period, you look back to see how many clicks, “web events”, phone calls, or other metrics you got in return for your money. From our point of view, a lot gets sacrificed so that this can be automated. Just one example of features lost: many of the custom geo-targeting features from Google AdWords.

Transparency, or lack of it

In bid management platforms, the cost to the search engine and the cost to the provider of the bid management tool is usually transparent.

In budget-based platforms, you are unlikely to know what percentage of your budget is spent on traffic and how much goes to commission or fees. Generally, though, the bite is a major one. Further, it may not be easy or even possible to determine how much traffic was search traffic, vs. how much was contextual or other types of traffic.

Some would argue that the results, i.e. how many calls or conversions and the associated cost, matter the most. To some extent, we agree with that point, as long as the numbers are the right ones, and they are in fact real. For example, it is also important to know how many clicks, calls, and emails come from the use of your company name as a keyword. Another key metric that is not easy to get is quality of incoming phone calls: how to filter out repeat calls, how many lasted more than one minute, etc.

(Note: if the two examples make it seem like we are splitting hairs, take a deeper look — results from your company name, duplicate calls, and short calls can each be 20% or more of the total.)

Use Automation Wisely

In reading this, you might assume that I am against automation. Far from it. I’m all for automation, so long as it [reduces] work or cost and does not compromise much quality of the process or results. For example, at TopSide, we recently automated two processes that, when done manually, take too much time and do not deliver added value to clients:

1. Rather than manually testing the websites we advertise (to make sure pages load quickly), we now automatically “ping” these sites at more frequent intervals.
2. We now have a reporting dashboard that automatically summarizes click, conversion, and other data from the search engines with data from our phone call tracking system.

Although these tools initially cost quite a bit to build, using them helps our clients, and it helps us too.

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If you would like to contact Gary directly to learn more about this topic or inquire about his services, contact Topside Media directly at 512-469-9935, or toll-free at 866-516-2301.

Related articles

• Bing/Yahoo! to permit bids on trademark terms (thesearchagents.com)
• Get to know SEM Technology (firstrate.co.nz)
• Five Safe 2011 SEM Predictions (mediapost.com)
• New Video: What is the best way to bid for paid search ad space? (thesearchagents.com)
• Google’s New “Automated Rules” (thesearchagents.com)
• How To Reduce SEM Churn With Integrated Customer Intelligence (searchengineland.com)

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Recently we rebuilt and launched a PPC account for an Austin client that had over 3,000 negative keywords. In our 5+ years of search marketing, this was a record at TopSide. The research and collaboration with our client on negative keywords was very productive, and took about as many days as all the other components combined.

A quick definition of negative or excluded keywords is as follows: a filter that prevents ads from showing. They are used to exclude aspects in your business category that you don’t want to trigger an ad for your particular business. Negatives (or NKWs as we call them around the office) increase overall efficiency of online ads. Proper use of negative keywords increases the CTR clickthrough rate, and this an important indicator of efficiency and relevance. The search engine ad programs reward efficiency with a lower CPC cost per click. More relevant ads usually produce a higher conversion rate and lower cost per conversion also.

Although in many ways they are opposite, like “positive” keywords that are used to trigger PPC ads, negative keywords can be single words or phrases. In some PPC ad programs, such as Google AdWords, negative keywords have broad , phrase, and exact matching options. Once an account is built and launched, we use a report called a Search Query report to look for additional negative keywords and topics for additional refinement.

The example we referred to is a Business-to-Business advertiser. B-to-B companies, particularly those in technology, tend to need more advanced negative keywords and tactics. The reason: many enterprise technology products and services have consumer level counterparts. Some of these (a couple of examples would be anti-virus and data backup /storage) are even free. In addition to negative keywords, filtering text in the ads can help filter out individuals who are not good prospects for a specialized or more costly product or service.

In summary, to make the most of your search marketing budget, a significant number of refinements are necessary to the default settings in PPC ad programs. Some of these are done up front, and more need to be done as search and click data comes in.

Surely you have seen the news by now that Google allows certain employees to manually adjust index rankings under special circumstances. Needless to say, the implications are rather widespread.

According to what I’ve read, employees sometimes have to make a judgment call about whether to lower a site’s ranking for a particular keyword or set of keywords.  The main scenario where this is deemed “okay” by Google is when companies vertically integrate to a content-heavy model, using existing “SEO Juice” to enjoy visibility that is not yet deserved. That certainly seems like a good thing, does it not? Particularly since big brands can leverage existing budgets, SEO benefits, etc. much more easily than the smaller outfits or self-employed. In a sense, it can serve to provide a little bit of level to the playing field, whether inconsequential or not.

The issue that this raises is much more concerning, though. If employees can manually adjust rankings based on that situation, what else might be going on “behind the curtain?”

Let’s look at a few spins on this scenario where this is particularly concerning:

1. The employee has a significant portion of his/her nestegg invested in the company in question
2. The employee has relatives or friends employed by or invested heavily in the company
3. The company in question is one of the top advertisers on Google AdWords (i.e. they contribute a rather noticeable amount of revenue to the company’s coffers)

Obviously, you have to presume that Google takes every precaution possible to employ honest, trustworthy individuals.  But even the most stringent interviewing, background checks, and even IQ/Compatibility testing can be fooled or just plain incorrect. In other words, in a company of this magnitude, you can’t hit the bullseye every single time you make a hire.

When you insert human judgment into the equation, everything changes. This mystical and ever-changing Google “Formula” is no longer strictly driven by rules and standards. The whole model comes under question. And, much to Google’s chagrin, they may no longer be able to keep their”secret sauce” so close to the vest, lest the company open itself up to an onslaught of potential legal challenges.

As perplexed as I am about the news, I’m also intrigued to see where this takes us. Will the “new Microsoft” finally take its first big legal smack to the face? Will this blow over without much ado? I don’t know about you, but I want to be sure that they are actually doing everything they say they are. One lie suggests there may be more, so best of luck to the Google PR department on getting some rest over the coming days and weeks.

What do you think? Am I overthinking this, or do you also have issues now with their credibility? Can you afford to bail on AdWords completely, or is it too important to your ongoing operations to bail?

They keep a nice blog on their site, and they recently posted a nice list of the “Twelve Questions to Ask Providers of Search Engine Marketing.” It’s a great list, and it also shows off a key reason I decided to work with them: transparency. In fact, Topside was forthcoming enough to bring up most of these topics on their own, and the list is a nice one, so it merits sharing here as well for all of you to review.

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Without further ado…Twelve Questions to Ask Providers of Search Engine Marketing…

“Here are questions to ask any provider of search engine related services

• Are they using an automated search platform for traffic?

If you don’t get a definitive “NO”, ask if they can:

• Let you experience the results month-to-month without having to sign a time based contract (This is a good question to ask all providers…)
• Provide you with written reports that clearly shows the percentage of clicks, conversions and cost of discovery searches (searchers who did not enter your company name and are looking for your type of service or products ) vs. recovery searches (people who searched for your company by name). If not, you may be buying your own goodwill and have no way to know how much. Note: there are some good reasons and best practices re: using your company name in keywords. You can learn more on this topic in our other blogs
• Tell you what percentage of your monthly budget purchased traffic to your website and what percentage was their commission, overhead, etc.
• Provide account structure, budget allocation, and reports that analyze your traffic and conversions by segments of your business (categories of your service or products, profit margins, geographic service areas or targets, etc.)
• Provide keyword and conversion data from PPC advertising that can be used to support your longer term SEO needs?
• Provide a breakdown of the quantity and quality of phone calls, including: duplicates from the same number, hang-ups, missed calls, length of call, recording of call, customized analysis
• Give a breakdown of how much traffic is search traffic from the major search engines and how much is contextual traffic or some other category
• If they are using contextual traffic, what kind of filters or controls are they using to see that your ads are appearing on websites that are a- appropriate for your company’s reputation and b- effective in producing online leads or purchases
• Provide customized geotargeting, such as areas other than DMAs or circle around one point.
• Increase, decrease, or pause your flow of traffic and monthly costs, based on your workflow and budget as they change
• Change the message or offers in your ads upon request. Examples: seasonal ads or different “dollars off” specials
• Include a phone number in your text ad. This works surprisingly well for some business categories”

They indicated on the page linked above that they will do a similar list for providers of customized services, which is what TopSide offers. I’ll share that one as well when it is posted just to be thorough.

Have you used these questions in the past? Any others you see missing?