Internet Marketing News, Reviews and How-to's
New video from Google UK. Quick overview of the Search based keyword tool (sktool) www.google.com/sktool/
I’ll cover the search based keyword tool in more detail in a later post, but if you know nothing about it then this video works as a good intro…
If you’re looking for the standard Google Keyword tool, then it can be found here - Google Keyword Tool (External) or from within the ‘Opportunities > Tools’ tab in AdWords
This is going to be a short and sweet post but may be interesting to some peeps.
I’ll call it the ‘Did you know?’ post…
So, did you know that you can buy clicks from StumbleUpon for $0.05 a click? (USD). Traffic quality is my main concern as I’ve not been overly impressed.
But If you’ve a spare $1,000 lying around, and a boss that only looks at ‘visits’ or ‘visitors’ metrics, then go for it! I’m sure an extra 20,000 visits to your site will look good on paper if nothing else 
OK so I posted on how good Google’s wonder wheel can be for the Google Content Network (GCN – if you like acronyms!). Anyway I thought I should elaborate a bit further…
The Wonder Wheel is great for broad or fragmented product categories like apparel, so perfectly matched for the example I chose, where you’ve got a great deal of variety for your target categories.
However, If you are planning to go after categories that are dominated by a handful of brands, the results may be a little more limited.
Mobile Phones are a good example of this.
The wonder wheel (GWW) approach in the case of ‘Mobile phones’ really doesn’t help us that much in defining our GCN ad groups and themes, as it tends to get a little confused.
So, while the GWW is an awesome tool, it doesn’t always help specifically to the content network. Sometime you are better off building your GCN campaigns using good old logic and common sense. (you know… that learned brain thingy of yours?!)
Don’t forget though, it is really good way to build out tons of secondary groups around broad product themes. Eg. Jackets, dresses, shoes, watches, etc. And this applies to Search Targeted (more so in a way) as well as content network targeted.
I love the Google Content Network… there I said it!
I’ve written a number of posts on content network optimization and the reoccurring message in all of them is to make sure you are creating themed ad groups.
I recently explained how Google create concepts when analyzing the content network and then group these concepts into categories, so when building out AdGroups for the content network, the goal is to great themes that Google can then easily match to the content categories they have defined.
Easy huh?
Well it’s actually easier than you think… Meet the ‘Wonder Wheel’ a free tool Google have added as part of their Search Options features.
Essentially, the Wonder Wheel gives us a graphical representation of the search we have performed, in relation to the other related searches. In effect, it actually build out our themes for us.
So let’s go back a step and I’ll first show you where to find the wonder wheel.
- Go to google.com and conduct a search. Let’s search for ‘jackets’
- Just below the search box, above the search results, you will see the link ‘show options’. Click on this.
- Down the left hand column we now have a whole list of options available. Select ‘Wonder Wheel’ below ‘Standard View’ (Fourth group of links down) and the wonder wheel appears to the right.
Now what we have is a graphical representation of the searches or themes that google believe are most relevant to the initial query, in this case ‘jackets’.
Clicking on ‘leather jackets’ on the wheel will then expand that topic to create another set of themed search queries.
…do you see where I’m going with this?
In order to then translate this to your content network ad group creation, follow each branch of the wheel for each search query, and build out your themes.
The most important thing to remember here is to create an ad group for each spoke of the wheel, and not one ad group that includes all the spokes.
Golden rule for the content network is to build tightly themed ad groups (and lot’s of them) with 1-4 key words.
Here’s an eample of how I’d do this with ‘jackets’
Ad Group 1:
- jacket
- jackets
Ad Group 2:
- leather jacket
- leather jackets
- leather jackets online
- leather jacket sale
Ad Group 3:
- designer leather jacket
- designer leather jackets
- designer leather jackets online
- designer leather jacket sale
Ad Group 4:
- mens jackets
- men’s jackets online
- mens jackets sale
Ad Group 5:
- discount jackets
- discount jackets online
- discount jacket
- discount jacket sale
And keep gong. Don’t be surprised if you end up with 100 (or 500).
Next step is to write the ads – Just do 1 ad per ad group initially. Theme will not be an issue as each ad group is pretty tight.
Remember, Headline for impact, and strong call to action.
Once your ads are live and you begin to collect data, you can optimize as per normal.
It’s great to see our achievements at Stateless Systems be recognized this year in the 2009 SmartCompany Web Awards.
Hats off to Guy and Bevan for building such a company. And more importantly, hiring such awesome people!
Fantastic effort by the whole team who continue to build cool stuff and are just all round great people to work with.
Stay tuned for more exiting stuff from Stateless soon.
Links below to the various awards
Best Search Strategy – RetailMeNot.com
Best Social Media – RetailMeNot.com
Best Site Under 20 Staff – RetailMeNot.com
And my favorite quote is from the award announcement for ‘Best Search Strategy’
…But co-founder Guy King says RetailMeNot has achieved search marketing success by ignoring practically every other method tried by rival websites.
“SEO is bullshit. Our philosophy is to focus on pages that are as useful as possible to as many people as possible. Basically this is due to our belief that Google is smarter than we are, so we’re better off spending our time building good products rather than abusing the system.”
“Out strategy is really just going against traditional strategies. One of the key metrics of a good website is time on site, but we are trying to get that figure down as much as possible. We want people to find what they’re after as quickly as possible.”
So to sum it up – Be unique & add value - SEO success is yours.
Disclaimer: I received this one-sheeter from Google last week. While I don’t yet have any hard data to support 
these strategy recommendations, they’re definitely worth considering.
- Set up your campaign correctly from the start
- Make it easy for people to respond to your offer
- Manage your campaign closely as it ramps up, then put it on auto-pilot
I’m not kidding – Google’s Content Network reaches more than 80% of global Internet users, and serves over 6 Billion Ad impressions a day! Are you getting your fair share of those impressions?
I’m a big fan of the Content Network from an advertiser perspective for many reasons. While a big factor for me is ease of use, every day I am blown away by the sheer power and potential of a network that has such a massive online reach. It’s just mind blowing.
I’ve posted before about Optimizing for the Google Content Network, and the truth be told, up until now everyone, including Google, seem to have very different suggestions on content network optimization strategies in general.
However, I read Josh Dreller’s article over at Search Engine Land last week and was impressed with the level of information he’s provided. Check it out if you have not already – ‘Why You Can’t Ignore The Google Content Network – AdSense Q&A’. It’s an interview Jasper Seldin, Content Optimization Specialist at Google.
I’m not going to re-hash the whole article here as that would be pointless, but I did want to highlight one paragraph that I think holds the key (although somewhat cryptic in parts) to success on the Content Network…
The question put to Jasper was “We all know by now that Content Targeting extrapolates the idea of your ad group via the keywords and then matches it with a theme and runs on those sites. Can you go into more detail about this process?”
Jasper: Google performs page analysis on every page in the content network. First, we scan the page and pick out words we think are most relevant to the content on the page. We can tell headlines from footers and can pick up on words that repeat often or are emphasized with bolding or italics. Together, these words create concepts. Concepts tell us the unique meaning of each page. There aren’t a finite number of concepts, unless you count the number of words that convey unique meaning.
And of course, we look at related concepts and see how they roll up into entire categories. It’s these concepts and categories that you are ultimately targeting with your keyword list. When you select keywords, we analyze the theme of the keyword list and place you on pages where the themes and categories match. An ad group can target multiple themes, but we recommend only targeting one theme with each ad group to ensure that you are putting the right message in front of the right user.
Really very interesting…
And the most important piece of information of all…
One of the best content targeted Ad Groups I’ve ever run had, wait for it…, one keyword, and one ad.
Theme? Tick!
Concept and category matched by Google? Yes!
Now I’m not saying that only one keyword per ad group will work every time, but If you only need one keyword to establish your theme, then job done!
A guest blog post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, providing local advertising services to small businesses.
In the name of helping you optimize your campaigns, Google has been releasing tools to help you estimate an appropriate campaign budget, add new keywords, bid appropriately, and so forth. What you’ll notice is that all these recommendations have one thing in common.
To get you to spend more money.
I’ve never once seen the tools say “Hey, I think you should decrease your bids on these keywords,”– have you? Google recently released the “opportunities” tab, which is an enhancement on their campaign optimization tool:
For each ad group, they provide a list of new keywords you can add to your campaign and the estimated number of incremental impressions you can get by adding them. For this example, we’re looking at a Denver liposuction surgeon, so we’re looking at just folks in the Denver area– although Dr. Verebelyi does have nationwide clients for certain procedures.
You’ll notice that the Opportunities tool isn’t smart enough to determine geography in it’s volume estimation. Note that for “facial peel”, we have Denver targeted and Colorado targeted ad groups. Google’s tool lists the same volume estimate of 45,000 searches for both.
Now let’s go into the specific keyword recommendations:
Note that it has terms such as “chemical peel training” (which is not a consumer-oriented term) and “chemical peel uk” (wrong geo). When Google gets smarter about these tools, they should be able to figure out which ones are truly relevant to small businesses wanting to do local Internet marketing. But at least they put a disclaimer in the footer about how these 
recommendation may or may not improve performance. In the same light, smoking cigarettes may or may not cause lung cancer.
But I digress. What’s nice is that the tool will uncover keyword variations that you might not have thought of. And while the particular volume estimates are way off, at least it’s directionally accurate for nationally targeted campaigns. For their next iteration, Google should be able to give you an estimated Quality Score should you add those terms and even allow you to sort by impact to Quality Score. After all, if you select the terms, they will calculate the score anyway– so might as well pre-score, don’t you think?
I’d love to hear experiences you have in managing campaigns for small business clients and local PPC in general.
This is something that I simply must share…
Two weeks ago RetailMeNot.com (One of our sites at Stateless Systems) was the focus of a question on Jeopardy!
I thought it was a joke at first when I got an email from one of my contacts in the US but, sure enough, it was true!
Needless to say, we all thought it was pretty damn cool.
Just wondering if putting an “As Seen on Jeopardy” logo on our site is maybe a bit too much?
The clip is below. Enjoy.
Once upon a time you could throw as many keywords as you could think of into a new AdWords account and just start testing and refining as you go. You didn’t even have to worry too much about structure or theme.
I call this the old school brute force PPC, and guess what? It doesn’t work anymore.
Google have server farms to maintain, response times to uphold, and users to please. They really don’t have the patience or the time to process account with 2,000,000 irrelevant keywords. They want to simply show the best ads to those that are searching.
Penalizing poor account structure, overloaded keyword lists, and irrelevant themes are just part of Google’s algorithm, but it’s important to understand what they’re looking for when you do set up your account so as not to trigger any filters that may signal to them that you’re a novice with no idea what you are doing (even if that’s true!) 
Google’s Account History comes into play when you set up a brand new account, as does keyword Quality Score, but account history’s an important one to understand.
When you start from scratch and create a campaign, Google knows nothing about you, or your product or service. Your account history does not exist. Nor do they know how well your ads, and offering will be received by their users.
Trust = Zero.
…and you, my friend, have to earn it!
So think about it from Google’s perspective when you’re building your initial key word list. Is what you’re about to do signaling trust? Or could it be flagged as suspect?
In short, don’t just go out and add in every single keyword you can think of, because chances are many of them will simply perform badly, and more to the point, anything that does perform sub-standard will impact on your account history and quality score, and ultimately the price you pay per click.
There’s no golden rule in how many keywords to upload at first, as every market is different, but I personally take this approach:
Firstly I do my keyword research…
Normally I’ll start with Google’s free tool to start to build out my lists. Then I may expand using a paid tool such as KeywordSpy or WordTracker.
After this I could have 10,000 or more keywords!
But… The next step is most important as I’ll then group my lists into head terms (high volume), Torso Terms (medium volume), and Tail Terms (low search volume per keyword)
What I want to do is give my new account the best possible chance of initial success, so putting in all 10,000 terms may seem like a good idea, but in reality it’ll just complicate matters and potentially raise a flag in Google’s system that could hurt your account.
What you should do is take the primary themes from the Head and Torso keyword lists and create your campaigns and AdGroups around these themes only.
Keep all your other keywords however as these are still potentially relevant, but don’t just dump them all in.
Once you begin to get traffic and build up your Account History and quality, you can them expand on the various themes that are working and slowly integrate in the long tail. Not only does this make for a well structured and tight account, it also cuts down on wasted clicks and money from day one.
Good luck and let me know if you have any questions.