With problems such as this in mind we came up with a practical and simple solution – the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool, a tool we use every day that is so useful that we thought we would share it and hope others would benefit from it too. It’s completely free so download it now and play around.

Use Case: Setting Up a Google AdWords Ad Group

To demonstrate how we use this tool lets us consider a real world example of setting up a new ad group in Google AdWords.

If I wanted to run ads for the Apple iPhone 4 and quickly needed keyword ideas I could use the Amazon.com listing for this product combined with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to produce a list of 300 keywords.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool extracts information from the content of the webpage that you input and gives you back related terms that people actually search for. There are various geographical, language and category adjustments you can make to this tool which means that it produces slightly different results based on these, so make sure to choose the settings that apply to your own AdWords campaign. This tool can produce up to 800 suggested keywords at a time, but if you’re not logged into AdWords you will only get 100.

Armed with your list of keywords the next step is to figure out which keywords you want to rule out. Working with a list of a possible 800 keywords this could be a daunting task, but using the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool makes this task that much easier.

The first step is getting your suggested keywords into our tool so you can manipulate that list in an efficient manner.

Download all of the keyword ideas from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Open this Excel file and then copy the first column (all of your suggested keywords) into the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool by clicking + Add under the Create List menu. The Add Keywords dialogue box will ask you to input the keywords one entry per line, but copying direct from the Excel file will allow you to do this simply by copying and pasting directly into the input box and clicking ok. You can also import a keyword list from a text file by clicking Import on the Create List menu.

Once you have your keywords list added to the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool you can then begin removing the unsuitable keywords. In our example we want to advertise the iPhone 4, so it’s necessary for us to remove any keywords relating to the older models of the iPhone. Though it’s tempting to keep all of these keywords intact because some might yield a significant number of monthly searches, don’t forget that the more targeted your keywords and ad text the better it is for your quality score.

Without the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool you would need to sift through this long list of keywords and delete the unsuitable ones manually, instead it’s simply a matter of batch modifying or cleaning the keywords. By clicking on Clean under the Change menu and selecting Unwanted Terms we can remove all instances of the term “3G” and “3Gs” from any keywords in our list. This does not delete keywords containing the terms we select, it deletes the term from the keyword. So, for example the keyword “16gb iPhone 3G” now becomes “16gb iPhone”.

However, we may already have the keyword “16gb iPhone” somewhere in our keyword list, so the next step is to make sure we have no duplicate keywords. By clicking on Delete under the Create menu we can choose Duplicate Entries, which will automatically remove any keywords which were exactly the same. In this example we were able to remove 32 duplicate entries quickly and easily. Here we would also want to remove any instances of the words “refurbished” and “used”, and again we use the Unwanted Terms option.

We might also want to highlight certain keywords in order to decide whether to modify or delete them from our list. In our example we might want to search for keywords containing the words “generation”, “1st”, “2nd” etc. as this relates to the language used to describe the various versions of the Apple iPhone. By clicking on Highlight under the Handle Output menu, and choosing Entries That Contain and Word Anywhere, we can easily view any keywords that have these words in them and then delete or modify them accordingly.

When you are happy with your cleaned up keyword list we recommend you export this keyword list and save it to a text file. Under the Handle Output menu choose Export, and All To Text File to permanently save your keyword list. Once this is saved you will then have the freedom to create additional keyword lists, so if you make a mistake you can go back to the original set of keywords and experiment with the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool freely.

For example you may wish to massively increase your keyword list by adding misspellings. You can add misspelling by choosing Multiply under the Change menu and selecting Add Misspelled Words. You have a variety of options here, the more boxes you tick the bigger your keyword list will be expanded. In this example we select all of the options and turn our 200+ keyword list up to a massive 24,000+ at the touch of a button, covering all your bases for this particular product.

You can also use the additional tabs to experiment with the various other options the tool offers. Under the Handle Output menu, selecting Export and All To Another List allows you to replicate your primary (List A) keyword list into the other tabs. Or you can choose to Export only the highlighted keywords.

When you’re happy with any of the results of these other keyword lists you can then use Export option to add them to your primary (List A) keyword list. If you make any changes to your primary keyword list that you are happy with, make sure to save it to a text file or you will lose all your work when you close the tool. Using the additional tabs and saving as a text file is a great way to ensure you can build your list without losing any of your work.

In our example, the 24,000+ keyword list we created is actually too large for this particular campaign and a large keyword list such as this probably isn’t suitable for everyone. What we recommend is that instead of creating misspellings of your entire keyword list that you use the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool to create misspellings of specific keywords in the additional tabs space and then add them into your primary (List A) list. If we wanted to add some misspellings of just the word “iPhone” we could use the List B tab to create these and then use then Export them into List A.

Or we could use the Replace Words and Duplicate option found under the Multiply menu, which would allow us to replace specific words while also retaining the original keywords. So all our keywords that contain the word “iPhone” would remain, and would be duplicated, but with the word “iPhone” spelt “iFone”, effectively doubling the keyword list.

Overall, the best feature of the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool is its ability to batch modify keywords, such as adding misspellings, removing unsuitable terms from keywords and more. You can also add words to the beginning or end of all your keywords. This could come in handy when you have multiple campaigns targeting different locations and you want to include the location name at the end of each keyword in each ad group. You can also use this tool to turn your keyword lists into keyword tags for SEO, using the handy Export all to Clipboard (Comma Separated) option.

There are quite a few other features which are outlined on its official page (this post would be three times as long if I was to cover each and every one) and you will also find the installation details there too.

Share This Tool

Like any of our free tools we love to hear feedback about it, so if you download it and find the RedFly Keyword Manager Tool useful to you, please do let us know.

We work hard to maintain all of our free tools, and in exchange all we ask is that you help us spread the word about them. Any retweet, stumble or Facebook share or share to any social network at all would make us very happy and motivate us to add to our growing list of internet marketing tools.

Not only is there an easy answer to that question, with a little bit of savvy, you can also be sure that your time isn’t wasted and that the content you create will almost certainly convert into a new lead or sale. In this blog post, I will outline a method of generating content that will involve a bit of practice to get right, but once mastered, you’ll never run out of content ideas again. Seriously.

Background

A lot of our blog posts are inspired by questions that clients ask over and over again but also by questions people had before arriving at our site. For example, Arnold wrote an excellent post on why you may need to redesign your website to benefit from SEO. This post was created after we found out that someone found our site after searching Google for the phrase “do I need to redesign my website to rank in google?” The person looking for an answer for this question found us at least a few pages deep so must have been quite frustrated after not finding an answer to their question. We know that when they found us, they converted into a lead (GA goal tracking). We know now that we should be number 1 or at least first page of the search results for that term, even if it doesn’t bring much traffic.

This week, the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends [Research Report] was released. Scott Brinker highlights something interesting though:

Coincidentally — or perhaps not — the biggest challenge for B2B content marketers last year was “producing the kind of content that engages.” This year, the biggest challenge is “producing enough content.” Now, I wouldn’t want to confuse correlation with causation, but one possible narrative is this: to create engaging content, you need to create it (mostly) yourself. And that takes quality time and effort, a trade-off to some degree in volume.

Jennifer Van Iderstyne wrote a great post about link building with answers here. However, this is only one piece of the puzzle. Jennifer is using more general and unverifiable data for her questions, which is perfectly fine. I wanted to go into a little more detail on how you can use your own data to create content that not only generate interest and traffic, but are practically guaranteed to convert.

So, how do you do it? You do this using the plethora of conversion data that you already have from Google Analytics and Google AdWords.

Step  1

The first step is to find out what content your potential customers are looking for. Better yet, the questions your potential customers are asking before buying. Knowing what questions or concerns your customers have means that you can reach out to them and answer their concerns for them in a blog post or video before they get a chance to find your competitors offering. So how on earth do you find out what content your potential customers want to see? The answer, as always, is in the analytics.

Open up Google Analytics (if it’s not already permanently open) and navigate to the “Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic” report. You’ve probably seen this report thousands of times and are quite frankly unimpressed with the data/crumbs that Google gives you here. Fortunately, for the purposes of generating content ideas, we’re in luck. All you need to do is type a question mark in the search box as shown below. Hit enter and voilà. Instant content ideas! 

The report shows the search terms that your site appeared in search results for when someone typed in a question (bonus points for spotting the 81 people REALLY i. These are all visits so you know that your product or service is somewhat relevant. It gives you the ideal list of common questions, concerns and problems that your potential customers are having and need solved. Hopefully by you. Why create blog post or video content based on flimsy public keyword research when you can demonstrate that you and your company can solve their exact problem? They wont need to look elsewhere.  But hold your horses,  let’s fine tune this a bit more.

If you have low volumes of traffic, try expanding your reports to a longer date range. Don’t be afraid to go back and see what people were asking last year. Additionally, you can fine tune by replacing the question mark with question words like “who”, “what”, “where”, “when” and “how”.

Step  2

Now, most of us are busy people. Rather than spending weeks/months churning out masses of content, why not make sure that you’re answering/solving the most profitable questions/problems? Let’s do some cross referencing with AdWords.

Log into AdWords and pull your actual trafficked keyword data from AdWords. To do this, go into your AdWords account and, without selecting a campaign (or selecting one, depending on how specific you want your keywords to be), click on the “Keyword Details” option. Then select “All”. This will give you a list of all the actual keywords that sent traffic to your site and not just the keywords that triggered your ads.

After AdWords goes away for a minute and pulls the data, you should be presented with a nice list of sortable keywords  This is one of the most valuable pages you will find in the AdWords interface. Since Google did away with providing most organic keyword data in Google Analytics, this is where you get it now. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it.

 As you can see, this is pretty valuable data. For the purposes of this exercise,  what we’re looking to do is find some keywords with a decent conversion rate and high ROI (Conversion Value/Cost). We need to pick 2-3 keywords that not only convert well, but match the topic/question asked in step 1 above.  What’s even more important is that you pick keywords that you are not already ranking in first place for. I’ll be covering the real value of these particular keywords in my next post, so stay tuned.

In the screenshot above, you can see that the two keywords that we selected in the previous step are ranking in position #4 on Google.com. Those are what we’re looking for.

So at this point, we have:

• A list of valuable topics that are actively being searched for. Not only that, but topics that you’re currently ranking somewhere for already.
• A (cross referenced) list of keywords that you can use in your content for internal anchor text linking and stemming.
• A list of proven valuable keywords that you can sprinkle into your content to improve your search rankings for.

From here, with sets of topics paired with multiple keywords, you can start to build out your SEO/Content Strategy. A handy tip is to perform the above searches and researches based on this month’s data and pop the topic-keyword paired sets into the WordPress Editorial Calendar for next month’s posting schedule. If you’ve got a bigger team, you can assign topics out to multiple team members. Perhaps the team member who could write most authoritatively on the topic. The new content is bound to generate more search data and the cycle continues helping you become an authority in your niche.

The title of the post(s) should be the question itself to help with the link anchor text. If people link to you with the exact question as the anchor text, you should have no problem ranking organically for the question itself and it’s very common for people to link to sites using the title of the post or title tag of the post (Yes, they can be different and in most cases should).

You can use the questions being asked to build out individual articles, a series of articles or even a whopper ebook or whitepaper. When people link to an article, they sometimes link to the article with the entire title as the anchor text, Aaron made a fantastic point about this in his post Using Site Search Keyword Data to Create Related Content. The links are self self-reinforcing (how’s that for perfectly illustrating the point?)

Bonus

Use Site Search. Go to the “Content -> Site Search -> Search Terms” report in Google Analytics. Here you’ll get a slightly more general idea of the questions potential customers are asking when they’re on your site, but you’re not answering.

Conclusion

So there you have it. No need to to guess what content you need to be producing. Your potential customers are already telling you. This is the very reason that we here at Redfly created the extremely popular Google PPC tutorials series. They now drive almost 40% of our site traffic and have resulted in hundreds of conversions. All from typing a question mark into a search box! What questions are your customers asking that you could be answering?

If you’ve found this article helpful, you should probably like and share it using the buttons below. Please also subscribe to our blog for future posts and follow me on twitter. If you have any topics you’d like covered, just ask :)

*Update: I have been contacted by a source inside Google and updated two points in the post accordingly*

I am constantly surprised at how little advertisers really understand Quality Scores. If you put in a little effort, you can reap some very tangible benefits and come out leaps and bounds ahead of your competition.

SECTION 1: QUALITY SCORE BASICS

While Quality Score is relatively simple to grasp as a concept, it’s a little more complicated in practice. Stasia, an AdWords Seminar leader, gives you a nice introduction to the basic concept of Quality Score in the video below:

Get the Flash Player to see this Google AdWords tutorial about building your keyword list.

The Opportunity.

Back in the good old days, AdWords was based on a pure auction-based model. If you bid more than another advertiser on a keyword, your ad would appear higher and ultimately get more clicks (and hopefully sales). Back in 2005 when Google introduced the Quality Score, it changed everything.
No longer could search results be flooded with irrelevant ads of those with massive budgets. Many advertisers were very upset, but a unique opportunity arose for those with smaller budgets and the inclination to put in a little hard work — perhaps people like you. With the refinement of the Quality Score algorithm and the great scam / affiliate flush of late 2009, there has never been a better opportunity for those advertisers with a quality product or service and a little time to try to understand Quality Score to really reap the rewards. Are you ready to learn more about Quality Score? Let’s get started.

Why Quality Score Is Important.

Quality Score is extremely important because it can make or break your campaign (and in some cases, your business). Quality Score determines how much you pay for your advertising on Google and how much exposure you get. You wouldn’t place a TV or magazine ad without knowing how much you have to pay or how much exposure you would get, would you? Brian Carter, a  humorous motivational speaker and the Director of Search  for Online Marketing Agency Fuel Interactive shares some interesting client information over on Search Engine Journal on the inverse relationship between Quality Score and cost per click (CPC). I have reformatted the data below:

As you can see, the higher your Quality Score, the lower the price you pay per click. Also, as you will see below, the higher your Quality Score the more exposure you will get as AdWords uses Quality Score to determine what Ads are placed in the coveted 1-3 search results above the organic and local search results.

SECTION 2: QUALITY SCORE FACTORS

Types of Quality Score And What They Impact.

According to Google, there are two “types” of Quality Scores. The AdWords help documentation goes into a little more detail, but the guys over on PPC Hero pretty much nailed it in their Quality Score Handbook (Essential reading by the way) when they said:

Search Network Quality Score is different from Content Network Quality Score. Also there are different Quality Scores for setting minimum bids and ranking ads for the Content Network, Quality Score and the maximum cost-per-click determine the ad rank on content pages. For search, Quality Score, along with maximum CPC, determines ad rank and determines promotion to top of page.

The Google & Search Network Variations/Exceptions.

There are slight variations to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bids:

• For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position, your landing page quality is not a factor. Also, when calculating ad position on a Search Network placement, Quality Score considers the click through rate (CTR) on that particular placement in addition to the CTR on Google.
• For calculating first page bid, Quality Score doesn’t consider the matched ad or search query, since this estimate appears as a metric in your account and doesn’t vary per search query.
• CTR on Google network, CTR on Google Network impacts QS on the Google Network, not on Google.

The Content Network Variations/Exceptions.

The Quality Score for calculating an ad’s eligibility to appear on a particular content site, as well as the ad’s position on that site, consists of the following factors:

• The quality of your landing page
• The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites

The Quality Score for determining if a placement-targeted ad will appear on a particular site depends on your campaign’s bidding option.

If your campaign uses cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding, Quality Score is based on:

• The quality of your landing page

If your campaign uses CPC bidding, Quality Score is based on:

• The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites
• The quality of your landing page

Brad Geddes of bgTheory has a handy Quality Score chart with all of this information (reformatted for this post) :

SECTION 3: IMPROVING YOUR QUALITY SCORE

Now that you know as much as Google is prepared to share about Quality Score, how it is calculated, and roughly how much weight is given to each factor, what factors can you as an advertiser realistically influence? As it happens, quite a lot! Let’s go into each of the major factors and look at what we can improve.

Improving Your Quality Score for the Search Network

The CTR and historical CTR of the keyword and the matched ad on Google

The CTR of your ad / keyword pair is by far the largest factor in determining Quality Score. The important thing to remember is that the CTR is normalized to your position so your CTR is judged good or bad for Quality Score reasons based on the performance of other ads currently and historically in this position.
Bidding more to move up to the number one position will more than likely improve your CTR, but it will rarely do you any good if your ad doesn’t get a better Quality Score than other ads have received in that position in the past. The goal here is to make your ad so relevant and enticing that the searcher just has on click on it. You can explore the topic of Improving CTR in more depth in some of my previous posts.

It is also important to aggressively research and add negative keywords. This will increase your CTR and reduce your exposure to those searching for something you do not provide. Consider running an AdWords Search Query Performance report daily or weekly, mining your server log files, or checking your Analytics account for negatives and add them to your campaign negative list. Matthew Mierzejewski has also written a fantastic post on this topic and detailed how negative keywords impact Quality Score.

A final historical CTR improvement tip: always bid (and bid high) on your company or brand name. You will get a massive boost in historical CTR because 70%+ of the time, your ad is what searchers are looking for. You will pay pennies per click and decrease the normalized Quality Score and historical account CTR of any competitors bidding on your brand or company name!

TIP: Here is an extremely important article showing the importance of CTR when determining quality score and reinforces where you, as an advertiser, should be focusing your efforts.

Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account

Account history is a tough one and is subject to a lot of speculation. Unfortunately, I believe a lot of it to be true. Advertisers with older accounts which have performed well in the past have a huge advantage over advertisers with new accounts. It can take anywhere from 1 week to 4 months to “shake off” a “bad history.”
This is also what some people refer to as the account level Quality Score. It is not so much a type of Quality Score as it is a factor. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done here with a new account apart from making sure that you have a solid understanding of the factors to get your account off to a flying start (ie: a high CTR off the bat).
If you have an old account with a poor historical Quality Score, you might feel tempted to create a new account to counteract this. This is against AdWords’ policy. If you want to be on the cutting edge and have an appetite for risk, you can beta test new AdWords search ad formats. New formats generally show huge CTR improvements before they settle into the consciousness of Google users. It’s also important to note that the AdWords system treats an edited ad like it’s brand new and has no performance history. According to the FAQ here:

Ad position is partly determined by an ad’s relevance to the search query as well as its historical performance on Google. Editing your ad, therefore, can affect its position.

The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group

A relatively new addition to the QS family, historical CTR of the display URL in the ad group is an easy one to get right. Make sure you initially split test the hell out of your ads/display URL and make sure you stick with the one that drives the highest CTR. Adding keywords to the subdomain and subdirectory of display URL can give massive improvements. Especially if the keywords are trademarks. Frank Pipolo has some good tips on using test domains for this.

The quality of your landing page

This is another subjective topic. However (and this is very important), Google has hired thousands of what are called “Ads Quality Raters.” These are actual humans outsourced by Google who sit at home and rate your ads and the quality of the pages those ads go to. To improve on this factor, it is important to pay very close attention to the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines here. I wrote a quality score post years ago on this exact factor, and a lot of the tips are still relevant.
Google also has thousands of Search Quality Raters, not to be confused with Ads Quality Raters, who look at and rate pages for classification in the organic search results. While I don’t have the Ads Quality Rater operations manual, the Quality Rater document is out in the wild for all to see. I’ve heard there is an awful lot of crossover.

Remember, you should ensure your landing page is capable of passing a human check. Make sure it follows the rules and never forget that once it is reviewed, it will be reviewed again.

The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group

You’ve heard it many times before. Make sure your base keyword is in the ad title, ad text and display URL. Easy peasy, even for the tiny fraction of weight it carries.

The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query

This one is a little trickier. Again, attack your negative keyword research aggressively — consider it an essential daily task. This is a more advanced area where going through some detailed buying cycle analysis and segmenting search phrase intent can really pay off. The effort-to-reward ratio will vary here. Getelastic has an amazing post on something very similar here.

Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown

This factor is a relatively new addition to the Quality Score algorithm. I wrote a post about using geo-targeting to improve CTR previously, but the important takeaway is not that blanket geo-targeting is the right way to go, but that you should pay attention to the geographic areas that are performing poorly and consider creating a dedicated campaign or adgroup for this area or remove it completely. Run an AdWords Geographic Performance report to see where you could improve. Consider using local colloquialisms in your ad text for those specific areas to help improve performance.

Other relevance factors

While there is no way to know for sure what all potential factors are, some common sense can be applied here. The first thing to work on is your bounce rate, or more specifically “back-bounce-rate.” Yes, you read that right. Google has mentioned throughout the years that if a visitor clicks your ad and immediately hits the back button, this is an indication that the page was not relevant. In fact, Google explicitly prohibits the disabling of the back button functionality in their policies.

We also have anecdotal evidence that adding your root or base keyword to your landing page title tag and the other keywords in the adgroup around your copy improves Quality Score marginally. If you have the time, it would be ideal to create a landing page for each individual keyword. When this is not possible, a landing page dedicated to each adgroup usually does the trick.

Page Load Time/Other Factors
You may have noticed “page load time” or “site speed” left out of the factors above. To be honest, I’ve never seen a poor Quality Score due to slow page load time. From my experience, as long as your page loads in a reasonable length of time, you don’t even have to worry about this for now. If increasing your page load by a half second has any impact on Quality Score, it is minimal. There are also many other marginal factors I won’t go into, but Bradd Libby does.

Improving Quality Score For Content Network

There is a lot of crossover in the areas where you can improve your Quality Score on the search and content networks. Let’s look at the factors we can influence to improve Quality Score on the content network. In most cases these are a little harder to influence and take a lot more time and resources, but they are worth the effort if you want to succeed on the content network.

The ad’s past performance on this and similar sites

You can do a little or a lot with this one — from site and site section targeting all the way up to joining the community (if it is a forum for example) to get to know the users of the site and what makes them tick. As a member of the site, what ads or ad text would you find most relevant? I have seen some people even targeting the site users themselves (ie: an ad headline that says something like “Attention Redfly Blog Readers! Want to know more about increasing your keyword Quality Score? Click here!“

Another tip is to try image ads and compare their performance against your text ads for each site (if the site accepts image ads). Many advertisers still don’t use image ads, so there is a huge opportunity to jump straight to the top of the pile.

The relevance of the ads and keywords in the adgroup to the site

Consider using Google AdPlanner to get the demographics of the site, and target your ad copy to those demographics. Also have a look at what other AdSense ads are showing on the site and make note of ads that are consistently displayed over time. In general, those ads are what Google finds most relevant to that site (at the time). If you can’t beat them, join them.

The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites

Again, use Google AdPlanner to see the “Other sites Visited” section of the site you are targeting. Run a site targeted campaign on some of the lower trafficked related sites. This will improve your “related performance” on similar sites. It might be a lot of effort but not only will you improve overall content network performance, but you will gain significant long tail content network leads or sales.

SECTION 4: Troubleshooting Quality Score

There are numerous things that can cause a sudden drop in Quality Score or a slower, more gradual decrease. Here are some of the most common Quality Score problems and what you can (or cannot) do about them.

Sudden 1/10 Quality Score on all (or most) Keywords & Huge First Page Bid Estimates

This is an extremely common problem and is characterized by an advertiser noticing a very sudden drop in traffic from AdWords. In a lot of cases, your search network traffic stops first and is followed shortly by your content network traffic. This unfortunately is known as a “Google Slap” and occurs when a review has taken place on your account and you are no longer deemed to be complying with the outlandishly opaque landing page and site quality guidelines.

Cause: You are linking or deemed to be linking to a bridge page, a get rich quick scheme, an affiliate page that’s only purpose is to redirect traffic to another domain, an affiliate site that provides no added value, a data collection site (a site that collects users’ email addresses or other info in exchange for a free product / whitepaper, etc.), a “poor quality” comparison shopping site, an arbitrage site, or a scam site.

Solution: Despite what you think about your own site, Google, the Ads Quality Raters, and the QS Algorithm/Bot feel differently. They more than likely feel your site falls into one of these categories. In this case, there is very little that you can do. If your site falls into the “scam site” category, expect to be banned permanently or investigated by authorities.

If you feel that your site absolutely does not fall into any of the categories, request a quick look over of your site on the AdWords Help Forum and then request a manual review by contacting Google here.Note that it should be a 100% false positive if you are to get this reversed so be completely sure that your site doesn’t even fall remotely into one of those categories. Remember, AdWords does not run on auto pilot. Real people will look at and inspect your account.

One High Volume Keyword has a Quality Score Of 2-4

This problem happens when a specific high volume keyword, usually a single word or two-word phrase, slowly drops its Quality Score and starts costing more. Because these keywords are usually high volume, they can generate a lot of traffic, and a low Quality Score on these keywords can cause a significant drop-off in exposure and sales.

Cause: High volume and low CTR.

Solution: Add negative keywords to the campaign, use exact match, remove the keyword (be careful as this can impact an adgroup “theme” on the content network) or place the keyword in it’s own ad group and optimize the ad copy and display URL aggressively.

Very High (Even 10/10) Quality Score but a Huge First Page Bid Estimate

Unfortunately, this is not a problem with your Quality Score. When it comes to certain keywords, there are quite literally hundreds of advertisers. Assume all advertisers also have a 10/10 Quality Score. What determines which ads show? That’s right, good old fashioned bid price.

Cause: High volume of advertisers.

Solution: Bid higher and use the backend to improve ROI and increase lifetime customer value (LTV) so you can afford to bid higher.

In Conclusion

AdWords Quality Score is still a closely guarded secret, as is Google’s organic search algorithm. While it may not be possible to figure out every factor, just like the organic search ranking factors, it is possible to extract enough meaning to understand them and make them work for you. The great scam / affiliate purge of 2009 may have made things easier for existing advertisers, but at the current growth rate of PPC and online ad spending, it’s only a matter of time before the paid search results become as competitive as they used to be. Those of you who understand Quality Score will be in a far better position to get more from your AdWords advertising spend than those who do not.

I hope you got some value from this post. If you did, please share it with others who might get something from it via Twitter, Facebook or Google+

Often third parties such as web hosting companies or other online businesses will offer similar coupon codes (often these will come with their own set of terms of conditions, so please read the small print).

For example Blacknight currently offers a variety of different AdWords vouchers when you sign up for hosting services with them.

The primary purpose of these types of coupons is to introduce AdWords to new users, to allow you to try out the advertising system and spend very little of your own money in doing so. You can safely experiment with AdWords, investigate its features and then decide if it would benefit your business.

These coupons are great for anyone that has never tried AdWords before, but these coupons are not intended for use with existing AdWords accounts. This is one of the major support issues that has cropped up with existing advertisers, as well as the numerous other questions that have been posted in the support forums by new AdWords users.

This blog post aims to cover the most common issues with regards to these Adwords vouchers. We are also giving away free AdWords Promo Codes.

New Accounts Only

If you already have an existing AdWords account you cannot apply this coupon code. This also applies to AdWords accounts that were opened in the past but were never used or activated i.e. you set up your AdWords account but never ran an advertising campaign, or failed to fully activate your account by entering your billing information.

As long as your account is under 14 days old you can use the coupon.

If you already have an AdWords account you cannot open a new account in order to use this coupon. Having more than one AdWords account is against the terms of service (unless you are a third party or search engine marketer).

If you attempt to add a promotion code to an account that is over 14 days old you will see a “Promotional Code Invalid” error message, even if the promotion code has not passed its expiration date. You may also receive this error message if your promotional code is invalid, or if you have failed to enter it correctly (the code is case sensitive).

“Promotional credit must be applied to a new AdWords account within 14 days of creating the AdWords account and is valid only for new Google AdWords customers with self-managed sign-up accounts.” *

The Expiration Date

The expiry date is the deadline by which you need to create and redeem the coupon code in your account. As long as you apply the coupon code to your account before the expiration date you can spend the amount credited to your AdWords account whenever you want.

So if you applied the coupon in May, and the expiration date is in June, you can continue to spend this amount after June. There is no rush on when you should spend this credit.

However, in some instances Google has been known to extend the expiration date of their promotional offers, which you would be notified of via email.

One Per Customer

If you received more than one coupon code you can only apply one of these to your new AdWords account. If you have two coupon codes, make sure to redeem the one that has a greater value, and if you’ve already applied a promotional code to your account, you cannot use another one.

“One promotional credit per customer.” *

Activation Fees

When you open a new AdWords account you are charged a one-time activation fee. This applies even if you sign up with a promotional code. The fee is nonrefundable, even if an account is open for just a short time and is not used for advertising. Google charges this activation fee to help cover the costs associated with creating, maintaining, and, if applicable, cancelling an account.

It is also a way for Google to verify your method of payment. This is important because it is possible to build up advertising costs that exceed the coupon code credit amount.

How you are charged for this fee depends on which mode of payment you choose for your account. There are two methods of payment in AdWords, postpay and prepay.

Postpay – You only pay after building up advertising costs and are billed every 30 days.

You must enter valid billing information before your ads can run. This is true even if you enter a promotional code.

If you choose postpay by credit card or debit card, the activation fee is deducted from the coupon code credit amount.

If you choose postpay by direct debit, the activation fee is taken from your bank account when your payment details are verified. You will then have the full amount of your promotion credit to advertise with.

Prepay – You add funds to your account, and your advertising costs are deducted from that balance. When you run out of funds, your ads stop until you make another payment.

If you choose prepay you must make a prepayment before your ads can run. This is true even if you enter a promotional code.

Once you’ve made this prepayment, the activation fee will be deducted. The amount that is left over after the activation fee has been deducted from your prepayment will be added to your overall account credit.

“Advertisers with self-managed sign-up accounts are subject to a €5 activation fee, which is included in the coupon amount.” *

“Advertisers who choose prepay billing are subject to a €10 minimum prepayment fee before their account is activated. Any such prepay amount will be credited to Advertiser’s account once account is activated.” *

The actual fees charged will depend upon the currency of your own billing country.

Where Do You Apply the Promotion Code?

There are two methods for redeeming your promotion code – entering the code manually, or if you received your code via email clicking on the URL given to you.

Manual Entry

You must go through the entire AdWords account setup process before entering your coupon code – this includes choosing your method of payment and billing details.

You must enter valid payment information in order to activate an AdWords account. These details are essential for Google to ensure users do not abuse the AdWords system by having multiple accounts.

Once your account has been fully activated you can go to the “Billing” tab, click on “Billing Preferences” and if you scroll to the very bottom there is a box to put your promotional code into.

Clicking the Email Link

The mailer or email you received may have given you a URL to use when setting up your AdWords account and indicated that the credit would apply automatically to your account.

If this is the case, you can leave the promotional code field blank, and the credit will be applied automatically to your account. If it hasn’t automatically updated after a few days, contact the Google AdWords support team or the support team of the third party whom you received the email from.

Exceeding the Promotional Credit

Once the initial promotional credit added to your account is depleted you will begin running up real costs. So if your costs exceed the promotional credit you will be billed for this amount. This is why you must complete your billing information when you are setting up your AdWords account.

Prepay accounts must have credit added to them in order for your campaigns to run, but postpay allows you to build up costs and pay them later. So if you have chosen to pay by postpay your ads will continue to run after your promotional credit has run out, and you are responsible for any charges that occur after that.

However, you do have the option of pausing all of your campaigns to stop this from occurring, but you will need to do this before the entire credit runs out. Also, if you want to reduce the likelihood of this occurring then setup a prepay account, instead of a postpay one. If you are prepaid, Google will not automatically charge you, you have to enter payments manually to “top up” your account.

The only downside to choosing prepay is that you cannot change this to postpay at a later date. If you do want to choose postpay, in order to manage your spending make sure to login to your AdWords account on a regular basis to check the account statistics and balance. If you find you are starting to reach the end of the promotional credit and do not wish to incur additional charges, gradually pause some of your campaigns, until the full amount is depleted and all your campaigns are paused.

“Advertisers will be charged for advertising that exceeds the promotional credit. Advertisers will need to suspend their ads if they do not wish to receive additional charges beyond the free credit amount.” *

Google Advertising Policies

Before setting up your new AdWords account make sure that the product you wish to advertise complies with Google’s advertising policies.

“Offer subject to ad approval, valid registration, and acceptance of the Google AdWords program standard terms and conditions.” *

In Conclusion

This promotional activity from Google is great way for website owners to finally try out AdWords, without having to worry too much about making trial and error mistakes with their own money.

The best advice that we can be give is to always carefully read the terms of the offer you have received – there is always a fine print attached to these coupon codes that outline their exact terms and conditions, making sure to read these before trying to use them can save you a lot of stress in the long run.

In some instances Google might send an offer that’s different from the one outlined above. So reading the terms and conditions is essential to see if you’re eligible to use the promotional code.

If you think we have missed anything from the list of common problems outlined above, please leave us a comment below.

*Terms and Conditions of the €75 coupon code distributed to Google Analytics users in May/June 2010.

Luckily there is an easy way to use Google Analytics to delve inside the behaviour of your website visitors, which in turn can help us improve our webpages. Whether you consider your website a success or not, most sites can be improved upon in one way or another, either from a usability perspective, achieving higher conversions, or with regards to the goals set for each of your pages.

An easy step toward trying to improve your sites can be achieved from using the data already previously gathered by Google Analytics but displayed via the In-Page Analytics report. This report adds valuable context to your data, perfect for anyone that has found it difficult to interpret analytics reports in the past.

In this post we aim to cover the In-Page Analytics report, from explaining what it does, how to use it and offering some examples of how it could help your website.

What is In-Page Analytics?

In-Page Analytics is a report in Google Analytics that allows you to see which links users clicked, thus allowing you to see how effective the links on your pages are and track where visitors go. It’s important to note that this tool shows you data for clicks to other pages on your own site, not outbound or inbound links. It uses your existing analytics data and therefore requires no setup or installation of new code, and you will find the In-Page Analytics report under the Content section in the left-hand navigation menu of your Google Analytics dashboard.

Starting with your website’s homepage you are given a navigatable overview of your website, allowing you to visit each page on your site to get a different view of where people are clicking on your subpages. You can click on any link on your homepage and once the new page is loaded, the corresponding data is shown for that page.

You can view this report in a widescreen mode by clicking the Expand button in the right hand menu, directly below the % Exit data. To go back to the regular view mode you simply click this button again, now the Shrink button.

Each link on every page has an associated percentage displayed beside it within a small bubble. This number indicates the percentage of clicks on that link, and if you hover over the bubble you get a more detailed view of this data, where you can see exactly how many clicks there were for that time period. It will also tell you if there is more than one link on the page that leads to the same destination, for example, you might have links to your home page in both the header and in the footer.

For more advanced users that wish to differentiate between these links,  you can tag your links separately with ?ref= (for example http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/?ref=footer) depending on which part of your page the link is located.

To further differentiate between the different links, using the Color Bubbles button in the right hand menu, directly below the % Exit data, will display your data bubbles in either Blue, Green, Orange or Red depending on the level of percentage clicks. The highest percentage clicks are displayed in Red bubbles.

A brilliant feature of the In-Page Analytics report is that it can tell you what percentage of clicks occurred below the fold of any given page. This is displayed in an orange bar on the bottom of the page overview.

Alongside all of this click data you can also see Pageviews, Unique Pageviews, Average Time on Page, Average Page Load Time, Bounce Rate and Precentage Exit, all at the top of the report.

Why Are Segmenting Options Important?

All of this data is valuable by itself and for the entire group of site visitors. However, most website owners will know who their target audience is and business users will know which markets they want to focus on. It is therefore much more interesting to break down this data into different user groups, via segmenting. Within the In-Page Analytics report you can select Advanced Segments to break down the data being displayed, the same way you would in any Google Analytics Report.

Advanced Segments allow you to select a segment of traffic in order to investigate how it interacts with a page. For example you can choose to look at New Visitors or Mobile Traffic etc. all depending on which user group you are most interested in. You can also select multiple segments to compare and contrast the behaviour of different groups and you can use the drop down box to toggle between them. So you can compare the behaviour of New vs Returning Visitors, or Paid Traffic vs Non Paid Traffic etc.

You will find the Advanced Segments options open when you click the button located in the top left hand corner, below the Home tab.

There are a number of default segments here to choose from, and you can choose four segments at one time to compare against. Each segment selected has it’s associated data displayed at the top of the report and you can toggle between the different segment click data (the percentage bubbles being displayed) via the drop down box, or by rolling over the percentage bubbles.

One of the best features of segmenting is the ability to create your own segments based on almost any other metric, such as geography, duration of visit etc. This allows you to  further analyse your data to great effect. To create a custom segment click the + New Custom Segment button.

A favourite In-Page Analytics report of ours is a comparison between browser users. To create these segments we selected “Include”, “Browser”, “Containing” and started typing in the browser names until they appeared in the drop down menu to select from. Learn more about how to create advanced segments.

To de-select one segment at a time from you report, you can remove it by clicking the x beside it’s name under the Home tab.

If on the other hand you want to reduce the amount of data you are seeing, you can filter out links that have a small number of clicks. Using the drop down filter you can hide any clicks below a certain percentage, so you can focus on where most people are clicking.

Segmenting  can help you concentrate on your target markets and compare their behaviour to the norm, to help you make informed decisions about your content and design but you can already do this in the other Google Analytics reports. So what makes In-Page Analytics any better than viewing your other content reports?

How is In-Page Analytics Beneficial?

In-Page Analytics is a superior alternative to the Visitors Flow report found in the Visitors section, because although helpful, when looking at these reports you lose the visual context that your website gives you. However, In-Page Analytics adds context back to your data by superimposing it directly over your website, in doing so it better enables you to answer usability and goal orientated questions about your website.

With the In-Page report you can look over any webpage and quickly make a decision visually about what links are working well and which links aren’t, helping you identify which content is popular on your website and which navigation links are most interesting. It can help you filter out useless content or reorganise your menu structure.

This report doesn’t just show you what links are being clicked, it also shows you which ones are being ignored. It doesn’t just track where your website visitors go, it also shows you just how effective the links are. It can help you focus on what links need to be improved upon and it can help you improve your site, be it for the benefit of the user or to help your call-to-action achieve better success.

Or you might be interested in whether your page layout is optimal for what you want users to accomplish on your page and if your users are seeing the content you want them to see. Most websites will show that the majority of clicks occur above the fold, and if this is case for you, make sure that you have all of your top action items near the top of the page. If you’re looking to optimise your page for different screen sizes, looking at the different percentages of clicks occurring below the fold of any given page can be helpful.

The In-Page Analytics report makes these questions and more much easier to answer because you’re less bogged down in report after report. Even with analytics data it can be difficult to determine if your site is successful or not without an industry average for each metric to compare your results to. Using this report to concentrate on improving your site could be more beneficial then getting bogged down by the numbers game.

Also, if you’re simply not a numbers person or don’t have the time to drill through your Google Analytics account then the In-Page Analytics report is for you, because the information is plainly displayed and easier to interpret.

Two Practical Examples of How In-Page Analytics Has Helped Us

Examining the In-Page Analytics report for our own website we were very quickly able to contextualise and identify two pieces of data that we had previously overlooked, because both pages that the data relates to were receiving high volumes of traffic.

One of the many goals of our website is to drive traffic to the Tools section, where we publish links to the Free Internet Marketing Tools created in-house by the RedFly Marketing team. Currently this page is host to two applications – Google Global (a browser extension that allows you to easily see what any Google search results look like from different countries and locations – watch this space for a new version of this tool) and The RedFly Keyword Manager Tool (a tool that enables you to quickly and easily create keyword lists for Google AdWords), and this page will be host to future apps currently in development.

The goal of these free tools, along with the Online Marketing Blog, is to provide value to visitors of the site and highlight the skills of the RedFly Marketing team. Though the Google Global page has always received a significant amount of traffic, the majority of these visitors have found their way here from links posted off-site. Meanwhile the on-site link to the Tools section, located in the header, was not getting as many clicks as we would hope from our blog readers and homepage visitors. We concluded that these were goals we wanted to improve upon.

In an attempt to improve the clickrate of this link, we simply changed the language of the anchor text, changing “Tools” to “Free Tools” to make the content of the landing page more obvious. After this change we paid close attention to the clickrate of this header link to see if there were any positive or negative changes, rather than focusing on the number of unique views to the tools pages themselves.

When we looked  at the In-Page Analytics report four months later we saw see a definite positive outcome to this subtle change, it went from 2.3% of clicks from homepage visitors to 6.4%, almost three times the original amount of clicks before this small change.

Looking at the In-Page Analytics report again today, 10 months since the small anchor text change, this link is receiving 7.3% of clicks from homepage visitors. We are very pleased with the result, and continue to use the In-Page Analytics report for both our own site and client’s sites to gain insight into the links clicked, rather than the pageviews received.

Here we were reminded of the valuable lesson that it is the quality of the traffic not the quantity that is really important. By having more homepage visitors and blog readers visit our Tools section we are closer to achieving our goal of providing value to visitors of the site and highlighting the skills of our team.

The In-Page Analytics report allows you to pay attention to links that receive a low number of clicks, despite having corresponding pages that receive high volumes of traffic. Alternatively, paying attention to links with a large amount of clicks means making sure the pages that they link to are conversion optimized to their full potential, rather than wasting all that traffic.

The second piece of previously overlooked information that we garnered from the In-Page Analytics report was that a high number of website visitors were clicking the link to our blog, whilst already on the blog page. We concluded that it is probable that our blog is in fact too integrated into the overall design of the site and that we should work to differentiate it. It also probably doesn’t help that there are three different links to the blog on the blog page itself.

This usability issue is unfortunately not as easy to fix as the first example and we will therefore take more time considering this information, making small gradual changes to the design and monitoring any changes in click behaviour.

For even more practical examples of how this report can help your site we suggest you read the article “What Makes Them Click? 7 Business Questions Answered With In-Page Analytics”.

Things to Consider When Interpreting the In-Page Analytics Report

Before making any decisions as a result of the data displayed in this report, make sure to pay attention to the time frame you have chosen. By default Google Analytics will display data from the past month, it is beneficial to compare the click data of one month to another, or look at the data from over a longer period of time, and a larger group of site visitors.

Also, this particular report is more suitable for websites with static pages. For example, the dynamic nature of a blog can make it more difficult to analyse as the main page is constantly changing, as new content is added.

However it can work well with dynamic ones if you pay attention to the time frame you have selected. Also, if you were investigating the navigation of your blog, it’s important to consider that the In-Page Analytics report will only show you the current design of the site in the overlay, and if you had a different blog theme it would be wise to only choose the time frame in which you were using the current theme.

Conclusion

In-Page Analytics gives you an essential visual overlay of your website, adding extra insight to your visitor behaviour, something that other data heavy reports lack. It allows you to focus on navigation and anchor text, helping you easily spot problems where you did not notice them before. However, until Google Analytics is able to differentiate between the same destination links on each page, the In-Page Analytics report will never be as accurate as paid services such as Crazy Egg and Clicktale, who both can provide you with heatmaps indicating exactly where users are navigating to on your site.

Nevertheless, if you already use Google Analytics you can access the In-Page Analytics report with just one click, the data is already there waiting for you to look at and there is nothing to setup or install, and like the rest of Google Analytics, it’s free. Also, as mentioned above, if you really want to make the In-Page Analytics report work perfectly for you, then it’s simply a matter of tagging your repeated links separately in order to fix this issue, at least until Google comes along with a fix of their own.

Despite it’s flaws, In-Page Analytics has been upgraded to a full report in the newest version of Google Analytics and continues to be a valuable tool to busy website owners and internet marketers alike.

Sitelinks give your organic search listing more prominence in the results, and can also expose more of what your website has to offer. It’s not surprising therefore that Google have decided to introduce this feature to its paid results.

Ad Sitelinks

Ad Sitelinks allows ads that appear in the top positions (ads with a very high quality score) to have as many as five links in their ad. This includes the main landing page as well as four additional links which appear beneath the ad text. Initially Ad Sitelinks was a feature introduced for brand specific searches only, but now you can enable this on more generic, unbranded campaigns.

Depending on how specific the search term is the Sitelinks will appear either as one line or two lines. For example when searching for “broadband” the 3 Broadband ad that is triggered has one line of links below the ad text, and searching for the brand name “3 broadband” will display this ad as having two lines of links below the ad text.

Ad Sitelinks will only appear when ads qualify for the top positions, however you can still enable this feature in preparation for a time when your ad will appear in a top spot. With Ad Sitelinks enabled, if your ad appears in the right hand side of the search results, it will appear in the same format as you are used to. For example, the ad below is the same ad triggered above in the search for “3 broadband” but now that it is no longer in the top spot the Ad Sitelinks do not appear.

Sitelinks don’t cost any extra in comparison to ads without them. Also, the costs per click do not differ depending on whether someone clicks on the main ad link or any of the Sitelinks. Additionally, if a users clicks on more than one link while viewing your ad you will only be charged for one click.

How To Set Up Ad Sitelinks

You will find the option to set up Ad Sitelinks in your Campaign Settings tab, under the “Ad extensions” section. To change which ad extension you are viewing, there is a drop down menu labelled “view” (directly underneath the campaigns tab) where you will see three options – “Local extensions”, “Phone extensions” and now “Sitelinks extensions”.

If you choose “Sitelinks extensions” you will now be able to click “+ New extension” which will open the next step in the process.

Ad Sitelinks is a campaign level setting, so the first step in setting them up is to choose an existing campaign to assign them to. As this is a campaign level extension you should take note that all of your ads in that specific campaign will have the Sitelinks assigned to them, so choose your campaign wisely. Make sure that the Sitelinks you setup are specific to the entire campaign.

The next step is to choose the link text (35 characters max), and the destination URL (1024 characters max). The text and URL follows the same rules as the rest of your AdWords account, so for example the URL must direct users to a page from the display URL website being used in that campaign.

You can add between one and ten Sitelinks for each campaign, though only four Sitelinks will be shown, which ones are shown will depend on the keyword that triggered the ad.

If the campaign you are writing the Sitelinks for is a generic one it is more likely that the Sitelinks will appear as one line of text, so it is best to submit short and relevant link text. However, if the campaign is very specific e.g. brand focused, the link text would be displayed across two lines and can therefore take up most of the 35 characters without seeming cluttered.

Once you have saved these Sitelinks they will then appear listed in the “Ad extensions” section, with associated performance data such as clicks, impressions and CTR.

When choosing what campaigns to assign Sitelinks to, remember that this feature is being assigned to already highly successful ads and as with any new AdWords feature, you should make sure to regularly check their impact.

The best method of monitoring the performance of the Sitelinks is to create two identical campaigns, and enable Sitelinks for one, but not the other. You will then be able to compare the performance with Sitelinks and without.

It is currently not possible to see individual link level performance data from within AdWords, but using the tagging feature of Google Analytics you should be able to see what links were clicked on.

Add More Control to Your Landing Pages Using Ad Sitelinks

Unlike the Sitelinks in organic search, Ad Sitelinks gives you complete control over what links appear, giving you the opportunity to offer multiple landing pages to the user. Thus you can choose to provide text and links to other persuasive pages on your website.

It is still the ad’s main Destination URL link that is taken into account when determining the landing page quality for individual ads. This enables you to utilize already successful AdWords campaigns to promote additional lower performing products or brand new products. However, Google suggests that you choose Sitelinks that are relevant for all your ads and search terms within your campaign, and to avoid attaching irrelevant links to your ads. As in the example below, the keyword “broadband” triggers the ad and the Sitelinks used all relate to broadband products that the company provide.

However, with regards to a branding campaign you may have a keyword list related to all areas of your business, therefore you could certainly use Sitelinks to promote lower performing or new products. For example, the keyword “3 broadband” triggered the ad below, however the Sitelinks relate to three other products (and product pages) that this company offers.

Maximize Your Click-Through Rate Using Ad Sitelinks

Ad Sitelinks make your ads stand out even more by giving your ads more real estate on the all-important first page of search results, with Google indicating that early users of the feature had reported on average a 30% increase in clickthrough rates. Some brands are even experiencing a 15-40+% lift in brand PPC sales YOY!

If you’ve already been bidding on branded keywords you’re likely to have been sending traffic to your homepage, and in this case it’s difficult to determine what the user was actually searching for. With Sitelinks you have the ability to offer multiple landing pages to the user, so searchers can choose the landing page that’s most relevant to them, which increases the chances of a conversion.

Sitelinks also give you the ability to include extra text in your ad. The extra text could either be used as an additional description line, linking to special offers or product benefits, or for promoting other products/services. If you use text that accurately describes the link, you increase the likelihood of a conversion. You can read the transcript of an interesting talk at SMX on supercharging your sitelinks here.

When creating your Sitelinks take into account the most popular ads already running in your campaign. Focus on the text from these ads and their associated landing pages that have the highest conversion rates. Linking to already successful landing pages will further increase the conversion rate of the clicks on your Sitelinks. You can check out some interesting examples of sitelinks in use here.

TIP: Brad Geddes has another creative use for ad sitelinks. Add your phone number to one of your sitelinks to increase your “call through rate”. If you’re advertising a local business, create a sitelink with your phone number as the anchor text and the destination URL being your site’s contact page.

Conclusion

Though Ad Sitelinks may improve your clickthrough rate it’s important to utilize them in a way that continues to bring highly targeted traffic to your site. Monitoring the conversion rates of campaigns that use Sitelinks is essential to determine if they succeed for you.

The extension, while still in beta is a little more limited than the Firefox extension as a result of our lack of access to the new API. This means that country selection in search results will not be available through the context menu until the next release. For now, the region selection and settings are only available in the incredibly innocuous icon to the top right of the Chrome taskbar. Our user testing has showed that this is the best place for it and I think you will agree.

You can install Google Global for Chrome by clicking the image below which will take you to the official Chrome extension gallery.

If you install, use and like this extension, we would really appreciate if you could rate it over on the official page. Any feedback or feature requests are always welcome too (we are working on a Bing version, what are we going to call it then?!). If you would like to install the more complete version for Firefox, please head on over to Google Global page in our Internet Marketing Tools section.

Finally, we work hard to maintain these free tools. You would be doing us a huge favor if you could help us spread the word. Any retweet, stumble, Facebook share or a share of any social network of your choice would make us very happy and will drive us to complete the other free internet marketing tools that we have in the pipeline.

Last week Vanessa Fox wrote an article on these updates and speculated as to what happened. While most dismissed her speculations, I believe she was right on the money. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Vanessa (Who’s an absolute sweetheart in real life as well as a genius) might even have known something that the rest of those on WMW didn’t and she was really REALLY doing her best to give a “please read between the lines” post. For that she was shunned. Their loss.

Note* As I do with all posts, I left this one in drafts to sleep on it. It just so happens that Matt posted a video with a little more information. It’s brief and you can watch it below. Please note that all content on this post was produced before this video was released.

Get the Flash Player to see this Google AdWords tutorial about building your keyword list.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?:

One poster on the thread mentioned:

“Everyone here is complaining about loss of traffic and nobody is gaining traffic, the lost traffic has to be going somewhere“

Let me tell you that we, our clients and our network of websites, are on the “other side”. i.e, sites like ours and our clients took that traffic.

We have concrete Google Analytics evidence that shows 30-60% increases in traffic to some of our and our clients sites just before and after May. It is important to note that these sites are all eCommerce and forum sites that had a steady flow of long tail traffic and now have a much greater share of this traffic. All this traffic increase is from Google search term referrals with a word length of 4 or over. I will follow this up as usual in another post with data as soon as we can anonymize  it and get permission.

So what do we do different to our competitors who we’ve now drastically overtaken in the serps?

Here at Redfly, we’ve almost always started a PPC campaign and all that goes with that long before even attempting to look at the SEO side of things. Those of you who deal almost exclusively with AdWords will know what I’m talking about here. Google has always taken a hard line towards ensuring quality on it’s network. They have penalized, suspended and even banned advertisers who pay a significant amount of money in order to keep their paid search results top notch. AdWords advertisers are constantly adapting to changes in Google policy and I for one have noticed that what works in AdWords is usually, eventually included in some form in the organic search algorithm. Site speed, relevancy, CTR (Don’t tell me CTR in SERPs is not or will not be  a ranking factor now that Google has released this data in WMT).

The MayDay update is something that a lot of AdWords experts knew was coming a long time ago. What really made me laugh is that some people genuinely think that Google has made a mistake and that things are broken and it will eventually roll back. If anything, it’s only rolling out. It’s going to get worse for you.

As an aside, this reminds me of a book I once thought was an incredible condescending read after being recommended to me by Rand Fishkin called “Who Moved My Cheese”. I never thought I’d see the day that I’d recommend this book or even make reference to it but I have to say, it really hit the nail on the head with this one. To all of you in denial, I’d recommend reading this book (It’s a short book, I completed it in under 15 mins). It’s an almost child like story about change, complacency and the dangers/opportunities of each. It’s available on Amazon for $3, but if anyone wants my copy, just let me know in the comments.

So, how come we’re sucking up all your “hard earned” traffic? Well, from Vanessa’s post and from the point of an AdWords advertiser/manager, it’s pretty obvious. The majority of those complaining have relied too much on domain authority and internal linking. IN MY OPINION, rather than site authority, being used by most of you as the main egg in your basket, carrying all the weight, Google is now seeing individual documents as their own entities a lot more.

Basic SEO principles still stand true here. Think about it. A document on a less authoritative site might be more valuable and more useful to the Google user than a page with less useful information pushed to the top of the SERPs by the authority of the root domain.Only 4 months ago everybody was complaining that big brands had the advantage. Google has done SEOs and small businesses a huge favor here and leveled the playing field for those of us who produce valuable, relevant content. Content that produces links. In every example of sites that I have seen “lose their rankings” those pages were overtaken by pages on domains with not much authority, but with a lot more backlinks to those individual pages. A lot of those links may be spammy, but they’re still backlinks.

OK, so let’s break it down.

E-COMMERCE SITES:

All our eCommerce sites and client eCommerce sites have never taken the “easy route” to market.  We have made sure of that because this is essential as an AdWords advertiser and the majority of AdWords policies eventually become reality for SEOs. Advertising a page with just a manufacturer boilerplate description and a buy now button wouldn’t survive a day in an AdWords auction. All our eCommerce sites/clients have put in the effort in creating unique descriptions, reviews, videos, UGC reviews (good and bad) and used incentives to get links to these product pages. As Vanessa mentioned, look at what Amazon does!  Google mentioned before (no source at present) that a lot of user feedback focused on the excessive amount of almost identical shopping results in the search engines. Why do you think they introduced the “less shopping results” feature in the sidebar? You need to build links, build quality and interesting product pages and get creative. After all, that’s your job as an SEO.

Every single one of our eCommerce sites have seen an increase in traffic since May despite the annual seasonal downturn.

FORUM SITES:

All of our forum sites sites and client forum sites have noticed a significant boost in long tail traffic too. This is because we insist on building links to and promoting every single thread created (that’s of any value of course). This has taken the form of incentivsing users and site owners to blog about and reference thread titles to bring inlinks, traffic and contributors to the forum thread which in turn encourages others to do the same. Self reinforcing. Write customized versions or synopsis versions of long forum threads, syndicate them, guest blog about the opinions expressed in a forum thread, get links from national newspapers on topics in your forum to build links to those threads/individual pages. After all, that’s your job as an SEO.

Every single one of our forums have seen an increase in long tail traffic since encouraging linking and externally referencing valuable threads.

Handy tip. To get you started, tweetmeme and topsy widgets on each page provide a starting point, a frequently crawled dofollow link from their main site when you use their widgets which also adds to the user experience. There are countless ways to build links to pages as long as you make them link worthy. Now the “secret” is out, I don’t expect this one to last long.

SOME QUESTIONS SEEN ON THE WMW THREAD:

Some “questions” I’ve seen on the WMW thread that I would like to address:

Q:”How can I get my eCommerce item page to rank where it once was, all I have is the manufacturer description, who’ll link to that?”

A: I think I’ve addressed that already. I hate to (really, I do) sound like a Google fan boy but put yourself in the users shoes. Do you really want a list of generic eCommerce site results in the search results for a product? Do you want to shift through them all, offering the exact same product at the exact same price, each offering only a unique-ish design and then pick which one you want? Or do you want Google to do what it’s good at and use it’s algorithm to show the top results by using it’s advanced (largely) link based algorithm? Isn’t this what you started your SEO career on? Building links to quality content? Just so happens that now Google is working just as designed and giving more weight to those pages with more links. If anything this is a rollback from the “brand update” a while back. If you’re good at what you do and have not gotten complacent (which I dare say is now rampant among “professional SEOs” who have inherited authority sites) you should be able to build a better links than your new competitors for you and your clients to these pages. After all, that’s your job as an SEO.

Q: “Really spammy sites are appearing above mine, can’t Google see this?”

A: No. They don’t. Google sees more links, which you as an SEO should know (in general) is a vote of confidence for this page. The question now is two fold: 1) Why does this site have more links than you? 2) What can you do to get more/more valuable links to YOUR page than your spammy competitor? This should be easy for you. After all, that’s your job as an SEO.

IN CONCLUSION:

Your cheese has  moved. Go find it again or go find more. It’s not coming back. Matt says so in his video.

Oh, and trust me, if you spent as much time on the AdWords help forum as I do, you’d realize, like all the other posters and top contributors on the forum that no amount of bitching, moaning, law suit threats, class actions, begging or bribing will get Google to roll this back. Google doesn’t care that it has “wiped out entire businesses” with this algo update. Google has literally wiped out billion dollar VC funded companies overnight on AdWords without even an explanation when they introduced quality score. Let this be a lesson that AdWords advertisers have learned countless times over the past 3 years, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If I may dust off an old chestnut, build your site as if Google didn’t exist. Then, when you’ve exhausted every possibility of getting traffic to every page on your site that doesn’t require a search engine, focus on Google.

“Familiarity tends to breed complacency” – Christopher Jones

“When a great team loses through complacency, it will constantly search for new and more intricate explanations to explain away defeat.” – Pat Riley

*I realize that this may upset a lot of the SEO industry folks but I believe that it is pretty obvious what has happened considering the timing and data that we have. It is very rare I write a post like this but I was astonished at some of the unbelievably outlandish theories presented as explanations for the update. I welcome any rebuttals, a few “you have no idea what you’re talking about”s and and more than a few anecdotal proofs that I’m wrong in the comments below.

I’m a really passionate technology advocate and recently I was awarded the title of Best Technology Blogger at the Irish Blog Awards. I have always considered myself an early adopter. From a very young age I have been captivated by technology (particularly the Internet) and I have always been fascinated by human behaviour and communication, hence my choice to participate in the MSc Cyberpsychology program at IADT – which I graduated from last year.

My interest in online marketing was sparked back in 2006 during my undergraduate studies in psychology and I channelled this into a thesis on the psychological effects of online advertisements. The psychology of how the consumer is influenced by their environment has been a particular interest of mine and I’m always trying to learn more about usability and successful human computer interactions. During my postgraduate studies I concentrated on social psychology applied to online environments, and my postgraduate research was interested in investigating the behaviour and attitudes of bloggers.

My extensive background in Psychology gives me an insight into human behaviour, in particular online, which will be of great use to me during my work at RedFly, which I am very much looking forward to starting.

Note from Managing Director Dave:  As our little company grows, we can afford to invest in the best people. I’m absolutely thrilled to have Sinéad on board and I’m sure that everyone who knows her is aware of how perfect a fit she’ll be here at RedFly. Welcome to the family Sinéad!

The new qualification, despite it’s teething problems is a welcome step forward as I can attest that the new advanced exams are just that, pretty advanced. The past few days have been spent up late, studying and studying some more to get the advanced exams passed but we did it and it’s a very welcome birthday present :) Thank you very much Google!

An AdWords Qualified Company has to manage a minimum of $100,000 per 90 days of advertisers spend and pass some simple exams. Currently, including Redfly, there are only 6 verifiable qualified companies in Ireland. This is being phased out over the next 6 months and Google will be replacing it with the AdWords Certified Partner program which although has a lower spend threshold, requires much more difficult exams to be passed to achieve it. We are very proud to be Ireland’s first certified partner in the new program.

More information on the certification can be found here. Seems like they are planning to release a lot more certification programs and consolidating them all into one area. Info on the future partner programs can be found here.

I’d like to thank Jen, Arnold and of course myself for working so hard on top of their existing duties to pass the advanced exams (which do include some pretty advanced API questions!) and get us certified. Although due to known issues with the program not all staff are showing on our company profile page, I have been assured they will show over the coming days.

I am sure there will be a lot more AdWords Certified Partners appearing in Ireland over the coming months, we’re just delighted to be first. Thank you to all our clients for their patience (and use of their account spend) to achieve this qualification. It means a lot to us.

Everyone is allowed on self back pat post per year right? This is ours for 2010.

Note: To those who already hold individual qualification status and are part of a qualified company, check your emails, Google are sending out vouchers to take the new exams for free.

The latest version comes with whole host of backend improvements, a lot of code re-writing, a much smaller memory footprint and a really snazzy new logo/icon that fits with our new free Internet marketing tools suite that will be released this year and finally an in-built auto update system so you wont have to worry about coming back to find updates, they will be automatically installed for your convenience.

So head on over to the new Google Global page which will detail the changes and let you download, install and get back to your search engine marketing.

As usual, the tool is free and while we appreciate bug reports, feature requests and general feedback, we can unfortunately not offer individual support to everyone.

Finally, if you have found this tool useful, please help us spread the word, tell your friends, tweet about it and if you really like it, we would love if you could blog about it. For those of you who have found the tool helpful and are kind enough to blog about Google Global, drop us a mail and we will add you to the beta test group where you can test future versions before they are released. These include:

• A Google Chrome version
• Support for Yahoo
• Support for Bing
• LBL support
• AdTest Support

We release our tools for free and appreciate each and every one of you who use them every day. Thank you. Each and every one of you.

The Workshop

The course / workshop was broken down into the following areas:

• Basics of Online Communications
• Developing a Communications Bible
• Developing a Communications Philosophy
• Working with Blogs, Forums, Twitter, etc.
• Finding Tools – Who is Talking about you Online?
• Crisis Communications

The Day

The Day started off early and I got in a little face time with Dena, Darragh and Leo. I also had the privilege of meeting Martina Skelly of activate.ie (who I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to speak with as I had not had my morning triple espresso). Next time Martina!

The event was held in the Radisson Blu, a venue where I’ve managed to meet numerous online marketing folks for some reason. It seems to be the new Dublin venue of choice.

The day started off on a very casual note — just the way I like it. Everyone in the room introduced themselves (except those who were late) and everyone felt immediately at ease. There were no awkward “Am I going to be asked to get up and give an elevator pitch?” moments. Again, it was just the way I like it.

Damien, who is amazingly comfortable speaking in front of people, kicked the morning off on the topic of grassroots media campaigns using examples from Techcrunch and Hotelicopter, and then dove straight in on the subject of “influencers.”  I have a feeling a lot of the presentation was ad-hoc, but it felt very prepared. Damien didn’t need to bother with fluff. Yet again, just the way I like it.

I was expecting there to be a lot of focus on Twitter but was very grateful that here was no focus on any one medium in particular. This was my biggest fear about the day — listening to someone rattle on about Twitter. It was nothing like this.

Damien went on and covered a lot about negative reputation management, which was quite interesting and a subject I feel will be very important in coming years.

There was then some audience participation and I got the most value from the day at this stage when the idea of “photowalks” and facilitation came up. There were some good nuggets of information here.

The next part of the workshop focused on SEO and reputation management. I believe there could have been a lot more said on this subject but I’m a little biased in this area. Leo and I provided the names of some tools for this part. As they are paid tools, I’ve included screenshots showing how they can be used in relation to Damien’s presentation. The tools are OpenSiteExplorer and MajesticSEO. Below I have included some sample images of reports I ran for Mulley.ie on OSE.

In the next example I used Majestic to run a basic link report on the same site. You can use both tools to complement each other and analyze the link graph of any site you choose. If anyone from the workshop would like me to run a report for them, let me know. We have lots of credits with each and it’s sometimes better to try before you buy. I can highly recommend each of these tools.

The next part of the day was extremely interesting, valuable, timely, topical, and relevant. Darragh Doyle, the Community Manager for Boards.ie, gave a talk on the very high profile security breach on the boards.ie website. Darragh went into some great detail on the steps that the Boards and Daft team took to resolve the situation and it turned out to be the perfect example of how to do crisis management right. It was almost as if the security breach was intended from the start to serve as the perfect case study for this workshop.

Next up was the topic of “owning the search results for your own name.” There was some good stuff here.

On a whim, Noel Rock gave a fantastic spur-of-the-moment talk on Soccer Stars for Haiti. He did a great job considering he was put on the spot like that. ;) Noel’s talk transitioned smoothly into the final official area of the workshop. Christian Hughes (who despite having lots to say, can talk the talk) gave a quote I still remember that’s worth mentioning:

A”Anything ‘viral’ is doomed to fail as the idea of ‘viral’ is inherently flawed. There’s no such thing as ‘a viral;’ things ‘go viral.’”

The day closed with a nice informal open session. I’m not so sure this would be suitable for “newbies” as there were a lot of high caliber PR and marketing folks who knew what they were talking about throwing around some interesting ideas. These were smart people. I doubt it could be recreated though.

The day finished earlier than I expected. I was very thankful — not because the content was bad (quite the opposite) but because I hate sitting down for a whole day. The length of the workshop was absolutely perfect.

The Feedback.

• I would have liked to see more actual case studies.
• I think the length the day was perfect. I wouldn’t try to make it longer.
• I would have liked if we all went to lunch together.
• I really liked the open session at the end. I think this should be an official part of the workshop.
• I liked the “no pitch” policy. I think it’s important even if some people did ignore it.
• I would have liked more info and examples on dealing with the mainstream press and their process.

In Conclusion.

The day was great. The day was valuable.

Would I recommend this workshop? Yes.

Would I pay for this workshop? Absolutely.

Below is a chronologically listed schedule for the remainder of this year. Do say hello!

January 23rd: Mulley Communications Online PR Workshop Dublin

The Online PR workshop run by Damien Mulley of Mulley Communications is putting on it’s inaugural workshop dedicated to online public relations, reputation management, online communications and crisis communication. The event will be held at the Radisson Blu hotel in Dublin and is set to be a sure fire hit.

February 4th: Dublin Web Summit

The Dublin Web Summit run by Paddy Cosgrave will take place in Trinity College Dublin. It will feature influential keynote speakers such as Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, and Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress as well as delegates from a massive array of Irish companies (and a guest appearance from bohemian economist David McWilliams) .

February 15th – 18: OMS & Search Engine Strategies (SES) London

The first search related conference of the year kicks off with a double whammy. The online Marketing Summit and Search Engine strategies have teamed up to offer search geeks and search engine marketers everywhere a bumper 4 day search conference featuring the legendary author of Web Analytics An Hour A Day, Avinash Kaushik. The conference will feature well known guest speakers such as Richard Baxter UK SEO, Lisa Myers, Ciaran Norris, The lovely folk from Ayima SEO and legend in his own right, John Myers of Mediavest. I’ve also heard there is due to be quite a large knees up at the LondonSEO party. To get a 20% discount on the cost of this event, use the promo code 20SPG when registering.

March 6th -7th: WordCamp Ireland

Another inaugural event, WordCamp Ireland will be held in Kilkenny, Ireland (which for some reason I’ve never been to). Wordcamp promises to be two days of everything WordPress related. The event is being run by Pixel Pusher Sabrina Dent and will feature well known bloggers and techies such as Donncha O Caoimh, Joost de Valk, Niall Harbison. Redfly are also one of the sponsors of this event for which we have been promised that there will be a “Redfly Cocktail” made available to all attendees.

March 27th: Irish Blog Awards (Galway)

The fourth annual Irish Blog Awards (which takes place in a different county every year) will take place in Ireland’s “Culture Capital”, Galway. The blog awards, run by Damien Mulley (Is there anything he isn’t involved in?) is set to be a night of fun, frolics, recognition and … well, cool awards. Redfly is also sponsoring the best group blog category. Good luck to everyone who makes the shortlist! *This event was held in the Radisson Blu in Galway.

April 22nd-23rd: Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Sydney

The Search Marketing Conference & Expo in Sydney is “Australia’s #1 Search Marketing Event and is the “must-attend” Search Engine Marketing and Social Media event of the year in Australia”. SMX Sydney will feature speakers like Greg Boser, Todd Freisen and the always lovely Gillian Muessig or SEOmoz. ***Thank you Volcano Gods for ruining this trip.***

May 17th-18th: Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced London

SMX Advanced in London is the only search marketing conference designed exclusively for experienced internet marketers. We’ve heard some great things about SMX Advanced sessions and have never been in the US for the Seattle event. No speakers have been announced at the time of this post but we’re positive that this is going to be great. Dedicated to a conference without a schedule or speaker list? It must be good. To get a 15% discount on the cost of the event, enter the promo code REDFLY010

May 20th: IIA Congress Dublin & Net Visionary Awards

The IIA Annual Congress 2010 will be held on Thursday 20 May in the Crowne Plaza Dublin Northwood followed by the Net Visionary Awards 2010 that same evening. The IIA Congress usually operates on an annual “theme” of which most of the sessions are (at least loosely) based on. We’ve been a member of the Irish Internet Association for nearly two years now and this will be our first congress.

September 17th-19th: Think Tank San Diego

For the past two years, something urgent has always come up to prevent us from attending this. Hopefully this year will be different. Think Tank is a conference with a difference run by one of the nicest blokes in the industry, Dave Klein of PurposeINC (Yes, the same Dave Klein who runs the Pubcon Charity poker tournament and fixes back problems). This is an invite only event and caters for experienced online marketers with a friendly no-pitch setting.

October 11th-13th: A4U Expo London

A4U Expo in London is one of the funnest events with the widest verity of attendees of any other conference. A4U focuses not only on the affiliate marketing industry, but the search industry that surrounds it. While we keep our involvement in the affiliate space fairly clear of the Redfly blog, the quirky and incredibly intelligent people you can meet at this conference makes it a must-attend.

November/December: Pubcon Las Vegas.

If A4U is one of the funnest conferences, Pubcon Las Vegas is without a doubt the funnest. Let’s face it, it’s in Vegas, it can hardly be anything but fun. Pubcon is the de-facto search marketing conference. It’s one of the oldest and most respected conferences of the year. Those who have been to one (or a few) know that it needs no introduction, those who have not should come along with us this year for the educational and online marketing event of the year.

Get In Touch.

If you would like to arrange a sit down, some lunch or just a chat at the bar at any of these events, get in touch. We’ll be more than happy to get the first round in.

Google has recently announced that you can now tag  your adwords ads with your company address. These are called location extensions. However, many advertisers do NOT want their company address under their ad.  We’ll cover that in another blog post. They are also not available in many countries.

Instead, we’re going to use regional targeting to add the County, City or State of the SEARCHER to the bottom of your ad. When the person that’s performing the search sees their OWN City, State or County below their ad they not only see a word they can relate to but an ad that’s a little different to most (if not all) of the other ads on the page. This has an immediate and sometimes astonishing impact on click through rates.

To achieve this we simply need to get a little more granular with our regional targeting in AdWords. It’s really quite simple. Instead of targeting a whole country like the US or Ireland, select “target specific locations within a single country or territories” and select EVERY STATE . You could even select every metropolitan area or even every city to have THOSE show up below the ad.

Likewise, Instead of targeting the whole country of The Republic Of Ireland, select “target specific locations within a single country or territories” and select all 26 Counties in The Republic instead. If you are based in Dublin for example, using this method, a searcher from Cork would see the word “Cork” below your ad.

That’s it! Simply update/upload your campaign, wait a few minute and when someone performs a search from any location that you are now targeting, their city, metro area, State or County will show up below the ad. We have found that in 100% of cases for both us and our clients, combined with gradual CTR increases this has improved our CTR significantly. CTR being the single biggest factor that you as an advertiser can influence towards your quality score, improving CTR is a no-brainer.

While it’s not possible to auto rotate these ads in the same campaign, we had to try and replicate that for this test. We spread it out over a month (yea, low volume) alternating the days that each campaign was enabled. So each ad got the same share of days of the week, times of the day etc. The big drawback here is actual demand for the “product” on any specific day may have skewed the results slightly but I think we got a pretty accurate result that is in line with what we have seen with all our other campaigns.You will notice that the CTR is almost 100% greater and the cost is 100% less.

An increase in relevant CTR (No bounce/back rate) is an effective increase in that keywords quality score.

On the subject, to remove the location from below your ad (I have no idea why you would want to), you can target a specific geographic area using customized targeting.  Many thanks to Richard at Apogee for teaching me something new and keeping me on my toes over on the official AdWords help forum.

So there you have it. A simple, yet effective way to improve your quality score without much effort. What other ways have you found to increase the quality score of your keywords?

The biggest revelation that was drawn from this and the subsequent thread over on WebmasterWorld was that Google was flushing out even the “highest quality” affiliates. They were even flushing out direct linking affiliates that were advertising with the parent merchants consent. I wont go into the rights and wrongs of all this, it’s been done to death on the WMW thread already and I do not want to discuss the whole Google Vs Affiliates topic again either. What I do want to point out is what happened next.

On Wednesday, November 11th, the Inside AdWords blog announced Product Listing Ads. Product listing ads are image ads that appear along with the “normal” sponsored listings on a Google search result page except they have images, merchant name and prices associated with the ad.

Pay only for results: Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and completes a purchase on your site. Because Product Listing Ads is charged on a CPA basis, it offers a risk-free way for you to reach a larger audience on Google.com.

While this is still in very limited beta it’s quite interesting. I was wondering how Google would go about charging merchants the CPA. I’m not sure how long this has been a feature in Google Merchant Center, but you can now link your AdWords account to your merchant center account.

You can now specify your AdWords account information in your Google Merchant Center account. By doing this, you can surface your product information in your AdWords ads. AdWords campaigns that are linked to Google Merchant Center accounts will receive the benefit of richer, more specific product information in their creatives; including images and prices.

You can add multiple AdWords accounts to a single Google Merchant Center account. To do this, simply enter your AdWords Customer ID under Add an AdWords Customer ID: and click Add. Once you’ve entered your AdWords Customer ID in your Google Merchant Center account, you’ll need to create a Product Extension within the Campaign Settings section of your AdWords account and link it to your Google Merchant Center account.

So now Google is allowing merchants to link their product feeds to AdWords and set a price they want to pay for each sale? Isn’t that what a PPC affiliate does/Used to do? Only this time, Google being the owner of the search engine can offer what no other affiliate can, images and branding directly in the search results.

Could it be that Google flushed out all the affiliates to make room for the merchants that it is promoting on a CPA basis? What if Google were to allow it’s affiliate network merchants opt in to product listing ads? All their feeds, data, images and prices are already uploaded to the network. Couldn’t/Shouldn’t Google start displaying product listing ads in the search results for it’s own merchants and getting a nice juicy CPA for it? Doesn’t this make sense? Google has all the data it needs to display the most profitable product ads too. Affiliate marketing is a multi billion dollar industry. Why wouldn’t they get on board? Especially if it compliments their existing search results. It appears that others have come to the same conclusion. Google have since announced more AdWords bans and in typical Google fashion, refuse to communicate clearly.

Google has just announced a whole slew of new ad formats, is slowly making organic results less visible and now with product listing ads is monetizing the remaining space above the fold. It’s also worth noting that this month, Google also released DFA analytics. It’s all mounting up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is great for merchants and I am a firm believer that Google can and should do what they want with their own search engine. I am also not sounding the death knell of affiliate PPC marketing. I do however believe that PPC affiliates are going to be up against a pretty powerful 800 Lb Gorilla in the very near future.

I’d like to end with a quote over on WMW by the very wise Netmeg (You should follow her on twitter too):

But nothing pisses me off more than seeing all the talk about how Google has destroyed your business. Google has NOT destroyed your business. If your business cannot survive without Google, then YOU have destroyed your business..

…Google is not responsible for the success or failure of your business. YOU are.

I was wondering why Google was flushing affiliates out of the AdWords system and not so much the organic results. This is, in my opinion, a possible reason why. Google is making room for itself. Time to focus a little more on paid search? What do you think?

I’ve touched on this subject briefly before but below, I have outlined a few more detailed ways that AdWords can (and should) be used for SEO.

(Please note that screenshots have been slightly modified to protect some sensitive data.)

1) For Keywords

Before you start to do any SEO on your site, you need to know what keywords to target (You can’t target them all). You could use one of the plethora of keyword tools out there but they are rarely accurate. AdWords allows you to test any amount of keywords you think are relevant to your site and get 100% accurate data on which ones you should be targeting. There’s no worse feeling spending months targeting a keyword for SEO and finding out that it doesn’t convert or it doesn’t drive any traffic. You can even filter out keywords that use a question mark so you can find questions to problems that your product or service can solve. You can then craft a blog post around this question.

2) For SERP CTR Improvements.

Any seasoned SEO knows that Google uses some sort of user data and probably uses organic SERP CTR data (and a recent patent looks like things are going that way) to judge how relevant an organic listing is to a keyword . Marcus touches on it here and Bill goes into patent detail here. With the CTR data and gains you obtain from a PPC campaign, you KNOW what page title and meta description to use to increase your organic SERP CTR. Just think, if you’re in position 3 and get twice the click through rate as the number 1 position over time, doesn’t it make sense that Google would factor this in? Simply pick the best headline from your best performing AdWords campaign and use that as your headline on your page. Pick the description of the best ad and add that to the meta description. This can be improved upon and changed over time too with zero risk. Use the AdWords Ad Performance Report for this (Make sure you filter the ads so that there is enough impression and click data to get a statistically significant ad, using AdWords Editor works great for this too). This also has the benefit of getting the perfect anchor text when someone links to you because many people will use the page title when linking out to you.

3) For Landing Page Optimization.

With Google’s website optimizer, you can quickly test and optimize your landing pages so that you don’t have to wait months for the traffic you would ordinarily need for optimizing with organic traffic. You can create a landing page that’s super optimized for your conversion type so that when the organic visitors do come, you’ll convert them at ultra high rates. This gives you a huge head start over your competitors. It also allows you to create personas that you can map to keywords or sets of keywords to each persona so you can create specific “SEO Campaigns” and more effectively structure a larger SEO effort.

4) For Geographic Targeting.

AdWords allows some pretty granular geographic targeting. Knowing which countries, cities or states convert best (by using a Geographic Performance Report in AdWords), can help you optimize your pages specifically for those locations. It can also help deciding which cities to target when running local business listing campaigns. This data can also help you decide if you should create location specific landing pages or not. Tailoring landing pages to a users location has proven extremely effective… How many really attractive people have you seen available for a date in *your area* lately?

5) For Link Ideas

The Google content network reaches 80% of all online users in the world! Running a campaign on the content network can generate a LOT of traffic but using Placement Performance Reports in AdWords, you can see where exactly you’re CONVERTING ads are running. You can use this info to strike a direct sponsorship deal with a particular site that’s sending you great quality traffic, or maybe you can write content for those particular sites and get a link back. Some people I’ve heard of have even bought links from those sites. An ultra relevant link that sends conversions. You wont get that from any directory links!

6) For Content Ideas

Further to (5), you can see a list of URLs that sent you converting traffic. You can look at the content of that URL and create some content (even a blog post) that has even better information than that page and solves the problem the visitor came to your site to solve to begin with. If that particular page of content was found organically, if you can make it better with your content and SOLUTION, you’ll have fantastic web content that attracts links naturally, more so than the original piece. You can even merge a lot of the ideas from different sources into one “super source” of content which will be seen as the ultimate resource and linked to as such.

7) For Large Scale Media Buys

While this is not strictly SEO related it’s very valuable. If your product or service has mass appeal, you can use the Google content network to test out creatives (flash ads, image ads, video ads etc.) to find out which ones drive the highest CTR and Conversion rate out in the wild. Now you don’t have to drop 25k on a run of network test just to find the best creatives. Anyone who has ever advertised on the Yahoo display network in the past can tell you, this is not for the faint of heart, although this has changed somewhat recently with the improvements of a FANTASTIC service called AdReady (More about this in another post). You can go into your media buy with what you KNOW are strong creatives.

8) Demographic Targeting Facebook

Again, not SEO related but a goodie. You can use an AdWords Demographic Performance Report and ad version reports to find out (generally) what age, sex and country demographics are converting on your site and the creatives that were associated. You can use this info to get a whopper of a start in facebook. Simply target the age, country and sex fields in facebook that matched your AdWords reports and use similar images/creatives for your ads. (You can pick up a free $100 facebook voucher code here). You can also use this demographic data for (7) above to give you that extra edge. Facebook uses CTR data and historical CTR data as a major factor on how much coverage you get so the higher your initial CTR for a new campaign the better. Start as you mean to go on.

9) For Link Exposere & Diversity

New website owners have always faced the chicken and egg problem. How do you get links to a new site if nobody knows about you to link to you? With AdWords, you can get immediate exposure to your content, product or service. With this immediate exposure comes the potential to be linked to which will ultimately improve organic search engine rankings (Be careful to redirect your users to the correct URL when using this method, you don’t want links to an analytics tagged URL or a URL with any sort of campaign tracking arguments in it). This is technically a “clean way” to buy a link. You can also buy AdWords traffic to your linkbait content. This is a slight variation on one of Gab’s tips in his fantastic piece on link buying here. *Image courtesy of SEO Book*

10) For Improving Your Conversion Rate

Yes, that’s right… improving your conversion rate. Microsoft/Atlas release an insightful piece of research (PDF) showing that and increase of up to 22% in conversion rate can be achieved by effectively synergizing search and display advertising. We have found this to be true not only with display and PPC search, but also with display and organic search. This information comes with a few caveats however:

Another point of interest is the impact of display ad frequency in driving conversion results for users exposed to both display and search. Again, the results varied by advertiser, but generally those users who viewed three or more impressions in combination with at least one search click had better results than those who viewed only one or two impressions. Both conversion rates and search click-to-conversion rates climbed significantly for these users, further suggesting the benefit of display advertising when paired with search. However, there is a point of diminishing returns when display ad frequency gets too high.

So there you have it. Ten ways in which AdWords (or any other PPC network) can help improve your search engine optimization. Do you use AdWords in any other creative ways to help improve your natural search engine rankings? If so, why not share them in the comments below and I will add more to the post (with a link) as they come in.

Note* I am fully aware that in a lot of cases, users who click on sponsored listings behave differently than those who don’t. Please use the above tips as guidelines and make sure to test everything for yourself.

In a lot of cases, it is no longer good enough to have a lot of inbound links OR a good looking website. You need both. There is also no point in having a website number one in the search results for a keyword if the traffic it brings just will not convert on your dated website. While constant hacking away at an already poor website may bring temporary relief, it’s just a band aid and will eventually be untenable.

Trent over at Blizzard Internet makes a very good point about how all the SEO tactics in the world can’t help a poor website. He goes into some detail on the stats but this jumps right out and should be highlighted.

… Sometimes they want to discuss SEO and are not open to discussing the overall problems with their website. Forget SEO for a moment, and consider that doubling the visitors to your website still won’t be profitable if your website doesn’t convert. It is the definition of throwing good money after bad… This hotel doesn’t need more SEO! They need to lower their 43% bounce rate AND improve their 0% conversion rate. They need a better booking engine.

Some web designers can even do a lot of damage to their clients online business if they don’t have at least a basic understanding of what I call “Core” seo. Adam has a great post on dangerous web design here where he states:

So what is there to learn from all this? At a minimum, this situation illustrates that knowledge of SEO is critical for anyone running a web design/development firm. But I would argue that this isn’t even SEO — it’s basic web 101. To think that companies are operating without this knowledge, and doing their clients real harm, is a little scary.

The emphasis above is mine because I think that is exactly what Eoghan and Ken were trying to get across in the SEO is Bullshit post here. While I do nott agree that SEO is bullshit (Bill pretty much put that to bed in his excellent “10 SEO Questions” post), I DO see their point. “Core” SEO is basic webmastering and web design 101. You’ll find it very difficult to make a website made completely with images or flash against a competitor with a well designed, standards compliant, accessible and structurally comprehensive website with logical internal linking and basic best practices kept in mind.

To all you small business owners considering getting a website built and asking yourselves “Do I need to redesign my website to rank in Google?” please remember to ask your web design company or web designer what they are doing to make sure your website is search engine friendly. To all you small business owners considering getting SEO “done” to an existing site, consider what I said above. All the SEO, inbound links or fantastic content in the world wont help you if you have a terribly inaccessible site.

This post may seem a little self serving but more and more we are not only having to redesign clients websites , but insisting on it. (We have now merged our web design service with our other offerings to be more in line with this idea). So before you even consider having an SEO company work on your site, make sure it’s ready to be worked on or it might end up costing you a lot more in the long run.

Finally, in relation to inbound links, a really good website design that pays attention to both style and standards can obtain a massive influx of high quality links and traffic by being included in the plethora of web design and CSS showcase galleries. These can be a huge boost to site authority and give a much need initial boost to any SEO efforts.

* This will be the final semi-self serving post of the year :) What do you think of the new design?

In a lot of cases, pay per click campaigns can give you some really valuable insights into the words that people use to find your site and ultimately become customers. In many cases, these words are quite long and were never phrases you were specifically targeting. Adwords for example can give you data on hundreds of CONVERTING long tail search terms. Once you know know what they are, you can simply craft a page specifically for those terms, focus on the on page elements, then sometimes all it takes is a new blog post linking to that page either internally or externally to get it into the number 1 position on the search engines. I wrote a post on the correlation between PPC and SEO a while back and I feel it’s still true today.

I do realize that optimizing for a search term that converts once every month may seem like a waste of resources in the short term but those rankings are easier to get and can add up quickly. To compete in a saturated market from the grass-roots level it’s essential. I also believe this method of growth and promotion is in line perfectly with what Matt Cutts (The head of search quality and webspam at Google) mentioned in the below webmaster help video in June. The video is only 87 seconds long but his point is clear.

Get the Flash Player to see this Google AdWords tutorial about building your keyword list.

Matt also reinforces this point again at his wordcamp presentation, (skip to ~29:30). He mentions specifically:

“Build up, build up, don’t over reach… you have to get there gradually”

“Start with a smaller niche then embiggen that niche”

“You’re writing about more and more important things and bigger niches and eventually, over time, people get to know you … they’re sending you links and LIFE IS GOOD.”

This method of building up very specific content should attract links naturally and over time build up the reputation and authority that your site needs these days to even have a chance in more competitive markets.

So we know that rankings matter. They matter a lot. There will never be a way to know 100% for sure where you rank for a given phrase but I think it’s pretty important to have as good an idea as possible so you can monitor the “success of your embiggening” (you can’t measure what you can’t track). I know a lot of people/SEOs are not fans of rank checkers but I think that if you monitor your rankings over local search engines over a long enough period of time, you get a good idea of how your doing and weather or not you need to focus more on the long tail or specific regions.

I wont go into too much detail about the variety of rank checkers available, Ann Smarty does a great job of that here but I will mention the one that we use here at Redfly. We use Advanced Web Ranking.

Advanced Web Ranking is website ranking software that allows you to track as many keywords as you see fit across every search engine imaginable, including every regional version of the major ones. The search engine database is updated almost daily and they even have the latest versions of Google caffeine and all it’s regional indexes included.

What’s even better is the fact that it uses the search engines API keys (You all still have your Google SOAP API keys right?) so you’re not violating any of the search engines rules about automated queries. The reporting is fantastic and you can easily see at a glance you’re overall organic visibility. The one problem I have with this application is that it only allows a single API key, I’d love to be able to enter multiple APIs, especially for each site. It’s expensive and not for everyone but for those serious about tracking rankings over multiple sites, I highly recommend it.

*** Edit: As noted in the comments below, the AWR search engine ranking software does indeed take the Google AJAX API keys.

Imagine if you had data on 1000 longtail keywords that only converted once or twice each year from your PPC campaigns. Each conversion is valued at say, €100. If you rank on page one for these results in the organic SERPs, chances are you’ll eventually get clicks and conversions. If you only get ONE conversion for each of these keywords again, that’s still €100,000. I’d be willing to bet you could generate relatively decent content for each of those terms for less than €100, especially if you are bootstrapping and especially if that content you are creating helps build your authority (see above). It’s a win-win-win situation. You’re creating content that you KNOW converts, that you KNOW will help build your authority (because you KNOW your customers convert on these topics) and that you KNOW is a worthwhile investment of time. It’s essential to monitor how you’re doing for these terms.

I know a lot of people will not agree with me in the value of tracking individual keyword rankings, they are indeed in a state of “everflux” (although longer tail term rankings tend to be a LOT more stable). But surely having a reasonable idea of how you’re performing holds value? Especially if you are entering a competitive market “through the back door” using the long tail method outlined above and in the videos by Matt.

What rank checkers do you use? Do you find they are a waste of time?

Google AdWords & Affiliate Marketing.

To be able to keep on top of the ever changing search marketing space, we absolutely have to operate our own sites. How can we help a client with their e-commerce site if we don’t have one ourselves or at least worked on one before? It would be like paying an accountant to do your accounts with no experience only after reading “accounting for dummies”.

To operate our own sites, we’ve had to create and build sites from scratch and use those sites to better understand what makes each search engine tick. We could hardly test sometimes risky techniques on clients sites now could we?  The lowest point of entry to do this is affiliate marketing. I have never spoken about affiliate marketing on this blog before, but I am going to today.

Let’s get this straight, Google most certainly DOES hate affiliates , to be more specific, affiliates that use AdWords and I completely understand why. Leaving aside the fact that a large majority promote some less than savory products or services (and sometimes outright illegal products and services) from Google’s point of view, it is NOT an affiliates job to help a searcher (their customer) to find a product or service, it’s theirs.

One of the most important articles I have read on Google’s view of affiliate marketing that sums things up has been AdWords Quality Score: Can Your Business Model be banned written by Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media. This article was WAY ahead of it’s time and if you are an affiliate marketer, I suggest that you read it if you use AdWords. The basic idea here for affiliates is to adapt and either change your business model or get the hell out. Rae Hoffman of Outspoken Media has the definitive guide on where to go from here with affiliate marketing. If you have not read this, you’re way behind. The days of affiliates providing no value making a quick and easy buck are long gone. If you’re not adding value, and a lot of it, you’re in trouble. I would also like to point out that the lines between Google’s paid and organic search policies is increasingly becoming thinner. What you could once “get away with” because you paid Google is no longer possible. PPC SEO is now real.

Advertisers Caught In The Crossfire

One of the benefits (and sometimes a hindrance) of being an AdWords qualified company is that we have direct contact with the AdWords agency team. We have a love-hate relationship with our Google reps and sometimes I have been outright rude to them (Sorry Guys!) because of their notoriously cryptic and secretive policies. But when you learn to read between the lines of what they are saying, their policies make sense and you can learn a lot.

Now, many “innocent” advertisers have been caught up in Google’s crackdown on affiliates using AdWords by getting “slapped” with €10 minimum bids (affectionately called a Google Slap), effectively making their accounts unsustainable. While I don’t agree with how they go about it, I understand why they do it. It makes sense to keep your “product” (AdWords) clean but doing it in Google’s stereotypical automatic way can cause a lot of false positives. If you are a legitimate advertiser caught up in a Google slap, there is something that you can do:

• Make sure that you have done everything you can to improve your quality score.
• Make sure you have no prominent affiliate links.
• Make sure any affiliate links are marked as “sponsored”.
• Make sure it is clear that your business model is NOT commission based. (In the traditional affiliate sense)
  
• Make sure that you have a physical address on your site.
• Make sure your site follows all quality guidelines. (As usual, this is only a TINY subset)
  
• Make sure your site is not a bridge page or a bridge site.
• Make sure you offer your own product or service.
  
• Submit your site for a manual review.

*If you are an affiliate, don’t bother submitting your site for a manual review, you’ll only make yourself look stupid. Google doesn’t want affiliates as advertisers any more. If you can’t read between the lines here, you probably shouldn’t be a PPC affiliate. The age of white labeling has begun ;)

Once a Google support rep has reviewed your site and is confident that you are not an affiliate, after a day or two, you should see your minimum bids go back to normal and your traffic flow again. For a more detailed breakdown of what I believe is involved in this “review” I would highly recommend joining the SEObook Community. There is some juicy… updated documents behind the scenes over there that can help a LOT in understanding what a “rater” is looking for.

Perry Marshall makes an excellent point in his Google’s secret criteria post for judging (and slapping) websites:

Might I suggest…. add “Would a Google rep send her grandmother to this site” to your bag of tricks and let’s all do our best to make the Internet a more trustworthy place.

Above all, don’t make Google look stupid and remember an adwords advertiser is not a Google customer, the average Joe Soap searcher is.

UPDATE: Looks like this is getting worse. The writing has been on the wall since I wrote this and now a lot more genuine advertisers are being outright “banned by the algo”. Barry has some coverage here and banned multi million dollar advertisers are having their say over on WebmasterWorld.

UPDATE 2: Google has just updated it’s “Website Types to Avoid” page here. Some notable additions pretty much in line with what I have been saying are:

Affiliate sites that the primary purpose of which is to drive traffic to another site with a different domain

Poor comparison shopping or travel sites whose primary purpose is to send users to other shopping/travel comparison sites, rather than to provide useful content or additional search functionality

I think the writing is on the wall. It’s only a matter of time before this sort of thing starts being inforced in the organic SERPS.

Two years ago (I think) when Google dragged it’s advertisers kicking and screaming into the new Quality based bidding system, the game completely changed. Google AdWords no longer operates on a “highest bid wins” system but on a rather confusing and sometimes illusive set of quality criteria.

Some people find it very difficult to get their heads around how this “quality” effects their bid prices and ultimately their ROI. Today, Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian has posted a fantastic video that simplifies the whole system and makes it easy for anyone to understand.

Get the Flash Player to see this Google AdWords tutorial about building your keyword list.

Easy to understand or what?

Now that you understand quality score a little better, realize how important it is to improve your quality score by increasing your click through rate and re-evaluating your landing page relevancy, what are you waiting for? Even if you increase your CTR by 0.01% a day over a month, that can be enough to bump your keywords quality score up and reduce your overall costs significantly.

Below you will find some screenshots of the new interface. Please note that I have removed any data that has identified the campaigns. These details are simply deleted and are indeed included in the interface. Please click images for full sized shots.

The new interface is a streamlined, ajaxified beast with a lot of new features. You’ll notice straight off the bat that the interface has been adjusted to look like Google analytics. In fact, the transition between AdWords and analytics is now seamless, complete with all the ajax progress animations. There is also an option to collapse the left sidebar (not shown) which includes a list of campaigns for easy access, similar to AdWords editor.

The one feature of note however is the new “networks” tab in each campaign. This tab lists the networks that your campaign is running on. Either search, search partners, content network and defined placements. The best part however is the content network automatic placements!

Previously, the only way to access this data was to through a tedious process of creating a placement performance report for the date range you wanted. Then you had to wade through the data with the awful pagination Google provides in it’s reports (what can we really do with 100 rows Google?). You also had to manually select your campaigns. Not any more.

Now you can see day by day metrics on each URL that your ads appear on the content network without running a placement performance report!

And that’s not the best part. With the new view, you can sort the columns in order of the metric of your choice, check the URLs that are performing to that metric and automatically add them to your placement campaigns! (Now called “Managed Placements” as seen).

To those of you who that were willing to put in the hard slog and suffer the sometimes agonizing wrath of the content network and placement campaigns you will realize how much of a fantastic new time saving feature this will be. This cuts out what can be hours of research time looking for decent performing placements.

The interface is still in very early beta. It errors out at least 2 times a session for me every time I have tried it. This has been a common complaint so I doubt it will be released any time soon.

Now, if Google could provide some cross segmentation options and integrate the bizarrely missing display ad builder tool, this will be an absolute hit. Great stuff Google!

Is anyone else as excited about this as I am?

Below, I outline five examples of ways you can increase your CTR without doing anything technical or magical. The ads are fabricated but the data is not. The ads are as close to the original as possible. Besides, you’re going to test the theory yourself anyway right?

1) Trademark Symbol/Registered Symbol.

While I have been using this method myself for years, Brad and Amber make some great points on this very topic. Not only can special symbols be used to increase your PPC CTR, but they can also be used to increase your organic SERP CTR. I could not agree with Ian Lurie more on his blog post predicting that organic CTR will matter a LOT in 2009.

2) Price In Headline

Adding the price in the headline is a great way to increase CTR. Be careful with this one though, if you’re not the cheapest, you’re CTR will suffer.

3) Seasonal Headlines.

Doesn’t matter if your product is not seasonal. If you sell blue widgets all year around, a headline like “Easter Widget Sale” will work great. There are so many different holidays, festivals and events that this can be used with. If you’re targeting locally, even better.

4) Trademark in Display URL Subdomain

While you can’t use most trademark terms in your ad copy, you can use them in your display URL.  Amber has a great post on why AdWords allows trademarks in the display URL here. Using the trademark in the display URL some argue confuses potential clickers into thinking that it is the “official” site of the trademark holder. Be careful with this one too… Google knows when a visitor clicks the back button on their browser!

5) The exact Keyword in the Headline.

An oldie, but a goodie. We all know that search engines BOLD your keywords when they match the search query. Having tightly knit adgroups will allow you to take advantage of this without having to use dynamic keyword insertion.

Remember, CTR for quality score reasons is only calculated on the exact match of the keyword and is only counted on the Google search network. This means that any increase in CTR from Dynamic Keyword Insertion does not improve your google quality score. CTR on Google search partners does not contribute to your quality score calculations.

For this example, we’ll use the trusted Google Content Network. For those unfamiliar, Google allows you to advertise using Adwords on three different “networks”. These are “categories” are the Google Search Network, which AdWords advertisers will be most familiar, The Search Partners Network which includes AOL and various other “trusted sources” and the Google Content Network which consists of hundreds of thousands of websites and domains running Google AdSense. For the sake of simplicity, I am leaving out print, audio and TV. What we will be focusing today is the Google Content Network.

Many advertisers either fail to consider buying additional domains to compliment their main one or don’t want the trouble of researching the value of the domain. With the Google Content Network, this is already being done for you behind the scenes.

The content network is, by default, run on all sources. This includes a plethora of relevant publisher websites as well as social networks, video portals and parked domains. We want to take a closer look at the latter.

It should be noted that Google give options to exclude most of these sources from within the AdWords console.

Assuming you are advertising on the content network and have your conversion tracking set up (you do have it set up don’t you?) you can use a rarely spoken about AdWords report called the “Placement Performance Report”. This report gives you insight into how your ads are performing on the different sources and gets as granular as the domain and URL of where your ad was served from.

When you run this particular report, you can choose to report and view on a variety of metrics. For the purpose of this post, we will only be looking at the domain, URL impressions, clicks, conversions and Value/Cost (Return On AdWords Ad Spend).

Below you will see an actual report run for one of our clients. As you can see, we have sorted the list by ascending conversion data. This is a report for ONE WEEK. Starting to see where I am going with this? For this particular client, the value for each conversion is between $97 and $227 so you can clearly see that the content network is working for them.

Great! We can see the content network is working well for this client. We can leave it running right? Well… let’s just take a look at what’s actually on “parked domain 1″. When we navigate to the site, we see a typical SEDO landing page with content network ads prominently displayed. We can also see the clients ad running in position #3. However, as with most/many SEDO landing pages that are only monetized through advertising while they are waiting to be sold, in the left column there is an offer to “Buy this domain“.

So this domain is for sale eh? If this domain is generating an average of six conversions per week for this client and it’s getting a lot of type in traffic, it must be worth something. Even sharing this domain with ten advertisers using AdWords, the value to this particular client is on the bottom end is $762 ($127 x 6) per week or $39624 per year! (assuming traffic is maintained AND that the client is still sharing with the other advertisers). We might be on to something. Clicking on the “More Details” link to buy the domain brings us to the following page:

So here we have a domain that’s generating $762 a week gross revenue and it’s for sale for $500? Do I need to tell you what happened next?

We advised the client and they purchased the domain the day of this report. Because we know which landing page was generating the conversions from this domain, the client simply did a 301 redirect to the landing page and let me tell you, they are reaping the rewards. They are getting an even higher than expected return because now they are not paying for the clicks to their site and are not sharing the page with 9 other competitors! Since the beginning of the year, they have purchased over 30 domains using this method.

Buying these domains that have type in traffic and that you KNOW convert (from your AdWords conversion data) offer a significant long term return on investment. So what are you waiting for? Go run your placement performance reports and see what money you are leaving on the domain table today! (before your competitors read this)

Aaron is considered an industry veteran and the “go to guy” for all things SEO related.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your site SEO book ?

I have been doing SEO for about 5 years now, and work about 6.5 days a week. My wonderful wife and I just had our first anniversary. :)

SEO Book was born as a blog covering SEO, and has morphed into a site which is more about search and online marketing in general, which offers a popular suite of tools and a training program.

Can you tell us how much of a difference switching from the ebook model to the online training model has worked out well for you and what was the one thing that tipped you into moving?

I think we easily have the best SEO community on the web. The pricepoint has simply filtered out the noise common at most SEO forums while lively conversation occurs daily. The one big flaw with the current model is that the members and I spend so much time inside the forums that little time is spent externally on marketing to bring new people in, so growth has not been fast but I would rather go for quality than size any day of the week.

I was an unhappy person with the old business model. It required me to answer questions for people who valued my time at $0, which lead to me having too many customers when we reached around the 13,000 mark. Plus as some of the sleazy email list spammer hype driven internet marketers started hyping SEO it lowered lead quality at the lower end, which was where my business model was situated. A business model that is scalable with 10,000 customers with less than 1% of the customer interactions not going well becomes simply unsustainable when it grows to 13,000 with 5% of the customers being not customers well aligned with your brand and strategy. I was doing so much email that I started to easily become rude and frustrated.

Many customers have told me that I made their business careers and made them millionaires, but as search grew more complex the market for people wanting honest advice moved beyond the $79 pricepoint the old business operated at. Ultimately I was serving the wrong market and lowering the percieved value of my product by being available so cheaply, even while competitors selling information products at 50x or 100x the price of mine were asking for the latest copy of my ebook before making their next info product, and lifting lines from my work and integrating it into their work.

The other thing that happened was that my sites that were 5% of my time started to become the majority of my income. It does not make sense to spend most your time on a job that does not make much money, especially if it is no longer enjoyable. And so changing the business model of SEO Book allows me to enjoy it again, while increasing the value to customers and not drastically lowering its revenues or drastically increasing the amount of time needed to maintain it.

Google is all over the place right now and it is looking like a lot of factors that once held weight no longer do and vice versa. What do you make of the current state of flux? Where do you see Google applying more weight?

I see a lot of people talking about localization becoming a more important topic. Google is placing a lot of weight on exact match domain names, and their current reliance on domain authority is springing up a bunch of general websites like eHow, Mahalo, Squidoo, etc.

The big thing to really look out for is arbitrary hand edits. If your site does not look good it might get edited out of the search results even if you offer the highest quality information in your space.

How effective do you think buying established websites is to SEO leaving the branding, customer base and community factors out?

Buying old sites based on their link equity is amazingly profitable. The key is to not be too drastic or spammy with the changes you make such that you can get many years of cashflow out of such a site.

Do you think that there are any on or off page white hat techniques that if over used (Think over use of the nofollow attribute, borderline excessive internal linking etc.) may trigger a flag at Google? Do you believe there is such a thing as an over optimization flag?

Sure. I think many people repeate keyword phrases more than is optimal, and some of my pages have got automatically filtered out for being too well aligned with a keyword. The key when that happens is to lower the keyword prominence and repetition – make sure there is some variance between your page title, inbound anchor text, and how you are using the keywords in page content.

Why do you think so many webmasters spend so much time and money *cough* on buying links when the cost of developing content that attracts higher quality editorial links is far less?

Man is inherantly lazy. Editorial links in many markets require building a brand and social interaction. That can be a slow and low ROI path that looks like there is no light at the end of the tunnel, especially if you are new to the social aspects of the web and do not have any experience with blogs and the like.

You offer a great Google Global Firefox extension and we have a suite of well linked to SEO tools. For you and I it is cheaper to create content that builds free links, but for most people on the web the ROI of such an experiment is not as obvious until after they experience it.

Also worth noting that at the corporate end there is also less risk to buying links, and many more people and hurdles in between the creation of a good idea and the finished product.

For those who say that SEO is “Bullshit” and that correctly designed, semantically sound design is all that is needed to rank higher than your competition, what do you say to them?

I made a site to prove them wrong. A semantically sound site that gets no search traffic, and gave it the name dollarseo.com. Please give it a look and laugh, but please do not link at it though or it will mess up the test. ;)

What do you say to the same group who think that SEO should not be a dedicated profession?

A non-trivial portion of the business world is driven by arbitrage. Some industries have licenses that require people to jump through hoops before they can profit in them, but many of the best things to arbitrage are new fields where guidelines are not fully established and the market is not well informed.

It does not matter that some people do not like the field of SEO. If done well it is both highly profitable and highly effective. If you pick the right products and clients it is one of the rare opportunities where you can help ensure that everyone wins.

Having said all of the above, SEO is becoming much more complex, and is becoming a subset of marketing. In some industries it requires the use of public relations, in others it requires the act of smart publishing, and yet in others it comes down to ad buying. Any single strategy can get you to the top for some keywords, but the more tools you have the greater the likelihood you can compete across many different keywords and categories.

From a client perspective I think if you sell SEO services it might be helpful to bundle them with PPC services. People looking for a consultant on PPC are looking for cost savings where they are already spending money. Whereas many people looking for SEO are looking for free traffic. This was one of the reasons why I thought my wife had a good idea in launching PPC Blog. Rather than catering to a market saturated with free misinformation with prospective clients wanting everything for free it caters to an audience looking to spend money.

Do you have any tips on ranking country specific domains/sites in multiple locations. For example, if I have www.mysite.ie and want to target the US, UK and Ireland? What approach would you take if starting from scratch and what approach would you take with an established site?

I have nowhere near the international experience that some great SEOs like you from across the pond, but if I was on a limited budget I would set my main market on the main domain name and use subdomains for other markets. If I were using one main domain I would try to build from the .com. I would also try to secure the other names in case I later wanted to change my strategy.

If I had more budget and knew I would market all the sites then I would get 3 domain names (1 for each region) and host each of them in their matching location.

In the coming years, what SEO techniques do you predict are going to become more/most popular with dedicated hard working SEOs?

I think SEO is really going to become more and more about public relations and social interaction. Today I read a post by a web designer talking about how you should aim for a 2% keyword density. He was no SEO expert, but because he was a popular web designer his post got hundreds of comments and many inbound links.

It is not what you know but who you know. What communities do you want links from? How can you integrate yourself and your business in them?

In your experience, what has been the TYPE of link that has been most worth your time acquiring?

Links that come as endorsements from trusted members of your community help with rankings, pay directly through sales and referals, and are hard for competitors to replicate. They pay 3 different ways and lead to additional links, plus they are beyond the reach of most competitors. Those are the links I really love.

Finally, how do you think the search industry, SEO in particular can move away from the “cowboy”, “get rich quick” and “snake oil” labels that so many low quality providers have caused all SEOs to be tarred with the same brush by default?

I think the only way this would be possible is if we made a group effort to highlight the sleasy stuff that Google markets in their paid ads and help rebrand their service such that we introduced opportunity cost to them for them trying to trash us. But it would need to be well organized to succeed, but from what I have seen most well known people in the SEO space are looking out for themselves, so I don’t think we would have any chance unless we decide to use a different label.

Many of the smartest and most successful SEOs have moved out of the SEO industry and are now web publishers building online brands for themselves. If you do great SEOs for others then eventually building your own sites and brands is a must from a profitability, income diversity, and a credibility standpoint. I still love the SEO field, but realize that it is not the path toward highest earnings for most as a service based model.

So there you have it. I hope some of those answers were as helpful and enlightening to you as they were to me. If anyone is on the fence about learning the ropes of SEO, I encourage you to check out the SEO training offered by Aaron. It’s worth every penny. Also, consider reading and subscribing to his SEO Blog and his new pay per click marketing blog.

I’d like to thank Aaron Wall for taking the time to do this interview and I look forward to meeting him at PubCon this year in Las Vegas.

Should you jump into social networking to promote your business? And if so, with so many options available, how do you choose which social networks to participate in?

Benefits of Social Networking

I’m not much of a supporter of diving into every new or large social networking environment or fad to promote a business. However, social networks do have some benefits that make them worth considering as an addition to your online PR efforts:

1. Social networks and microblogging services can serve multiple roles with a single tool. For example, you can network with colleagues, while also promoting offers or information to clients and potential clients of your company.

2. Social networking is cost-effective. Most networks are free to join.

3. Social networks and microblogging services can help you get news or a message out very quickly to a targeted audience.

Problems with Social Networking

Despite its benefits, there are also some drawbacks to social networking for promoting a business.

1. Social networking can be a productivity killer. Many businesses simply try to do too much – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc. The multiple updates aren’t always reaching different audiences, and it’s a waste of time that could be spent elsewhere if you’re simply targeting the same groups with the same messages, but in different locations.

2. It’s easy to get too personal, or too off-topic, when social networking, Twittering, etc. You may divulge more information than you wanted to (or than you should), and once you’ve said it, you can’t take it back. The instant gratification factor also makes it easier to communicate without thinking things through; contributing to negative “Web wars” at times.

3. The bulk of the population still hasn’t embraced these technologies, meaning your target audiences may not yet be well-represented there.

Choosing Social Networking Services for Your Needs

There are good things about social networking for PR. There are negative things as well. So how can you strike a happy balance? How do you choose the best social media communication tools for your business, without over-extending your resources to reach only a small portion of your audience?

1. Target, target, target! It doesn’t matter what the largest social network is if your specific audience isn’t represented there. Niche social networking tools may be a far better option than simply going with networks that always seem to be getting the buzz. For example, no network yet beats Myspace for promoting to musicians. If you’re trying to reach an adult audience as opposed to teens, you may be better off using a service like Gather.com. If you want to network with other professionals in your industry, LinkedIn might serve your needs more effectively. There are also smaller social networks targeted to very specific niches (webmasters, photographers, etc.). There’s no reason to try to “do it all.”

2. Understand the numbers. Don’t join a social network simply because they say they have X number of members. Those numbers mean absolutely nothing. What you should care about is not the total membership, but instead the “active” membership (and those specifically within your target audience – it goes back to targeting).

3. Get to know a network’s policies on promotion, as it applies to your plans. The last thing you want is to be labeled a spammer. Understand that these tools are more about networking, building relationships, and communicating than blatant promotion, as in marketing and sales.

No matter how deep you decide to delve into social networking and / or microblogging, always make sure you’re making the best use of your time, and reaching your intended targets.

As part of the Visa Business promotion, Visa are offering $100 USD in advertising credit to facebook users/advertisers. To get the free credit all you need to do is…

Update: We are now offering $100 to one lucky fan of our Facebook page each month. Simply “like” our page for more details.

Click here to enter our monthly $100 Facebook advertising coupon code giveaway.

Log into facebook and add the Visa Business Network App. Once added, Facebook will send you a coupon code with instructions on how to add the credit to your account.Perfect if you want to test the waters on facebook and perfect if you’re already spending a fortune with them. There’s more to PPC than just the big three :)

Seems like Alexia was WAY ahead of me finding this. Also, Master Mulley is running a competition for the best stats on a facebook campaign. Have a look!

UPDATE *** You can now receive this free facebook advertising code credit by following the instructions here.

With PPC, you can get detailed demographic data, hourly conversion data and of course what we are going to touch on here… typo conversion data.

PPC data comes with a huge bonus, conversion data. If you bid on typos, you can see what typos are actually converting. While the volume is usually a lot lower, over time, this conversion data can be very valuable in optimizing for organic search engine rankings.

Lets use the screenshot here as an example. If you were presented with this data, you can see that the search term “londkon hotel” over the past year and a half has had 314 conversions. With each conversion being valued at $80, that’s a little over $25000 in revenue for this “fictional” company.

If this “fictional” company was to organically optimize their organic rankings for for the search term “london hgotel” they would probably have seen zero results. If they had optimized for “londkon hotel” they would have seen some fantastic results. Assuming the organic number one position gets (a conservative) double the number one PPC result, that would be an additional $50,000 in revenue for this company. That’s just for one search term! More than likely, they wouldn’t have organically optimized for ANY typos.

Caveat: Bidding on typos in AdWords and Yahoo will usually result in a poor quality score for those keywords.

Now, if we take this data and write a press release, an article and a blog post all containing links to the company site with the anchor text “londkon hotel” that would probably be enough to rank their site for that search term seeing there is much less competition for it. Organic search engine optimisation without conversion data for each keyword is not where you want to be focusing your efforts. Most online companies engaged in active search engine marketing know that and focus on their core keywords. This leaves the competition in the typo landscape for that niche much easier to compete in.

So there’s another good reason why SEO and PPC compliment each other. So while you competitors are eating each other alive in the PPC Pirahna tank, take a step back and see how you can take advantage.

Before we start, here are three tips to save you time and get you the most out of your PPC campaign using this guide:

1. Download the free AdWords Editor tool from Google.
2. If possible, create a new account for your content network campaigns.
3. Download the free KeyWordPad tool from GoodKeywords.

We will first start off creating our campaigns in AdWords because the tools available make for easy creation here first and AdWords makes it even easier to export your completed campaign for use on other PPC networks. I would strongly advise against using AdWords starter edition if you can help it as it encourages “lazy” and hence poor performing account structure.

Step 1) – Account Structure Determination

The first step is to understand how your account will be structured. It is usually best to consider the product or service that you are offering at it’s most granular level and create your account like a tree. So if you have a site selling a software product or products, you should create a new campaign for each feature. For example, if you are selling some sort of image editing software, you should have a different campaign for “image editing” and a different campaign for “photo editing” and so and so forth. Inside each of your campaigns you should have generic ad groups (like a “cheap image editing software” group and a “buy image editing software” group) as well as an ad group for all the features relating to the root keyword (image editing). This may seem blindingly obvious but you’d be surprised how many advertisers just lump everything into a “software” adgroup with the default “campaign #1″ name. The tree should branch out immediately, more like a bush. So keeping image editing as an example, a single campaign will look like the attached image. Note, there are actually a few in this example.

Caveat. Each account is different. Splitting your account up into as many campaigns and as possible will give greater visibility but less general manageability. Find the right balance for you.

Step 2) – Keyword Research

The second step is keyword research. There have been a million posts on a million blogs about this topic, so I won’t go into it. Let’s just assume that you have generated a nice keyword list for each of your ad groups using your favourite keyword research tool. Wordtracker, SEO book’s KW tool, Keyword Discovery and HitWise are all great tools. Each has individual pros and cons but for now, compile your list an move on. We will expand on this later on in the campaign setup but for now, we should have as big a keyword list as possible with all the keywords and phrases not related to your business taken out and put in a separate “negative” list/file. We will also use this at a later stage in the setup.

Tip. There are literally hundreds of different ways to go about getting your first keyword list. Lisa Barone has a great article on KW research here. If you are new to PPC advertising, I suggest you read that before continuing.

Step 3) – Set Up Campaign

The third step in setting up your PPC account is creating a new search network only campaign. I wont go through the steps to create a new keyword targeted campaign but please look out for the options that are not set by default. The first setting you need to change is the network settings by removing the check from the “Content Network” checkbox. The content network can be very valuable so I do not recommend ignoring the content network completely. We will set up a new content network only campaign later or in another account. You also need to make sure that your ad serving option is set to “rotate” so you can split test your ads and your delivery method is set to “accelerated”. The last option may not apply to you if you are working with a very small budget, but in general, you want to max out your budget initially if you can afford it to get some numbers to work with.

Caveat. The search network is the only network we will be working with in this post. The content network is very valuable and should not be ignored but it should be treated separately. For now, we want to focus on the search network.

Step 4) – Build A Negative Keyword List

The fourth step is creating a new keyword list. A list of terms you do not want your ads triggered for. Google has recently removed/hidden it’s negative keyword builder so have a read of our negative keyword tips. You should have at least a few terms already from building your keyword list in step 2. You also know your business so sit down with your colleagues for 5 minutes and brainstorm some negative words too. Another tip is to run a search query report in AdWords if you are already running a PPC campaign and mine the negatives out of that. You can also go into your analytics package and look at what keywords people are finding your site for and take negatives out of that. For those queries in the search query report that Google does not want you to see, have a read of apollo SEM’s guide to extract all the data. Once you think you have all the negative keywords you can think of, add them to your campaign immediately. In my opinion no campaign should ever start without negative keywords.

Tip: Do a search for your main keywords on Google. Look at the first 50 results and try to identify possible negative keywords from the sites that are listed that are not related to your business.

Step 5) – Create Your Root AdGroup & Ads.

What we need to do now is create a default, generic adgroup and ad. The ad should be action oriented and describe your product. Create your ad with strong words and use our guide to link them words with a strong call to action. This ad is only going to be our default ad for setup. We will not be using this ad in production. It should accurately reflect your product or service so you do not start off with a poor quality score. So assuming we are setting up the “Image Resize Software” campaign, we create an ad with “Image Resize Software” in the title and at least once in the ad copy. No need to tweak just yet, this is only for setup. We like to call this initial adgroup “Campaign Name Root”. What we need to do now is dump all the keywords from our keyword list into this adgroup. There could be thousands, that does not matter. We will separate them all further on. The important thing is to setup this root campaign and have all the keywords possible thrown in. Once setup is complete, confirm all your actions and your campaign will go live. Pause this campaign immediately. We will be doing a lot more work on the campaign so we do not want it live.

Caveat: You may notice that a lot of your keywords have a poor quality score in this situation. This is normal. While you may not see this if your account has a lot of history, if your account is new or previously performing badly, this is common. We will fix this at a later stage.

Step 6) – Download Your New Campaign & Split It Up

Now we really get to have some fun. If you have not done so already, download AdWords Editor and download your account containing your new campaign with the root adgroup. What we need to do now is use the “keyword grouper” tool within AdWords editor to group our keywords by theme (Check the screenshot to see how to access this tool). When given the option to “copy text ads from a template” select yes as we will use our default root text ad for now. Finish the process and you will have lots of ad groups divided into common “themes”. Upload the new campaign with the newly separated adgroups to Google and log out of AdWords editor for now.

Caveat: When using the keyword grouper too make sure that you do not exlude “stop” words, especially the word “in” as this will prevent AdWords Editor from creating the “in” adgroup which usually refers to local searches. Local or location specific searches can be some of the most valuable.

Step 7) – Manually Create New Ads For Each AdGroup

The next step we need to take is to go back into AdWords and create new and custom ads for each adgroup. If you are stuck for time, create a minimum of two ads per group. If you want to start off strong, create at least four ads for testing. It is absolutely essential that we use the “theme” keyword in in our ads titles. AdWords editor makes this easy by naming the adgroup the same name as the “theme” word. The “theme” word should also be used in the ad copy if possible and absolutely in the display URL as either a “fake” sub directory or a “fake” subdomain. The reason for this is so that AdWords will assign a decent initial quality score to your keywords and so that anyone searching for your keyword will see the exact keywords they searched for bolded in your ad. You should set the destination URL to either the category/product page or if you have the time, an individual landing page for that product and keyword combined. Make sure that your ads are compelling, are grammatically correct and have a clear call to action. You may also want to take this opportunity to create some Dymanic Keyword Insertion powered ads.

Tip: If you do not want to or do not have the time to create an individual landing page for each keyword, use PHP (or any other server side scripting language) to dynamically insert the keyword into the general landing page for this adgroup.

Step 8) – Expand Your Keywords

At this point we like to go into each adgroup and use the AdWords keyword too to expand our keyword list. Copy all the keywords from your adgroup and paste them into the keyword tool making sure the “use synonyms” box is checked. The AdWords keyword tool will give you a list of possible other terms you might want to add to the adgroup that you may not have thought about (as well as give some additional keywords for your negative list). In some cases, you may also want to use the in built keyword pad tool to duplicate all your keywords using different match types. A lot of times different match types cost different prices and convert differently. Once you have a packed up your adgroups with relevant keywords, you are almost good to go.

Caveat: It’s always wise to build one campaign at a time and build your keywords and adgroups slowly. If there is a problem or a problem setting you will not have to spend hours manually going through all your hard worked on campaigns fixing a problem you could have found early on with patience.

Step 9) – Duplicate,Track, Monitor, Succeed.

Once you have all your search campaigns ready to go, your final step is to make sure that your analytics package is installed correctly and that your ads are showing up in the countries you are targeting. Insure that your conversion tracking is working correctly and place a test order if necessary. Once you are sure you are setup correctly, you can now duplicate your campaigns for content network use (Simply copy and paste in AdWords Editor) and for use on other PPC networks. Please note that your campaigns will almost always perform differently on the content network and on your other PPC accounts. You should modify your bids and check your status on these accounts individually.

That’s pretty much the typical setup for each of our campaigns. This may seem incredibly basic to some of our readers but time and time again we come across accounts that are so badly put together that it shocks us the owner continues to use it in the hope that their results will change.

People continuously ask, “Does Adwords/PPC Really Work?” and the answer is an overwhelming yes! As long as you are doing it right! Do you have any PPC setup tips that have helped you get the most from your PPC campaign?

The Harbour Master in Dublin’s city center will play host to food, drink and talk that was once a pipedream in our normal social circles. Kindly sponsored by the most fantastic hosting company in Ireland, Blacknight. If you can make it we will be meeting at 7:30PM. This is an open event and anyone can attend. The more names we can all put faces to the better. If you work with anything web related, please feel free to come along. A good time is guaranteed to be had by all*

The confirmed attendees are as follows:

Cormac Nolan ;)
Louie
Richard Hearne
Mark Walsh (I can’t wait to print out Google paid link guidelines and show to) ;)
Dave Davis
James Larkin
Allistar
Eoghan McCabe
Ken Stanley
Ciaran
Gavin Doolan
David Behan
Micky Wall
Gavin
Michael Flanagan

There is a continued discussion on the Irish webmaster forum here. Special thanks to Gavin Doolan for kicking this all off. Not too sure if any of the ladies are confirmed yet? I hope to see all you guys there.

*This is not a guarantee.

Because press releases are increasingly being used for their SEO benefits, many business owners assume that more is better, or that they should be on some kind of set press release distribution schedule. That’s generally not the case.

Sending too many press releases can actually damage your company (or site) reputation and credibility. Here’s why:

• You’re very likely targeting a similar, if not the same, audience with each press release you send.
• Sending multiple newsworthy press releases over time can help to keep your company’s name fresh in their minds.
• Sending too many press releases just for the sake of sending them (as opposed to disseminating real news) will also keep your company’s name fresh in their minds… just probably not the way you’re hoping for.
• If you put enough garbage in front of people, you’ll end up with a sort of “boy who cried wolf” syndrome when you have real news. Members of your target audience will now recognize your name, and immediately attach it to images of “fluff” instead of news, and you won’t get the coverage you otherwise might have. You’ll put yourself on the fast track to being ignored.

That’s not to say that a schedule won’t ever work; only that you shouldn’t send out a weekly press release just for the sake of doing it. In some cases it does work. Here are a few examples of cases where regular press releases may not have such a detrimental effect:

• Regular contests – If your company runs a monthly contest, and it’s big enough to be newsworthy (giving away a $10 prize each month really wouldn’t justify a press release each time), then there’s nothing wrong with sending a regular press release for each one.
• Regular product launches – I used to work with a company who released a new product every Monday. They would issue a release for each product launch, because each product (in this case new t-shirt designs) was directly tied to something relatively newsworthy that would appeal to their target audience.
• Regular research or reports – If your company conducts research and issues public reports on industry issues, and you tend to do this on a regular schedule (as in serious research, and not something like a casual Web poll), then you shouldn’t hold off on announcing your findings through a press release just to avoid regular distribution. It has news value, and in this kind of case, a regular schedule may even give people something to anticipate if you become known for their quality.
• Regular charitable efforts – If your company is involved with a long-term charitable endeavor, and you’re making significant progress (such as in raising funds for an organization) on a regular basis, it might be worth mentioning repeatedly (for example, if a company raised $10,000 for a charity in January and then $15,000 in February, sending a release each month probably won’t hurt).

The key is to know your audience. Know what they’ll care about, and try to issue press releases that will appeal to them – remember, you want them to help spread the word. The trick isn’t to send a lot of press releases for results… it’s to actually make yourself newsworthy. As long as you do that your press release distribution schedule won’t become an issue.

If you find yourself almost never having something newsworthy to say, start putting some thought into things you can introduce to fix that (get involved with a charity, run contests, participate in important events, etc.). Every company (or website, organization, or individual) has the capability of becoming newsworthy. Don’t let your chances pass you by.