Have you ever been too hot and turned down your air-conditioner only to find that you are too cold later? And then you turn the AC back up only to find that you are too hot later? The difficulty getting it just right is, in effect, what happens with over-optimizing search: The user logs in, changes all the parameters (keywords, bids, creative, etc.) to improve results and then finds that they did too much. So they log back in and make a number of similar changes to correct the campaign; except the campaign quickly goes back the other way. This happens to too many search campaigns and the following is intended to provide a brief guide on how to avoid over-optimization:

Scientific Method: This holds true for Adwords as much as science: Before taking action, create a hypothesis and construct the campaign in a way that lets you know if your hypothesis was right or wrong.

Learning: Whether a test succeeds or fails, knowing what does not work is just as valuable as knowing what does. Ensure that variables are isolated so that results – positive or negative – are definitive.

Historical Data: Do not continue to rely on results and assumptions that are more than 3-6 months old. Continue to re-test former winners and losers to ensure that optimization takes into account changes in the landscape that may impact current results.

Limit Variables: Tests should not overlap with each other. All testing variables should be isolated to eliminate the chance of misreading results and to drive learning more quickly. For example, a change in bid strategy should not be executed at the same time as a creative test if at all possible because it will be difficult to attribute a change in performance to the correct cause.

Limit Risk: Do not run tests on all keywords or adgroups at the same time because results will be unpredictable and there is always a chance that tests will yield poor results. Segment a portion of the campaign to test and run winners on the remainder of the campaign. The level of testing is dependent upon the marketer’s threshold for risk, but should be somewhere between 10-40% of budget. For example, if there are 10 adgroups spending $1000/month each, then segment 1-4 adgroups to be eligible for tests and run winners on the remaining adgroups. Rotate the 1-4 adgroups every time a new test is started to ensure that no overtesting of any particular adgroup occurs.

Click to read more posts about paid search or marketing tests.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Challenge: Thrivepoint was hired by Uplifting Athletes in June-2008 to help generate donations for an upcoming event at Penn State and to help launch the Ohio State chapter. Uplifiting Athletes had created a Google Adwords campaign with a Google Grant that was inactive due to poor Quality Scores. With the key events coming in July, Uplifting Athletes was under a looming deadline to generate awareness of the pledge drive and donations before and during the events. The situation was especially urgent given that the events only take place once per year ahead of football season.

Solution: Thrivepoint created a three-pronged strategy focused on achieving the following goals:

• Re-organize the account to immediately increase quality score and get the campaign live;
• Optimize Google Adwords creative, create new adgroups, and expand keyword lists to increase volume;
• Integrate social media to amplify the results of the campaign across the college campuses.

Implementation: On day one, Thrivepoint’s goal was to get the campaign live and generating traffic by end of day. Upon starting work, Thrivepoint discovered that the root cause of the low Quality Score was that keywords were bundled in one ad group with just one creative. A best practice for increasing Quality Score is to segment keywords into specific groupings with similar concepts and to launch at least two creatives in each AdGroup so that Google’s auto-optimization algorithm may select the best performing creative. Thrivepoint set to work segmenting the campaign’s existing assets into groups that would have a high enough Quality Score to go live. By afternoon, the campaign was live and generating visits to the website.

With the campaign live, the focus shifted to increasing volume and pledges for the donation drive. The campaign started with less than 20 keywords and just one creative. Thrivepoint expanded the number of keywords to 1,200+ across eight different segments. Thrivepoint also created a test matrix and wrote 50+ new creatives across the eight segments (~6 test creatives for each ad group) in order to maximize the learning and performance of the campaign.

Given that college campuses have been early adopters of social networks, Thrivepoint diverted portions of the campaign traffic from the uplifting athletes website to social networks so that results may be amplified by the supporters of the cause. To implement this approach, a portion of campaign traffic was diverted to Facebook to allow people to donate via Facebook Causes and to ‘Become a Fan’ of the Uplifting Athletes group. The goal was to encourage participation by users so that messages would be published in their Friend Feed to people’s social circle.

Part of the campaign was also diverted to YouTube for users to watch Uplifting Athletes videos and to encourage users to embed the videos on their blogs and social networks to share with their audience.

Results: Within just a few days, the campaign went from not live due to Quality Score to generating traffic to generating viral response. The end result of the pledge drives was a success with Penn State giving more than $75,000 to Kidney Cancer research. The Ohio State launch was also a success with more than 60 student-athletes pledging their support and participation in generating donations for Kidney Cancer research. The results were accomplished in less than 4-weeks time from start to finish.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free needs assessment, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

One of the key tools in an advertiser’s toolbox is the “cookie.” Cookies are a common component of most website tracking and online advertising targeting systems and are defined as: “A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.”

The primary use of Cookies in marketing has been to determine the value of a particular advertising buy using a methodology called, “closed loop marketing.” Closed loop marketing assigns a cookie to each user who sees or clicks an ad; the cookie is then used to determine if that user later purchases at the website. Closed loop marketing math works like this:

Ad Spend / Purchases (or leads) = Cost per Order

With a cost per order (or other ‘cost per’ metric), the marketer can rank their different buys and make decisions about how to improve their program.

So how does this all matter to Line of Sight Marketing? Because there is a debate about how long a cookie should be active. The reason is that many marketers know there is a limited time that one person remembers an advertisement and they want to limit the amount of credit that ad receives by using an expiration date. For example, if a person sees an ad 95 days ago, a 30-day cookie would not give credit to that advertisement if the user later visits the site and makes a purchase.

The problem arises that by expiring the cookie, the marketer has lost sight of someone whom they have already started a relationship with. There is no question that there is an expiring value associated with a particular media placement and advertisement’s results. However, when the cookie expires, it also expires the intelligence that you have about that person’s preferences and response to a particular message. Because most systems assign only one cookie for media tracking and creative intelligence, when the cookie expires, so does the intelligence.

To maximize your line of sight, cookies for creative intelligence should be separate from media and never expire so that the marketer will gather an ever-growing set of intelligence to inform and improve results with.

Evergreen Creative Cookies Use Case: Bob is browsing the web in July and notices an offer for a new Widget A from Company X. He looks at the ad with interest but does not actually click or visit the website. He later forgets about the ad. The tracking system sets a cookie on Bob’s computer to indicate he saw an ad for the widget. In December, Bob is browsing the web and again notices an ad from Company X. What ad should Company X show Bob now? The potential scenarios are:

• Scenario A: With an expiring cookie, Company X does not know that Bob already saw an ad for Widget A in July. The system shows the same ad Bob saw in July and the result is the same — no click, no visit.
• Scenario B: With an evergreen (non-expiring) cookie, Company X knows that Bob saw an ad in July and did not click. The system instead shows Bob an ad with Widget A offering a 10% discount or a different ad with Widget B featured. With the evergreen cookie, the marketer employs a more intelligent creative program that allows them to better maximize their advertising budget.

There is a nascent set of solutions out there that are starting to separate the media and creative cookies so that marketers can maximize their line of sight. Two to keep an eye on are ChoiceStream RealRelevance® Advertising and Atlas Engagement Mapping.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free needs assessment, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

“Designed for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, Google Grants is a unique in-kind advertising program. It harnesses the power of our flagship advertising product, Google AdWords, to non-profits seeking to inform and engage their constituents online. Google Grants has awarded AdWords advertising to hundreds of non-profit groups whose missions range from animal welfare to literacy, from supporting homeless children to promoting HIV education. Google Grant recipients use their award of free AdWords advertising on Google.com to raise awareness and increase traffic. “

Google was recently shown to have more than 70% search engine market share and is routinely touted as marketer’s #1 performing advertising placement. The upside is the program is free, the downside is that there are some limitations and hurdles to getting it to work properly. Whether you have a Google Grant or want a Google Grant, here are three things to look out for with your Google Grant program:

Application: Google reviews applications each quarter and you will find out within 6-months if your application is approved. The first step is to create a well-crafted proposal that clearly outlines to Google how you will use the Google Grant and that you are an Adwords expert. To increase your likelihood of approval, key in on the specifics such as campaign objective, target audience, sample advertisements and a keyword list. Make sure to spend time reviewing the Adwords best practices documentation that Google provides so that you can submit your best application the first time.

Getting Live: Once approved, you need to design a campaign that will compete in Google’s open and competitive marketplace where your ads will compete against other Google Grant recipients and paid advertisers. Google utilizes the Quality Score to evaluate your campaign’s advertisements and keywords against the competitive set before allowing the campaign to go live. Google Grants puts constraints on your campaign – maximum cost per click, maximum budget, Google.com only distribution – that make it harder for your campaign to achieve a Quality Score high enough to have Google approve the ads and post the campaign ‘live’. To get your campaign competitive and live requires extremely tight Adgroup definition with explicit tie-ins between the creative and the keywords – the more specific the better.

Utilizing Budget: Google grants you a set budget per month (often set to a daily budget) which allows you to purchase clicks up to that limit without incurring any actual cost. If you do not use your daily budget, the budget does not roll over to future months. It is imperative to maximize your campaign’s performance so that you can utilize 100% of your Google Grant. Given the constraints on cost per click and distribution that Google Grant recipients have, utilizing the maximum budget often becomes a major hurdle. For example, if you receive a $10,000 per month Google Grant and spend $150 per day, you would be leaving $65,250 per year on the table. And if for every dollar spent, you generate $5 in donations, the total loss could be >$325,000 which is a significant sum for any organization. Ensuring that you use every dollar of the Google Grant should be a key goal of the program which requires ongoing attention paid to optimization, budget and bid management.

Thrivepoint offers a service, Thrivepoint for Google Grants, which helps you in each of these three stages of the campaign – application, setup and program optimization. The program is designed specifically for non-profits looking to maximize the utilization of their Google Grants budget.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free consultation on your marketing efforts, please download the service fact sheet or contact a Thrivepoint advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Whatever approach you have heard in the past, its worth considering a completely unique approach to Google budgeting – demand-based budgeting.
Demand-based budgeting is based on the amount of demand for a product or service at any given time. The budget is allocated to placements immediately in response to a customer’s request for information or other question. Google (and other search engines) are the perfect laboratory for this type of budgeting given the nature of keyword searches and the technology used to buy the ads.

Whereas many forms of marketing are based on reaching people of certain demographics or behaviors, search marketing is based on responding to a customers expressed need or want and the the following three steps will help you set the right demand-based budget:

What is your sales goal?
One of the most important steps in setting any marketing budget is to first determine your goals and objectives. How many sales do you want? What is your target margin per sale? How much room does marketing have to contribute to each sale?

The key reason this step is important is to establish goals and governing metrics for your spend. If a DVD player has a 15% profit margin, then it is likely not in your favor to spend more than 15% of the retail price of the DVD player per sale. Many budgeting methodologies build off this same premise but most stop here, but don’t stop here!

With demand-based marketing, you are targeting the market’s pent-up demand. Setting goals is critical to determining if there is enough demand in the market to reach your goal or if the market is too competitive (ie. expensive) to reach your goal. The next two steps help you determine how your goals map to the demand in the market and if market demand is not quite up to what your expectations are, how to determine where latent demand exists.

Understand your target customer’s problems and then choose keywords
Unless you are blessed with a ubiquitous brand like “Coca Cola”, “McDonalds” or “Wal-Mart”, most customers may not have heard of your company, product or service and as a result will probably not express themselves uniformly. To make sure you respond effectively to the universe of pent up demand in the market, target a customer’s problems/questions in their language and present your company’s products and services. Using a DVD player as an example, Customer problems may be…

• Explicitly known, such as “I need a DVD player” or
• Implicitly known such as “I want to watch a movie” or
• Latent and unknown such as “I am bored and do not know what to do”

Not only that, customers have different vocabularies that they use to express this pent up demand. Vocabulary variations have important implications for the demand-based marketer. In the above example, if you are selling DVD players, and focused your marketing only on ‘DVDs’, then you would miss up to 78% of the traffic in the marketplace or up to 132 Million searches per month:

• Do they search for “DVDs”? (37MM queries per month)
• Do they search for “videos”? (68MM)
• Do they search for “movies”? (55MM)
• Do they search for “”films”? (9MM)

Tailoring your overall campaign (and its messaging) to fit the customer need and vocabulary helps you increase your reach and sell to your customers.

To get started, use Google’s keyword tool to build a keyword list. Spend some time working on a number of different variations. Build the list to be targeted specifically to your product and service but expansive enough to include the variations that different customers might use when searching for something they might not know of yet.

Determine how much room you will give the competition to maneuver and then set your budget
The demand-based marketer knows that their targeted keywords reach potential customers that just need to see their offer before they become a paying customer. Much like you would not let your competitors steal your customers right before they walk in your door if you ran a retail store, why let your competitors do the same when customers are searching for products and services that you offer.

Use Google’s traffic estimator tool, to determine the traffic available and cost per click of each targeted. Then rank how valuable the traffic for each keyword is to your business success. Many search marketers do this by running active campaigns to determine how “a keyword performs”. This reactive approach lets you utilize real data to determine how well a keyword performs. An overall best practice, Thrivepoint also recommends proactively identifying high value keywords that are critical to business success.

The exercise is not intended to force you to max out your spending. Instead, it is intended to focus your efforts back on the sales goal. If a keyword is valuable enough to purchase, then ask yourself, why wouldn’t I purchase all traffic available? This part of the exercise helps you understand your real upper limits on the budget and lets you tie the results back to the sales goal. Keep in mind organic search listings will command the majority of clicks and it will be critical to get placement on target keywords there as well.

All budgets usually have upper limits and what ever their cause, cash flow, performance, expense, etc., using these three steps will help any marketer build a more targeted Google budget with direct marketing performance and demand based response at the core of the campaign.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free consultation on your marketing efforts, please contact a Thrivepoint advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Google’s Quality Score is a generic name for a number of different calculations. Quality Score is used to determine:

• An advertisements eligibility for placement
• The keyword’s minimum bid
• An advertisement’s position on a particular keyword

Each of these factors has slightly different calculations to determine the outcome. Whether you are managing a 100, 1000 or 10,000 keywords, here are seven things to do and not to do when managing your campaign:

First and foremost, understand that Google is a business: Google makes money when users click on ads. A higher click rate is good for users because it means that they found your ad relevant and it is of course good for business because Google earns money for each click. Ads that have low click rate or a likelihood for low click rate, have low Quality Scores. If you can find ways to increase the likelihood of your ad being clicked while following Google’s editorial rules, then your Quality Score will be high enough to keep your ads active and perhaps lower your cost per click.

Do not use just one AdGroup: Given the complexity of managing a search campaign, it is easy to assume you can use just one AdGroup but this is a leading reason for campaigns that have trouble generating strong Quality Scores. Google evaluates the keywords, creative and landing page in the AdGroup to determine the theme and if each is relevant to each other. When all keywords are placed in one AdGroup the theme is not apparent and as a result, it is difficult for the system to determine which keywords and creative are relevant to each other.

Always separate keywords into different concepts: The more finite the concept, the higher the likelihood for success. For example, separating ‘disease’ related keywords from ‘hospital’ related keywords would allow more relevant creative that draws a higher click rate.

Searching for ‘local hospitals’ with a creative that says, ‘Learn about Heart Disease’ is not as relevant as a creative that says, “Find a Hospital”. Alternatively, a user searching for ‘heart disease’ is more likely to click on an ad that says “Learn about Heart Disease’ than on an ad that says, “Find a Hospital”.

Be as finite as possible in keyword segmentation: Using the example above, seperate the concepts of “disease”, “illness” and “sickness” into three separate AdGroups. This enables your creative to key in on the language that the user has entered into the search query. Someone searching for “kidney disease” would see a creative that says “Learn about Kidney Disease” while someone searching for ‘kidney illnesses’ would see a creative that says “Learn about Kidney Illnesses”. This creates a relevant user experience where the user is more likely to click on your ad.

Do not forget a call to action: Google loves a good call to action because it helps increase the likelihood of a user clicking on an ad. A call to action can be “join now”, “order now”, “register for free”, etc.

Do not make generalized statements in creative: The goal is to promote action. Many companies want to describe their offering in the creative, but Google rewards those companies who generate action. We think of titles as ways to summarize a theme like a magazine or book title. In advertising on TV or magazines, the title is often a catchy phrase to capture attention. In search, the title makes all the difference. It needs to be action oriented and provide the strongest response to the user’s query. Statements do not provide urgency for the user to click your ad and therefore will likely lower your Quality Score.

Last, and perhaps most important, always respond to the search: Most advertising is intended to interrupt. TV commercials, print ads, billboard ads, etc. are intended to capture your attention while you are doing something else. Search ads are different because they need to capture someone’s attention while they are already looking for something. In that respect, your ad needs to stand out still but instead of interrupting the user, it needs to stand out and say, “click me because I have the fastest or best solution to get what you are searching for”. The ad needs to provide utility for the user. If it does not, it is likely the user will ignore it and go to a more useful ad. When that happens, your Quality Score drops.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free consultation on your marketing efforts, please contact a Thrivepoint advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Great campaign results are the goal but if you do not understand why results are good or bad, then it will be impossible to scale your marketing for profitable growth. Testing provides you a framework for understanding why your campaign behaves in certain ways so that you can continually improve and scale your campaign profitably.

There is not a simple formula that you can apply to magically create great search advertising results, but here are five standard practices that you should incorporate into your Google Adwords practice to test and improve results:

1. Segment and Define the Variables: The key is to limit the variables between creatives so that you can understand why one may perform better than another. We recommend that you start with creative that has different titles and the same description and display URL. Using the different titles as the variable will help you understand which messages are driving the desired campaign results while using the same description and display URL limits the variables. Creating a list of benefits, features, customer needs, customer pain points, etc. as it relates to your service or product is a great place to start segmenting. As you start to learn about which messages work, you can begin experimenting with different descriptions.
2. Choose Your Success Metric: Every campaign has an objective (sales, leads, etc.); the purpose of the metric is to assign a quantifiable value to the successful achievement of the objective and use that to govern decisions made about the campaign before and during its run. For example, while the objective of the campaign might be to drive leads, the success metric states that the goal is to spend no more than $x per lead. The success metric helps you understand where money is being spent well.
3. Track your results: Tracking is the mechanism used to understand if the campaign is meeting its success metric. If the success metric can not be tracked on a daily basis, then either new tracking is required or the success metric needs to be adjusted. We recommend using Google Analytics – it is free and easy to install.
4. Statistics: This is your silver bullet. Utilizing statistics, you can determine with 99% certainty that one creative message will always perform better than the other. And by using statistics to continually monitor performance and evaluate tests, you can continually be improving your campaigns with certainty. Statistics is critical because it takes the guess work out of the evaluation. Often times creative will vary in performance but in many cases the variance might not be wide enough to justify any change – statistics helps you understand if the variance in the creative’s performance is real or not.
5. Practice Patience: The hardest part about creative testing is waiting it out. In many cases, the results will be below expectations and you will want to turn it off. Or sometimes it greatly exceeds expectations and you want to do more of it! Hold on tight and wait for the statistically valid signal that the results are in fact real. The tendancy is to ‘optimize’ the campaign each day when in fact, the best marketers are testing, reading results, and adjusting every day. The big difference is that at the end of each day, when you run a smart testing regimen, you know when, why, what, how and where your campaign got better and will get better – and that makes all the difference in the world.

A note about Auto-Optimization: Automated optimization tools, like those provided by the search engines or through third-party software, offer marketers an opportunity to improve the results of the campaign and to save a lot of time. The testing approach recommended in this post can be applied in conjunction with many auto-optimization technologies. Just remember, the goal of testing is to drive great results and provide the knowledge and understanding about why the campaign performs as it does.

If you need help setting up or managing a rigorous testing program for your Google Adwords creative or any other marketing program, contact Thrivepoint and we will be happy to assist you.