Search Engine Monkeying

If you’re using Google Local Search as well as a national campaign, there is a little fact you should know.

Google ranks Local Search above a nation-wide search regardless of the quality score.  What this means to advertisers is that their local search will trump their national search despite quality score and bidding.  If your nation-wide search has a higher quality score and appears in the third position and your local search has a lower quality score and shows in the seventh position, the local search will show to users despite the quality score or bidding of the national campaign within that local area.

Theoretically, the relevance of the local search will become better because the ads for that area can be personalized and users will see the additional copy and click on the ads.  The quality score should improve. At the beginning of the campaign be aware that there will probably be degradation until the local quality score improves.

There is no way I know of to prevent this from happening.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Learned an interesting bit of information when I visited Google on Thursday.

Most people understand and use to their advantage the fact that if you have the same keyword in the same Google account, the system will only display the most relevent ad with the highest CPC.

Additionally, if you have two accounts that have the same keywords in them, if both accounts have the same Display URL, Google will run the ad in the account with the most relevent AdGroup with the highest CPC.

I plan on using this technique to phase out old bloated legacy accounts with new streamline Google accounts without comprimising traffic or quality score.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Ad Comparator
Taguchi-Based Ad Optimizer (Free)

This tool is incrediable.
1) Choose the number of elements that you want to test. The AdWord Ads, I would choose 3 Elements.

2) Choose the different elements you want to test; Headline, Description, and Display URL for example.

3) Ad Comparator will arrange the different elements into a variety of ads.

4) Make sure your campaigns are set to Rotate Ads and create your AdGroup Ads based on Ad Comparators guidelines.
5) After your done testing the ad, input the results and the site will show the rank, best option, and the influence of each element in the ad.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Happy belated five year birthday, Google AdWords (February 23, 2007).

Popularity: 6% [?]

It looks like Google implemented more changes in their AdWords around last Friday that changed the landscape dramatically this week. I’ll get into the advantages of separating your content and search campaigns in a later post, but it looks like, if you were using this strategy, you avoided the blunt of the blast. A lot of our competitors’ ads simply vanished this weekend.

It sort of sucks because I’m out in Palo Alto this week and hoped to meet with our Google rep. But after this shock wave, all I have been getting back is a voicemail stating “advertiser support is unavailable.”

I’m still amused most of my competitors’ ads disappeared.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Everyone probably all ready knows how to do this but I thought I would share it anyway.

1) Upload a test campaign, Order (AdCenter’s equivalent to an AdGroup), some keywords, and some ads.

2) Second, download the campaign from AdCenter.

3) Format your campaigns to match the semantics of the AdCenter download

4) Lastly, upload the new document into AdCenter.

Sure beats reading MSN’s crazy technical help files and documentation.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Usually, I don’t like to vent and would rather come up with solutions then complain about problems but I’m just fed up with MSN AdCenter.A while ago I uploaded a variety of campaigns into there system and that went well enough. The structure was similar to Google. The import went well enough, the mechanical part of the experience. From there it just went DOWNHILL.

Slowly, my keywords started to get rejected. Not all of the keywords. If there were 10 keywords in an Order, then five might be rejected. The reason they were getting rejected was the website copy. Why didn’t they reject ALL the keywords in the Order? Why only five? It doesn’t make any sense?

I spent some time checking out their editorial guidelines and these are some of the conclusions I drew that may have affected the account:

1) The first reason they gave was that the page contained “military references”. The site was about attacking weight loss and the only sentence that might have been flagged was a metaphor.

2) Second, there may have been embedded <div> tag, which to the untrained eye, may have looked like a pop-up. It was a coupon for free shipping that popped up in the corner of the page, hovering over the text, for new customers.

I would call up and talk to a representative about the problem and they would agree with me that there was nothing wrong with the Order or copy. But then, AdCenter’s appeal process is just a mess. You’d have to have an Account Rep email you because they didn’t have an email contact on their site or an online upload form (I think they had online contact form but no file upload). Then after a week of no action, I’d call them and they’d say they had never received the file.

All in all, the process is just frustrating and it seems that everyday, I’ll get a message that a couple more keywords have been deactivated. I’m spending between 15k and 25k a day at Google and I can’t even get an account rep at MSN.

On they other hand, I think that most advertisers are as frustrated as me. Competition is really low and the ads have a really good click through rate. I’m going to try to continue to work with them, but AdCenter is just a huge pain.

It’s interesting to think that MSN created their own barrier to entry for advertisers by having such a messed up and obstinate advertising process.

Popularity: 14% [?]

While Google does not allow different Display and Destination URLs, Yahoo Panama has not caught up and still allows you to use different Display and Destination URLs. As I posted before, according to my tests, a relevant Display URL can increase click through rate by .5%. So it’s worth checking out and trying a number of different possibilites for your Display URLs.

Additionally, even if your using Google, there are a lot of different ways to present your Display URL and it is worth testing to see what is the most effective.

www.searchenginemonkeying.com
www.SearchEngineMonkeying.com
searchenginemonkeying.com
SearchEngineMonkeying.com

Popularity: 10% [?]

I think eventually Google will have to rewrite the rules on this one but for now, it works. Ever since Google really started cracking down on ads where the Display URL and the Destination URL didn’t match, I have been looking for a way around it. Our ads with really catchy display URLs generally have a click through rate that is .5% higher then our standard Display URLs.

I got our hosting guy to set our server to do wildcard subdomains. So the servers setup is comparable to *.website.com. Keeping in mind that the Display URL can only be 35 characters, I started writing subdomains that read like an additional line of copy.

• FindTheTruth.Website.com
• MoreInfoAt.Website.com
• ChicksDigMe.Website.com

Unfortunately you can’t use _ in the domain name but the message is still pretty readable.

The wildcard feature will even work if the consumer types in the wrong subdomain.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I’m not a big Yahoo user and I really didn’t start analyzing the site until Panama came out but I noticed something interesting about the structure of Yahoo’s Search Results page that allows you to dominate the SEM listings.

When you type in a high traffic keyword, Yahoo usually displays a group of links above the results labeled “Also try:” These links are terms that Yahoo feels is closely related to the original high traffic keyword and that consumers may use to drill down their search results. The thing is, some of the terms are labeled pretty strange and, more important, Yahoo puts the term the consumer clicks on directly in the search box and returns the results related to that term.

I used a mind mapping program called FreeMind to create an image that represented Yahoo’s link network associated with the main keyword. After I had it all mapped out, I went back and was able to create a campaign and ad groups directly related to these terms that Yahoo places above the search results.

Using this method I was able to totally dominate the market I was advertising in and the keywords barely cost anything. The only downside is that Yahoo is always updating the links so you have to keep an eye on them but for a couple hours work, it was well worth it!

Yahoo FreeMind Map

Popularity: 14% [?]