AdWords advertisers are often faced with the challenge of determining whether or not to advertise for their AdWords campaigns keywords which have clicks and costs, but no conversions. Without knowing the value of the keywords, an advertiser can unwittingly:

• Overbid on specific keyword terms – Not knowing its value might lead to wasted advertising dollars and unqualified traffic.
• Underbid or pause specific keywords – Not knowing its value might lead to limited exposure for advertised keywords, resulting in missed conversions and revenue

This article discusses two options to determine the value of these keywords and better manage your AdWords campaigns, resulting in qualified traffic, conversions and high ROI. The two options are:

• Tracking Engagement Metrics goals using Google Analytics and AdWords
• AdWords Search Funnel report

Tracking Engagement Metrics goals using Google Analytics and AdWords

Google Analytics has improved its goal tracking, allowing advertisers to track Time On Site and Page/Visit. These metrics highlight the level of user engagement on your website for the keywords you are advertising through AdWords and other search engines. These metrics can be used to determine the value of the keywords you are advertising for.

The advantage of Goals is that they can be imported into Google AdWords. That means that you don’t have to access your analytics data separately to determine the performance of keywords. Secondly, seeing the keywords (along with CPC and other visitor engagement metrics) tracked as goals allows you to more easily determine your keyword performance and to manage bids.

Step 1: Ensure your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts are linked. Check the following link for more info: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55507

Step 2: Determine the base line or reference value to be set as goals for these engagement metrics using:

• Your own top performing keywords’ engagement metric values
• Website averages
• Industry averages (obtained from Google or 3rd party data)

Also, determine the dollar value for the respective goals, based on your business data.

Step 3: Log in to your Google Analytics and select the Goals tab. You will find the various goal types. Google Analytics gives you the option to set up multiple goals, so you can set both Time On Site and Page/Visit, and their goal values as previously determined.

Google Analytics Goals

Step 4: Log into your AdWords account, click on Tools and Analysis, and select Conversions.

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking

Step 5: Under Conversions, select Import from Google Analytics and import the respective goals into AdWords.

Importing Goals in to AdWords

AdWords pulls data from the day you started importing Analytics goal data. This means that you won’t get any previous (historical) data. Now you can use the imported data to determine which keywords brought in qualified traffic by analyzing the engagement goals – Time On Site and Page/Visit.

In general, the higher these metric values, the more valuable the keywords are. But this may not always be the case, depending upon your business and website objectives. So verify them; use this data wisely to determine the value of the keywords with no conversions, and bid effectively.

Search Funnel Report

Google AdWords attributes conversions to the last keyword, and doesn’t attribute any conversion value to other keywords that helped lead to the final conversion. Let’s say you offer B2B lead generation and marketing automation services. Business buyers spend time researching for their needs and finding solutions to their problems, using multiple search queries over a period of time before contacting the vendor.

In the example below, the buyer starts his research with a general search query based on his needs/problems, discovers marketing automation, investigates further, and finally converts for the keyword phrase Marketo Consultant:

• lead generation best practices
• marketing automation
• marketing automation software comparison
• marketo marketing automation software
• marketo consultant

AdWords attributes the conversion to the last keyword only, which is marketo consultant. As an advertiser, you will tend to bid high on the keyword that converted based on AdWords data. What about keywords that have generated clicks and costs or impressions, but no conversions?

How do you determine their value and bid more effectively?

Search funnel report helps advertisers understand how your target market searches for products and/or services, offering detailed conversion funnel data. You can use this report to determine the value of numerous keywords within your campaigns that didn’t generate a direct conversion, but did assist in the conversion process.

These reports also provide valuable information to help you understand your target market’s buying cycle (not discussed in this article). Following are the steps to download and analyze search funnel reports to help determine whether or not to advertise on non-converting keywords.

Step 1: Click on Tools and Analysis within your AdWords account. Select Conversions, and then click on Search Funnels.

Google AdWords Search Funnel

Step 2: Click on Assisted Conversions within the search funnel navigation.

Google AdWords Search Funnel Assisted Conversions

Step 3:  You have two tabs – Click-Assisted Conversions and Impression- Assisted Conversions. Click-Assisted Conversions are keywords with clicks on your ads that assisted in conversions, while Impression-Assisted Conversions are keywords with impressions with views of your ads that assisted in a conversion.

AdWords Search Funnel Click-Assisted Conversions

Set the report detail to display keyword level data, and select the Click-Assisted Conversions tab. Also set your conversion history window to 30, 60 or 90 days, depending upon the buying cycle of your products/services. If you are a B2B advertiser with long buying cycles, then chose the appropriate date range. The report shows:

• Keywords, along with their match types.
• Last click conversions – The last keyword that a visitor searched for and clicked on your ad prior to converting.
• Last click conversion value – The actual value of the conversion generated by the keyword.
• Assisted Conversions – The keywords that either initiated or aided in the buying cycle.
• Assisted Conversion Value – This is the actual conversion value (set by you or dynamically captured), multiplied by the number of assisted conversions.

Download this report and filter out last click conversions, since you want to determine the value of the keywords that didn’t have any conversions. Sort the keywords by Assisted Conversions. Determine how often these keywords assisted in conversions, and their conversion values.

Determine the keywords’ cost per click (CPC), and compare them with their assisted conversion values to determine if your bids are optimal. Use this as a reference, and decrease or increase your bids accordingly.  Repeat the same process, this time selecting Impression Assisted Conversions.

Impression assisted conversions have value, as the keywords were actually searched for by your target market, although they didn’t click on respective ads. Determining why these keywords and their respective ads didn’t get clicked can help you gain insight into the purchasing behavior of your buyer, and to improve your ad copy for the related keyword terms.

Also, use the impression assisted conversion values to bid on keywords that have assisted impression but no clicks, instead of pausing or removing them without a proper analysis.

Please note that search funnel report only includes keywords that aided in a conversion. So if you found keywords missing in your search funnel report that were present in your AdWords account with costs, that means those keywords didn’t aid in any conversion.

Also, ensure that you have already checked these keywords’ engagement metrics for Analytics goals. Now that you have checked your keywords against goals and assisted conversion data, you can remove keywords that are costing you advertising dollars, but not helping to generate conversions.

This approach should enable you to more effectively manage keyword bids, helping realize better returns on the advertising dollars.

Advanced Keyword Bidding Strategies for AdWords is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Keyword Bidding with Google AdWords Bid Ideas
2. Why You Shouldn’t Use AdWords Keyword Positions to Manage Your Keyword Bids
3. Google Analytics – Advanced Segmentation Ideas

Not every action that you want visitors to perform on your website (conversions) can be tracked by AdWords’ default conversion tracking. For example, if you don’t have a Contact Us form with a Thank You page on your website, but have an email link that  prompts the user’s email client to open when clicked, tracking how many people click on the email link can effectively measure that type of action.

Unfortunately, it cannot be done by AdWords’ conversion tracking. The same thing goes for tracking the direct download of a white paper, demo software (assuming visitors are not required to fill up an information form), etc. In a previous article, we shared another method to track clicks as Adwords conversions using a Javascript code that opens an invisible iframe containing the AdWords (or any other tracking code) at clicks on the tagged links.

Today we’re describing how you can achieve the same goal by setting up Event Tracking as Goals in Google Analytics, and importing the goals into AdWords as conversion. Here are the steps:

1. Add Google Analytics’ onClick event to the link that you wish to track:

<a href=”HYPERLINK URL” onClick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'CATEGORIES', 'ACTIONS']);”>CLICK ME</a>

*Note: Replace all caps fields with the appropriate value.

HYPERLINK URL: the actual URL of the hyperlink.

CATEGORIES: Can be anything. Email Click or Download would be good choices from the above examples.

ACTIONS: Can be anything, but since we are tracking clicks as goals, let’s call it Clicks.

CLICK ME: The anchor text of your choice.

2. Log into your Google Analytics account.

3. Click on the profile setting icon on the top right hand corner.

4. Click on the Goals tab.

5. Click on + Goal from any of the available goal sets (if you don’t have any goals set up yet, just use Set 1).

6. Fill out the form as shown below:

7. Set a Name for your goal. It can be anything, as long as it makes sense to you.

8. In Category, fill in the blank with the exact string you used for the CATEGORIES variable in the tagging parameter.

9. In Action, fill in the blank with the exact string you used for the ACTION variable in the tagging parameter.

10. Click on the Save button to save your goal settings.

11. Log into your AdWords account.

12. Click on the Tools and Analysis tab and choose Conversions from the pull down menu.

13. Click on the Import from Google Analytics tab.

14. Select the goals that you would like to import, and you are done!!

If the Import from Google Analytics tab is grayed out, that means there are no goals currently available to be imported – probably because no one has clicked on the hyperlink you wish to track yet.

Pitstop Media offers ROI-based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.

How To Track Clicks As Conversions in AdWords Using Google Analytics is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. How to Track Clicks as Conversions in Adwords
2. Identify AdWords Mistakes with Google Analytics Visualizer
3. A Powerful Google Adwords – Google Analytics Combo

Often it is difficult to tell whether or not there are fundamental issues within your PPC account by just looking at metrics such as Conversions or Cost per Conversions. If you are in a managerial position and not working hands on with the accounts every day, it gets even more difficult.

One way to quickly gauge the health of your account is by looking at the Quality Score of the keywords you are targeting. Low quality scores can sometimes point out certain issues within your account such as a bad landing page, bad ad copies, bad keyword choices, etc. A quick and easy way to overview the keyword quality score within your account is to create a pivot chart in Excel, like this:

Quality Score Distribution Chart

This Quality Score distribution chart can provide a quick overview of the health of your account. Ideally, you want to have all of your keywords in the 7+ range. If you see a lot of 1, 2 and 3s in relation to the rest of the keywords, that usually means there is room for improvement in your account. Realistically, a Quality Score of 6 and above is decent. A Quality Score of 4 can be considered  a warning sign. Scores of  3 and below need to be taken seriously.

Here are the steps to create a Quality Score distribution chart:

1. Download a keyword performance report (in Excel) for the whole account. Make sure the Quality Score column is included in the report. (It can be any date range, since AdWords only shows the most recent quality score.)
2. Delete all keywords from the report that don’t have an Active status.
3. Delete all columns from the report, keeping only the Keyword and Quality Score columns.
4. Select the entire  A and B columns, then go to Insert > Pivot Table > Pivot Chart, then click OK.
5. When the pivot chart is inserted In the new sheet, this is what you will see:
   

   Chart Before Formatting

6. Check both Keyword and Quality Score boxes in the PivotTable Field List on the top right corner.
7. Drag Quality Score and Keywordtabs into the desired fields:
   

   This is the initial state

   

   This is what you want

8. Now you have a Quality Score Distribution Chart that you can use to analyze the health of your account.

To make things easier, you can download a sample Excel template here (2.1Mb). Just paste in your data into the Data Input sheet following the column names, and a chart will automatically be populated in the Chart sheet. Note that the file contains a macro to automatically update the chart, and you have to enable macros to make it work properly. Enjoy.

Pitstop Media offers ROI-based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase their AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.

Analyzing PPC Account Health Using Quality Score Distribution Chart is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Google Adwords Quality Score Explained
2. Google Adwords Quality Score – Part 2
3. Another Factor to Quality Score

If you haven’t noticed, Google has quietly made changes to its location targeting options in AdWords in late October. Actually, I found out about the changes during my AdWords certification renewal exam, so I was quite shocked to see the completely different location targeting interface (and Google can you please update the exam questions?!).

Anyways, the new interface makes it easier to search for locations you wishes to target and also provides “reach numbers” to help you estimate the audience within you selected target (Reach is an estimate of the number of users in a selected location target, based on unique cookies).

So, how easy is it to search for locations now? Very easy!!

Simply type in the name of the city you wish to target (and the built-in auto-suggest function is really handy), and a list of eligible choice will show up. Just click on the “add” button beside the name of the city you wish to target, then you are set. And of course, you can choose to exclude the city as well, just simply by click on “exclude”.

Not going into too much detail here. You can get more info on the new features here from Google’s Adwords blog:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-10-31T08:15:00-07:00&max-results=10

What I’m going to focus here though, are features that Google took out during this makeover which in my opinions, are very disappointing.

1. Custom shape targeting is gone! Advertisers can no longer draw unique shape on the map to define the boundaries of their targeting areas. At the moment, Google still supports this feature for advertisers who are already using it, but only till the end of the year though. How to work around this? Advertisers are advised to run a geo-targeting report to find out which regions they were getting traffic from and add them back as individual locations.
2. Bundle targeting is removed as well! It used to be that advertisers could choose to target US & Canada as a bundle or All Countries & Regions as a bundle and now this feature is longer presented. It might not be a big deal for local business, but imagine how annoying it’s going to be for business that targets globally now they have to add all the 100+ countries one by one. You can argue that companies that advertise globally should have separate campaigns for each region or country anyways, so they have to pick out each country one by one regardless (this leads to the third point). Yes, that is the optimal scenario, but there are also small-medium size businesses that just don’t have enough budgets to spread across 100+ campaigns.
3. Browse function is gone! It used to be that advertisers can browse through the list of available targeting locations and pick out the ones they choose to target and now this is no longer available. Assuming I want to target all countries and regions, but I don’t know all the names of the different countries (be honest, who does?), what am I gonna do?! Sadly, I haven’t figure out a way around this.

I’m not really sure whether it’s just me not being able to find the missing features mentioned above in the new interface or Google had really taken them out, but aside from the newly integrated search function, the revamped location targeting interface feels like a downgrade to me.

Let me know if you guys are able to dig up those features. That would be much appreciated.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.

AdWords Location Targeting Update is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. PPC Targeting Options
2. AdWords Search Query Report Update
3. AdWords Tips for Beginners – Part 02

This holiday season I was searching in Google for Jawbone bluetooth headsets on sale. Tigerdirect.ca had an enticing Ad.

TigerDirect.ca PPC ad

Clicked on it expecting sales promotion on Jawbone head sets. But I was directed to home page with nothing related to Jawbone or Bluetooth headset promotions.

TigerDirect Homepage

I tried to search their Bluetooth section and found that they don’t have any Jawbone products at all. Not sure why would they specifically mention Aliph Jawbone, which is an actual product of Jawbone and not have any Jawbone products.

TigerDirect.ca promoted Jawbone headsets but didn't have them on their website

TigerDirect.ca is failing in many areas. Google AdWords policy clearly states that

• advertiser should honor the deals and offers promoted on their ads
• user should be able to find what the ad promises (discounts/free offers) within 1-2 clicks of the landing page

Further TigerDirect.ca is paying more per click because the ad has very low relevance to the landing page leading to poor quality score. You can check the Google AdWords policies from the below links:

AdWords landing Page policy on finding products within 1-2 clicks

AdWords landing page policy on honoring the offers made on the ads

AdWords Quality score

You can also check the video from Google AdWords on Landing page and site quality:

I hope this helps you understand the importance of selecting the right keywords, ads and landing pages to promote your website. If you are an e-commerce advertiser, ensure that your landing pages are relevant to the keywords and the ads you advertise. Further honor any sales promotions/discounts for you are not just losing advertising dollars but disgruntled buyers, potential new sales, business revenue and brand reputation.

e-Commerce Landing Page PPC Blooper is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Match Search Engine’s Search Query with Landing Page Content
2. Search Results Relevancy Blooper – www.futureshop.ca
3. 6 e-Commerce Email Capturing Techniques

Those of you who work with AdWords on a regular basis knows that it’s impossible (or impractical) to manage AdWords accounts by only either using the AdWords Online Interface or AdWords Editor. Most people use the combination of the two.

When working on two separate platforms, making sure data are in sync on both of them becomes very important (on a totally unrelated side note, I’m lovin’ iCloud). The common practice for most people would be making small changes like a campaign budget change or add a few negative keywords that caught your attention using the online interface and use the editor for making bulk changes like updating different ads across campaigns or changing bids for lots of keywords at once.

Since the data and stats you see in AdWords Editor are only stored on your computer and not actually linked Google, any change you made using the online interface won’t be reflected in the editor unless you use the “Get Recent Changes” function on AdWords Editor. Only then, you will be seeing the most updated account information on your editor.

I’m sure the following scenario has happened to the majority of advertisers out there: You made some minor changes to your account using the online interface and a few days (or even a few hours) later, you made some bulk changes using the editor and you uploaded the changes.

AdWords Tip

Pause! What’s missing? You didn’t get recent changes to retrieve the changes you made from using the online interface before uploading the new changes made from the editor. Don’t deny it; you must have done this at least once! What are the consequences? Well, personally, I never noticed any.

I didn’t really look into this until a client told me she started noticing some of the changes she made to the account got revert back to the original (we both have access to the account) and she suspected it was because I didn’t get recent changes before I uploaded the changes I made using editor. I wasn’t sure if that was the case so I called Google and ask about the situation. To my surprise, the representative actually confirmed that uploading changes using the editor without getting recent changes first will override the changes made from the online interface with the current data stored in the editor.

I was shocked at first because I had never encountered any problems like this. Then, being the paranoid and defensive person I am, I ran a test on our agency’s AdWords account (plus, you shouldn’t believe everything that government…wait…I mean Google tells you anyways). I added a negative keyword to the account using the online interface, then made some change using the editor and uploaded the change without getting recent changes.

Get Recent Changes

Result? The negative keyword I added using the online interface was still there! It didn’t get over written.

So what’s the conclusion? Just make it a habit of getting recent changes every time you use the AdWords editor because Google can change its regarding this issue system without us knowing it. But if you realized you forgot to do it, don’t freak out, it most likely didn’t do anything to your account.

I’m interested to see if anyone is getting different results. Let me know!

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.

AdWords Tip – Is “Get Recent Changes” Necessary Every Time? is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. AdWords Search Query Report Update
2. How to Import AdWords Campaigns into adCenter
3. 5 Tips to Use Google Adwords Reports More Efficiently

Starting this month, I’ll be writing a series of articles on how to create and manage successful pay per click campaigns for small & medium business owners in a step by step fashion. Each article will cover one single area (step) of creating PPC campaigns from scratch. Later in the series, I’ll start talking about how to manage and optimize the campaigns once everything is created and has been running smoothly for a while.

As the title of the series suggests, this is a self-help guide for business owners. At this moment, I haven’t set an amount on how many articles there will be in this series because there are countless things that you can do to improve your account; but I hope those who follow me to the end of the journey can all have a positive ROI from their online marketing effort, or at least have a self-sufficient PPC account in the worst case, without having to pay a cent to anyone for consultation or other kind of help.

I understand that reading manuals can sometimes be very tedious and dry, so I’ll try to keep the articles as entertaining as possible (mostly with my sarcastic humor). If you are easily offended, you might not want to come back (Joke #1).

On a more serious note, even though having successful PPC campaigns is largely based on a lot of planning and strategies, it’s also very technical and there are some key terms and metrics one should familiar themselves with:

Keyword

The keywords you choose are the terms or phrases you want to “trigger” your ad to appear. For example, if you deliver fresh flowers, you can use “fresh flower delivery” as a keyword in your AdWords campaign. When a Google user enters “fresh flower delivery” in a Google search, your ad could appear next to the search results.

Campaign & ad group

AdWords accounts are organized into campaigns and ad groups. You start with one campaign, which has its own daily budget and targeting preferences. As you expand your advertising, you add more campaigns or ad groups, which are sets of related ads and keywords within a campaign. For example, you might choose to create one campaign for each product or service that you want to advertise.

Click

If a customer sees your ad and clicks on it to learn more or to do business with you, it’s recorded in your account as a click. Monitor your clicks to see how many people choose to enter your website from your ad.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

With cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. You can have AdWords manage your CPC automatically, or you can choose to set your maximum CPC bid manually. Your CPC bid helps determine how often your ad can appear and its ranking on the page.

Impression (Impr.)

The number of impressions is the number of times an ad is displayed on Google or the Google Network. Monitor your impressions to see how much exposure your ad is getting.

Clickthrough rate (CTR)

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions). A keyword’s CTR is a strong indicator of its relevance to the user and the overall success of the keyword. The more your keywords and ads relate to each other and to your business, the more likely a user is to click on your ad after searching on your keyword phrase.

Average Position

Average position is a statistic displayed in the “Avg. Pos” column in your AdWords account. It refers to the position on a search results page where your ad appears for each of your keywords. “1″ is the highest position on the first page of search results. There is no “bottom” position. An average position of “1.7″ means your ad usually appears in positions 1 or 2. Average ad positions are not fixed; they may vary depending on various performance factors.

Networks

You can choose where on the Internet your ads will appear. Ads can appear on Google’s Search Network, Display Network, or both. The Search Network includes Google and other search sites. Ads can appear beside or above search results for keywords that you choose. The Display Network includes a collection of websites that have partnered with Google (display partners), YouTube, and specific Google properties that display AdWords ads.

Quality Score

Quality Score is a measure of how relevant your ad, keyword, or webpage is. Quality Scores help ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network.

In the next article, I’ll talk about how to effectively create a keyword list. But at the mean time, get yourself familiar with the terminologies above. It’s very important to have a solid foundation and knowledge before you start the journey. The road ahead might be rocky from time to time, but I promise (hope?) it will be fun!!

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.

Business Owners’ Self-Help Guide to Successful PPC Campaigns is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Tips to Optimize AdWords PPC Campaigns Using Impression Share
2. How to Import AdWords Campaigns into adCenter
3. Negative Keywords for Your PPC Campaigns

Looking for a laptop support today, I reached ikea.ca’s page and added 3 of them to the cart.

Surprise, for a $4.99 item the shipping fee is $34.55. Would you buy online from someone who’s charging that much? Hell, no!

$4.99 for the product , $34.99 for shipping? Good by IKEA!

You can do all the remarketing in the world, I am not going to buy this product online from IKEA.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as landing page testing services and conversion rate optimization services. Our A/B and multivariate tests have helped companies increase conversion rates by as much as 75%. Let us increase your conversion rates, too!

Who Wouldn’t Abandon This Shopping Cart? is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Which Call to Action, Add to Cart or Buy Now?
2. Google Does Usability Mistakes Too
3. LG.com’s Internal Search Gone Wrong

An internal analysis by Google, found that over 90% of their web properties could have improved their SEO simply by optimizing the TITLE tag format and length.

Titles are one the first things searchers see after performing a search query, so it will determine whether or not they will click on your listing and visit your site. It is also one of the most important on-page SEO factors. Also, when others link to your pages, they tend to use the page title as anchor text.

Ironically, the tag came last on my alphabetically-sorted list of tags when I started The Definitive HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization series, but it got the entire deserved attention. I hope you will find the article useful either you are new to SEO or an experienced search engine optimization professional, or a marketing manager educating himself.

We know that <TITLE> is not really a HTML tag (it’s an element), but since everybody calls it a tag, we will use that term, to grab some search engine attention and, hopefully, some rankings/traffic for related terms ;)

There are tons of tips later within the article, but let’s start by debunking a popular myth and answer one of the most common questions about TITLE tag.

Myth: most of the knowledgeable webmasters and even advanced SEO professionals think that the content of the TITLE tag is the only piece Google uses to display the blue page titles within the search result pages (in the sample below the color is violate since it’s a visited URL):

Most of the times the content of the TITLE tag is displayed in SERPs

Fact: The content of the TITLE tag is part of the snippet equation but it’s not the entire part. To display page titles within SERPs Google uses relevancy rather than blindly following your TITLE’s tag content. If your title is not relevant to the user query, but the page content is, Google will use other sources to display a relevant page title.

This brings us to one of the most frequent questions of Google Webmaster Help forum:

Question: Why is Google changing/rewriting/not indexing my TITLE tag properly?

Answer: As mentioned before, Google’s mission is relevancy. To accomplish it, they use various sources and signals, which can be onpage signals (relevant parts from body content and headings, for example) or external sources (DMOZ or Yahoo! directory) to match user query with relevant search results.

There are cases when search engines need to modify the displayed titles, such as missing:

- malformed tag

- too short or too long titles

- URL is blocked by robots.txt but has lots of backlinks and they still decide to show it to users.

Watch the video below from Matt Cutts to hear it from the horse’s mouth, if you don’t believe me.

It is not that Google doesn’t index your titles correctly, it’s just that relevancy comes before whatever you put within the TITLE tag.

TITLE tag tips

When writing TITLE tags there are 3 masters to serve: SEO(rankings), CTR (clicks) and ROI(revenue). Order them any way you want, all of them are important and should play a role when crafting the perfect title. Most of the tips listed here are for SEO (rankings) and not CTR or ROI oriented.

Below is a list of recommendations that one should take into consideration when writing with SEO in mind.

Non HTML documents

The title for non HTML documents (such as .pdf or .doc files) is taken from the anchor texts pointing to the document, or from the document’s properties.

Social CTR metrics

The same way AdWords titles have the largest impact on CRT, titles within search results pages greatly influence click-through rates on search result listings. CTR is one of the social metrics used by Google to rank websites; therefore better CTR equals better rankings. If you can create enticing titles, while following other tips presented here, you’ll get a “double double” effect.

Hx matching

One method to reinforce the relevance of a document is by matching heading(s) on the page with the TITLE tag. If you can do an exact match between H1 and the title of the page, it will add more weight to the document outline. Since the exact match between the two is not always possible you should aim at least at having the keyword from the TITLE tag repeated within other headings (H2 or H3).

Remember, the words in the title of the page should reflect the content of that page and should be present within the content, otherwise search engines may not display your original title in the search results pages.

Keyword significance consolidation

This is a great tip that will help you increase your site keywords’ significance, which in return will create more “authority” around the targeted keyword:

1) on the home page, place the most top-level generalized keyword for your website at the very beginning of the TITLE tag

2) repeat that keyword on ALL other internal pages at the end of the title tag (after the brand name, if it’s the case, even if the title is going to be longer than 65 chars).Ideally, the reinforced keyword should come after the 65 char limit

3) make sure that keyword shows at least twice per hundred words copy on each page of the website

4) consolidate anchor texts from internal pages to point to the home page using the keyword used the beginning of the title tag on home page

On our own website, see how nicely the most significant keywords are floating around optimization, marketing and search:

The number of occurrences dictates the keyword significance

Geo-targeting

If you’re targeting a specific region/city/province, it’s advisable to mention it in the TITLE tag in order to show up for a local search query such as “Vancouver SEO“. This approach is great when you’re a start up and can compete on low to medium difficulty keywords only. Once you grow and support your rankings with external backlinks, you can revise the targeted keywords and geo-targeting options.

Ecommerce sites should build unique pages for each retail store in their chain. The address (at least city and state/province, should be placed in the TITLE tag and the pages should support and reinforce the address with addresses and geo tagged images (link to image tag).

Holiday Specific Titles

You will love this technique, but you’ll hate me for making you work harder.

User behaviour is changing around holidays (boxing day, mother’s day, Halloween, etc) and so is the way they search. If you’re an online retailer (or if you know that your audience might be searching for specific events related keywords) you should be able to change your titles easily to accommodate that behaviour change. Around Christmas, it’s much more enticing for users to see and click on “Christmas Gifts for Him. All Items on Sale & FREE Shipping” than “Gifts for Him. All Items on Sale & FREE Shipping“.

The titles are changed to match user behavior during Christmas

For more information on this please read the article holiday-specific titles.

Char count

This is another very misunderstood concept. Google doesn’t index only 65 chars (or close). It only displays 65-70 chars, cropping the complete words if they run over this limit, but it indexes as much as 250 chars per some tests (I’ve read about 1000 chars being entirely indexed). Knowing this it opens doors to new opportunities, such as thinking your titles in blocks rather than a one piece. It may worth testing a bit:

1) First block, the first 65 characters, where you would craft your perfect title (keywords, branding and call to action). This will be the title seen by people on search engines.

2) Second block, second-tier keywords, plurals, synonyms or other strategies. On pages other than the home page you can repeat the top most important keyword for your website, at the very end of the title.

Branded titles

If some SEO experts are advising you to remove the brand name from your titles, they could be wrong. You should know better than them the goal of your organic traffic campaign and should act accordingly:

- if you have a well established brand (i.e. Amazon) you may want to have the brand at the beginning of the title;

- if you are trying to build a brand and your efforts are sustained by SEO, brand name will be the first word

- If your brand has some recognition you can still place and your campaign goal is to drive unbranded traffic, the brand name can be placed at the end of the tag.

- If you’re company name is not well known, or if you don’t care about branding, don’t put your brand name in the title at all

Big brands like Amazon are branding their page titles right at the beginning of the tag

Keyword prominence

The main targeted keyword should be at the beginning of the TITLE tag. Period!

Keyword proximity

If you target keywords with more than two words, they better be one next to each other, i.e. if you target “marketing services” you should not have anything in between the two words.

Modifiers

Modifiers are those words that can be placed before or after your targeted keyword, to address a specific segment of the market. Keywords can be generally categorized into 3 main categories informational/educational, transactional/purchase intent and navigational/geo-location.

Depending on the pages you write titles for, you can add a transactional modifier (buy, sale, discount, cheap) for product pages, directional/geo (Vancouver, BC or Seattle, WA) on store locations page or educational/informational (learn, discover, read, find) for your white papers or case studies/success stories.

Keywords order

In many cases you will find that there’s a different search volume for the same 2-word combinations. For example “Vancouver SEO” has a different search volume compared with “SEO Vancouver“. Obviously, you should focus on the keyword with highest demand. You can compensate the other keyword with internal anchor support and/or by including it within your description, headings and main body content.

The two keywords have different search volumes

Singular or plural? Or both?

Google doesn’t recommend repeating the same word more than twice in a TITLE tag. But is the plural considered a repetition of the singular? Given the way search engines interpret content (by bringing the word to their root form) I would tend to say, yes, it is a repetition. But you will be fine if you use the keyword no more than twice, once in singular and once in plural. This strategy may have some impact on ecommerce stores, where people may search for “dell laptops” or “dell laptop”. Another option is to write your perfect title in blocks, within the first 65-70 displayed chars and repeat the keywords in a plural/singular variation at the end.

Stop words

Words such as and, or, the, in or for are called stop words. Search engines will most of the time filter them out when computing page relevance. After all, no one cares how many times you’ve use the word “I” or “WE” on a page. You should aim to use as few of them as possible, since you SERPs title space is limited. As a good practice you should remove them from URLs too. In case you’re interested here’s txt file with more stop words.

Separators

The most used separator is the pipe sign “|” but others are acceptable too, such as hyphens and commas. Do not use underscores or use any of the following special characters in title text: ‘ ” < > { } [ ] ( ).

Some websites are using catchy titles that use a lot of non alphabet symbols, such as ~~~!FREE iPODS!~~~ to grab attention and possibly higher CTRs. Keep in mind that use of special symbols may get you better CTR but also might rise spam penalties.

Char savers

If you need to squeeze more text you can replace word like “and” with & symbol, “or” with / or “copyrights” with ©. Remember to implement special chars using HTML entities (& with &amp; © with &copy; and so on).

Other space savers are abbreviations (i.e. instead of search engine optimization you could use SEO) or shorter synonyms for the word, or variations of your chosen key terms, tee-shirt and T-shirt.

The decision on which version should be used, has to be based on the search volume for those keywords and even be based on the content targeted on the page. For example, if your content targets mid stage customers, using the jargon “onsite SEO” in the title might be ok, since they might already be familiar with it, but it may not be used by early stage prospects.

Call to action (CTA)

Your page titles act like headlines within SERPs and a compelling call to action can actually generate more clicks for the page listed #2 than a poor title listed #1. One of the most important element tested in advertising, and conversion rate optimization, are headlines.

Usually, CTA are strong verbs, strong unique selling propositions (USP) or promotional words. Sometimes store/inventory-wide promotions can affect CTR also. An example of a promotional title can look like “All Digital Cameras 60% OFF ……”. There’s an interesting thread on this subject here.

Exact match

If a three/four-word phrase such as “internet marketing services” drives qualified traffic, it’s best to have that exact phrase as opposed to having those words appear out of order, such as “Internet services: marketing and web hosting“.

Capitalization

One or two words can be in uppercase, but an entire title written with caps lock on will raise spam flags, so don’t do it. Keep this in mind when you add document properties for non HTML documents. Capitalizing each first letter of the word is acceptable.

Competitive differentiators

If you know that your target market is sensitive to a particular feature or benefits which is part of your unique selling proposition(lowest price guarantee) or competitive edge(i.e. the only retailer for a product) you can use it to attract more clicks on your listings and differentiate from others (which can generate better conversion rates)

Apart from the entire list of tips, here are some basic, boring things about titles (you already know this stuff, right?):

- Each page should have a TITLE tag (muhahahah)

- TITLE tag should not be empty

- Each page should have only one TITLE tag

- The TITLE tag belongs inside the HEAD section of a web page

- The content of the TITLE tag should be different from the contents of the META description tag

- The TITLE tag of each page should be unique and distinct from the TITLE tags of other pages in a site.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Rate this post!

TITLE Tag SEO – The Definitive HTML Reference Guide for Search Engine Optimization is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. META Tags and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization
2. LINK Tag, REL attribute and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization
3. List Items and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Have you guys ever heard of the rumor that whenever you create new ads for your PPC campaigns, it’s always better to pause existing underperforming ads then create brand new ads instead of overwriting the existing ads?

Turns out the rumor is true!! (Okay, enough with the sarcastic attitude.)

The primary reason is that the new ad you created might not necessarily perform better than the old ones. There is always a possibility that you’ll want to revert back to the old ads. But for Microsoft adCenter, it is even more important to follow this guideline. Why?!

In Google AdWords, whenever you overwrite an existing ad, the old ad is automatically treated as deleted and the new ad’s stat is reset back to zero. But adCenter is different! If you overwrite an existing ad in adCenter, instead of treating the old ad as deleted, adCenter simply replace the content of the ad with the new ad copy and even the stats from the old ad are carried over to the new ad. You can see how this can create a huge problem.

Imagine you have this very bad ad in your account (no conversion, low CTR, accumulated lots cost, etc) and you want to replace it with a new ad to boost your account performance. If you just overwrite it, the next time you check up on the performance of the new ad copy, you will be seeing the crappy stats from the old ad copy combined with the newly gathered stats from the new ad copy. There is no way you can make an accurate analysis from that.

So, yeah, always create brand new ads instead of overwriting and make it a habit. One day it will save the world!! (or just your PPC account…close enough)

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Rate this post!

Why Is It Important to Create New Ads Instead of Overwriting Old Ads in adCenter is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. How to Import AdWords Campaigns into adCenter
2. Yahoo Updates its Search Marketing Platform
3. Hijack Your Competitor Ads on Google AdWords