(source)

Frustrated with the lack of blogs on this topic, I wanted to compile a troubleshooting checklist to help anyone experiencing tracking issues.

Search Funnels

Scenario:One of my clients was receiving more leads than I was seeing in the Adwords interface

AdWords attributes conversions to the day the initial click occurred and not when the conversion action takes place (PPC hero has a great blog on conversion attribution). Therefore, Search Funnels was one of the first places I checked. More specifically, I looked at the Time Lag reports to see if that was a possible explanation.

Conversions – Webpages

Scenario: A client stopped receiving leads even though they were still tracking in Adwords

After looking into Conversions-Webpages I saw that conversions were occurring on two different webpages which coincided with the timing of when the client’s tracking dropped off. Since conversions should only occur on one webpage, I was able to alert my client to the problem and have their developer fix it quickly.

Plugins!

Scenario: Our test conversion wasn’t showing in Google Analytics

Our team uses the Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-On to help avoid skewing our clients’ numbers. While it’s a great add-on, it makes running a conversion test nearly impossible: having it enabled will prevent your test conversions from coming through properly even if everything is functioning correctly. Once we disabled the add-on, we re-tested and saw our conversion come through.

Side note – The new Google Analytics has a new feature that allows users to test verifying goals.

Is Your Code There?

Scenario: Our test conversion didn’t come through

You might be wondering why I’ve put this in here, but it’s very easy for a client to accidently place code in the wrong place. For reference, the code should go in the body of the confirmation page. One way to quickly rule this out is to check the page source (CTRL & U).

Is Your Code Correct?

Scenario: One of my clients was receiving more leads than I was seeing in the Adwords interface

In February 2013 Google changed their AdWords code so users wouldn’t need to select “HTTP” or “HTTPs” during set up. This change should not have affected 99% of users who used the old code, but my client was a part of the remaining 1% because of a previous HTTP vs. HTTP problem. Updating to the new code resolved our issue.

Because these codes are extremely sensitive simple errors such as extra spaces or misspellings can be enough to throw things off.

As mentioned above, I recommend referencing the page source to make sure the code in the Adwords interface is identical to the one placed on the webpage.

Google Analytics

Scenario: Any

Google Analytics has tons of information you can look into when conversion tracking goes haywire. You can check out landing pages and visits, verify against goals, and so much more.

Google & Bing Support

Scenario: Any

Google and Bing have a great team of conversion tracking specialists who can help users with most conversion tracking issues.

Your Client

Scenario: Any

Last but certainly not least, your client is key to accurate conversion tracking. Good communication with your client can help you prevent conversion tracking issues and also help you resolve them should they occur.

While this might not resolve all of your conversion tracking nightmares, I hope this lists helps you rule some items out. If you’ve experienced any conversion tracking issues not listed, please feel free to share them and your solutions in the comments below.

Happy Tracking Everyone!

Google:

Google is probably the most common engine that advertisers choose to run paid search ads with. Google receives more than 1 billion searches per day. So, when you’re deciding where you want to show your ads, this is a good place to start. Once you’ve decided to partner with Google, you can decide where and how you’d like to serve your ads.

Google Search:

You can choose to show your ads only on the standard Google.com search page. In order to choose this option, you want to choose “Search Network Only” under Campaign Settings in AdWords.

When you select “Search Network Only” AdWords will default to showing your ads on both Google search and search partners when users search on your keywords. Google Search partners are a group of various sites that Google partners with to show ads on when users search those sites. Google doesn’t tell us exactly what sites this includes but they drop some hints that sites like AOL and Ask.com are a part of their network. You can choose to opt out of search partners by going to your campaign settings and unchecking the little box that says “Include search partners”.

If you choose to opt out of search partners, your ads will only show when a user searches on Google.com or other Google search sites such as Google Maps or Google Images.

Google Display Network:

If search isn’t your thing or if you want to reach more people, the Google display network is a great option. In order to show ads on the display network you’ll want to choose “Display Network Only” in the campaign settings tab.

The Google display network is a wide range of sites across the internet that partner with Google to show ads. This even includes ads on mobile devices and within apps. (Ever wonder about those ads that pop up during candy crush?) Your ad can show in many different places throughout these sites. You can also choose to show both text and image ads. Similar to the search network, you can use targeting methods to determine where your ads show. You can target specific sites with managed placements or you can use keywords to tell Google which sites might be relevant to automatically place your ads on. In addition to these, you can target by overall interest categories (like showing on sites related to games) or even by user’s gender or demographics. If you want to get an idea of what kinds of sites are in the Google display network, Google’s ad planner is a great tool!

Remarketing:

Another option within the Google display network is Remarketing. This is when you can cookie users who have visited your site and then serve them ads as they browse different sites across the display network (yes this is a little creepy, but it does work!). Remarketing can be a great targeting option because you can re-engage users who did not convert originally. You can even show them special offers or coupons to make them more likely to come back. In addition, since this serves ads within the display network, you can show both text and image ads to grab the user’s attention.

YouTube:

Yet another option under the Google umbrella is showing ads on YouTube. There are a few different options for YouTube advertising. You can go big and choose Masthead advertising which is similar to a banner ad on the YouTube homepage or you can stick with more traditional paid search options like TrueView advertising. Within TrueView you can decide if you want to show ads within the video search results, alongside a relevant video, or within the viewing screen before the video starts. You can run text or image ads on YouTube as well as video ads. To learn more about YouTube advertising check out my colleague Jess’s blog!

Bing:

The other most common engine for paid search advertising is Bing. Bing recently reported that “47.3 million unique searches in the US only use Bing”. Bing tends to be lower volume but sometimes the cost per click is less since there is less competition on this engine.

Bing Search Network:

Just like Google, you can choose to show ads on both Bing and Yahoo! Search (they are partnered together) or on their search partner network. To choose your network, go to the settings tab in a particular ad group and check the box for “Search network” and then choose your specific network option.

On Bing Ads you can choose these settings at the ad group level. Also, on Bing you can choose to target only search partners on their own (this is not an option on Google). This can be helpful if search partners are under performing or out performing and you’d like to test them at different bids or budgets so that you don’t miss out on potential volume.

Bing Content Network:

Bing also has a content network that you can target like Google. You can choose this setting at the ad group level by clicking the “Content network” box in the settings tab like you can see above. The Bing content network does not include as many sites as Google’s and therefore has not been known to have as strong performance.

In addition to Google and Bing, there are many smaller engines you can also show ads on. We’ll be covering these in our next post so stay tuned!

Tons of people are looking for someone – anyone – to help them out, basically in exchange for a link… jackpot, right?!

Not usually. While you may infrequently find a ‘diamond in the rough,’ most days, queries like this generally clutter your inbox:

So maybe your client eats baby powder for breakfast and cat food for dinner. But it’s probably not the type of PR he or she is looking for.

Consider this, however. Every day, hundreds of reporters, journalists, and authorities in your client’s industry are so desperate for information, expertise, and stories, that they have taken the time to publish a query on HARO. You think this desperation is a one-time thing? Think again.

Today, a journalist may be looking to discuss your (questionable) eating habits, but tomorrow, he or she may want to talk about creating a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle. If this is your client’s industry, creating a warm lead today will help you get the link for tomorrow’s story.

Let’s discover how to mine today’s queries for publications that will make sense for tomorrow’s opportunities:

Mine HARO for queries relevant to an industry your client is in. Education, for example:

Although, at this time, my client might not be able to provide advice for college students regarding their student loans, they may have something to contribute to the education section of US News & World Report in the future. I may want to hold onto Kelsey’s contact information.

Find the reporter’s social profiles and verify that they do, in fact, write for that publication:

Get their email address:

Typically, HARO will encrypt email addresses, but with a minute or two of research, you can easily find their real email address:

What to do with all this information:

1) Throw all the information into a spreadsheet. I include:

• Domain
• DA
• Category/Industry
• Contact Name
• Contact Email
• Query & Date
• The client this contact will be useful for

Alternatively, if you are a Buzzstream user, you can easily add the prospect’s details through your Buzzmarker with notes about the queries they’ve been submitting, include their contact information, and tag it with something like “HARO contacts”.

2) Establish a Relationship

Now that you’ve saved this contact information from your target publications, don’t let them go to waste! Follow the journalists on Twitter, subscribe to their blogs, comment on their articles, and re-tweet their posts. Start building a relationship with them. It will give you a leg-up on all the other people sending them cold emails.

3) Wait until you’re ready

When you’re launching an asset, looking to guest post, or want to be added to a resources page, you can reach out to your new (highly relevant) reporter friend!

TL;DR

When skimming HARO, don’t solely pay attention to topics your clients can comment on, but also pay attention to:

1) Industry/publication of queries. Even if the query they submitted doesn’t make sense for your client at the time, it doesn’t mean the publication doesn’t cover topics your client IS an expert in.

2) Reporter contact information. HARO typically encrypts email addresses, but there are other ways to find email addresses: *ahem*.

3) What they’re asking for. Even if you can’t provide expertise on the query topic, you might be a fit for them in the future, whether that be a guest post, an infographic share, or an addition to their resources page. You could even try checking out their editorial calendar to see if there’s anything you can help them out with in advance. (h/t @stephbeadell)

Next time you’re looking for someone to promote an asset your client made, or need some guest post prospects, you can refer back to your HARO “rolodex” full of warm prospects.

Other resources: ProfNet is a nice (paid) alternative to HARO, oftentimes with higher-quality queries and publications. ProfNet also usually gives you the direct email address of the reporter.

Google and Bing do a great job explaining their budget settings. At a high level, Google and Bing allow you to set daily budgets at the campaign level. Bing also allows for monthly budgets which aren’t capped daily, or evenly distributed throughout the month, so you may exhaust your budget before the month ends.

Delivery Method

If you have an unlimited budget, you’ll likely want to set your daily caps to unattainable limits (within reason – not $2M/day) to limit the possibility your ads will stop showing due to budget constraints. Also make sure the delivery method for campaigns with “unlimited” budgets is set to “accelerated” so your ads are showing as frequently as possible throughout the day. Generally speaking, you’ll primarily want to use “standard” delivery when you have budgets that cap daily, which can’t be increased, so that your ads maintain a presence throughout the day. This approach can vary by campaign or depending on your goals.

Dayparting

The alternative to standard budget delivery is accelerated budget delivery. With accelerated delivery, it is possible to exhaust the budget early in the day. Potentially, our ads might not show during higher converting traffic times later in the day when we have no budget left. Quickly running a Google dimensions report can inform ad scheduling around these stronger periods in the day:

Keyword Research

For accounts with limited budgets, planning and research are key so that you’re getting the most bang for your buck. As my colleague Audrey pointed out last week, there are great tools available to aid you in keyword research. Hoa also shared some awesome keyword research tips to take your lists to the next level. These tools can help you better estimate how much budget you’ll need and how to best allocate it.

An important factor to consider is what the estimated or average CPCs are for your keywords in comparison to your budget. If you’re limited to, say, $20 per day for a campaign but your initial target keywords are a bit more general with estimates of $4 per click, basic math says you may only receive 5 clicks in a day. Is that enough clicks to meet your goals in a day, factoring in you anticipated conversion rate, or should you exclude those keywords and aim for longer tail variations or misspellings which may be less competitive with lower CPCs? The latter is likely preferable. If you find your campaigns are regularly meeting their budgets, you may want to focus on more strict match types like modified broad match, phrase or exact for your keywords to reduce potentially inefficient spend.

Lost Impression Share

Lost impression share (IS) due to budget metrics are available in Google and Bing. Impression share makes it easier to calculate how much extra you may need to spend to show your ads all the time:

Shared Budgets

Shared budgets are a great AdWords tool which, as the name suggests, allows you to share a budget cap across multiple campaigns. In the past, you would have to set budgets for each campaign individually. This meant that if you wanted to break one campaign out into five and get more granular by theme, possibly only for tracking purposes, you would also need to divide the budget across the five campaigns. If you ultimately don’t mind which of the five campaigns utilizes the budget, and just want to see the data differently at the campaign level, you may now opt to share the $100 across these campaigns. Shared budgets can be found under your account’s Shared Library in the left hand navigation of the Google UI:

At the end of the day, be open to re-allocating budget toward stronger performing campaigns or engines. There’s no magic percentage of spend that needs to be allocated to Google vs. Bing or any other engine. Likewise, some campaigns may not spend the same amount each day and can be subject to weekly fluctuations, seasonality and holidays. Budget tracking worksheets can be great tools to help you gauge total monthly spend and anticipate capping or under-spending ahead of time.

Now you know a few things to keep in mind for budget management. Feel free to share your tips and tricks as well!

Today, I’m going to share with you some secrets about college students, and then I’m going to show you one of my favorite methods for finding actual contact information for club officers. I’m 12 months removed from the glory days of Indiana University, but I feel fairly confident in my understanding of college student behavior.

Let’s get started.

The Truth About College Students

Remember those “info@schoolname.edu” and “contact@schoolname.edu” emails you send your fantastic outreach to? No one checks those email addresses except at the start of the school year during call-out meetings (if that). Trust me.

“But Hillary,” you might say, “I want to sponsor these students’ clubs. Won’t they be super eager to get back in touch with me?” They will be. But – and hold on to your seat because I’m about to let you in on another not-so secret – college students are lazy. Ain’t nobody got time to check a second email address!

If you want success with your outreach to student clubs and organizations, you have to make it as easy as possible for them. Get your outreach message in the personal inbox of every member of the leadership board of the club you’re targeting. Why every member of the leadership board? Because the club’s website probably hasn’t been updated in at least a year. You’re going to be lucky if even one of the students listed hasn’t yet graduated.

So, there you go. College students are lazy and infrequently (if ever) check the club email. Now that we’re up to speed on the not-so-secret lives of college students, let’s get down to brass tacks. How are you going to obtain the personal email addresses of multiple university students all while maintaining efficiency in outreach?

Student Directories

My favorite trick is to see if there’s a student directory listed on the school’s domain. Because these directories also list faculty and staff, they are often referred to as “People Finders.” Here are a few of the advanced queries I use to locate the online directory:

[student directory site:schoolname.edu]

[people finder site:schoolname.edu]

[roster site:schoolname.edu]

In honor of my alma mater, I’ll show you how this works using Indiana University as an example:

1. Search Google using one of the advanced queries above:

Bingo.

2. Enter the name of one of the club officers:

Let’s use my name as an example:

Pro tip: If you search for a name and there are no results, make sure you’ve checked nicknames. For example, Dick Vitale may be listed by his birth name, Richard Vitale, in a school directory. If you’re not sure what ‘Hal’ is short for (Spoiler: Henry), then check out this comprehensive list of common nicknames.

If the student’s name either has no obvious nicknames or you tried a couple variations and are still coming up dry, chances are the student has graduated.

3. Do a victory dance:

For those of you trying to hunt down my university contact information, you’re in luck, as Indiana University still has me listed as a former student and employee. You can now proceed to send your outreach to me!

Next Steps

If you’re hunting down the contact information for one of the many John Smiths, Millers, or Andersons of the world, using the People Finder successfully might take a little digging and research. If the club webpage mentions the student’s major or area of interest, you should be able to narrow down the results to the “right” John Smith.

No luck still? See if you can find the club officers via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn – this is usually my last resort as the return is infrequently worth the time required.

Do you use any similar strategies? Is there a term for “people finder” or “student directory” that I missed? Let me know in the comments!

Follow Hillary on Twitter for more helpful stalking outreach tips!

The New Google Keyword Planner 

Google’s finally listened to years of feedback and recently launched a new, robust Keyword Planner that allows you to find new keywords & ad group ideas, pull search volume estimates, and identify competitive bids & budgets all in one place. Some of us in the SEER office have been playing around with the new tool and so far so good!

With the new release, Google expects to retire the current Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator by the end of July. While the new Keyword Planner shares features we loved in the in the Keyword Tool there are some notable differences.

Keyword Research

Whether you are creating new search campaigns or expanding and refining existing campaigns, the Keyword Planner helps discover the most efficient keywords. You now have the option to target individual cities and regions (vs. only countries in the Keyword Tool) plus languages, and networks. You can further customize your results by filtering keywords by number of avg. monthly searches, CPCs and competition. The Keyword Planner will also hide any keywords that already exist in your account (awesome!).

One new Keyword Planner feature that could be really beneficial is the ability to ‘multiply’ keywords, or combine two or more keyword lists to generate new keywords, similar to this keyword concatenation tool.

Keyword Estimates

After you’ve set up keyword filters and targeting the Keyword Planner uses historical data to provide keyword statistics for exact match (vs. broad in the Keyword Tool). To review broad and phrase estimates you must add the keywords to your ‘plan’. Your ‘plan’ is a computation of keyword ideas you’ve selected. As you’re building your ‘plan,’ you can adjust bid ranges and budgets to see updated volume estimates.

(click to enlarge)

 
If you feel like the Keyword Planner average search volume data is higher than the Keyword Tool results, you’re correct! With the move to Enhanced campaigns Google is now providing estimates for based all devices (vs. defaulting to just desktops in the Keyword Tool). It is not possible to segment by device in the planner. The average search volume data is also specific to your targeting options. In order to see global monthly search volume like before you’ll need to select all locations to target.

Also new to the Keyword Planner is Avg. CPC estimates column (vs. approximate CPC in the Keyword Tool).  Approximate CPCs took the average of CPCs across all ad positions and was not affected by your suggested bids. The new Average CPCs in the Planner are influenced by your suggested bids and will change accordingly. I’m excited for this update as it should help increase accuracy!

Once you click the blue “Get Estimates & Review Plan” button  (shown in the screenshot above) you will receive more detailed estimates based on specific bids you choose. Similar to the Traffic Estimator, Google Keyword Planner provides a nifty graph with daily performance estimates for your keywords and ad groups based on your selected bids and budget. While its functionality doesn’t differ much from the existing chart in the Traffic Estimator Tool I think its streamlined look is much easier to comprehend.

(click to enlarge)

In the screenshot above you can see that our traffic would be limited by the current bids and budgets for the selected keywords. This is a nice baseline to use for making adjustments. After you are satisfied with your selections Google gives you the option to upload your ‘plan” directly to your account. While this may be a helpful feature for some, I’d recommend downloading the build to Excel and doing the actual build outside of the Planner and using this as more of a suggestion.

I’m personally excited for the new tool and look forward to streamlining the build process. We’d love to hear your experiences with the new Keyword Planner.

How do you build that trust and make the relationship with clients stronger?

We work in an industry where we experiment different strategies (onsite and offsite) to continually improve and efficiently drive results. And to achieve those results we need approval on the strategies we provide to our clients and in a quick period of time.

Why is it difficult to build trust?

There are number of issues that may have been the reason for the client to not fully put their trust in you and your company. Below are few of many examples:

• Client may not have been educated in SEO
• You point of contact may be pressured by their bosses
• Regime change
• Lack of communication
• Hidden strategies that can cause disruption in the success of the campaign due to algorithm updates

Why is it important to build that trust?

• Appreciation: They would be more appreciative. Their circle of influence can affect other sources within the company to help you help them create success.
• Accelerate approval times: Onsite & Offsite strategies will start getting approved and implemented quicker to help you create success for them.
• More than just SEO: They started talking about strategies that inform business decisions. You will become more than just an SEO.
• High level decisions: You start getting involved with different departments of the company, such as: IT, Designers, Developers, etc.
• Collaboration: They start to become collaborative. The tone of their questions starts to change, examples:
  1. ‘What happened to these keywords, why did they drop?’ Changes to ‘We saw a drop in few keywords ranking, can you please take a look at this for us?’
  2. ‘Can you tell us why you are recommending this link building idea?’ Changes to ‘We understand the value of the strategy but we need some proof so we can help get some budget from our seniors’.

I wanted to share a quick example of a story that helped me gain that trust of the client to help speed up the approval process of the strategies, which led to achieving our initial goal quicker than intended.

What was done to improve the process? We provided an example of a small win that had the ability to create a big story and changed the entire approval process.

We had a really good win for one of the top keywords’ ranking position. We wanted to provide a story beyond just the ranking data. The analysis we provided included rankings plus the impact it had on the revenue.

Below is a graph of the ranking improvement for that keyword from November 2012 to March 2013 and how achieving those rankings also helped improve their revenue.

Let’s take it to the next level. Let’s look at the revenue this one keyword generated since the start of the campaign.

I would love to hear your examples :).

Conclusion

• Stories, strategies & results helps you become more of a long term partner. They will help you build trust and relationships.
• Personally, this is a path of my journey to become a marketer from an SEO.

Resource
I highly recommend and I know Wil does too to read this book —–> Speed of Trust

So What?

Blog Commenting

Starting with What

Keyword Research

Starting with What

Understanding the Why

Competitive Research

Starting with What

Understanding the Why

Conclusion

Web analytics tools can

• Identify on-site activities
• Provide information to help you improve conversion rates
• Let you know which pages are most visited, or frequently bounced from, to identify potentially good or bad website content
• Identify site-search keywords that you can test in AdWords, or build site content for

CRM systems can

• Decrease manual lead management time for you and your staff
• Compare PPC performance to other channels
• Help identify lead quality

Regardless of whether you’re just starting PPC on a new website, or you have a team managing the website, try to take advantage of the information and insights found in other tools like web analytics and CRM systems.   The tools search engines provide alone aren’t enough, having and sharing PPC information with other tools is best for the company as a whole.

Image Source

There are countless web analytics and CRM tools from many vendors to consider.  Without diving into all of the technical details, here’s how you can get started.

Decide What Tools You Might Integrate With

In my experience, few medium or larger companies have an easily accessible master list covering all of the web analytics and CRM systems they utilize.  An individual group may use tool X and not tell anyone else; team Y and team Z don’t work well together so they’re in the dark, etc.

The first step is to look at your source code to find out what tools are already being used.

However, not all web analytics and CRM code can be easily found by looking at a view source. The second step is to try a website speed test like Pingdom to see what’s taking time to load because some tools use 1×1 pixels to serve JavaScript and make requests to third party servers.  You’ll see most of the calls in the pingdom results.

Your final step is to talk to IT.  Tell them the background research you’ve done, and ask what tools are installed on the website for business intelligence, web analytics, and website monitoring and marketing purposes.  IT is busy too.  Telling IT what you did on your own to try to answer your question will make them much more likely to want to help you.

Now that we know what to integrate with, let’s get started.

Web Analytics

Google Analytics is but the tip of the iceberg.  Unica, Omniture SiteCatalyst, CoreMetrics, WebTrends and other tools provide best-in-class information, some of which is not available in Google Analytics.  Be sure to tag your destination URLs properly to work with these other tools (if your company/client has them).  Having your information in Google AdWords and Bing Ads is not enough.  To learn how to tag URLs for a particular tool, perform a web search and analyze the results.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems

It’d be helpful for sales to know where leads came from and for you to know from sales if leads sent via PPC were helpful.  Tools like Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, Salesforce and many others can do this, but you’ll need to integrate PPC with their systems to get the full benefit.

Think about the capabilities of these tools when creating landing pages.  You can create landing pages in some tools like Hubspot and Marketo.  Lead Lizard wrote a great post about how customizing Marketo forms can help capture precise information and per-populate fields.  These steps can increase conversion rates and help you later assess lead quality with information from sales.

Conclusion

Don’t overlook the basics.  Do some research on what tools you might integrate with (you’ll never know until you check).  Get started early to realize the full benefits, like CRM’s that can pre-populate fields and increase conversion rates.

Stay tuned for more on mastering PPC from my colleague Nick Viggiano next week.

When a user expands your Tweet, they see an image and description of your offer, and a call to action. Their name, @username and email address are already pre-filled within the Card—they simply click a button to send this information directly to you.

This could be a major development from Twitter.  Instead of having social media access to followers only, names and email addresses submitted via the Lead Generation Card make the following possible:

1- Increased touch points.  Companies can email market and sales teams can follow up via traditional means (email) to users who show an interest in a company via Twitter.  Our rep noted that it will require some work on the advertisers’ end to create an HTTPS endpoint, and the advertiser will most likely pull in their tech team.  However, it sounds like it’s worth a test for a client with a substantial Twitter campaign.

2- More Accurate ROI Measurement. Names generated via Twitter can be fed into CRM systems to associate with other marketing efforts and better judge cross channel marketing ROI.

3 – Higher total engagement rates.  We don’t think that users have to follow an account to fill out the lead generation card (though we are not 100% on this).  Users who don’t want to have their Twitter feed blown-up by following more accounts can now use the lead generation card and expect email follow-up which can lead to higher engagement for the advertiser.  Some people prefer email follow-up to social media overload.  

SEER’s Twitter rep has told us that the lead gen card can be applied across both organic and promoted tweets, but it has to be created through the Ads UI.  Therefore, only active advertisers can manage and create lead generation cards.  To make the card, you’ll need an image at least 600 pixels wide with a 4:1 aspect ratio no larger than 1mb.  The description is 80 characters maximum and the call to action is 20 characters maximum.

This could be Twitter’s way of trying to entice more people to advertise so that they can set up the lead generation card.  Stay tuned for more updates!