Expanded broad match increases importance of negatives

Have you seen your ad appearing for a search/keyword you’re not bidding on?

If so you’ve been hit by the Expanded Broad Match bug.
Google will serve your ad against, for what they interpret as, a relevant search.

E.g. Your keyword – ‘toner’, Search query is ‘HP colour printer’ = Impression for your ad.

First port of call is to review the search query data in the Report Centre within AdWords to see what searches your ad is appearing for. This will help you on two fronts:
- Add relevant terms that you don’t have in your account.
- Add irrelevant terms as negatives.

The quick way to control how your ads are served is to move all terms away from broad match and use phrase or exact.

There is however a downside to this tactic. If the account is not built with sufficient depth then there is a possibility that you will see traffic and conversion volumes drop when moving away from broad match.

The most effective tactic is to optimise the negative terms used. This should be an ongoing process and be part of your optimisation cycle.

Utilising negative terms will give you control over your account performance and will not sacrifice the volume of relevant traffic. Tighter control should also improve a number of KPI’s:

- Increase in average CTR by ensuring relevant impressions only.
<- Improve quality score.
- Potential decrease in average CPC or improved average positions.

Monitoring the search queries on an ongoing basis will naturally help you move away from relying on broad match in the long term by increasing the keyword variations in your account. One step further is to monitor the search queries that are generating conversions via your tracking tool(s). Unfortunately the new Google Search Funnels does not provide converting search query data…..yet.

Adding long tail terms to the account and understanding the influence of each keyword will help you devise a clear bidding strategy.

Yes the term is relevant to your offering but is it converting? Is it part of the conversion funnel? Where in the conversion funnel is it? How many times is the term used in the funnel?
Answering these questions will give you great insight into user behaviour and in turn will help you devise the correct bidding strategy for different type of terms. I.e. Browser terms vs. Research terms vs. Converting terms.

Google wins trademark case…what does this mean for your PPC account?

You may have read about the landmark case between Louis Vuitton and Google. The European Court of Justice ruled in Google’s favour – in short this means that the current Trademark Policy is unlikely to change anytime soon.

We thought that it might be a good time to recap on the rules, what this means for your PPC account, and what you should do to protect your brand.

At present all advertisers can bid against any search term, this includes brand terms. If you are not relevant for that search then your quality score will be hindered and you are likely to have an inflated CPC to accompany your poor conversion rate.

Bidding on competitor brands is common practice in today’s search results, especially in competitive markets like car insurance. In such markets it is imperative that you use PPC ads in order to protect your brand and not give your competition a free run at your traffic and potentially your conversions.

Good practice is to utilise the site links functionality to help occupy more of the landscape and push your competitors down.

On a side note if there is no competitor activity on your brand terms it is still advisable to use PPC as studies have shown that it provides significant incremental conversions.

Google’s analogy is to compare their results with a supermarket shelf where the user is exposed to a number of brands despite knowing what they are looking and want. The Google results are designed to give the user relevant choice.

To help protect your brand it is important that you submit your trademark to Google. This will restrict advertisers from using your brand in their ad copy unless they are an approved partner/reseller.
To register your brand as a trademark with Google you need to submit the following form.

Contact the Make It Rain PPC team for advice/consultation/account management.

Make It Rain wins Best Western Hotels Search Account

We’re excited to announce that hotel brand Best Western has appointed Make It Rain as its search agency following a competitive three-way pitch including incumbent Bigmouthmedia and Greenlight. Make It Rain will provide all PPC and SEO services to Best Western Hotels.

Best Western are placing particular focus on pay per click and search engine optimization in 2010 with the imminent launch of a completely new and re-vamped website. Jason Munslow, Interim Head of Ecommerce and Distribution for Best Western commented “Make It Rain showed great understanding of our brand and the travel sector and we believe they are the right agency to maximize our competitiveness against the many aggregators and other hotel chains”

Make It Rain Managing Director, Justin Hayward said “ Best Western is a great brand with huge potential to increase market share by advancing their search marketing. We’re delighted to be working with them in 2010.”

About Best Western
Best Western is the largest group of independently owned and managed hotels in the UK and worldwide. Member hotels maintain their independence, charm and personality, while benefiting from being part of the Best Western brand. Hotels benefit from sales and marketing activity available to them by joining with like-minded independent hoteliers.

Five steps to better PPC

We believe every PPC campaign can always be better as there are many elements to consider.  Think about how seasonality, competitors, messaging, budgets, sales targets and search engines can change.

With this in mind, Justin Hayward along with Econsultancy will be presenting ‘Five steps to better PPC’  in London on 26th November.  If you can’t make it to the event Econsultancy will also be running this session as their first ever webinar on 1st December!

We’ll be covering:

1. KPIs and objectives – What do you really want to achieve and is it feasible?

2. Keywords & account structure – Long tail, brand, ad groups, have you got it right?

3. Creative ad writing – Is your message better than the rest?

4. Site landing pages and SEO integration – What happens when they get to your site? Designing for conversion.

5. Tracking & technology – Data blindness? Are you analysing the right stats?

All details can be found at the Econsultancy site