Writing PPC ads can be fun – using your brain to shoehorn great messaging into a limited number of characters is like doing puzzles. The parts of the copy-creation process that get really tedious are the repetitive acts – checking character count obsessively, combing the text to make sure your capitalization preferences are followed, appending the same word over and over.

There’s good news, though – Excel has some handy features you can use to streamline those mind-numbing steps. Here are my four favorite ad copy time-savers (they work for keywords, too):

1.       Length Formula

If you’re writing or customizing a significant number of text ads, create an extra column to the right of any ad text component to automatically measure length (i.e. the number of characters, including spaces, in the cell). Type in =LEN(cell), where cell is simply the cell whose characters you want to count. This feature makes it easy to see if you’re hitting the character count limits for Headline, Description Line 1, Description Line 2, or Display URL in AdWords. You can easily copy the formula down multiple rows and use conditional formatting (see #2) to quickly flag any cells over the limit.

2.       Conditional Formatting

It would be impossible to go into all the conditional formatting options in such a short blog post, so I’ll stick to the two main uses for ad text and keyword builds. First off, we can use the “Greater Than…” option to flag any ad text lines that exceed the specified limits. Go to “Conditional Formatting” > “Highlight Cells Rules” >  “Greater Than….” and enter your max limit in the dialog box that appears.

The screenshot below shows that the last two headlines exceed the 25-character max. As I modify the text of the headlines, both the length count and the conditional formatting will automatically update.

You can also use the “Less Than…” option if you want to identify ad text components that are significantly below the character limit. For example, you may want to flag any Description Line with fewer than 20 characters – perhaps there is additional, relevant text that can be added to use up more of the real estate and enhance the message you are trying to deliver.

Another useful conditional formatting tool is “Duplicate Values…” which is also found in the “Highlight Cells Rules” section. You can use the “Duplicate Values…” option to flag repeated keywords in keyword builds, duplicate ad text, etc. In the screenshot below, the two headlines flagged in green are duplicates.

3.       Capitalization Functions

Another useful feature for ad text is the “proper” function, which capitalizes the first letter of each word in a cell. Type in =proper(cell) to use this function.

There are a couple things to consider when using “proper.” First of all, the output appears in the cell where you place the formula, and the output itself is a formula. In order to manipulate it, you’ll need to copy and paste as special (values). You may want to paste it back into the cell with the original text, so you maintain the headers (“Description Line 1” in the example above). The other thing to keep in mind is that acronyms (such as PPC) will be modified so that only the first letter is capitalized. You’ll need to go back and fix any acronyms – fortunately a simple find/replace can do the trick.

There are additional capitalization functions that may be useful, depending on your preferences for keywords, ad group names, and ad text. The “lower” function makes every word lowercase, and the “upper” function makes all letters capitalized.

4.       Concatenate

The last feature I’ll hit on today is “concatenate,” which allows you to join the contents of two or more cells and/or cells plus text. For ads, “concatenate” is a great tool for appending tracking parameters to destination URLs, or for adding text to existing ads, among other things. For example, if you want to run an ad test with the word “Free” added to the beginning of every headline, the concatenate function would let you do this easily in Excel.

Note that, like the “proper” and “lower” functions, the output is placed in another cell and needs to be copied and pasted as values in order to manipulate the text.

Another great use for “concatenate” is to append the plus sign before broad match modifier keywords – however, it will only append the sign to the first token in a keyword. For the remaining tokens, simply use find/replace to find spaces and replace with space and plus sign.

There are several more functions and tools in Excel that will make your life as a search engine marketer much easier, but these are some of my favorites for ad text creation (and they can be handy for keyword builds, too).

Do you have any to add? Leave a comment!

AdWords Editor is a go-to tool for anyone managing large accounts or campaigns in Google AdWords. But even if you’re only dealing with small campaigns, it’s worth checking out this free tool from Google. AdWords Editor allows you to make bulk changes to individual or multiple campaigns – changes that cannot be made easily through the AdWords UI. As an added bonus, all of this is done offline so you can easily revert errors or unwanted changes before posting anything live. In this post, I’ll outline some of my favorite AdWords Editor tools.

1.       Advanced Bid Changes

Let’s say you’re nearing the month’s end and you find yourself with some budget to spare. Among other things, you may decide to increase bids across the board or across top-performing campaigns, ad groups, keywords, or placements. In the AdWords UI, you have the option of copying a particular bid from one keyword (for example) to several others on the page. In the screenshot below, the up/down arrows next to the $0.25 max CPC indicate I’m copying that bid to the other selected keywords.

So that’s useful if I want the same value for each keyword. But what if I have different bids for different keywords, and I want to increase all of them by 25%? That’s where the Advanced Bid Changes option in AdWords Editor comes in handy. To find it, go to the tab where you need to make bid changes (Keywords, Placements, Audiences, or Ad Groups). Select the data you need to adjust, and then click on the link below to “Advanced bid changes”.

The pop-up box gives you the option to increase or decrease bids by a certain percentage amount or dollar amount. You also have the option of setting minimum or maximum caps on bids. And as always, since you’re working in AdWords Editor, you can easily revert or modify any bid changes that seem out of whack prior to posting the changes live to your account.

2.       Copying Campaign Settings

At PPC Associates, we are constantly reviewing performance across different geos and different times (day of week, hour of day) for our accounts to look for additional optimization opportunities. Unfortunately, we can only apply hour of day bid adjustments or custom geos in the UI at this time, but we can use AdWords Editor to easily copy these specialized targeting settings to multiple campaigns.

Here’s how to do it: In the Campaigns tab, select the campaign that already has the targeting settings you need (this assumes you have already clicked on “Get recent changes” in AdWords Editor to download the settings you created in the UI). Right click on the campaign and select “Copy campaign shell.”  Alternatively, you can go to “Edit” à “Copy campaign shell.” This automatically copies the following settings: Devices, Ad schedule, Language targeting, and Location Targeting. Now you can go to any other campaign in that account in AdWords Editor, and simply click on “Paste” next to any of those four settings to copy over the targeting.

I should note that you can copy campaign settings fairly easily in the AdWords UI, as shown in the screenshot below. However, I still prefer working in AdWords Editor whenever possible, since it reduces the potential for errors.

3.       Custom View (Advanced search)

Finally, the Custom View option (also called Advanced search). This powerful tool lets you apply multiple filters based on campaign or ad group name, words contained in ad text or URLs, performance statistics, status, and more. We use this tool often to QA our work prior to posting, especially when making complex changes in bulk. To find the tool, either click on “Advanced search” in the top right of any tab, or use the “View” drop-down menu to find “Create or set custom view…”

Once you’re in the custom view, add as many filters as needed. For example, if I’ve recently appended destination URLs with a new tracking parameter (CUSTOMCMPGN) and want to easily identify any URLs missing the parameter, I change the settings to “Destination URL” “doesn’t contain” “CUSTOMCMPN.” But maybe that new parameter is only used for ad groups containing the word “free.” I can add a second filter for “Ad group name” “doesn’t contain” “free.” And if I’m only concerned with active ad groups? In the “Status” section, I check the box next to “Enabled” and nothing else. The results will be ads from active ad groups, not containing the word “free” in the name, and missing the new parameter.

Fluency with AdWords Editor does more than let you work on your accounts offline; it’ll save you tons of time with its advanced tools – and it’ll save you the time and headaches of troubleshooting errors pushed live directly from the AdWords UI. It’s arguably one of the most indispensable tool of all SEMs, from beginners to 10-year vets.

If you’re running paid search campaigns in Google AdWords, and you don’t already use the Dimensions tab, you’re missing out on a ton of useful data. Rolled out in mid-2010, the Dimensions tab is one of the most important components of the AdWords UI. It allows you to view data for an entire account or specific campaign(s) that can be used to better target your customers, decrease wasteful spend, and improve conversions. At PPC Associates, our Production team relies heavily on the Dimensions tab to pull detailed reports on campaign behavior across different time periods or geos, and to better understand how and where our ads are being shown on both the search and content networks.

The Dimensions tab is located on the right-hand side of the tabs list in the AdWords UI. If you can’t already see it, click on the drop-down arrow at the end of the row to bring up the menu of available tabs.

Once you’re in the Dimensions tab, go to the “View” drop-down menu to see the types of data available. The screenshot below shows the main menu; for Time, Conversions, and Reach and frequency you have additional options, such as Day of the week, Day (date in time), Week, Month, Quarter, Year, or Hour of day.

So now that you know where to find this, how are you going to use it? There’s a ton of good stuff here, and obviously not all of it will be relevant to every campaign. If you’re not using track-able phone numbers in your ads, for example, the “Call details” option is not going to have any data for you. If your campaigns are only running on the search network, you won’t have any automatic placements to review. But take advantage of what you can. Here are a couple of examples of how we use the Dimensions tab at PPC Associates:

1)      Day parting. We usually run two types of day parting reports: day of the week and hour of day. You can pull the data separately, or you can use the advanced segmentation feature in AdWords to break it down by hour of day for each day of the week. Once you have the data in Excel, use conditional formatting to easily spot trends in campaign performance. This can then be used to optimize the campaigns; for example, you may choose to increase bids during time periods with high conversion rate and low CPA, or decrease bids when the opposite is true. If there’s a clear drop in performance during specific days or hours of day, you may even want to turn campaigns off during these low-performing time periods. In the sample data below, it’s clear that the hours of 5 am – 8 am do not perform well, whereas the hours of 4 pm to 8 pm have high conversion rates and low CPAs.

2)      Search query review. Being able to see the actual queries that cause your ads to show is powerful, both for finding terms you don’t want to show up on and getting new ideas for keywords. We all know that running keywords on broad match – or even modified broad match or phrase match – opens up a campaign to a wide range of search queries, many of which might not be relevant to what we’re advertising. The “Search terms” option in the Dimensions tab will let you see the queries triggering your ads. Use this data to promote high-performing queries by turning them into keywords with targeted ads, and also to scrub out unwanted terms. This is especially important when your campaigns include a lot of general keywords. Just imagine how many irrelevant queries you can get matched to when bidding on “will” (as in last will and testament) keywords. The screenshot below shows just a few out of thousands.

Clearly this is a very broad overview of the Dimensions tab and the ways you can use it to optimize your campaigns. There are a lot of different ways to use the data, and the “Customize columns” and advanced segmentation options let you slice and dice the data in innumerable ways. No time like the present to get in, start some tests, and figure out how to improve your campaigns with the options on hand.

-  Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily of Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.

Here’s a brief overview of some of the changes you’ll notice:

First, Google says one of the new benefits is the ability to see search data from the original Keyword Tool and the Search-based Keyword Tool.
What you’ll notice immediately  is the new keyword box. It now allows for a keyword search to be performed with a combination of keywords, a URL and  a category.

You can also compare your keywords by match type using one or more match types at the same time. For example, I can get both sets of search data for a broad search term and an exact search term at the same time just by checking both boxes under the match types.

The change that I’m most excited is the new “starring” capability. This allows you to star keyword ideas, which then saves them while you search for new ideas. Gone are the days of having to download your selected keywords between searches!

In addition, you can now download starred keywords only, all results, all keywords for certain queries or keyword ideas in bulk.

Finally,you have the ability to search within terms using the “more like these” option. So you star or select your keyword phrases that you like the best and search within those phrases to find even more related keyword ideas.

For SEOs these changes will definitely help when conducting keyword research for clients.  We’re excited to see future updates to Google’s keyword research tool!

If you like free SEM tools like the Google Keyword Research Tool, definitely check out Schipul’s SEM tools.

FBML can add Google Analytics tracking to your facebook pages.

You finally have the outer edge offices understanding the need to allocate resources to social media. Now, you want to measure some of your traffic to your faceBook Fan page? Facebook does a fair job of letting you see basic traffic, but for a more comprehensive view of where your visitors are coming from, you can now use Static FBML to add a Google Analytics tracking code to your pages. Excellent! Let’s do this.

FBML is a markup language based on familiar html tags and a few facebook specific calls. It allows applications to be created in separate tabs or static boxes. Friend of Schipul, Beth Kanter, pointed out this Analytics in FBML how to article for a step-by-step process on adding code without having to trigger Javascript. Let us know if you have any problems and we will be happy to help.

Bidding vs. Profits for Google PPC Advertising

Folks over at Search Engine Watch published an in-depth article on the future of bidding for Google CPC advertising and how automation is becoming more prevalent. Efficiency in business is typically a good thing, but we still subscribe to the belief of more information is better when making decisions about where our advertising and ROI are focused. Google has done a great job of opening up much of its data in the past few years (Insights, Trends), but advertising hasn’t always seen that same transparency. Read to see the discussion about transparency and trust.

Use Value related keywords: Review your keyword list and top phrases driving traffic to your site. Google Trends clearly shows a trend for the word Coupon in  rising trend for the past twelve months. Can you incorporate price and discount related words? Add discount, savings, coupon, sale to phrases when relevant. Make sure to incorporate negative keywords such as –free to prevent paying for irrelevant clicks or bringing unwanted traffic. Use a Search Based Keyword Tool to both expand and target your list.

Low prices and savings in Display Ads: Customers both new and repeat are looking for values. Let them know about a sale, bundle pricing or a special promotional code. This text can be used in Display Ads and should be reinforced with the same message on the landing page. Can you promote a Sale, offer a bundle or discount for 10% off your web order? From Forrester research in late 2008, half of consumers believe they find the best deals online. Take advantage and market to the savvy shopper.

Market to existing clients: Let people know you have a new offer. Send an email to your house list with the latest coupon or discount code. Examples may include“Mention this email and receive 10% off your entire purchase” or “Print this coupon.” Include a discount code or free shipping if your ecommerce cart provides that option. Create your newsletter with text and graphics incorporating your special offer and keywords. Look at your email list and segment them based on what offer or target goal you are trying to achieve. It may be different offers resonant with different groups. Now, post that same newsletter as an article or page on your website to build traffic and attract additional readers.  Please make sure you have permission to send your email so you will not be flagged as SPAM. Watching your web analytics program, track visitors after sending an email to help measure success of your different target markets. Focus your efforts on the high-performing groups and consider allocating resources accordingly.

Jonti Bolles

For more information about this article or Web Marketing, please contact our Search Engine Marketing Team or Business Development Team at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.

Google AdSense Explained

Google AdSense is a partnership between Google and website/blog owners that allows site owner/admin’s to place Google’s pay-per-click(PPC) ads alongside their site’s content. Site owners can earn money by placing Google PPC ads on their site. If a visitor clicks on the ad you get a cut. For most ads the cut isn’t that much but if you blog about Law or Insurance your cut would be bigger. For instance, on another one of my blogs on poster design I have ads running to the right of the content. The content of these ads are based on keywords in the content of my blog. Change the content and the ad changes. This poster’s landing page has ads based on the keywords ‘Meridian and Houston.’ This poster’s landing page has ads based on the keyword ‘Chairlift.’ Neither of these pages ads really appeal to me. That is mostly my fault as I have very little text content for Google to find the correct ads to show here but thankfully I can take control, to an extent, of what Google will show me the site view NOT the site admin/owner.

Making Google AdSense More Interesting

Google calls this ‘Making ads more interesting’ making it easy to ‘connect people to the advertisers offering products, services and ideas that interest them.’ The concept seems pretty easy enough but as someone who spends a lot of time on the internet I’m not sure I spend that much time. And by that much time I mean that these ads are so frustrating to me that I am going to spend fruitful time catering ads that I barely see in my peripheral to be more relevant to me.

If you do spend a lot time looking at the AdSense ads and are frustrated with the ads that are shown to you head over to the Ad Preferences Manager and tell Google what you do and don’t like.

ONE THING THOUGH: This is based on cookie settings in your browser. If you use multiple browsers in multiple places(Work computer, Laptop and/or home computer) you will have to set up every browser in order for your settings to follow you.

WOW

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

Google also recently launched their new results page for mobile users and I am sure it looks great on the iPhone but I am a Blackberry user and somehow my Google home page changed as well and quite frankly it looks and acts horrible. I sure hope they return the non HTML mobile view back to the way it was.

For more info on Google Mobile Ads check out their video

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

Look How Easy it is to Create Google Displays Ads!

Choose Your Demographic

Before you have your ad just right you’ll need to make sure it gets in front of the right people. Use the Placement Tool to choose the right demographics for your ad.

Placement Tool

Creating an Ad

Now that you have your demographic you can choose from predesigned templates or upload your own or your Schipul designed creative into Google Adwords. Choose your ad text, upload your logo and then set your budget.

Google Display Ads – Wow That Was Easy Now What?

Like any type of marketing you want to be sure that it is effective and the only way to do that is to measure your traffic. One of the newest reports in the Google AdWords stable is the PPR or Placement Performance Report. Sit back and let your ads run for a week or two, run this report and see where your ads are hitting them out of the park and see where you are striking out.

Don’t get discouraged if some sites don’t bring you any traffic. This happens all the time and the beauty of having reports like these is recognizing where you aren’t performing and stopping it

Google Display Ads Tutorial Video

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

Google is offering different levels of AdWords training in various cities, so no matter if you have never done PPC or have some experience there is something for everyone. Each seminar will be broken up in to a morning and afternoon session.

Here is a list of the three levels you can attend:

1. AdWords 101 Beginner – This class will introduce online advertising and Google AdWords to those that are new to the PPC world. They will go over different types of online advertising, features and benefits of AdWords, how to create a new account and understanding the stats.
   
2. AdWords 201 Intermediate – This class is for those that already attended the 101 class. This will focus on optimization techniques such as location targeting, demographic bidding and keyword optimization. You will also learn changes with the AdWords Editor and how to create compelling ads and brief introduction to TV, audio, print and the ad creation marketplace.
   
3. AdWords 301 Advanced – This will be a class for those that have mastered the basics and are ready for a bit more. Here you will be able to focus on the psychology of search, understanding how people search, best practices of landing pages, content network optimization, placement targeting and advanced geographic targeting.

Find out if there is a city near you offering the Google AdWords Seminars and sign up now!

Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to learn the inside scoops, you will also receive a $50 value to use toward your Google AdWords Campaign, a Google USB thumb drive with all the seminar materials and other Google goodies…How cool is that?

Annisa Chan

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com