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

What is Landing Page Load Time? – the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after they click on your ad.

Again, you can see your landing page load time score from your Keyword Analysis Page.

This score is now being added to your overall quality score.  So it is very important to check now and fix it quickly before you start to see your minimum bid increase due to a low quality score.

For more information on how to improve your page load time, take a look here: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93116 

Annisa Chan

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

Here’s How:

1. Sign in to your Google Adwords account.
   
2. Choose a campaign you want to review
3. Click on the AdGroup you wish to see page load time for

   

4. Click on the magnify glass icon next to each keyword

     

5. A window will appear and click on Details and recommendations

   

6. You will then see your landing page load time score
   

This landing page load time will start to affect your campaigns in mid-June. 

For more information on how page load time can affect your quality score please visit: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87144 

Annisa Chan

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