Bryan Rahn – Life in the Blue

As you travel the back waters of the internet for blogs and forums regarding pay per click, you will undoubtedly cross paths with a number of people who can’t get enough complaining about the Google Quality Score. In case you haven’t heard, Google now places a ‘quality score’ that relates your keywords, ads and landing pages. The idea is that a higher quality score will increase your average position, because your site is very relevant to what the user is looking for.

The people who complain about the quality score are the same people who still write checks and still think Zubas pants are cool. (Were they ever cool?) They cannot accept change. Believe me, I don’t like change either. Saying that you welcome change is really just saying that something you didn’t want to have happen, happened. But you don’t have to like change to embrace it. I am always prepared for change and move with it. As long as you are prepared and can adapt to whatever is changing, you will be just fine.

Decent advertisers should not embrace the quality score with anything other than open arms and excitement. For hard working advertisers who aim to provide the user with a relevant and positive experience, your time has come. You will now be rewarded for your efforts. As for the spammers who buy anything and everything to get random traffic to their adsense ads, may you become the doormat of the search engine industry upon which I wipe my feet.

And this doesn’t relate just to spammers like ebay either. Even consider a good advertiser who sells both Zubaz pants and sweat pants. If the search is for Zubaz, how hard is it to have an ad for Zubaz and send the user to a page about Zubaz? I mean, if you walked up to a clerk outside a food and liquor store and asked, “Where do you keep the Tangueray?” And her response was, “Inside somewhere, you’ll have to find it.” You would not be a happy camper, and you would leave the store.

Some advertisers can’t seem to get it thru their thick skulls that it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at Google every month. You’ve heard these people. They just can’t throw out their average daily spend fast enough. “I spend over 4 gabillion dollars each day on Google and now they want to charge more for some of my keywords?” Nice try sport, a real number might have been more effective. While Google will encourage ad buying and help advertisers in any way possible, they know one important fact. There is only one person they need to make happy, the user.

Smart people learned long ago that you can’t force internet users to use or do something they don’t want to. Google won the search engine war because they provided, and still provide, the best user experience.

So my advice? Get of the soap box. I can’t even hear you complaining anymore because my ears are stuffed with the money I have made capitalizing on the new quality score. There may be some kinks to the quality score but they will get worked out. Bottom line, the quality score is not bad and it is here to stay. Use it to your advantage. Work to make your keywords, ads and landing pages more relevant. That will only help you live the life in the blue in the long run anyway.

Happy Chirstmas everyone.

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It’s that time of year again. That special time during the holidays where we gather round at the local pub and watch such college football Bowl Game classics as Middle Tennessee State vs Central Michigan, and the long time American tradition, the International Bowl. Along with the college bowl season comes the rush online shopping period.

As last minute shoppers shop and click, they can generate some spendy PPC costs. But not all users are great for a site to have. Maybe they are shopping for stuff you don’t offer, are looking for a shipping offer you don’t provide or have no clue what they want and are just browsing away. I call these people ‘Negative Donkey’s.’ They click on your ads but you have little chance of converting them into a sale. Although it is not possible to totally rid your life of Negative Donkey’s, there are steps you can take to help limit their presence, and soon, hopefully they will no longer exist to you. In short, Donkey’s on your site are about as valuable as flip-flops in December.

Negative keywords can help. AdWords lets you easily add lots of negative keywords. One easy trick is to look at your referring keywords from an analytics account like Google Analytics, or you may even have your own tracking. See what keywords people are typing in to get to your site for both PPC and organic. This is different than the keyword you are actually bidding on by the way. For example, if you don’t offer anything for free, make that a negative word. These people are looking for something free, you don’t have it, and so you don’t need to get them to your site. If they are looking for strawberry candy canes, but you only sell peppermint ones, strawberry can be a negative keyword.

The flip side to that coin is that if you notice people converting on your site from keywords that you hadn’t thought of before, you can promptly add them to your accounts. If they are good keywords you will be on your way buying a private party bus so you don’t have to wait for a plane at the airport ever again.

Don’t get caught into the thinking of, “Well, even if I don’t have it as a negative keyword, no one that searches that will click on may ad anyway.” This is bad for two reasons. First, many online users are about as smart as a pile of coathangers. Don’t ever think a user is too smart not to do anything. If they can do it, they will. Second, even if the user is not clicking on your ad, it is hurting your click thru rate. All those times where your ad is showing and you aren’t getting a click adds up and kills your CTR.

Another thing that can help is to be very clear in your ad text as to what it is your site offers. Don’t advertise things you don’t have. If you only sell baseball equipment, your ad should say so. If the search is for ‘sporting goods’ and the person is actually looking for golf clubs, you don’t need them click on your ad and costing you money that could be spent on beer. Another example is that if you are providing high end goods in some industry that are high end in price, put that in the ad. Then you won’t get Donkey’s that are trying to spend $1.99 on Wal-Mart brand t-shirts wasting your advertising budget when you only provide cashmere sweaters.

The final way to help out is try to convert the Donkey’s into something else. They might be looking for Wal-Mart t-shirts, but you don’t have them. So maybe you could set up an affiliate program with a low end clothing provider. Then you ad some text to you page that says, if you are looking for items not offered here, check out our partner site at…Maybe they go there and buys something and you can earn commission.

Keeping the Donkey’s off your PPC traffic will help you minimize costs. You don’t want them and they don’t want you, so there is no need for the two of you to have met. Either avoid them or find a way to convert them, and have a Life in the Blue…Christmas.

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It is getting tougher and tougher to compete in the PPC landscape. More people are getting involved everyday, and bids are always going up. I once read that PPC costs increased at 4% a month, not sure how accurate that is, but I could believe it. Can you imagine if the cost of beer or gin went up at 4% a month? I would either be broke or still on my first liver, not sure which.

Part of being successful and able to compete in the game we call pay per click is being successful on your site, and getting the most value for your traffic. Think about, if your conversion rate increased from 2% to 4%? If your conversion rates doubled you would make twice as much money, assuming you have scaled your process for selling or doing what ever it is you do. Instead of making $10 per visitor after PPC expenses you would be making $20. Now, if the bid price jumps from $4 to $5, it doesn’t seem so bad.

Another idea is to find a way to generate more money from each user. Maybe you could convince them to buy two things instead of just one. After all, if they are buying ball, they are going to need the bat. This also can increase the value you get from each PPC visitor.

By night I am a conversion guru, so more tips to come on that in the future, but keep this in mind. I tell people this every day. You see your webpage all the time, you visit it constantly. Try a different approach and do this:

Sit down at your computer, search one of your terms, look at the completion and their ands and then look at yours. What makes yours stick out? Is there something they are offering that you aren’t? What would you think if you were an online shopper and were seeing these results for the first time?

Then go to the other sites and finally go to yours. Again, how is yours different? Look for things they are doing to help convert the visitor and consider them for your site. Maybe your site is missing something crucial, or missing the point and delivering the wrong message. One key thing is be sure your keyword, ad and landing page are all related. It should be like a continuous magical journey. Remember field trips when you were little and the jean shorts wearing hippie would yell at you ‘stay on the path!’ This is how it should be for your visitor, a journey where no one wants to stray off the path and wander. It’s like a line from search to purchase.

For example, if the search is for ‘donkeys’ and your ad is about donkeys, it would make sense that the lading page reinforces that this is the place to be for donkeys. The only true way to known these things is thru conversion testing, but this is a great place to start.

You are guaranteed of three things in life death, taxes and raising PPC costs. As long as you can stay ahead of your competitors and be able to move with increasing costs, you can be living the good life, life in the blue.

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Welcome to Life in the Blue. As you can tell by now, this site is my blog. I hope this site to be a lively discussion about living the good life – Life in the Blue. I am a PPC guru, and my ads live at the top of Google’s paid search listings – in the blue.

A little background on your host – I have worked in the search industry for three years, with my main focus in pay per click. I have worked in some of the most competitive industries learning from the ground up. I also have experience in web site conversion testing, and learn more about online behavior everyday. It is my goal in life to travel the world going to conferences, blogging and getting paid to drink.

Moving on to this week’s discussion about life in the blue. This may bore some of the professionals in the audience, but you will agree how often this comes up. Many times I hear someone who knows very little say something like “I want to start a PPC campaign and be in the top spot on the blue, and I’ll spend whatever it takes.”

Yawn…Here we go again. Now I respond, “While simply bidding thru the roof will help your ad position, you cannot simply start a campaign and be the top result. Google takes into factors such as click thru rate history of the keyword, adgroup and advertisement. They also look at the quality of your landing page.” People who are a really big deal may throw around the phrase ‘quality score’ to describe this. You don’t know what your quality score is, though I have heard there may be tools in testing to give you an idea. It is basically has to do with how relevant your landing page is to the keywords you are bidding on.

A similar statement is “I searched and I always see my ad in the blue, but today it was the top one on the right.” They then start panicking, get short of breath and start opening up their wallet to throw more money at Google to get their ad back living the life in the blue. This is a common occurrence. Sometimes Google wants to see how the ads really compare against each other in click thru rate. As long as you have a strong CTR history and maintain it, your ad will go right back to the premium position.

Some people are bothered by Google’s secretiveness in quality score and not being able to control everything. I am not. For organic search they have their sandbox. The CTR history is the same effect. It rewards people for a long positive history and prevents fly by night strategies from taking control of the top spots.

The point of this is to always remember, that some things are not always about money. Google uses a variety of factors to calculate ad position. And don’t waste your time trying to figure out exactly either to always control your spot. Bids and click thru rates are always changing. Trying to come up with a bid strategy to control your position for every single keyword will not yield positive results. You might as well have spent your time…blogging.

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