Brief Overview of Negative Keyword Conflict Reports – Microsoft AdCenter
NEGATIVE KEYWORD CONFLICT REPORTS: INTRO
Have the right negative keywords and click through rates (CTR) rise, cost per acquisition (CPA) drops, and cost per click (CPC) drops. Have the wrong negative keywords and best case scenario you’re not filtering out unqualified searches. The worst case scenario, you’ve totally screwed yourself by blocking important and relevant searches.
AdCenter has been reaching out to the PPC community lately and Negative Keyword Conflict Reports could be an olive branch of peace to a group of advertisers historically frustrated with AdCenter’s lack of features, usability issues, and lack of support.
Following is a short overview of Negative Keyword Conflict Reports.
Overview:
Adcenter’s Negative Keyword Conflict Report lets you compile a list of negative keywords that conflict with active keywords. Reports display the account, campaign, adgroup, keyword, negative keyword, and conflict level.
Conflict level refers to the account level where the positive keyword conflict is occurring, for example, campaign or adgroup. We’ve also seen numbers in this column when we’ve downloaded the report and are not sure what these are referring too.
Note: This report will still pull negative keyword conflicts from paused adgroups and campaigns if the keywords are still set to active. Be sure to select specific accounts, campaigns, and adgroups under “Report Scope” to avoid wasting time.
Report options and customization is limited to selecting entire accounts or selecting specific accounts, campaigns, or adgroups. There is no option to select a time range since the report is compiled based on the current negative and positive keywords.
The Good:
This is a fantastic tool unique to AdCenter. Reports run quickly and provide invaluable data.
· This report is especially useful for large and complicated accounts.
· If you are taking over a new AdCenter account that has been managed by another company this is a must run report.
· This is a great tool to audit an account before going it live.
· While Negative Conflict Reports are not quite as essential for smaller accounts it will still save a lot time combing through keywords.
The Bad
No Flexibility.
· When selecting “Report Scope” you are unable to sort campaigns and adgroups by active, paused, or deleted. This is an annoying time waster for large accounts.
· Only a limited number of report columns are available. Additional columns would be a welcome addition to Excel Jockeys.
· This is a report not a live tool.
What I’d Love to See
If this report option was a live and functioning tool I think I’d have to ask for Bill Gates forgiveness for all the awful things I’ve said about AdCenter in the past. If I could click, sort, edit, and bulk change this negative keyword conflict report information from AdCenter Desktop I think I’d even buy him lunch.
If I were nit picking, being able to sort by status when selecting specific accounts, campaigns, and adgroups would be a huge time saver for users managing large accounts.
Overall
This is a fantastic and time saving report. It’s a bit limited but it really is hard to complain about. However, like most things AdCenter, it could have been a homerun as a tool but ended up very useful as a report.
I’m excited to see some advanced tactics developed for this. Post your tips and tricks below!
Author: Mark Jensen
Photo Courtesy of http://www.vanishingtattoo.com
Top PPC Takeaways From Pubcon Las Vegas 2011
Pubcon Las Vegas was epic from start to finish. Not only was there epic dinner, epic karaoke, and epic networking, there also was loads of great PPC information being passed around! I’ve compiled the best tips and tricks from the PPC experts who presented at the conference:
Dave Feldman from Microsoft adCenter said, “adCenter Quality Score does NOT affect rank or CPCs – just indicative.”
Kerstin Baker-Ash shared about one study which found, “19% of conversions came from GDN. 84% of those were from view-through conversions.”
David Szetela said on positioning, “1-3 is magic in search, 1-4 in content. Impressions drop off after that.”
Brian Piepgrass from Facebook shared, “People are “performing” on Facebook. If they like your page they are trying to look cool in front of their friends.”
Brad Geddes shared several gems:
“If you are trying to update your account for relevancy it may take up to 2 weeks for the changes to take effect.”
“Static conversion rates do not exist. They vary from hour to hour and day to day.”
“On your landing page forms is the value of what you are asking for equal to what you give out?”
“Don’t ask questions that Analytics can answer”
“City and state are redundant if you get the zip code”
Amanda Watlington, in the Keyword Research session commented, “There are two types of competitors: competitors on your keywords, and competitors that your client identifies.”
Joanna Lord, on strengthening brand on landing pages said, “Use mission statements, testimonials, awards, customer counts, logos, consistency, badges, press mentions, positivity.
Michael Black said, “On the display network, match types don’t matter, but exclusions do.”
Janet Miller, in the Facebook landing pages session said, “If you use an Iframe in Facebook you can use your existing PPC landing page with just some small tweaks.”
Mat Siltala tweeted, “Everybody knows what happens in Vegas gets posted on Twitter… FB, Tumblr, etc… hahahah (oh and YouTube)”. Great ORM advice.
This was my first conference and it was better than I bargained for. Awesome information was shared and I met some great people.
If you were at Pubcon Las Vegas, what PPC advice did you find most helpful?
Dental Pay Per Click Strategies – Part 5 – Account Optimizing
This is our final dental pay per click strategy in our 5 part series. Thus far, we have discussed four important aspects of an effective dental pay per click account:
· Account structure
· Dental ads
· Dental keywords
· Landings pages with offers
After you have created that solid foundation, it is essential that you take time to optimize your account frequently. In this post you will learn some great tips to help your account improve and save you money.
The follow are things that are ‘musts’ when it comes to frequent dental account optimizations.
Dental Ad Optimization
Select an adgroup and compare the CTR or click through rate of your ads.
Pause the ads that have the lower CTR and create a new ad that is based off the best performing ad.
Repeat this process for all of your adgroups weekly or at least monthly.
Dental Bid Optimization
Select an adgroup and view the keywords. Pay attention to the average position and CPC (cost per click) of your most important keywords.
Adjust your bids according to how much you want to spend on a keyword and if you have a desired position.
New Dental Negative Keywords
Take a minute to view the search term report found within the keyword tab.
Select keywords in the search report that are not relevant to your practice or are searches that show they are not serious about finding a dentist.
We recommend that you view this report at least monthly if not weekly
If you have more time to dedicate to your dental pay per click account here are few otherthings we recommend.
New Dental Keywords
Use Google’s keyword tool and websites like www.keywordspy.com to find ideas for more relevant dental keywords.
Use your search term report to find relevant searches that you are not currently targeting.
Break High Volume Keywords Into New Adgroups
Look for keywords in your adgroups that are receiving a high volume of clicks and impressions.
Copy one of those search terms like ‘dentist’ into a new adgroup with all three match types: broad, “phrase”, and [exact].
Write ads in the new adgroup that are relevant to the separated keyword.
Note that by separating the keyword, you are able to pay special attention to its progress and also write ads that are more relevant than before. This strategy helps with the CTR and quality score improve.
That concludes our 5 part series for Dental Pay Per Click Strategies with Google Adwords. We encourage you to implement these strategies and find how Google Adwords can benefit your practice.
–Sterling Green
Dental Pay Per Click Strategies – Part 4 – Landing Page and Offers
Having great ads and a solid keyword list is great and all, but without a proper landing page and dental offer, you will be hard pressed to get the new patients in your office.
Landing Page
When making an effective landing page, it is first important to first consider your potential patient and why they have come to your website. If you have written an effective ad, you should have called them to an action of some kind. With that call, they are at your site with the expectation that you want them to do something – a phone call, form request, or read about something important. It is important that you make it easy and almost obvious for them to do what you want, on your dental PPC landing page. That might mean:
· Putting your phone number in big bold numbers at the top of the page
· Putting a fast, easy form on the landing page
· Having an arrow pointing to what they need to do
· Having an obvious link to where you want to send them next
These techniques should always be done tastefully. People aren’t dumb, they will see through a gimmick quickly. We recommend using a form with a dental offer to get the best results.
Dental Offer
People on the internet will rarely give without getting something in return. That is why we recommend offering some kind of dental offer to new patients. We have seen that having multiple offers, which appeals to a larger group, are more effective than an offer that is very specific. To the right is an example of a form used in a dental pay per click account.
The form is very simple, but in the context of the website it is obvious and tasteful. It is also very effective and brings in a large number of new patients every month. The offer is only valid to those that schedule an appointment and come in to redeem it.
It is also important to have a simple and clear navigation on your landing page and content that is relevant to the keyword searched. This not only helps the person surfing your site, but also will help your PPC quality score with Google. A better quality score means a lower cost per click and a better average position.
So make sure that you have a relevant landing page that has incentive for your new patient. This is a key part in having a successful Dental pay per click account.
–Sterling
Dental Pay Per Click Strategies – Part 3 – KeyWords
This is the third post of a series of dental PPC strategies. This week we are going to focus our attention on writing keywords that will attract the most relevant traffic and keep you safe from searches that have no relevance.
When developing a good keyword list, we recommend using Google’s keyword tool to start. You can find that tool in the Adwords dashboard under the tools tab or when you click on the “add keywords” button in the keywords tab. Look for keywords that you know would be relevant to your site and do not be afraid to create a good sized keyword list. Here is an example of keywords found in a “Denture” adgroup:
- [dentures]
- “affordable dentures”
- “cost of dentures”
- [denture]
- “cheap dentures”
- “dentures cost”
- dentures ronan montana
- “partial dentures”
- “low cost dentures”
- “denture implants”
- “same day dentures”
The actual list is much bigger, some adgroups can have up to 40 or 50 keywords in a dental ppc account.
You will notice that some of the keywords are wrapped with “quotations”, [brackets], or nothing at all. This is called ‘keyword match type’ and is a great way to control how your keywords are used by Google’s search engine. The bracket match type is called exact match. The quotation match type is called phrase match. The keyword with nothing wrapped around it is called broad match. We commonly start a campaign with exact and phrase match to limit search volume to the most relevant traffic and have only a few specific terms use broad match like: dentures ronan montana.
One last tip for your keyword list is to include negative words. Negative keywords are a great way for you to tell Google about specific keywords that are not relevant to your site. This can be used to block out people using related keywords that are not prospective new patients. Here are a few examples of negative keywords we use in a dental ppc account.
- -books
- -employment
- -resumes
- -education
- -staffing
- -seminar
- -career
- -picture
- -supplies
For someone just starting a dental ppc account, we recommend using the ‘see search terms’ report to find what irrelevant search terms are being used to find you. You can find that report by clicking on the keyword tab at the campaign level. Click on the drop down menu titled, ‘see search terms…’ and click all. This report will allow you to see what terms your ads are showing on. Use this report to determine if a keyword is relevant or not and quickly add it as a positive keyword or a negative one.
Please check in next week when we talk about how to use landing pages and dental offers in a dentist pay per click account to more effectively see a return on investment.
- Sterling Green
