Table of Contents
Alarming Campaign Settings 1
Vanishing Language Settings 3
Mystify Your Ad Copy 4
Kill Off Your Broads 6
Mysterious Single Keyword Ad Groups 8
AdWords Editor Keyword Opportunities Tool 9
Sinister Soovle & Undead UberSuggest 12
Tricky Time Lag Reporting 13
Chilling Retargeting 14
Abhorrent Attribution Modeling 16
Thrilling Top Paths 18
Search Buying Cycle 19
Ghastly Keyword Granularity 21
Alarming Ad Group Level Negative Keywords 22
Cut Away the Ad Overflow 23
Make Your Ad Copy Lurking Local 24
Add Special Ogre Offers In Ads 26
Make Your Hair Raising Headlines Longer 27
Deadly Description Line One 28
Keywords In Headlines & Display URLs 29
Answering Quivering Questions in Ads 30
Hack Your Ad Extensions 31
AdWords Sorcery Scripts 32
Automatic Countdown Scary Scripts 33
Automated Revolting Rules 34
Checking Ghastly Geographic Areas 35
Capturing Moldy Mobile Opportunity 37
Negative Keyword Lists 39
Afraid of Auction Insights? 40
Torment Your Competitors 41
Bid On Your Smelly Self 42
Ghoulish Gmail Advertising 43
We live in a freaky cool digital era. People all over the web are now more connected and smarter online than they’ve ever been before.
As connectivity increases, so do the opportunities for marketers and advertisers, but you have to stay on top of your game because what worked a few years ago might not work today.
Although Google, Facebook, and other PPC advertising partners constantly introduce new (and sometimes creepy) innovations to make our lives simpler, the core goal of the end user always remained the same—“fix my problem.”
So, whether your goal is to get more conversions, lower your cost per conversion, or simply improve your PPC performance, we’ve put together a shocking list of ways to fix your problems.
This guide is a treasure trove of delicious goodies, so enjoy!
Here are some of the tricks and treats that we’ve found work ghoulishly well for our partners, clients, and thousands of other marketers and advertisers around the globe.
It’s time to bring your PPC performance back from the grave…
–Jacob Baadsgaard
Download the free guide at Disruptive Advertising
i Table of Wicked Content Alarming Campaign Settings
1 Vanishing Language Settings
3 Mystify Your Ad Copy
4 Kill Off Your Broads
6 Mysterious Single Keyword Ad Groups
8 AdWords Editor Keyword Opportunities Tool
9 Sinister Soovle & Undead UberSuggest
12 Tricky Time Lag Reporting
13 Chilling Retargeting
14 Abhorrent Attribution Modeling 16 Thrilling Top Paths 18 Search Buying Cycle 19 Ghastly Keyword Granularity 21 Alarming Ad Group Level Negative Keywords 22 Cut Away the Ad Overflow 23 Make Your Ad Copy Lurking Local 24 Add Special Ogre Offers In Ads 26 Make Your Hair Raising Headlines Longer 27 Deadly Description Line One 28 Keywords In Headlines & Display URLs 29 Answering Quivering Questions in Ads 30 Hack Your Ad Extensions 31 AdWords Sorcery Scripts 32 Automatic Countdown Scary Scripts 33 Automated Revolting Rules 34 Checking Ghastly Geographic Areas 35 Capturing Moldy Mobile Opportunity 37 Negative Keyword Lists 39 Afraid of Auction Insights? 40 Torment Your Competitors 41 Bid On Your Smelly Self 42 Ghoulish Gmail Advertising 43
ii The first step towards PPC success is to make sure you know what your goals are. The second step is to architect a campaign that helps you meet those goals. Too many times have we seen campaign settings set in a way that wastes a ton of money. Picking the wrong campaign settings is a great way to set yourself for your own PPC horror story. To get started, the first thing you should do is look at your Dimensions tab. Then, click on “User locations” and see what countries/territories your ads are showing in. Once there, you may discover that your ads have received impressions and/or clicks from foreign countries (see below). Unless you’rre advertising a blood bank, you probably aren’t going to get a lot of conversions from Transylvannia. Alarming Campaign Settings
1 If you don’t want your ads to show to everyone internationally (not all advertisers are Coca Cola), all you have to do is go to your AdWords campaign settings and go down to “Location options (advanced)” and target “People in my targeted location”. If you don’t see this functionality, it’s because you have your campaign type as Standard, and not “All features”. This setting change will immediately prevent your ads from showing worldwide and focus only on the geographic cities, regions, states, or countries that you’ve chosen in your Locations settings. Easy fix, no? Alarming Campaign Settings ( Continued )
2 You’d think that when you target the English language, your AdWords ads would show to all people within your geographic settings. Unfortunately, you’re wrong. AdWords‘ language settings are based on the Google domains being used (Google.fr, .de, .mx, etc) and the devices interface language set by the user. There are tons of different nationalities in the US (and other countries in the world) that have their device settings set to other languages, but then still search on Google through English keywords. If you’re only opting into the English language, then Google (and other search engines) consider searches (even in English!) from devices or domains with a non-English language setting as non-English searches—so, they won’t show your ad to the user. Confused? Me too. Fortunately, to prevent this from happening and/or to see the difference in traffic, all you have to do is switch your Languages to “All languages”. Vanishing Language Settings
3 Not all of us are gifted with the wizard skills of turning our ads into hypnotizing copy that can get anyone to send you money after they click. Us mere mortals must deal with limited character spacing and the English language. To pumpkin spice things up and stand out from your competition, you need to think of ways in which you don’t end up like one of these advertisers: As you can see, nothing dramatically stands out. In fact, hardly anyone here is taking advantage of their own headlines. Mystify Your Ad Copy
4 Some ideas to help you stand out more and increase your CTR from a strict ad writing perspective are: • Change the headline to be the end result to visitor is looking for: Are you a car buyer? “We’ll Buy Your Car Today!” Are you a plumber? “We’ll Fix Your Plumbing!” Are you a cosmetic dentist? “Smile Beautifully Again!” Although some of these ideas don’t include the keyword in the headline, give them a shot and see how more benefit driven headlines can lead to higher CTR. • Include parentheses, brackets, and squiggly brackets (in your headlines). • Add a smiley face to your headlines. 
• Add numbers to your headlines. (2015, $6, or others) • Add discounts or coupon codes to your headlines. • Add part of a testimonial to your ad. • Make your headline a list or comparison of things (5 New Tax Accounting), then continue the sentence in your description lines. • Have the description lines cut off with an ellipsis … so the person is more intrigued to finish the sentence with a click. • Focus on a stronger offer/call-to-action than your competitors. • Try adding quotation marks to your headlines. • Add dollar signs, registered trademarks, and asterisks to your headlines. Mystify Your Ad Copy (Continued)
5 We’re not telling you to kill off any women, we’re talking about your broad match keywords. Broad match keywords are by far one of the biggest killers when it comes to AdWords PPC performance. These types of keywords will trigger your ads to show for synonyms, variants, and sometimes even completely random search terms! To show you the damaging effect that broad match keywords can have on your PPC performance, consider the screenshot below: Kill Off Your Broads
6 The Keyword column is what the advertiser wants to show their ads for, but the Search term column is what they’re really showing for. Admittedly, this is an extreme example (like, who would bid on the keyword ‘Salt Lake City’?), but it goes to show that what you think you’re showing isn’t always what you’re actually showing for. Instead of using broad match keywords when you are limited by budget, make sure you pause them completely and use broad match modifier instead. Broad match modifier is a keyword match type that allows you to add a “+” sign in front of every word you want in your keyword. Google then makes sure that the search terms your ads show for, must have that word in them. Kill Off Your Broads (Continued)
7 This idea piggy backs off of the previous method for killing of your broads. Single keyword ad groups (also known as SKAGs), are meant to help your keywords, ads, and ad groups become extremely relevant to each other. And with higher relevance comes higher quality scores and click through rates. So what does your CTR look like when you focus on single keyword ad groups? Look above! You’ll notice that the blue line is clicks and the red line is CTR. You’ll also notice the beautiful trend of the red line, and this is a direct result of being more specific and relevant with the single keyword ad groups. So what are single keyword ad groups? We’ll they’re just like the name implies. Every ad group you have should only have one keyword in them. Let’s say you were a bounce house rental company. Each of your ad groups would look like this: Mysterious Single Keyword Ad Groups Keywords: +bounce +house +rental “bounce house rental” [bounce house rental] Ad Headline 1: #1 Bounce House Rentals Ad Headline 2: EZ Bounce House Rentals The reason you’d set up your keywords and headlines this way is because there’s a huge relevancy between the two. If someone searches for a ‘bounce house rental’ and sees an ad headline specifically for that, there’s a high likelihood that they’ll click on it too. But be careful! Don’t go creating SKAGs for all your keywords at the same time. Start with the search terms that have the most traffic and build those out first. Then, if performance does show improvement, continue down the list and build out more SKAGs over time.
8 If you don’t already have AdWords Editor, GET IT NOW! Seriously, this tool will make your life so much easier. Grab your download here. The great thing about AdWords Editor is that it allows you to make bulk changes and edits to your AdWords account on almost any level. AdWords Editor Keyword Opportunities Tool The AdWords Editor has a very hocus pocus way of finding new keywords for you to target which will help you get more relevant impressions and clicks. To get there, make sure you’re on the Keywords tab. After that, click on Keyword Opportunities to the far right. After that, you’re presented with 3 different ways of getting new keywords. One is Keyword expansion (where you type in a root keyword and the system gives you different variants and different tail lengths, including monthly search volume, and competition levels).
9 The second option is the Keyword multiplier. This tool allows you to connect multiple parts of different keywords together to generate multiple keyword variations. AdWords will then automatically match them up across different angles and give you monthly search volume and competition levels as well. If you want to, you can export all the keywords generated to a CSV or add them directly to certain ad groups that you already have or create brand new campaigns or ad groups. AdWords Editor Keyword Opportunities Tool (Continued)
10 For the third and last option, Search-based keywords allows you to input your website and the tool will then scan your site to come up with relevant keywords. This is for the ultimate lazy man shortcut, but it’s also very effective A quick note here is to not let the competition levels scare you. If they’re high, then that means that most people use those search terms and you should definitely bid on them. It’s very difficult to capitalize on any service-based niche keywords. AdWords experts Editor Keyword Opportunities Tool (Continued)
11 Soovle.com and UberSuggest.org are amazing freetools for keyword discovery. If you really want to impress someone based off the sheer volume of keywords you’re bidding on, these tools would be your best friends. Soovle shows you the top searches based off your keywords on all the major search engines in one spot. UberSuggest gives you a breakdown alphabetically on longer tail keywords based off the root keyword you gave it to begin with. If getting more traffic is your goal, adding new keywords that you aren’t currently showing for will definitely help you out. Soovle: Uber Suggest: Sinister Soovle & Undead UberSuggest
12 Do you know the buying cycle of your customers? Even before you start interacting with them? As you probably know, a lot of people don’t buy or reach out to you the first time around. They comparison shop, even paralyze themselves, and hold off on making decisions until later. AdWords time lag reporting shows you how long it actually takes people to convert after the first impression, first click, or last click. If you have a high percentage of people (10%+) of people who convert after 12 days, then remarketing could be a huge benefit for you. Remarketing (where your ads follow people around) could help keep you top of mind and also target new offers and call to actions (even discounts) to bring back lost visitors. To see your own AdWords time lag report, go to Tools > Conversions > Search Funnels > Time Lag. This is what it looks like: As you can see in the screenshot, over 12% of people convert after 12 days. If you set up a good remarketing campaign, you could potentially decrease the time and get them to convert much sooner. Tricky Time Lag Reporting
13 Have you ever been creeped out? Like REALLY creeped out? What about creeped out online? Have you ever had ads follow you around everywhere? Like, even our own ads here at Powertraffick. This is called retargeting and it’s a method that involves tracking your browser to have ads follow you around after you leave the website or page. While we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, we’ll never stop. And the reason for this is because retargeting works really well for getting more conversions when you’ve set up it the right way. Here are some rules to follow when it comes retargeting: Chilling Retargeting
14 1. Use only one retargeting vendor (AdWords, AdRoll, Retargeter, Criteo, etc). This is because a lot of retargeting platforms are set up on a cost per thousand impression (CPM) bid model. And if you have multiple vendors competing, then it will drive up your costs. 2. If someone didn’t convert the first time, then it’s most likely because your offer wasn’t attractive enough. Use retargeting to bring back lost customers with new offers. Have you tried something less threatening like a free guide that is unique to your services? 3. Use retargeting to stay top of mind of your customers while they compare you to your competitors. Use these retargeting ads as opportunities to explain other benefits you offer. 4. Add frequency caps to your audience so that they’re not inundated with your ads every single day. Too much of a good thing, is no longer that good. A good practice would be 1-3 impressions per day as a max per user. 5. Stay creative and funny. A/B split test your retargeting ads with new messaging and looks. Having the same retargeting ad follow someone for 30 days is not ground-breaking, nor will it give the results you’re looking for. 6. Once your retargeting tags are working and you’re getting conversions, make sure you add a burn pixel to the confirmation/thank-you page so the visitor is removed from your targeted audience. AdWords can do this automatically based on the audiences you’ve set. 7. You may get a ton of retargeting traffic and even a good amount of conversions. If this happens, take the time to start segmenting your demographic/ geographic data so that you can see which areas and type of people perform the best. While we’ll stay focused with PPC, there are lots of opportunities to retarget to your email lists, your SEO traffic, and other direct media buying audiences. Chilling Retargeting (Continued)
15 The reason why attribution modeling is so key for today’s marketer is that it shows a more complete picture of what causes your conversions. To date, many of us have only given credit to the last click for the conversion, but what about the display ad impression, the click, and the other search keywords that were used before the conversion was made? We call those clicks “assisted clicks” or “top of funnel clicks” that help “assist” the end conversion. And while you may think that some keywords have never helped you get conversions, looking at attribution modeling can paint a completely different picture. Within Google AdWords, you’re now able to look at your own attribution modeling to see what affects what. To get there, go to the same place where we looked at the Time Lag reporting: Tools > Conversions > Search Funnels > Attribution Modeling. There are 5 different attribution models available, and they go as follows: Last Click: Conversion credit goes to the last click First Click: Conversion credit goes to the first click Linear: All clicks get the same percentage of credit Time Decay: More and more credit is given to clicks that are closer to the conversion Position Based: 40% credit is given to the first and last click, and remaining 20% is given to all clicks in between Abhorrent Attribution Modeling DAY 1: Originator Vistor views ad on Social Media site. DAY 2: Assist Vistor searches for candy. DAY 4: Assist Vistor clicks on banner ad. DAY 8: CONVERSION Vistor searches for your candy brand.
16 So how do you read this data and use it to your advantage? In the example above looking at Last Clicks vs First Click, you’ll want to look at the % change in conversion column. If anything is more than 2% (plus or minus) then it’s worth studying. If we look at Keyword 4 for example, you’ll notice that as a first click attribution, it’s much more valuable than a last click attribution. That means that you want to make sure you don’t disregard that keyword completely, and depending on ad position, maybe you want to increase bids to give it more oomph. While these aren’t dramatic differences, it all really depends on your industry and how long people take to convert. The longer your buying cycle, the more fun (and time intensive) your attribution modeling will be. But be careful! Attribution modeling inside AdWords only gives you PPC data. What about organic or social influence that has helped convert? To see that, you’ll want to use Google Analytics to give you a more holistic view. Abhorrent Attribution Modeling (Continued)
17 Similar to where you find your attribution modeling, Top Paths show you which queries have been made the finally convert. This tool also gives you a very interesting look and shows you the most common paths that customers take to perform a conversion. This can be through the campaign, ad group, keyword, or even query level. You’ll sometimes find that the query level shows the first query where people have problems and then the second query is based off the solution. An example of this could be a local plumber shop. Their Top Paths report could look like this when looking at the queries. Query 1: frozen basement pipes Query 2: Home Depot Provo Query 3: Emergency Plumber Provo And if you’re a smart marketer, you would bid on all these types of keywords with different bids as it helps you understand the cycle a visitor would go through before converting on your site. Thrilling Top Paths
18 Just like there’s a buying cycle for when you get new leads on board, there’s also a buying cycle that takes place before you even get in contact with your prospective customers. We like to call this the Search Buying Cycle. For PPC, it’s important to understand how the Search Buying Cycle relates to the “assist clicks” we talked about earlier. Take an average plumbing business again for example. Because keywords and search terms can take many different forms, it’s important to understand which keywords to bid on how and much to bid since each keyword will convert at a different rate. Many question keywords (like “how to”, what, why, etc) are quickly added as negatives by a lot of PPC marketers, but could be very valuable to keep on board with low bids as they could be assisting and helping push the visitor further down your buying cycle. Depending on the intent behind the keyword, you will often find that it follows this cycle: Awareness Stage – Where do I find a plumber? (not searching) Interest Stage – Searching for solutions and/or plumbers on Google Problem Description Stage – My basement is flooded Cause Description Stage – My pipes are broken Purchase Stage – ACME Plumbing in Provo The earlier in the buying cycle, the lower your bids should usually be (at least to begin with). SEARCH BUYING CYCLE Search Buying Cycle PROBLEM CAUSE INTEREST PURCHASE AWARENESS
19 Here are some other examples of high intent vs low intent keywords that should get you thinking of your own possibilities: Provo plumber high intent vs. broken pipes = lower intent DUI lawyer high intent vs. i just got a dui = lower intent Artificial grass install high intent vs. my grass is dying = lower intent Bora Bora vacation packages high intent vs. exotic vacation destinations = lower intent Sell my car high intent vs. what’s my car worth = lower intent Search Buying Cycle (Continued) 20 Just like we spoke about in regards to single keyword ad groups, keyword granularity is extremely important to focus on. If you’re looking to improve your quality scores, CTR, lower your CPC, and lower your cost per conversion, keyword granularity can be an amazing way to make that happen. The way it works is to make sure that there are no discrepancies between your keywords and search terms. This means that when you look at your search term report, all you should hope for is to have green “Added” labels all the way down. Because if you do, you know there’s a great amount of relevancy between what you’re bidding on and what the visitor typed in. Pair this with ads that are keyword specific to the search terms and you’ve set yourself up to outrank your competitors and pay a lower cost per click. Ghastly Keyword Granularity
21 So what happens if you have a high level of keyword discrepancy? When that happens, it’s mostly because you have a shorter tail keyword that is stealing away impressions from your longer tail keywords. Let’s say you sell vacation packages around the world and it’s about to be ski season. Not only do you rent lodges in Switzerland, but also in Canada, Norway, and France. You have two keywords in your AdWords account that look like this: “vacation ski lodge” (own ad group) “vacation ski lodge switzerland” (own ad group) If a visitor types in “vacation ski lodge Switzerland” then there’s a good chance that the shorter tail “vacation ski lodge” takes the impression for that search and shows a generic ad that isn’t location specific, and even worse, may take the visitor to a destination URL that isn’t about Switzerland, but all of the locations. Did that just scare the crap out of you? Well it should! Because you’re wasting valuable seconds that could be turning into conversions, and the solution could be as simple as using ad group level negative keywords. In this situation, all you would do is add the term ‘Switzerland’ as an ad group level negative keyword to the ad group that has the generic “vacation ski lodge” keyword. This will now prevent that keyword from stealing impressions and allow the longer Switzerland keyword to take its deserved impression and show an ad that’s specific to Switzerland and also take the visitor to a page about the country. Everyone is happy and you’re making more money Alarming Ad Group Level Negative Keywords
22 If you’re like many advertisers out there, then you don’t have an unlimited budget to capture all the available traffic. Often we see that a lot of advertisers have ad groups filled with a ton of different ads, but may only get around 10-20 clicks/day. This is a very bad thing as you’re spreading your clicks so thin that you’ll never be able to make any decisions as to which ads are working best. Instead of bidding on everything, you’ll get a lot more bang for your buck if you only test 2-3 ads at a time. This will allow you to focus your click data onto a limited number of variants and quickly determine the winners and losers. Your ad testing cycle should be looking like this: 1. Write new ads (have at least two) 2. Allow traffic to run 3. Measure results 4. Learn from winners and losers 5. Pause losing ads 6. Make iterations off winning ads and/or completely redesign Then, keep a doc with a winning and losing column. Here, you should write down what you found works well and what made things worse. Also, make sure you never have only one ad in an ad group. If you want to improve your performance, then testing should always be going on. Cut Away the Ad Overflow
23 People love local things. The fact that a solution to a person’s problem is local and not at an unknown location increases the speed at which a visitor decides to do business with you. Let’s look at these two plumber examples (since not many companies that need to be local practice this). Google knows we’re in Provo, UT – but here are the results we get when we search ‘plumber’ Notice how none of the ads are specific to the city we’re in. Lurkingly Local Ad Copy
24 Now let’s add a geographic term to the keyword. Let’s search ‘Phoenix plumber’ and see what happens. Big difference, right? But what happens when people aren’t geo-specific to begin with? Could you win the “local” race by making sure that your ad headlines were specific to the person depending on their location? Absolutely. Should you? Yes. And here’s why: We’ve done a lot of split testing in different industries and found conversion rate improvements of up to 112% when going local. Pair this with geo-specific landing pages and you have much more power. So how do you make it work? You need to make sure that your campaigns are individually targeting cities instead of counties or bigger geographic areas. We recommend looking at your user location report under the dimensions tab to decide on which cities to test first and then expand from there. Make Your Ad Copy Lurking Local (Continued)
25 You see car dealerships doing this all the time. They announce a special or discount and sometimes hike the prices up in the back end. We’re not saying you should do this; but, if you’re not a fan of giving discounts or special offers, then this may be the only option for you. If all your competitors have the same call to action or offer, then adding special offers like coupons, discounts, or codes can prove to be very beneficial and help differentiate yourself since visitors will comparison shop you and your competition. The best thing to start testing is adding percentages off or dollar amounts off. If you have a certain code you want to use, then try it out, but be aware that you’re limited on ad space. Now here comes the important part: You want to make sure that your destination URL shows that discount, coupon, or offer in the form of a coupon (yes, an actual coupon look with the dashed line, barcode, everything) to make it look real and continue the message match. Add Special Ogre Offers in Ads 50% OFF ANY PUMPKIN With this coupon code you can order any pumpkin from our online store for 50% off! That’s a deal that will make you scream! PPCPUMPK50 Expiration Date: 10/31/2029
26 You know how you have character limits for your ads? 25 characters for your headline, then 35 for each of the description lines and display URL. It’s important to have rules, but how many times have you had that perfect headline that was 26 characters? To make sure you control your headlines and grab the biggest bang for your buck, you’ll want to make sure you have ad groups with keywords that are around 25-30 characters long. And then for your headline, you’ll want to use this formula: {KeyWord:This Is My Best Keyword} It happens to the best of us, and luckily, there’s a sneaky way to beat it. It’s called Dynamic Keyword Insertion, and it allows your ads to sometimes expand your character limits by up to 7 more characters. Talk about dominating the search results page! Google will then automatically add your keyword to the headline if it is within the character space. Do this for your longer tail keywords first with their own ad group and see if you’re able to make it happen. And if you do, what the performance change looks like! Make Your Hair Raising Headlines Longer Take a look at this search engine results page (SERP). See that little ad in the corner? It’s headline is 27 characters.
27 This is a very simple and straightforward tactic that also allows your headline to look longer if you’re in the 1-3 spot above the organic search results. By adding a period at the end of description line 1 of your ad, you’re able to have description line 1 share the headline space with the actual headline. The bottom ad in the screenshot has added the period at the end of description line 1 to extend their headline while the competitor above them has not. Deadly Description Line One 28 Along with single keyword ad groups and keyword granularity, making sure that your ads have the keyword in the headline is of uber importance to become instantly more relevant to the visitor and help you perform better within AdWords. Taking it one step further would be to add your keywords to the display URL so that your ads are bolded there and in your headline. With the split second a person uses to decide which ad to click on, the bolded feature Google uses helps you stand out much more to also get a higher clickthrough-rate. So, if character space allows and you’re using single keyword ad groups, make sure your headlines and your display URLs have your keywords in them! Keywords in Headlines and Display URLS
29 There’s no time for redundancy in PPC. If someone types in “I Need To Sell My Car” then your ad doesn’t do the person any good if your headline says “Need To Sell Your Car?” Yes! The person already told you that. Take these home buying advertisers for example: Even though all of them buy houses, no one explains how they do it for the visitor. The 3rd ad is definitely the worse because it’s redundant to the search term, but what if you answered the question the visitor wants to know. Having headlines of “Sell Your House Today” or “Sell Your House Fast” are great but leave the visitor confused as they don’t know if the website buys it or if it’s like an AutoTrader format where they post their house for sale awaiting bids. A much better approach to headline writing that’s much more compelling would be “We’ll Buy Your House Now!” With this, there’s no confusion or head scratching from the visitor as they know exactly what to expect in a split second. That split second can be crucial when almost ads look the same like the example screenshot. Answering Quivering Questions In Ads
30 As you may already know, enhanced sitelinks allows you to add descriptions to them. These can be specifically useful when you’re bidding on your own branded terms (which will cover in the next section) and other competitors are as well. They look like this and something you should definitely use: (Source: adwords.blogspot.com) Your one ad just turned into five! Besides the enhanced sitelinks, there are many times where you won’t be allowed to show the additional description lines. So, to give your ad extensions (also including callout extensions) a little more flair, try adding new characters to them. One trick we’ve found works really well to have your ad stand out more and gain a higher CTR, is to simply add plus signs (+) in front of sitelinks and callout extensions. Another idea we’ve found that works well is to use your ad extensions for promos and discounts. This is especially helpful when a lot of your competitors use those precious ad copy lines for boring terms like: Contact Us, About Us, Free Consultation, etc. Hack Your Ad Extensions
31 What if you could change your AdWords account based on outside sources, automatically? Consider automatically activating your flood repair ads when heavy rain fails, or turning on your car detailing ads when the weather is good and then automatically pausing them when it begin to rain. AdWords scripts can help you automate and track performance within your AdWords account in ways you never thought possible. A few things we found quite helpful with AdWords scripts are: • Bid to a certain ad position • Activate/pause ads based on weather conditions • Track anomalies in your account • Pause/activate ads, ad groups, campaigns based on inventory levels • Update pricing in ads without needed re-approval • Increase/decrease bids based off your TV advertising schedule • Change multi automated bidding rules • Track keyword performance through aggregate quality score • Track account level quality score You can have these data points update on a daily/ weekly/monthly basis into a Google spreadsheet so you can see if the changes you’re making have a positive impact on the health of your PPC account. You can also import your CRM data (whether that be Zoho, Salesforce, Infusionsoft, and others) into AdWords to report on your actual sales instead of just regular lead converting. This can be extremely powerful as you’ll begin to optimize based off what brings you sales and not just what brings you leads. If you’d like to test the waters and start adding some basic scripts, the place to do it in the AdWords interface is under “Bulk operations”. AdWords Sorcery Scripts To learn more about the different scripts available, check out developers.google.com FreeAdWordsScripts.com Optmyzr.com
32 Everyone loves automation, but not everyone knows how to use it. Like we talked about earlier, scripts are a great way to put your account on a more robust type of autopilot. Another very cool thing that Google has recently released is a sales countdown timer script. Let’s say you have an event or special sale going on and you’d like to show urgency to your visitors with a countdown. Well, instead of having to manually change your ads every day or create multiple ads that are automatically turned on and off (and waiting for approval), you can now automatically have it done without Google re-approving your ads. The cool thing about this is that you can have your ads say “Only X Days & X Hours Left!” and then message match that script with something similar on your site! This is specifically useful and very powerful for retailers that run Black Friday sales or what to countdown and create anticipation for other sales events. To get the exact script, visit the post by Google here. Automatic Countdown Scary Scripts
33 Similar to AdWords scripts, automated rules within AdWords help you achieve almost the same levels of automation but without the need for coding/programming skills. If you want to make sure that certain keywords, ads, ad groups, or campaigns are paused or activated because you’ll be out of town or it’s a holiday in your area, then you can use automated rules to make that happen. You can also use automated rules to send reports to you based off parameters you set around performance targets. Let’s say that you’re having a killer cost per conversion day, but your budget is about to be hit and you wouldn’t get to take advantage of that sweet momentum. With automated rules, you can tell Google to increase your budget a certain dollar amount when this cost per conversion threshold is being hit. To see what’s available, simply go to your automated rules section within your AdWords agency account under the “Automate” button. Astonishingly Automated Rules
34 Not all geographic areas are created equally when it comes to PPC performance. The more geographic areas you target, the higher the chance that all of those areas perform differently in regards to cost per click (CPC), cost per conversion, and conversion rate. To make sure that you’re being the most effective you can with your PPC budget, it’s important to be open to the idea to reallocate your budget to the areas that perform the best for you. Take this screenshot for example: You’ll notice that all the cities are behaving differently. And since Fresno and Ventura are performing the best, wouldn’t it make sense to remove some budget from Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles? Almost. Checking Ghoulish Geographic Areas
35 If we judge this PPC account (which is a lead generation account) by these numbers, then we forego the chance to understand what profit levels those different cities brought in. Make sure you know the complete sales picture of your performance as a higher cost per conversion could also yield bigger sales profits depending on the size of deals you land from the leads. To see how your geographic areas perform, go to your Dimensions tab and then select “User locations” in the drop down. Checking Ghoulish Geographic Areas (Continued)
36 Just like the fact that your geographic areas perform differently, so do the devices people use to search for your services. As you may already know with the enhanced campaign rollout, Google has lumped computers and tablets together in all search campaigns with the option to remove mobile devices completely (you can still control all devices with display campaigns). By default, all AdWords PPC campaigns are opted into targeting mobile devices, but you have the option of lowering your bid percentage modifier all the way down to -100% (so you don’t show for mobile phones) or increase your mobile bids by 300%. To see how your mobile traffic is performing, you’ll want to segment your campaigns or ad groups by device. Capturing Moldy Mobile Opportunity
37 After that, you’ll notice that your campaigns or ad groups will show three new lines of data that show you how computers, mobile, and tablets are performing. This will allow you to determine whether you should switch your mobile bids to be lower or be higher. You could also test to see how a mobile optimized/responsive landing page experience would change the performance of mobile. Capturing Moldy Mobile Opportunity (Continued)
38 Negative keyword lists are great to use for housing all your negative keywords in one spot. If you know that there are certain negative keywords that you never want to show for, using a negative keyword list can be much simpler than adding negatives directly to the campaigns from your search term report. Also, you can make sure you always have a list of negative keywords to apply to any new campaigns you create. There are also some other nifty tricks you can use negative keywords for. For example, when you make the transition from old to newer campaigns, you can prevent the older campaigns from triggering ads in the new campaign due to the keyword competition. To find and use negative keyword lists, you’ll want to go to your Shared library > Campaign negative keywords. Then you’ll want to create a list, add in your negative keywords, and make sure you apply that list to the campaigns you want. You’ll find the Shared library on the left hand column within your AdWords interface. Negative Keyword Lists
39 Auction Insights is great little tool to see how you’re doing against your competitors. Within the auction insights table, you can see how many competitors are in the same AdWords auctions as you and also how you compare to them. To see your own Auction Insights report, go to the Details button and select “All”. Within the this report, you’ll be able to see the following: • Impression Share: Of the impressions available, what percentage are you capturing vs. your competition. • Average Position: How your average ad rank compares to others. • Overlap Rate: How often you enter the auction with the same competitor. • Position Above Rate: The percentage of time that your competitor’s ads are above yours. • Top of Page Rate: The percentage that you are in the 1-3 ad spots. With this data, you can use spy tools like iSpionage, SpyFu, SEMrush, or WhatRunsWhere to see what other keywords and display placements your competitors are using that you aren’t. Afraid of Auction Insights?
40 If you have competitors that do other types of advertising beyond PPC, then bidding on their company names could be a great way to take advantage of their other channel marketing dollars. Let’s say you have a competitor who does a lot of billboards, TV commercials, and/or radio spots. If they do, their prospective customers will most likely search for them on Google to learn more about their services/products. Because of that, you could bid on your competitor names specifically to stir up the pot and potentially steal away their customers. But be careful! Do not have competitor names in the ads or use dynamic keyword insertion for those ads. The reason why is that you’d be falsely advertising making visitors think they actually click on the ad they want, but then are taken to your site instead. Also, be aware of Trademarked terms that can’t be in ads. Since you’re not using your competitor names in your ads, you should be fine. And, if you’re really creative, do what Instapage is doing here (notice the added “d”): Torment Your Competitors
41 You’d almost think that it would be silly to bid on your own company since you’re probably already showing great organically. It’s just that there are two major flaws to that stance. 1. Your competitors could already be bidding on your name, cannibalizing your traffic. 2. Your website isn’t as good at capturing conversions as your PPC destination URL/landing pages are. Here are two other reasons for why you should do it, and these involve saving you money. 1. Branded keywords are usually very low cost per click terms since you own the domain. 2. Branded keywords usually get very high clickthrough-rates and high quality scores, ultimately helping lift the health of your entire account and reducing overall CPC. Not only are those four great reasons, but your ad will be huge because of enhanced sitelinks and reinforced by your organic ranking on Google. Bid on Your Smelly Self
42 Did you know you can advertise with Gmail, directly from your AdWords account? It’s one of the ways that we’ve seen additional traffic and conversion success for some of our clients. With Gmail advertising, you’re able to showcase your text ads on the sidebar or above the body of emails. And even though there are a lot of different types of Gmail ads, we’ll focus on the most simple and basic ones for now. What you’ll want to do is create a display campaign and use placement targeting. Then, you’ll want to add these two URLs to target: mail.google.com mail.google.com::Inbox, Top center Then, you’ll want to decide which keywords to bid on. Keyword match types don’t matter here, so feel free to keep them all broad match. Some keyword ideas for you could be: Your product/service keywords Your own company name Your competitors names Google will then scan the emails for those keywords, and—if there’s a match—showcase your ad within the Gmail interface. Once you get familiar with this, we urge you to look into Gmail sponsored promotions where which you can target people who receive emails from specific senders. Pretty crazy right? Also, Google is rolling out new Gmail targeting functionality that allows you to target your ads to people who visited certain websites before coming into Gmail. Ghastly Gmail Advertising
43 With AdWords constantly changing, it’s vital that you stay on top of new ideas and jump on them before your competitors do. And although the basics of PPC have stayed the same for years, the opportunities of improvements have never been bigger. You’ve got a great grasp on the AdWords side, but what about the landing page/website experience for the visitor? What if you could make one change and double your performance in one day? Sounds like witchcraft, right? It’s not. And we’ll tell you how in your next guide. Until Next Time! In closing…
44 Get a FREE 12-Point evaluation from Powertraffick! Want to Take Your PPC to Monster Levels? Want to Take Your PPC to Monster Levels? Get your FREE 12-point PPC evaluation from Powertraffick. Get your FREE 12-point PPC evaluation from Powertraffick.
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