Tips for Google Site and Category Exclusion Tool

Targeting Google AdWords contextual advertising campaigns just got easier. This new tool keeps your ads from appearing in some pretty dodgy places online.

Google launched an important new tool that prevents your ads from showing on poorly-performing sites: the Category Exclusion tool.

Remember why content campaigns drain ad dollars? You waste budget because contextual ads appear on sites that are "poor quality," meaning visitors to those sites are not likely to convert, even if your ads garner clicks.

We've discussed several strategies for controlling which sites carry your ads. The Category Exclusion tool simplifies the job by allowing advertisers to exclude whole swaths of site types.

To find the tool, click on Tools under Campaign Management. First you're allowed to choose a campaign. Though you can choose search campaigns, you shouldn't -- the tool really only acts on keyword-targeted and placement-targeted content campaigns.

Having chosen a campaign, you'll see the familiar site exclusion text field where you can type or paste the specific domain names of sites that shouldn't carry your ads. But you'll see two additional tabs: Topics and Page Types. Let's start with Topics. Here's an example of what you'll see:

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Here's Google's explanation for each of the topics that can be excluded:

Conflict and tragedy

• Crime, police, and emergency: Police blotters, news stories on fires, and emergency services resources
• Death and tragedy: Obituaries, bereavement services, accounts of natural disasters, and accidents
• Military and international conflict: News about war, terrorism, and sensitive international relations

Edgy content

• Juvenile, gross, and bizarre content: Jokes, weird pictures, and videos of stunts
• Profanity and rough language: Moderate use of profane language
• Sexually suggestive content: Provocative pictures and text

But Google doesn't trust its intuition, or yours, to lead to an intelligent decision about which site topics to exclude. The tool shows you, based on your campaign's history, exactly what you're risking by excluding sites within each topic.

In the example above, the advertiser would probably be wise to exclude sites in the crime topic, since the CTR has been a dismal .52%, with no conversions. But the advertiser might think twice before excluding sites in the juvenile topic, since despite the poor CTR, clicks from that site are converting at a respectable 7.41%. Notice that cost-per-conversion data is also available, so advertisers can make sure their decisions are likely to result in acceptable ROI .

Let's turn now to the Page Types tab:

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Here the advertiser is presented with a range of page types that have traditionally yielded poor results for some advertisers. Again, Google's explanation of each type:

Network types

• Parked domains are sites in Google's AdSense for domains network. Users are brought to parked domain sites when they enter the URL of an undeveloped Web page into a browser's address bar. There, they'll see ads relevant to the terminology in the URL they entered. The AdSense for domains network is encompassed by both the content network and the search network. If you exclude this page type, you'll exclude all parked domain sites, including the ones on the search network.
• Error pages are part of Google's AdSense for errors network. Certain users are brought to error pages when they enter a search query or unregistered URL in a browser's address bar. There, they'll see ads relevant to the search query or URL they entered.

User-Generated Content

• Forums are Web sites devoted to open discussion of a topic.
• Social networks are Web sites offering an interactive network of friends with personal profiles.
• Image-sharing pages allow users to upload and view images.
• Video-sharing pages allow users to view uploaded videos.

This data is fascinating because it illustrates something I've been hearing from Google for some time: it's not uncommon for pages/sites like parked domains (arbitrageurs) and error pages to yield good-to-excellent CTRs and conversion rates. In the example above, only social network pages yielded poor results, while the others produced results that rivaled the best search campaigns.

So, use the tool to further fine-tune your content campaigns -- but watch out for these caveats:

• Not all languages are supported -- at the moment only Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish sites can be excluded
• The tool is not infallible -- so continue to run Placement performance reports and use the Site Exclusion tool to opt out of poorly-performing sites/pages.

5 Ways to Kill Your Search Rankings & Their Solutions

One of the biggest fears for web site owners that have long relied on search traffic for new business is a sudden drop in search engine rankings. Some webmasters are experiencing this very situation as a result of Google’s recent Mayday update (Matt Cutts video).

In most cases, it takes a lot for a tenured web site to mess up its search visibility. In other situations, it doesn’t take much at all. Avoiding mistakes that result in exclusion, penalties and more often confusion for search engines are often overlooked. Don’t fall victim to carelessness and ignorance when it comes to maintaining the search visibility achieved from years of content and online marketing by avoiding these common mistakes:

1. Website Redesign

Probably one of the most common situations that result in fluctuations in search visibility involve significant changes to a web site’s design, content, internal linking relationships and the new use Flash, Ajax or JavaScript for navigation. Search engines copy websites and the links between pages. Think of it as taking a picture of your site. If you change your site from what the search engine has a copy of, the new form might not include the same content, keywords and crawlable links.

The worst case scenario is when a company decides to redesign the website and over write all previous SEO work. Upon finding that search visibility has completely tanked, they call up the SEO agency and demand an explanation.

Solution: When significant changes are planned for the company website, work with your SEO to identify how the new design will impact search visibility. Have them map out and prioritize the implications of page layout, content and keyword usage, navigation, links and redirects.

2. New Content Management System (CMS)

Along the lines with a new website design, changing content management systems can create a lot of confusion for search engines. Many companies have had websites long enough that the legacy CMS used to launch the site no longer serves the needs of the organization. Large companies may find that the hodgepodge of CMS used by different business units and acquired companies is inefficient and a common content management system would better serve the organization.

A change in the CMS means a change in the templates that format web pages, navigation and oftentimes the URL structure of pages. It’s common that major changes in content are rolled out along with new website software and that can spell confusion for search engines. URLs that change can also create confusion. For example, web page file names that previously ended with .asp and now end with .aspx are perceived as completely different.

Solution: While the IT department or web developer will understand the importance of redirecting old URLs to their new counterparts, execution in a search engine friendly manner is another thing entirely. 302 vs. 301 redirects and mapping URLs when there is no logical page in the new system are essential. Identifying the top sources of inbound link traffic to pages and conducting an outreach program to get them to change the URLs other sites use to link to your site is a specialty area for link building SEOs moreso than IT. Simply put, make sure you have a SEO migration plan.

3. Loss of Inbound Links

In the SEO game content is King and links are the Queen. Or content is the Yin and Links are the Yang. Whatever the metaphor, links are an essential mechanism for search engines to discover pages and signal for ranking them. Companies that proactively acquire links organically, or that earn vs. buy the links, don’t have much of a problem in this area. The longer other websites link to your site, the better. But some sites may go offline temporarily or permanently. A blog may decide to remove it’s blogroll or a site may simply decide to remove links to your site. If you change your CMS as noted above, other sites that don’t know this will continue to link to your old URL format (.asp vs .aspx) and that will appear as a loss of links. If you buy links from other sites and they are detected by search engines, those links may be devalued of any PageRank. There are many reasons for link loss.

Solution: Active content creation, promotion and social participation are essential for building a significant and relevant inbound link footprint on the web. Those links will drive traffic and serve as a signal to search engines for ranking your content in the search results. The key is to monitor your link footprint on an ongoing basis using link building tools that will identify major fluctuations in inbound link counts. Then you can drill down to see where the link loss has occurred and see if you can do something about it. The best defense is offense, so make sure you have an active link acquisition in place so minor to moderate fluctuations in links will have little, if any effect.

4. Duplicate Content

Serving up duplicate content using different URLs confuses search engines. This can happen when sites use queries on a database to display lists of products in a category that can be reached multiple ways. Printer friendly versions of pages, other English language versions of pages or outright copying content from one website to another can all cause duplicate content issues. When an search engine is presented with multiple versions of the same content, it must decide which is the original or canonical version, since engines do not want to show the exact same thing to users in the search results. Anything your website does to make that process confusing or inefficient can result in poor search performance for your web site.

Solution: A professional SEO working with website content managers can help manage broader duplicate content issues for a company website and any micro sites they’re publishing. With press releases, RSS feeds or articles that are syndicated, it’s a best practice to make sure the original is published on your site first, then to have any duplicates clearly link back to the original. Ongoing monitoring can also help with unintentional duplicate content issues caused by other sites scraping your site’s content.

5. You’ve Become a SEO Spammer!

As more content is published and promoted online, more websites are launched and more competition comes into the market, companies will be tempted to achieve the coveted first page listing at any cost. Many companies that succumb to this temptation do so because of seeing their competition get away with tactics that are clearly more aggressive and manipulative than search engines allow. Webmasters might see suggestions in forums (often disinformation) or get advice from others doing well in the disposable site, content monetization game.

Engaging in simple things like hidden keywords, redirecting pages to present one version to search engine bots and another to site visitors or publishing numerous copies of the exact same web site using search/replace keyword optimization can all result in negative effects. There are far more aggressive tactics considered spam than that of course, but SEO spam isn’t an area we work with and I’m not interested in promoting unsustainable, high risk tactics.

Solution: Understand the webmaster guidelines from each search engine: Google, Yahoo, Bing. Don’t violate those policies with the site(s) that are your bread and butter. If you must test, do so with other websites that are not going to affect your business. Rather than focusing on loopholes and exploits, be a better marketer and understand what your target audience wants, what influentials respond to and develop smarter, more creative marketing that can stand on its own to drive traffic and sales. Include SEO in those “UnGoogled efforts” and you’ll realize the added benefit of great performance from your website in search engines as well.

Introducing The All-Important Quality Score

Throughout this column, the phrase “Quality Score” has popped up on different occasions. Understanding Quality Score is fundamental for successful paid search campaigns, but can be a difficult concept for beginners to understand. So the time has come to cover this topic so you can use Quality Score to your advantage and not fall into its traps.

The early days before Quality Score

In the beginning of paid search, auctions existed in a purely capitalistic marketplace where the advertiser who was willing to pay the most for a keyword was awarded first place, the second highest-paying advertiser’s ads were second, and so forth.

It was an easy system to understand and it made sense. However, the ad space became a bit muddled. Advertisers with deep pockets literally took over the search engine results pages on keywords that weren’t necessarily related to their business. For example, a global soft drink company could start to take over terms such as rock and roll, skateboards, or even Britney Spears. These advertisers mostly weren’t trying to cause chaos—they were just trying to reach their target demographic. But in doing so, the sponsored search results for some keywords could potentially contain no results directly related to what a searcher was looking for.

The engines realized that this could be a problem. Google has long maintained that the best thing for its business is to keep results as relevant as possible—including paid listings. To improve the relevance of paid search ads, Google created the Quality Score. Microsoft and Yahoo soon followed with their own systems to improve relevance of ads.

So what is Quality Score?

Simply put, Quality Score is a numeric grade from one to ten (ten being best) assigned to each of your keyword/ad/landing page combinations. The score is updated frequently, calculated at each time your keyword is searched on to account for changes to your terms and creatives. So what’s the value of a high Quality Score? If your keyword is deemed highly relevant, Google will lower your cost-per-click and rank your ad higher than other competitors even if they’re bidding more for those terms. On the flip side, a keyword with a low Quality Score may mean you have to bid a premium price to even appear on a search result page.

How is Quality Score calculated?

We don’t know exactly what goes into the Quality Score black box but we do know that high click-thru-rates (CTRs) are a big piece of the pie. The engines probably correlate high number of clicks as “virtual votes” by past users for the advertiser and figure a good CTR means a relevant keyword.

Google does offer some insight into how Quality Score is calculated in the AdWords help area:

While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the Search Network, the core components remain more or less the same:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Note that there are slight variations to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bid:

• For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position, landing page quality is not a factor. Also, when calculating ad position on a Search Network placement, Quality Score considers the CTR on that particular placement in addition to CTR on Google.
• For calculating first page bid, Quality Score doesn’t consider the matched ad or search query, since this estimate appears as a metric in your account and doesn’t vary per search query.

What do you really need to know about Quality Score?

You’ll have plenty of time to test various tactics to improve Quality Score once the campaign starts, so don’t waste too much time worrying about it right now. The one thing you do need to take into account though is to make sure you keep your ad groups tightly focused. Because click-thru-rate is the biggest weighting factor to Quality Score, you’ll want to make sure that your ads are highly relevant to the keywords in each group so that you get the best CTR as possible. In my experience, as long as you’re getting a good percentage of clicks to impressions, the engines will consider your terms relevant enough to gain fairly high scores. After that, there are just a few things to keep in mind such as ensuring that your landing pages are loading at a good speed and you have some of your ad group’s keywords in your ad text. You do those things right and your Quality Score should be just fine.

Overall, my best advice is to not obsess over Quality Score. There are a couple hundred other factors to PPC success that are just as important. The important thing now is to just make sure you understand the concept fully and do some extra research if you feel you still need some clarification.

The premise that ad popularity and a high quality score leads to improved search advertising results may or may not be true….especially for B2B advertisers. I urge business marketers to challenge this assumption and understand the relationship between PPC quality score and ROI-based results.

Quality Score algorithms

In simple terms, ad position is primarily determined by how much an advertiser is willing to pay for each click (i.e. your bid) and the popularity, orclick-through-rate (CTR), associated with your ad. Relevancy also plays a role… and very poor landing pages can lead to penalties.

More information can be found here on Google Quality Score, and Yahoo Quality Index. Details aside, Quality Score causes most advertisers to try and maximize response, or click-through-rate.

Note: Not surprisingly, this methodology also increases the click charges that go into the pockets of search networks!

Tips on PPC targeting

All advertisers should be deploying these PPC best practices to accurately target your audience:

• Select very specific keywords and long tail keyword phrases
• Utilize keyword match-types
• Deploy negative keywords
• Test geo-targeted ads (even for national brands)
• Implement day-parting

This week’s question: ”What have you heard about Quality Score?”

Google Caffeine Is Live (But Don't Panic, It's Cool!)

Today the official Google Blog and other official blogs announced the cross posted news, that Google Caffeine is live, the new Google index and indexing mechanism. According to the blog post the main change is the speed by which the web is indexed. This advancement primarily concerns the distribution of news today, which happens in realtime. The update corresponds to this demand and the expectation on the side of publishers to be indexed in time.

If you search Google on Tuesday, you may notice that the information you're looking for is a bit "fresher" than it would have been on Monday.

That's because the world's most popular search engine has unveiled a new search method called "Caffeine," which claims to index new information 50 percent faster than Google's old search.

"Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for Web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of Web content we've offered," the company says in a news release on its official blog. "Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before."

That doesn't mean Google has changed its search formula entirely, or that search results will pop onto your screen faster than before. Essentially it means that Google is able to find new content more quickly. So, for instance, a new Twitter update that, in the past, would be been missing from search results because Google hadn't found and indexed it yet, would be posted to Google search results more quickly with Caffeine.

Here's a promotional video from Google that explains how the search works.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, google built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

To better understand how Caffeine works, it might help to think of Caffeine as a blog and the old Google as a newspaper. Where a newspaper collects content and then publishes it all at once, at the beginning of the day, a blog is constantly looking for new information and updating on the fly. This is sort of how Google Caffeine works. Rather than collecting big "batches" of Web pages to index for its search, Google is trying to publish more frequently as it goes.

"Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second," Google says.

"Content on the Web is blossoming," she writes. "It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average Web page is richer and more complex.

"In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."

"It's interesting to see that Google is focusing again on the element of its offering where it does lead the pack: search," he writes. "That's what made its [Google's] name, but it's clear that even if Microsoft's Bing hasn't (yet?) won the market share, it has got Google thinking about how it can improve what it does."

I’ve not seen as many people notice another feature of Caffeine that may be the most “actionable” form an optimization perspective. Google now has more ability to associate data about any particular piece of content they index. They are explicitly telling us that they are building capacity into their algorithm to reference more indication of the quality or importance of a document. Also note that a document might not refer to just a web page, it could be a video or other content.

What does that tell us? Yes, your content will get retrieved and indexed more rapidly than ever before. But you also need to make sure that Google gets as many signals as possible that it is worthy of attention. Links to it, reviews of it, “Likes”, tweets and any bit of information that Google might be able to pick up are more important than ever. This has been fundamentally true for some time, but the number and nature of these signals of quality are only going to increase.

Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic

Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks. These frequent changes are one reason Google itself downplays algorithm updates. Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.

Google Makes One Change Per Day To Search Algorithm

Google’s Matt Cutts just posted a video on YouTube answering the question, “how many search algorithm changes were made in 2009?” In response to that question, Matt said Google likely makes a change per day to the search algorithm. They don’t necessarily release those changes each day, but they will release them in batches. But overall, he hopes to average at least one change per day to the algorithm. He said in 2009, they probably had between 350 to 400 or so changed to the search algorithm.

A few months ago we covered a Wired story on Google’s algorithm where Udi Manber, Google’s head of search said Google has introduced 550 “improvements” to the search algorithm in the past year alone. So I guess Matt was being conservative with his math?

Here is the video:

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However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A, ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

I asked Google for more specifics and they told me that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before. Based on Matt’s comment, this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic.

This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with “item” pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them. For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite. Based on Matt’s comment at Google I/O, the pages that are now ranking well for these long tail queries are from “higher quality” sites (or perhaps are “higher quality” pages).

Before, pages that didn’t have high quality signals might still rank well if they had high relevance signals. And perhaps now, those high relevance signals don’t have as much weight in ranking if the page doesn’t have the right quality signals.

What’s a site owner to do? It can be difficult to create compelling content and attract links to these types of pages. My best suggestion to those who have been hit by this is to isolate a set of queries for which the site now is getting less traffic and check out the search results to see what pages are ranking instead. What qualities do they have that make them seen as valuable? For instance, I have no way of knowing how amazon.com has faired during this update, but they’ve done a fairly good job of making individual item pages with duplicated content from manufacturer’s databases unique and compelling by the addition of content like of user reviews. They have set up a fairly robust internal linking (and anchor text) structure with things like recommended items and lists. And they attract external links with features such as the my favorites widget.

From the discussion at the Google I/O session, this is likely a long-term change so if your site has been impacted by it, you’ll likely want to do some creative thinking around how you can make these types of pages more valuable (which should increase user engagement and conversion as well).

Update on 5/30/10: Matt Cutts from Google has posted a YouTube video about the change. In it, he says “it’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries.” He recommends that a site owner who is impacted evaluate the quality of the site and if the site really is the most relevant match for the impacted queries, what “great content” could be added, determine if the the site is considered an “authority”, and ensure that the page does more than simply match the keywords in the query and is relevant and useful for that query.

He notes that the change:

• has nothing to do with the “Caffeine” update (an infrastructure change that is not yet fully rolled out).


• is entirely algorithmic (and isn’t, for instance, a manual flag on individual sites).


• impacts long tail queries more than other types


• was fully tested and is not temporary

Using Search Funnels to Grow Your Adwords Account

What is the new search funnels feature?

Search Funnels are a set of reports in Adwords that allow you to analyze ad impression and click behavior for campaigns, ad groups and keywords. So why is this important for advertisers? Adwords currently attributes conversions to the last click, but as we all know, few conversions are driven by just one click on one ad. There are usually many touch points with a customer, so the search funnels reports allow us to see the impressions and clicks that lead up to the conversion, which in most cases is just as important as knowing what finally lead to the sale.

What reports are included?

The search funnels reports are found in the Adwords interface under Reporting > Conversions. Click the link on the right hand side of the page, and you will be taken to the Search Funnels section.

Let’s first define the data that you will be accessing from these reports.

First click – The first time one of your ads is clicked.

Last click – The click on an ad that precedes a conversion. All conversions in Adwords are by default attributed to the last click.

Assist click – The click on an ad that precedes the last click.

Assist Impression – When an ad is shown preceding the last click, regardless of whether or not the ad was clicked.

Items to Note:

• The number of conversions in Adwords will differ from the Search Funnels, because Adwords includes conversion from the Google Content Network, and the Search Funnels do not. They also exclude information on organic results, actual search queries, and competitor keyword information.
• Cookie settings – search history is currently set at 30 days, and is not yet customizable.

Reports within the Search Funnels

Overview – Show how keywords and campaigns work together to create a conversion. Data is generated from conversion paths, or the sequence of ad clicks & impressions that lead to conversions. As mentioned above, content network, organic and competitive information isn’t provided.

Top Conversions – This report pulls together the various conversion types that you have set up through Adwords conversion tracking.

Assist Clicks & Impressions – This report is helpful when you need data that is not conversion focused. Assisted impressions are when your ad is shown, but not clicked, but these metrics are important in considering how many touch points you have had with the customer. Once again, you can see data for all conversion types together or individually, and you can drill down to the campaign, ad group and keyword levels.

Assisted conversions – This report shows both last click and assisted conversions. The drop down box allows you to view all conversions, or select one particular type. This will come in handy if you have different types of conversions set up (a sign up versus an ecommerce purchase), and you want to see if there is a difference in how each type conversion is reached. This report also gives you the ratio of Assisted conversions to last click conversions, so see below on the details of how to analyze this metric.

First Click & Last Click Analysis - First click and last click analysis reports allow you to focus on conversion paths that began or ended with a specific campaign, ad group or keyword. Once you are on the level you want, you can choose any other report in the drop down (while staying focused on conversions).

• For example, you can choose the top paths report in drop down. Once you are there, the breadcrumbs will show you that you are in a subset of conversions. You will stay drilled in until clicking on a main navigation report.

Top Paths – Shows most common conversion paths, and how everything works together to create conversions. Choose keyword in the dimension drop down box, and you will see the most common path for keywords. If the same keyword is repeated, it represents two clicks for that keyword that then leads to a conversion. As with the other reports you can also view data on the campaign and ad group level. If you select keyword path (impressions) you will see the sequence of keywords that showed your ads, regardless of whether the ads were clicked or not. This data closely represents the breadth of related keywords people are searching for prior to converting.

Time Lag – This section represents the time it takes customers to convert. If it takes a lot of days before a conversion, you will know that your customers are in the research phase of the buying cycle. However, if conversions come on the first day, and the rest of your research shows that there was only one click and one keyword, you will know that your customers are coming to you on those terms when they are ready to buy. The hours data represents the first 24 hours in hour segments.

Path Length – This report is a high level diagnosis that allows you to see how many clicks it takes to get a conversion, and the type of conversions. As mentioned before, different conversions may take more clicks. You can also see how the value of your various conversion types changes by clicking the value link. The data represented here is the percentage of your revenue that is attributed to paths of different lengths. Additionally, if you change to the impressions view you will see how many times people saw your ads (without clicking) before converting.

The search funnel reports can be overwhelming when you first look at them, but it is important to keep in mind that the additional data that is provided is just one more way we can make educated decisions. Start with the overview reports and familiarize yourself with the broad data like understanding on average how long it takes before your customers convert, and identifying if your campaigns tend to have more assisted or last click conversions. From there you can dive deeper into the data, and ensure that you are benefiting from it, and not just spending time looking at more numbers.

Along with the tips above, remember the following:

• Keywords play three roles in a conversion path. Last click (immediately preceding the conversion), assist click (immediately before the click that leads to the conversion), and assist impression (ad is displayed but not clicked).
• The ratio of assisted conversions and last click conversions is a quick indicator of whether the keywords serve more in the role of last click or assist click. A value close to zero means they are last click, and a value close to 1 means they are equally an assist and last click. The higher the number, the more they are in the role of an assist click.
• Some keywords in your Adwords campaigns may not show up in the reports because they only include keywords that play an assist or last click role.
• Assist clicks & impressions report break out information in same way, but for clicks and impressions instead of conversions.
• When possible, have FUN with this data. This is great information that will help you grow your accounts, and at the end of the day that’s the main goal, so enjoy getting there!

10 Easy Ways to Optimize Your PPC Landing Pages & Increase Conversions

It’s common knowledge that a professional website design can increase conversion rates and sales. A professional website design ensures trust and credibility with your users. But website design and landing pages can play a part not just in SEO, but in PPC too.

Actually, there is an entire procedure to optimize PPC campaigns including writing successful PPC Ad Copy, Optimizing Your AdWords Campaigns Now, back to PPC landing page optimization. The tactics I describe in this post will not only improve your Quality Score which can increase your ad position for a lower cost, but can also help convert more people that come to your website.

Now, I will admit that most of these tips are for lead generation, not all of these tips would apply to an ecommerce website.

1. Call to Action/Buttons – It’s no secret that adding a call –to- action or a button that is large and very noticeable on your PPC landing pages will help increase conversions. Anything that draws attention to a user is more likely to get clicked on. Tell people what you want them to do on your landing page, don’t just assume they’ll know automatically.
   
   
2. Minimal Navigation – The key to successful PPC landing pages is keep the user to from getting too distracted. Remove the top, left or right hand navigation from your main site on your PPC landing pages. Simply have your company logo at the top left of the page with a link to your homepage. That will be enough for people to click on if they need more information before converting.
   
   
3. Important information above the fold – Some people who are searching for a service like yours are sometimes in a hurry. If they enter your landing page and don’t see what they need to do within the first 5 seconds, they’re likely to bail. Be sure that your call to action, button, or form is above the fold. Be sure to check Google analytics to see what resolution size the majority of your users are currently using. This will help your designers make the important information above the fold for most of your users.
   
   
4. Easy-to-scan copy – I’ve worked on clients before that use way too much industry language in their PPC landing pages. You have to think that if an executive is looking for a service they’re likely to ask their assistant, intern or even a receptionist to do research before they engage in anything. While the executive may know all the industry jargon the assistant or intern may not. Also, these people who are searching for many companies are in a hurry, and simply just scan the copy on your landing page and don’t necessarily read through it all the way. So break up your copy into several paragraphs instead of one large paragraph. And I like to use the rule of thumb to put your benefits or advantages of choosing your company in a bullet list or numbered list so it stands out more prominently.
   
   
5. Few images to convey professionalism – Some PPC landing pages I have seen have a lot of well, dorky images that don’t convey any professionalism whatsoever. This can really turn off a potential client and make you look untrustworthy. Have one to 2 images on your PPC landing pages that show professional looking people, smiling as if they have just engaged in yoru services and are incredibly happy. Also having too many images on your PPC landing page will make your load times longer.
   
   
6. Fast loading times – One factor of the Google Adwords Quality Score is the load times of your pages. If it takes more than 10 seconds to fully load your pages that’s way too long. It should take less than 5 seconds. Large flash files, too many images, or animated graphics could hinder your fast load times. Also, if I have to wait for a flash animation to load before I can get information about your services, I’m more than likely not going to stick around or come back.
   
   
7. Dynamic headlines – Using dynamic headlines on your PPC landing pages is a great way to better target what the user is actually typing in the search box. Dynamic headlines are generated by tracking URLs that will insert the specific keyword into the headline. This is like using dynamic keyword insertion in your PPC ads, only it’s for your landing pages. If the page headline is more targeted to what the user typed in the search, they’re much more likely to continue reading and complete an action.
   
   
8. PPC keywords in your landing page copy – Many people think this is only true for SEO, but you still need to include your PPC keywords in the copy of your PPC Landing page. This will not only help improve your Quality Scores, but will also help your users connect better to your copy.
   
   
9. Short contact form – You could potentially be driving away qualified leads by having a contact form that is too long. If your contact form is running below the fold, it’s too long. You should be able to see the ‘submit’ button above the fold. Look at your current forms and only require the information you truly need. If someone sees a very long form, they may think, ‘This is going to take too long to fill out’ and could possibly skip that process altogether.
   
   
10. No Clutter – This is really a no-brainer, but unfortunately too many people make the mistake of dumping too much content on their PPC landing pages. You should have one main goal of your PPC landing page, not 3, 4 or 5. Remove any extra copy that isn’t necessarily useful to the user. Remove any unnecessary images or icons.

If you need any persuasion to make changes to your existing landing pages, just take this for an example: if you were to make changes on your landing pages, and increase your conversion rates by .5%, add that to your current sales and see how much of an increase that is. You would be surprised how much additional revenue .5% would drive.

If you have any additional PPC landing page tips that will help increase conversions that I have not mentioned feel free to add them in the comments section!