Here is a quick screenshot

Ok now you can play all you want with the Google keywords tool

May be it will take me a little more time to start liking the new interface, nevertheless i like the new features that have been added to Google Analytics. I would like to point out some cool features

1. Compare to past: At the top right you will find the date range of the report and when you click on the drop down you will see the option “compare to past”. With this option you will be able compare data month over month or quarter over quarter…And you can do this comparison across several parameters like visitor, referrers…and finally you can export this into a PDF file.
2. Site Overlay: You will this feature under the content tab in the left navigation menu. What this does is provides a heat map of your web page with the click/goal count on each of the links on the web page. Now you can see the clicks and conversions of all your website links.
3. Referral Source Bounce Rate: This is a really cool feature. When you click on all traffic sources under the traffic sources tab in the left navigation menu, you will find the list of sites that referred traffic along with visits, page views…however the last column will be the Bounce Rate. Now you can not only know the sites that are sending you traffic but also which site is sending you TARGETED/QUALITY traffic.

If you would like a more extensive information about the new features read the 27 top features in Google Analytics

Well you need you consider several aspects before you answer that question. At the very basic you need to need know the conversion rate (how many sales/leads they get per 100 visitors) and the cost per acquisition (how much they can spend to acquire one sale/lead). Effectively with this two numbers you can find out how much you can afford to spend per click. Also where available you would consider historic data, performance of other channels and overall ad spend limitations to arrive at a reasonable forecast.

The second scenario where forecasting comes into picture, typically happens when the client wants to either increase or decrease the ad spend and arrive at an optimum spend level. This is even more complicated than the first scenario because lot more parameters come into the picture like Ad Position, CTR, CPC, Keyword Set, Conversion Rate and you need to several combination of these parameters to arrive at a reasonable forecast. This is more of trial and error process which I am not going to go into right now.

However if you are looking to do a forecasting at the macro level, looks like the square root rule might help. While this method has its own pitfall, try it out for yourself if this is something that works for you. If you do not want to do all the work to figure out the square root rule, go get this free plug and play with your numbers spreadsheet.

And if you aren’t still satisfied with your forecasts and you are someone working on your forecasts weekly or monthly, here is an alternative. You might want to try the 7 day or 30 day exponential moving average, which might give you a reasonably close forecast.

Earlier Google did launch the pay per action or cost per action (CPA) model of advertising, however that dosent seem to have grabbed enough publishers to adopt the system. This is an expected behavior because for publishers to adopt a CPA model, they will need to be provided with lot more information and support like the CPA networks (cj, linkshare…) do.

The CPA model was a move by Google let advertiser know that Google is working towards providing value for the advertiser. Since the CPA model hasn’t picked up momentum for Google, the placement performance report looks like a workaround for that.

A good number of advertisers use their own /third party tracking systems to find out the preformance of each individual domain / URL from the google content network. However tracking systems do have their own limitations and at times not able to grab this data. Now that google themselves are going to give this data, is a welcome move.

Now why is this data so important?

1) With the placement performance report you can identify websites that send in traffic that converts and allocate more spend on those sites utilizing the site targeting tool within adwords

2) With the placement performance report you can identify websites that send in bad traffic that dosent convert and remove those sites utilizing the site exclusion tool within adwords

This gives the advertiser the power to identify the sites that convert well & scale the campaigns and remove the junk sites from the campaigns saving some dollars. This report is currently available only to a few advertisers, and looks like will be available to all advertisers in a few weeks time. If you like more details about creating placement performance reports and some best practices on how to use this data head over to the Google Adwords Blog

Think of the situation where a user types in your brand terms and you are not showing up, you have lost your customer right there. People who recognize your brand have a high probability of purchasing from you. Even worse what if your competitor shows up for your brand term. Ethical arguments aside Google does allow bidding on brand terms, however Google dosent allow you to use brand terms and trademarked terms in your ad copy unless you have the permission from the owner. So it is up to you to capitalize on such opportunities.

Most websites do rank at the top organically for their brand terms and there comes the question should you still bid on those brand terms. I would say YES! Showing up both on the paid search and organic search definetly lifts the brand experience and a web savvy customer will sure recognize that you take your marketing efforts and your customers seriously. While brand terms may not bring ton of sales/leads, from my experience I would say it does make a significant contribution.

Associated Concept - Type in traffic: While we are discussing bidding on brand terms, I would like to point out that it is good idea to buy domain names with your product and company name. Lot of times people do type in product names in the address bar as if they were website names. And this traffic is called the type in traffic.  If your site grows big, type in traffic will be a significant portion of the traffic you get. When Youtube.com was acquired by Google, there was another company utube.com whose server crashed because of the type in traffic and they even went on to sue Google.

Associated Concept - Reputation Monitoring: Again you need to vigilant of what is being talk about your brand online in blogs, forums, communities…If you someone searches for your brand term and all the search results on the first page of the search engine are negative reviews about your brand, well you know the result then.

These two associated concepts require coverage on their own and I will do so in a future post, however that shouldn’t stop you from start utilizing the Brand Terms in your campaigns.:)

Now lets say all you care about is the average CPC, thats when you go for the preferred cost bidding. Now when you specify a Preferred CPC, you are telling google to place your ad in a range of positions higher/lower than the highest possible position you could get for your preferred CPC.

So when is choosing preferred CPC the right approach and when is it not?

1. When you run campaigns where all you care about is the traffic/clicks and not the actual conversions, preferred CPC is a good option.
2. When you want to test what will be the performance of your campaigns when you bid above or below the actual CPC that you can afford, preferred CPC is a good option.
3. However be cautious about running campaigns solely based on CPC, because most of the times it is about conversions than clicks.

This kind of bidding options and some advanced techniques are already available with the bid management tools. Google’s focus is on mass marketing, and the bid management tools will have their own marketplace.

With the toolset additions to google adwords like the google analytics, budget optimizer, position preference, preferred cost bidding, website optimizer, pay per action it wouldnt be a surprise if google came up with a simplified bid management tool that incorporates otpimization based on conversion/ROI/ROAS.

Follow the link for more detailed explanation of preferred cost bidding

Why is this important? Hitwise released a report of the top search terms for 2006 and guess what navigational search queries are at the top of the pile. As much as we would like to believe that people will type website names only in an address bar, the contrary does happen and makes a significant contribution.

So how can you use this information in your search engine marketing or pay per click campaigns. Find the navigational search terms in your niche and start bidding on them. From the data that I have seen on ppc campaigns, navigational searches not only bring additional traffic, but some of them convert well too.

Typically affiliate marketers do bid on the name of the merchant site that they are promoting unless restricted by the merchant. There are other scenarios too where you will find opportunities to bid on navigational search queries. You can look at competitive intelligence data provided by sites like spyfu and gain insight into these search queries. And dont stop right there, go ahead and implement them in your campaigns and see for yourself.

Feel free to share your thoughts/experiences using navigational search queries. Talk Soon!!!

1. Some advertisers have called up the google reps and were told it is a technial glitch and not the quality score update which is to be rolled out next week
2. Some feel its the quality score update thats been rolled out on some random selection of accounts and they might probably rework it a bit and roll out the update on all accounts
3. Some say that they have incurred clicks on their paused campaigns
4. And there are advertisers who report that bids have gone up from 0.04 cents to incredibly high $10 per click
5. In fact there is a post by ddogg on webmaster world forum

I’ve got you all beat.

My biggest keyword, THE biggest keyword for my industry, for the site that I spend over $3 million a year with on Google, has gone inactive with a min bid of $10. I am in the top 5 for the organic listings for this very big keyword.

I have been advertising over 2 years on this word for this site. The keyword is so relevant to my site that it would be completely impossible to get any more relevant. The group, landing page, even my url is perfect for this keyword.

But Google now wants $10. Like I told my rep, this better be a joke.

Bottom line is that you better take a closer look at what is happening in your account right now, this week so you might get heads up for whats coming up next week.

Stay tuned for more news on adwords quality score updates in the coming week!!!

Well interesting to note that yahoo panama removed the transparency in bids and moved to more google like platform with a quality index. Also Yahoo will still be utilizing the ad performance history until enough performance history is accumulated after the yahoo panama rollout. However yahoo panama decided to show the quality index.

Though google has decided to show the quality index, they are also going to be applying some tweaks with this roll out. While Google keeps saying it will only impact the keywords not driving traffic, there is a lot of talk that its not exactly true. Looks like a google slap part 2.

Ok there is some good news too from google. Google now allows CPC bidding on site targeted campaings as opposed to CPM bidding which was the only option available previously. You can also switch back and forth between CPM and CPC bidding. This is in beta and you can sign up here

In the coming days I will provide more tactics on working with Google Adwords and Yahoo Panama. Stay Tuned!

The site got indexed in about a week, however the happiness was shortlived. Since I wasnt posting frequently, I started seeing that the same content was appearing in multiple pages with different URL’s like the post for the day(2006/10/07) and post for the category. There are mixed opinions about this information architecture issue. While some say this being the general architecture of blogs and since search engines recognize this and wouldnt consider this as duplicate content, unfortunately there is a good number of blogs get trapped in the supplemental results and this blog is one of them too.

Though I was little demotivated to see this blog go into supplemental, I shifted my focus to experimeting with this concept. All it takes is the cost of a domain name and hosting and some good amount of time. Interestingly enough MSN was showing just one inner page of the blog as indexed and nothing else.

So I went back to do some structural changes to this blog. Well here is a list of things that I did

1. Placed unique title for each post
2. Added Meta Description and Keywords information for each post/category
3. Changed to url structure from something like 2006/10/07 to something like google-supplemental-results
4. Redirected non-www to the www version
5. Did a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new pages
6. Placed a sitemap page with a list of all posts and categories

I waited for a while for the search engines to pick up the new pages. And slowly the new pages were indexed and showing up on Yahoo and MSN, however on Google all pages except for the home page were in supplemental results.

Here is quick summary of the above experiment, with the steps that I have taken conclusions arrived at and the questions that remain unanswered

1. Made sure the pages were unique
2. Made sure the same content dosent show up under different URL after the change in URL structure
3. Waited until the search engines picked up the new URL’s and changes
4. Interestingly enough I was still in supplemental results which leaves me with one other critical variable to test which is building links to the site.

Well link building, thats another big story that I will save for tomorrow. Stay Tuned!!!

Quick Tip: Calculating your supplemental index ratio - the number of pages of your site in supplemental index Vs the number of pages of your site in the main index.

(site:www.searchtipster.com *** -view)/(site:www.searchtipster.com)= 56/57=98.2% of my blog is in the supplemental results. What a loser? Well you learn a lot from failure than success.

Feel free to post a comment on your experience with google supplemental results.