Author: Tony Colafrancesco

Broad Match Modifier is Changing, What Now?

In February 2021 Google announced that they will be changing the matching behavior of broad match modifier in favor of an updated version of phrase match, which began to take place in mid-February. In July 2021, you will no longer be able to create broad match modified keywords but your existing BMM keywords will continue to match to queries in a similar way to the updated phrase match behavior. This announcement stands to be one of the most significant changes to Google Ads since Google ended support of “pure” exact match back in 2014. Read on to learn more about what is happening and what your Google Ads account manager should be doing to prepare for this upcoming change.

Why is Google changing the way these match types work?

Google claims that this change will “make it easier for you to reach your customers, no matter how they’re searching.” This will be possible because their match type system will allow keywords to match to queries with close meaning, rather than a close variation to the keyword like it has in the past. Additionally, the elimination of broad match modifier will mean there will be one less set of keywords to build out for and optimize, reducing management time.

As you may remember, this isn’t the first change Google has made to keyword match types. Here is a full list of changes below:

• 2014 – Google requires all campaigns to opt into using close variants, killing off “pure” exact match.
• 2017 – Google updates close variants to include adjusting for word order and adding function words to matched queries.
• 2018 – Google updates close variants once more to allow exact match keywords to match to intent of query.
• 2019 – Google extends updates to same-meaning variants to phrase and broad match modifier.
• 2021 – Google to retire broad match modifier and lump matching behavior into phrase match.

What will change for phrase match?

Phrase match will continue to exist but will be more important, as it will expand to include the matching behavior of broad match modifier. Google claims that word order will continue to be prioritized, which historically has been phrase match’s main function, but only when it is important to the intent of the search query.

In the diagram from Google below, you will find how phrase and modified broad will look once the change goes into effect.

As you can see, the sample keyword is “moving services NYC to Boston.” With traditional phrase match, it’s necessary that order of the words remain as-is and this keyword would not be a great fit for modified broad as the order could change from “NYC to Boston” to “Boston to NYC” and change the intent of the keyword. Google shows us in the final scenario that with the updated phrase match, this won’t be an issue as Google’s matching behavior will respect word order.

Google provided some additional examples to display how matching behavior will be changing. See below:

What will change for broad match modifier?

Changes to both match types began in February 2021, so it’s important that phrase match keywords are added to all accounts in order not to lose out on queries you’ve been historically matching out to. We are led to believe that BMM terms will have the same matching behavior as the updated phrase match, so there is still time before the July deadline to get your account in order.

The change will be official in July 2021, so advertisers must begin preparation as soon as possible. At that point, we will no longer be able to create broad match modifier keywords and both phrase and modified broad will be officially running with the new matching behavior.

What should you do to prepare for these upcoming changes?

Whether it’s you or your account manager, we recommend that preparation for this change take place as soon as possible. Below we’ve included a list of recommended next steps that should be taken to ensure no hiccups in performance occurs while this change rolls out.

• Monitor search query reports closely over the next several months, specifically look to see if your account continues to match to historically impactful queries.
• If you haven’t already, add phrase match keywords for all your broad match modifier terms in your account (conversion drivers at the very least) as soon as possible. The change to matching behavior will start as soon as this month.
  • Consider pausing BMM keywords after enough time has passed and traffic/queries are mostly matching to the phrase match counterpart.
  • If you are seeing that your BMM terms are continuing to outperform phrase match terms past July 2021, we suggest leaving BMM terms active as they will leverage the same matching behavior as the updated version of phrase.
• Do not waste your time building out broad match modifier keywords, as they will become redundant come July 2021.

Need help managing your Google Ads and other performance marketing campaigns? Please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com  or by phone at 781-591-0752.

Average Position is Gone, Now What?

As I’m sure you know by now, Google Ads retired one of their original metrics (average position) back in September of 2019. This was a significant change, as many advertisers found average position to be a critical metric during optimization efforts. For some, average position was a simple way to determine where your ads appeared amongst your competitors. While it was valuable in that regard, it was also a flawed metric as it didn’t tell you exactly where you were appearing on the SERP. You could have an average position of 1.3, but you may have been showing for only 20% of available impressions and missing out on plenty of opportunity.

In this article, we will discuss why we won’t miss average position (and why you shouldn’t either) and what critical metrics we should focus on moving forward.

Out with the Old, in with the New

Average position is gone, so no need to bore you with its definition and how it was calculated. Time to move on! The focus now should be on these four metrics:

• Search top impression rate – Search top impression rate “Impr. (Top) %” is the percent of your ad impressions that are shown anywhere above the organic search results.
• Search absolute top impression rate – Search absolute top impression rate “Impr. (Abs.Top) %” is the percent of your ad impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results.
• Search top impression share – Search top impression share “Search top IS” is the impressions you’ve received in the top location (anywhere above the organic search results) compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
• Search absolute top impression share – Search absolute top impression share “Search abs. top IS” is the impressions you’ve received in the absolute top location (the very first ad above the organic search results) divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.

So what does all that mean? When Google originally made this announcement, they included the following graphic to help illustrate how we should be evaluating these metrics moving forward. See here (image from Google):

References to Top speak to ads that appear above organic results and Absolute Top speaks to ads that appear as the very first ad above the organic results. Knowing the percentage of time you are showing above the organic results or as the number one ad is extremely valuable. These metrics should be used every time you or your account manager is evaluating bid optimizations or campaign performance.

Now What? Show Me the Numbers!

Let’s evaluate keyword performance alongside the four visibility metrics we discussed. To apply this to a real-life example, assume your Google Ads campaign needs to be optimized towards a $45 CPA. How aggressive should you be with bids? By leveraging the visibility metrics for impression rate and impression share, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how aggressive your bid optimizations should be. Please find some sample keyword data below:

In this example keyword 2 and keyword 3 seem like great opportunities for bid increases considering their current CPA are under goal (28% headroom and 47% headroom respectively). Upon a closer look, you’ll see why the opportunity for one is greater than the other.

While keyword 2 is well under goal (by about 28%), top impression share (94%) and top impression share (89%) indicate we are already plenty aggressive on this term. Any additional increases will likely cause self-inflicted harm by inflating our CPCs. Keyword 3, on the other hand, is a whopping 47% under goal and is sitting at just a 59% top impression share, indicating plenty of opportunity for traffic and lead volume growth.

Final Thoughts

While no one likes change, especially within Google Ads, this one appears to be harmless. With the additional top and absolute top metrics, we get a much deeper understanding of where our ads are appearing, and how often. Leverage these moving forward to make sure your best performing ads are maximizing their visibility on the SERP.

If you’re looking for assistance managing your Google Ads and/or other performance marketing campaigns, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com  or by phone at 781-591-0752.

How to Perform a Proper PPC Competitor Analysis

You’ll often hear that a little healthy competition is a good thing for your business. It certainly doesn’t feel that way when you look at your Google Ads campaign and see your CPCs have almost tripled in the past week and you have no idea why. You might be scratching your head to see that nothing in your account has changed but your CPCs are higher than you’ve ever seen them.

It’s likely that you’ve seen an increase in competitive bidding behavior on your keywords but you might not know to what degree. Well, fortunately, Google provides great insight into how aggressive your competitors are on your campaigns. In this article, we’ll go into detail of how to access this data and how to interpret this information in a valuable way.

What is an Auction Insights Report?

The easiest way to evaluate competitive trends on your keywords is by using the Auction Insights report within Google Ads. This tool allows you to select campaigns, ad groups, or keywords and see exactly how your competitors are bidding on your keywords. Remember, this can only be done to keywords that you are currently bidding on. We also recommend when evaluating Auction Insights, that you do so on a very specific keyword with strong volume so the data isn’t muddied by match types and other keywords.

In the below screenshot, you’ll find a sample Auction Insights report from one of our client accounts (masked for anonymity). Please find brief definitions (per Google Ads) of each metric below:

• Impression Share is the number of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
• Average Position is the average rank of the ad in the auctions, which determines the order of the ads on the search results page.
• Overlap Rate is how often another advertiser’s ad received an impression in the same auction that your ad also received an impression.
• Position Above Rate is how often the other participant’s ad was shown in a higher position than yours was when both of your ads were shown at the same time.
• Top of Page Rate tells you how often your ad (or the ad of another participant, depending on which row you’re viewing) was shown at the top of the page, above the unpaid search results.
• Top of Page Rate tells you how often your ad (or the ad of another participant, depending on which row you’re viewing) was shown at the absolute top of the page as the very first ad above the organic search results.

How to Evaluate an Auction Insights Report

If you’ve ever tried to review the Auction Insights report in Google Ads, you might find the dashboard format a little difficult to digest. Below you will find a screenshot from Google Ads that shows auction data segmented by device. While this view isn’t too bad to look at, if you wanted to segment by 10+ weeks, it would become quite challenging to pick out any trends efficiently in this cluttered format.

Auction Insights from Google Ads:

Therefore, we suggest reviewing Auction Insights in a different format, one that requires the data to be exported from Google Ads and manipulated via a Pivot Tablet (see below):

Auction Insights, Pivot Table format:

With the above format, you can glean insights quickly and apply conditional formatting to help you identify trends more efficiently. You’ll notice too that we’ve isolated each metric into their own pivot tables. We prefer this approach, as it appears less cluttered and makes the data easier to interpret.

There are a number of metrics you can look at when reviewing an Auction Insights report but we recommend limiting it to 3 metrics in the screenshot above. Impression Share indicates roughly how aggressive your competitors are on your terms. In this case, the week of July 8^th shows that our competitors became more aggressive on our terms. Position Above Rate will tell you how often another advertiser in the auction is appearing above you. Judging from what we are seeing during the week of July 8^th, it is safe to assume that our competitors started to bid much more aggressively on our terms. Lastly, overlap rate will show you how often an advertiser appears in the same search that one of your ads appeared it. This is valuable in determining if the increased presence of competitors appearing alongside us is having an impact on performance.

Other Competitor Analysis Tools

The Auction Insights report is the only first-party competitor analysis tool through Google Ads but there are third-party tools that also provide valuable insights. SpyFu and SEMRush are just two examples of competitor analysis tools we use to gather insights for our clients. Both tools provide similar features related to ad copy monitoring and keyword bidding insights. We often leverage these tools to gather keyword opportunities that we use for expansion in our accounts. That challenge we find with them is that they often have very broad lists of keywords, thousands of rows long, and it is a bit challenging to mine through them efficiently.

If you are interested in having our team dive into your competitor data, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com  or by phone at 781-591-0752.

Starting Fresh: Rethinking PPC Ad Copy Testing Pt. 2

In one of our previous articles, we discussed two approaches to ad copy testing; impression split testing and optimize for conversion rotation testing.

To summarize, impression split testing is done to deliver the same number of impressions to each ad in the test. This is done to allow each ad to have an even opportunity to show and the winner would be decided based on KPIs important to the business. Optimize for conversion testing leverages Google Ads’ (formally Google AdWords) algorithm to deliver the best ad copy based on several specific signals (i.e. user location, device, time of day, etc.). Instead of trying to figure out which ad is the best, this setting is designed to have all ads in an ad group work together and allow the system to show the ad that is best for each query.

Historically the impression split testing has been our preferred approach to ad testing. However, we have since tested the new optimize setting to see how effective it could be. This article provided an interesting way to test the results of this setting, which we included an excerpt below to help describe the test:

“Test an ad group with one ad (A) against an experiment ad group with four ads (A, B, C, and D) with rotation set to optimized. You can use drafts and experiments to create these two versions. That way, you’re testing to see whether or not more ads result in more impressions and clicks at the ad group level.”

Results & Insights:

If you refer to the results below, you’ll find performance for the ‘test campaign’ (leveraging the ‘optimize’ setting with 4 ad variations) against the ‘control campaign’ (only running 1 ad variation). As you’ll notice, there wasn’t a significant difference between the two data sets.

We found that the test campaign was able to achieve better CPCs and higher impression volume, but the control campaign had a better conversion rate and CPA. These results gave us confidence that this new ad setting wouldn’t hurt campaign performance, but also may not make it significantly better either.

Recommendation:

Since we didn’t notice much of an impact on performance, we wouldn’t recommend completely overhauling your approach to ad testing. We found that a secondary benefit to using the ‘optimize’ setting is that we can let ad copy tests run longer, because Google will in most cases match the strongest ad to the most impressions. You might find it worthwhile to run a similar test for your account, to see if your results are similar.

If you were interested in learning more about you should rethink PPC ad copy testing, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com  or by phone at 781-591-0752.

Starting Fresh: Rethinking PPC Ad Copy Testing

If you are like us, then you can appreciate how useful AdWords can be to determine the right message to distribute to your customers. Ad copy testing is an important component of optimizing your campaigns and should be done regularly. The question is, what is the best way to do it?

In this article, we’ll be going through our preferred method as well as an additional method recommended by Google. We will spend time speaking to the pros and cons for each but plan to put this test into action and write a follow-up article on results for next quarter.

Our Preferred Approach (Impression Split Testing):

The most important thing for us, when it comes to ad copy testing, is to ensure each ad tested has received an even share of impressions. This is done by setting your AdWords campaign to ‘rotate indefinitely.’ This gives each ad the same amount of opportunity to entice the user to visit your site and convert.

The issue with this method is that sometimes one ad can throw off the impression split if its relevancy is much higher than the rest. This happens when a group of queries matches up better with one ad variant, then it does with another. If you refer to the table below, you can find an example of an ad test with uneven impression distribution.

If you were to make your decision purely based on CTR and Conversion Rate, you might think that Test 3 is the best ad. However, if you look at the impression difference between Test 1 and Test 3, you’ll see that Test 1 received almost 5x more impressions! This happens typically when one ad has a much stronger Quality Score relationship with the keyword than the others.

Some would argue that the most relevant ad, independent of ad-level metrics, should be the winner here. We would likely relaunch this test once more to determine if the results were merely a fluke.

The Other Approach (Optimize for Conversions):

One other method worth considering is using AdWords’ optimize for conversions setting. With this option, you can leverage Google’s algorithm that will automatically serve the ad that’s been deemed most relevant in most of the auctions. The benefit to this is that this setting will optimize your ads for clicks in each individual auction using signals like keyword, search term, device, location and more.

The downside to moving forward with this method as your primary ad testing setting is that you are trusting that Google’s algorithm will provide you the best results. You won’t be able to distribute an even share of impressions. This isn’t all bad since the goal is to achieve the strong results for the ad group.

Next Steps:

Being the skeptics that we are, we’ve decided to take our Google rep’s recommendation and put this method to the test. Our rep shared this article, and in it, the writer discusses a suggested methodology for testing using optimize for conversions. The test they suggest is as follows:

“Test an ad group with one ad (A) against an experiment ad group with four ads (A, B, C, and D) with rotation set to optimized. You can use drafts and experiments to create these two versions. That way, you’re testing to see whether or not more ads result in more impressions and clicks at the ad group level.”

For our next article, we’ll be putting this method to the test. The idea will be to determine if the optimize for conversions method yields more favorable results than our standard method. If you were interested in learning more about you should rethink PPC ad copy testing, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com  or by phone at 781-591-0752.

3 Keys to Improve Your PPC Lead Quality

PPC can be a truly remarkable sales channel. Nowhere else are you able to target hand-raisers with such precision. With paid search, someone actually tells you I want “this” and as marketers, it’s our job to provide them with information to help meet their need. If your company’s primary marketing objective is to drive leads for your sales team, you might often run into the issue of “quality” when it comes to your PPC leads. While quantity is important, the qualified leads are the ones that end up generating real profit. In this blog, we will discuss the 3 fundamental keys to improving your PPC lead quality.

Account Structure:

Like with many things in the world, a strong foundation typically leads to success. The same can be said for your Paid Search account. Without it, you can assure yourself that you’ll be wasting a lot of time and money. Keep the following in mind before you start building an account from scratch:

• Campaign structure: The account structure should be carefully planned with your business goals in mind. Consider which geographies are most important to target, how much budget should go to certain product lines, and what type of reporting you’ll need. Proper planning will allow for precise budgeting and simpler optimizations which will lead to more profitable results.
• Keyword targeting: When it comes to keyword targeting, you want to ensure that you have strong coverage over a wide range of keywords relevant to your business. After you finish identifying your initial keyword list, select the ones that you believe will drive the most qualified traffic and deliver the top leads. These terms will likely be longer-tailed iterations with less traffic volume.

If enough historical data is present (sometimes your best guess must do), we highly recommend focusing on best-performing geographies and keywords. This high priority campaign will then receive a bulk of the budget, to ensure that your top performing keywords will receive maximum impression share.

Ad Messaging:

Once you have your keyword set finalized, it’s time to move onto the ad copy. Leveraging the appropriate messaging can be crucial in further qualifying traffic before you even incur the cost of a click. Often our clients will bid on expensive keywords that are applicable to both larger enterprises and smaller ones. This is inevitable because many organizations have similar product types but different target markets. This is where strategic messaging comes into play.

When we onboard a client, one of our biggest interests is their target market. Are we going after CMO’s, companies with XXXX+ employees, or companies that drive $XXm in annual revenue? We’ll take these insights and include them in our PPC ad messaging to further qualify our traffic. We know our keywords are applicable to multiple customer sizes, but we need only be concerned with the smaller percentage of qualified traffic. Look at a recent ad copy test below:

As you can see, while our No Qualifier ad drove more front-end leads, it was our Qualifier ad that drove 150% more qualified leads. The cost per qualified lead is also much lower, almost 77% lower than the No Qualifier ad. We sacrifice performance from metrics like CTR and conversion rate, but we make up for it in the volume of qualified leads we generated with our Qualifier ads.

Back-end Tracking:

Lastly, and arguably most importantly, you will need to ensure that your back-end tracking is linked back to your PPC campaigns properly. By using hidden fields within your forms, you can pass valuable PPC specific information from a landing page URL to your marketing automation or CRM system. This is very important for PPC advertisers because it will allow us to better understand which of our ad groups and/or ad messaging are driving the most qualified leads.

We recommend including parameters like campaign name, ad group name, offer type, and messaging for starters. This way, when you run a Qualifier vs. No Qualifier ad copy test, you’ll be able to tell which ads are generating the qualified leads. This level of tracking also can help you cut costs on areas of the account that never drive qualified leads and will allow you to reallocate to more profitable areas.

If you were interested in learning more about improving your PPC lead quality, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com  or by phone at 781-591-0752.

Enhanced CPC vs. Manual Bidding Test

Many search marketers may be afraid to admit it, but we aren’t always perfect. There are always some things that can be done better but great search marketers know when to admit these faults and allow for a little help. Recently we learned that Google AdWords had recently adjusted their enhanced CPC bidding strategy to be more effective. For those who aren’t aware, AdWords describes enhanced CPC (or ECPC) as “a form of AdWords Smart Bidding that uses a wide range of auction-time signals such as device, browser, location, and time of day to tailor bids to someone’s unique context.” ECPC uses about half your campaigns’ traffic to make bid adjustments of up to 30% of your Max. CPC bid. All of this is done with the purpose of driving more conversions and/or improve efficiency.

Our initial thoughts when hearing more about the ECPC bidding strategy were very positive. The fact that AdWords would leverage many signals (like browsing history and relevancy) to make real-time adjustments seemed like a perfect fit for many of our client accounts. We decided to test ECPC bidding with one of our e-commerce client accounts, where we optimize the campaigns using first-click attribution from Google Analytics (currently ECPC works off of AdWords data only).. Below we discuss how we set up the test and our initial results and findings.

How to Set up Your Test

Currently we handle most of our bidding efforts through manual adjustments. We leverage historical, seasonal, and many other data points to help make effective bidding decisions. So we decided to test the enhanced CPC bidding strategy directly against our standard manual bidding. This required us to set up a test in AdWords leveraging the Drafts & Experiments tool to set up an A/B test. The goal was to allow half of our traffic to be only affected by ECPC adjustments and the other half to only be affected by manual bidding. Results for each traffic segment would then be reviewed against one another.

To get statistically significant data, we ran this test for 4 weeks. The length of time will vary client to client, but based on our client’s traffic volume we felt 4 weeks was a sufficient length of time. We also decided to test in various markets, both domestically and internationally.. Our hypothesis was that because of its ability to leverage numerous data points, the ECPC bidding would outperform manual bidding.

Initial Results & Findings

While the ECPC bidding strategy can be set to optimize for either AdWords conversions or Google Analytics conversions, we decided to have ECPC optimize for AdWords conversions. This is because we currently optimize our campaigns for first-click interaction from GA which can’t be imported to AdWords. We were interested in seeing what type of results we’d get so we moved forward with the test anyways. Please find our test results below:

Domestic Market Results:

International Market Results:

When looking at Google Analytics data, the manual bidding strategy significantly outperformed ECPC bidding.  For the domestic market, the ECPC segment conversion rate was 41% lower than manual bidding and the international market’s conversion rate was 30% lower than manual bidding.

When looking at Google AdWords conversion data, performance varied between markets and bidding strategies. For domestic, conversion rate was mostly flat but international was oddly up 39%.

What was most interesting was the fact that front-end metrics like impressions, clicks, and CPC were very even between the two bidding strategies. These were very questionable results because the front-end data was so even between the two testing segments, but there was significant variation when referencing the eCommerce data.

Since our test was relatively inconclusive, we decided to end the test for the holiday season to maximize this account’s performance. We plan to relaunch this test in more domestic and international markets in Q1 and update our findings. We will also be opting into cross device conversions and extending the period we run the test for. After internal and external discussions, these factors along with seasonality could have led to unfavorable results for the ECPC bidding strategy.

Another important consideration when evaluating ECPC, is the attribution model the conversion data is leveraging. Currently, ECPC only has the capability to optimize using AdWords’ conversion attribution or GA’s last non-direct click attribution. Both attribution models are limited and don’t value the source of discovery. Therefore we are focused more on GA’s first-interaction, which ECPC can’t leverage. This is a major reason why we have a hard time trusting the results of the ECPC test.

If you were interested in learning more about the enhanced CPC bidding strategy, please look out for our next blog scheduled to be published next month. For all other inquiries, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com  or by phone at 781-591-0752.

The Ins and Outs of Competitor Keyword Bidding for PPC

One of the greatest things about PPC is that if there is a query with enough search volume, you can likely bid on it. Not only that, but you can have your brand showing front and center on a search engine results page for that query as well. That is just one of the benefits of bidding on your competitor’s branded or trademark terms because it allows you to get right in front of prospective customers and persuade them to consider your product or service instead. When done right, competitor keyword bidding can be a profitable venture for a PPC strategy. In this blog, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of competitor keyword bidding as well as the tactical and strategic best practices to maximize results.

Pros and Cons

Before you consider identifying your top competitors and increasing bids on their terms, it’s important to weigh the positives and negatives of this strategy.

Pros:

Incremental leads/sales – When scaling a PPC account, it’s important to consider all options when looking for keyword expansion opportunities. Look no further than your competitors’ branded terms! Unless specified through a contract, it is not against the rules to bid on these types of terms. By doing so, you open up the opportunity to appear for relevant traffic and attract potential prospects away from your competitors. While conversion rates may be lower, this is still a great way to drive more leads/sales through your site.

Branding potential – As mentioned in the preceding section, your ads will be distributed to many prospects who are already relevant to your business because they are looking for an organization very similar to yours. This provides a great branding opportunity while your potential customers are in a critical consideration phase in the purchase funnel. Make certain to leverage engaging ad copy but be careful when using specific trademark terms in the messaging or risk ad disapprovals.

Cons:

High cost-per-click – Depending on your account average CPC is, you may run the risk of seeing higher click costs when running a competitor campaign. This is due in large part to the fact that you will likely have low Quality Score on competitor terms, which will inherently drive CPCs up. If you currently run PPC campaigns for your site, you know that your branded CPC is always of the cheapest. This is because your ads are most relevant to your site which is why your Quality Score on those terms will be strongest. It’s this exact reasoning as to why your competitor keywords will see a low Quality Score and that’s due to the relevance of your site to those terms.

Negative relationships – Would you like it if your competitors started bidding on your branded terms? Didn’t think so. Another potential con is negative relationships that you might begin with your competitors when bidding on their terms. They may reach out with a cease and desist letter or they might start bidding on your branded terms to try and drive up your CPCs. While certainly a negative, the gains from bidding on your competitors’ terms might outweigh the issues here.

Strategic Best Practices

Now that we’ve discussed the pros and cons to competitor keyword bidding, it’s time we talk about how to execute a successful competitor campaign.

Campaign structure: Separate your competitor keyword targeting into its own campaign. This will allow for easier optimizations. Other benefits are as follows:

• Budget management – Ensure you are not devoting too much of your overall efforts to this one strategy. Setting a daily cap on how much you are willing to spend will help you stay on top of these campaigns.
• Geo-specific targeting – If you are looking to minimize costs when it comes to competitive bidding, consider only targeting in certain higher priority regions. You’ll be able to still have visibility in top markets but you’ll not waste spend in less important areas.
• Ad scheduling – Similar to geo-specific targeting, ad scheduling is another campaign specific optimization that can be used to manage costs. Use ad scheduling to only have your competitor campaign distribute ads at certain times of day or days of week that are most advantageous for your business.

Ad copy: An important consideration with competitor campaigns, is having the most engaging ad copy in rotation. Ideally, you should test a number of different ad variations. We’ve recommended some messaging considerations below:

• Trademark variations: Instead of using a competitor’s trademark term, consider using a close variation that will still produce high Quality Scores but protects you from potential trademark infringement claims.
• Inclusion of pricing – One of the best approaches when bidding on competitor keywords, is to include pricing in your ad copy especially if your prices are better than your competitor’s.
• Competitive benefits – Does your platform deploy in under an hour and your competitor’s platform takes 24 hours? Do you offer free shipping and the competition charges $5.95? If your product or service has superior benefits, don’t be afraid to hammer that messaging home!

Landing pages: The last piece of the puzzle is converting traffic at a high rate, and that is mostly done with an effective landing page experience. It’s important to include iterations of your competitor’s trademark term if you can to ensure you are maximizing Quality Score too. Please find two approaches to developing an effective landing page below:

• Conservative approach – If you’ve decided that bidding on your competitor’s terms is enough and you don’t want to bug them anymore, we recommend providing prospects a conservative landing page experience. This would be similar to your current strategy where the above-fold CTA is prominent but you have additional below-fold CTAs to engage users even further. Also, be sure to showcase messaging that makes you appear superior to your competitors.
• Aggressive approach – If you are thinking about a more aggressive approach, consider a comparison chart that directly presents why your product or service is better than your competitor’s. This would include pricing and any other superior benefits side by side with the competitor’s name included in the chart. Insights from prior tests show this as a very effective strategy.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can more effectively leverage a competitor bidding strategy, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com or by phone at 781-591-0752.

Why Custom Landing Pages are More Important than Ever

“I’m afraid our paid search campaigns have plateaued; how do you expect to achieve the aggressive growth goals we have set for our account?” Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. As many can attest, you will find that most of the conversions and revenue you see from your campaigns will be driven by a core set of keywords. Ad copy testing, bid optimizations and keyword expansions are just a few popular tactics used to help our paid search campaigns reach their full potential, but are they enough? While these tactics are important in improving front-end performance for an account, customizing the landing page experience has always been one of the biggest opportunities to maximize performance. Read on to learn more about how we achieve efficient account growth through custom landing page development:

Increase Conversions & Visibility, Efficiently

Experienced PPC managers understand that in order to run a successful campaign, you must maximize conversions produced in the most efficient way possible. This is why custom PPC landings pages are now more important than ever. Specially, the improvements we saw to both conversion rates and Quality Score have helped our account reach new heights that we were previously unable to achieve. Please refer to the table below for results from one of our landing page tests:

Test Results A:

Our test was set up where all variables apart from the landing page were the same (keyword set, ad copy, etc.). If you refer to the table labeled Test Results A, you will observe that conversion rate was 44% stronger on the new page compared to the old page. This lead to a staggering 86% increase in conversion volume.  On a separate note, impressions were higher for the new page as well, which is something we’ll explain further on.

Test Results B:

We also reviewed impression share, Quality Score, and average CPC differences between the two pages, which can be seen in the following table:

An interesting trend we started to see with our custom landing page test was that the impression split difference would favor the new landing page considerably. Our tests were set up so that each ad would have an equal opportunity to enter the auction, however we found that the ad with the new page was able to win more of those auctions and appear more often which increased its Impression Share. We determined that the new page’s ad was able to achieve this due to a higher Quality Score. Please refer to Test Results B where you can see that our results yielded stronger Quality Score (+17%) and Impression Share (+14%) with the new landing pages.  Lastly, and most importantly, we saw 19% lower CPCs when using the new page which lead to more efficient performance without sacrificing traffic.

Testing & Measurement Considerations

Before you go out and develop dozens of custom landing pages for your account, we strongly encourage that you test some drafts before moving forward with scaling out production. While we are confident that custom landing pages are applicable to most accounts, there may be some subtle tweaks that need to be made before you settle on a template that works best.

We recommend that you leverage AdWords Drafts & Experiments to test the impact your custom landing pages have on performance. Using Drafts & Experiments is especially important because it is the only way to ensure that each ad variation gets an equal chance to enter the auction and allows you to measure Quality Score and Impression Share for individual keywords.

Test Results C:

The following table displays the effects our custom landing pages had on individual keyword Quality Score, CPC, Position, and Impression Share:

In most cases, we saw improved performance across all KPIs measured. While we expected to see Quality Score improve and CPCs to decrease, the biggest surprise was the increase in Impression Share we saw. This is why you saw impressions for the new page in Test Results A significantly higher than that of the old page. Where we were previously unable to increase bids to capture more Impression Share due to efficiency constraints, the custom landing pages allowed us to capture more traffic without having to increase our bids.  We explained this dynamic in one of our advanced PPC series articles.

If you consistently see that your new landing pages help to drive costs down and increase conversions, you know that it is time to scale out development efforts and implement these pages across your account.

Best Practices for Custom Landing Pages

Now that you understand why custom landing pages are now more important than ever and how you are going to measure their performance, it’s time to learn what goes into developing one. Two things need to be considered when developing custom landing pages; the page’s relevancy to a particular keyword theme and the page’s ability to convert traffic at a high rate.

To optimize a page for Quality Score, you must first determine your highest traffic keyword themes and design pages accordingly. Each page must be specific to that theme to ensure ad relevance is maximized. We typically recommend including a keyword-centric headline with an appropriate call-to-action above-fold. Then we recommend at least 4-6 iterations of that keyword be included on the page to ensure it receives a strong Quality Score. We also recommend a section of content be added to the bottom of the page (directly above the footer) 3-5 sentences long with the only purpose of helping improve Quality Score.

Next, you want to design the page for conversion rate purposes. We suggest having the primary CTA above-fold so it is clear to the user what next steps they should take. Credibility-builders like logos of current clients, trust badges, or testimonials will establish a sense of security and trust between the user and your organization. If an individual is not ready to complete the primary CTA, we then recommend including softer CTAs below-fold to provide a user with additional opportunities to convert.

Custom landing pages, which were once thought to be a routine addition to our PPC efforts, have become more important now than ever before. With their help we’ve surpassed our original expectations and delivered extremely strong performance to our clients.

To learn more about how PPC landing page strategies can drive more leads with greater efficiency, please contact us by email at sales@synapsesem.com or by phone at 781-591-0752.