The enhancements include:

Content Network Support – Create and launch campaigns on the Google and Bing content networks so your text ads can appear on third-party websites

Display Network Support – Create and launch campaigns that leveraging graphical (also known as “display” or “banner”) advertising on the Google Display Network

Mobile Network Support – Target mobile users by creating and launching mobile advertising campaigns on the Google Mobile and Bing Mobile Networks



Multiple Ad Creation Wizard – Easily create multiple versions of your search, content, display and/or mobile advertising with real-time ad validation

Ad Cloning – Easily create copies of your existing ads and even versions of those ads targeted for different publishers and network types (e.g. display, mobile, etc.)

Improved Bid Optimization – We have continued to make significant advances in our bid optimization technology to deliver even better results for your online advertising campaigns.

Improved SEO Inbound Link Analysis – Our link analyzer has been enhanced to more accurately track inbound links and benchmark your link building performance comparatively against other websites

Scheduling Standard Reports – You can now schedule the Natural Search Report, Paid Search Report and Landing Page Optimization reports to be automatically run and emailed to you on a weekly or monthly basis.

Improved Power Editing – We have exposed more statistics for you to view and now all the statistics can be searched and sorted

Real-Time Task Monitoring – You can now view and track the status of campaign imports and custom report processes as well as receive real-time notifications when these tasks complete

We hope you enjoy them and as always, if you have any questions, feedback or issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@yieldsoftware.com.

Saying the same thing using different words can have a surprisingly dramatic impact on your pay-per-click performance.  It can:

Make your ad stand out more

Evoke a stronger click response among searchers

Cause more searchers to complete a conversion once they get to your website

Following are some common concepts advertisers try to portray in their ads, along with some alternative ways to say the same thing:

Free, $0, Complimentary

Affordable, Won’t Drain Your Wallet, Cheap, Bargain, Deal, Budget, Special, Reasonable. Manageable, Low Cost, You Can Afford, Cost Next to Nothing, Get Your Money’s Worth

Amazing, Dazzling, Jaw-Dropping,  Impressive, Rockstar, Thrilling, Awesome

Quote, Estimate, Proposal, Evaluation, Assessment, Personal Price, Size Up, Find Out How Much

Fast, Speedy, Quick, Expedient, Instantly, Overnight, In 5 Minutes, Over Lunch

24/7, Day or Night, Anytime, All the Time, Always

Large, Enormous, Wide,  Huge, Gigantic, Massive, Humungous, Jumbo, Mammoth, Infinite

Expert, Well-versed, Know It All, The Source, Experienced, We Know Our Stuff, Pro, Hot Shot, Guru, Veteran, Well-Versed, Whiz

Leader, Favorite, Top Dog, Top-Notch

Award-Winning, Top-Rated, Highly Acclaimed,

Reduce, Lower, Knock Down, Slash, Crush, Eliminate, Trim, Tame, Lighten Your Load

Fast, Warp Speed, Speedy, Zippy, In a Jiffy, Rapid,  In a Flash, Presto

Improve, Transform, Boost, Skyrocket, Multiply, Turn It Up a Notch, Step Up

Simple, Easy, Natural, a Cinch, a Snap, No Sweat, No Hard Work Required, No Learning Curve,

Dramatically, Significantly, Meaningful, Substantially, Fundamentally, Extremely,

Responsible,  You Can Count On, Responsive, Trustworthy, Top-Notch Service, Come to Expect, Unwavering, Reliable, Safe, Reputable, Committed

Guaranteed, Warranted, For Sure, Or Your Money Back, We Promise, Our Pledge, Give Our Word, Our Commitment

Now, Immediately,  Today, Pronto

Instant, Immediate, Right Away, Straight Away,

Limited Time, Brief Time,  Won’t Last Long, Act Now

Voted, Named, Called , “”, The

Call Us, Give us a Jingle, Pick up your phone, Dial, Give us a Buzz, Ring Us, Get in Touch, Holler, Shout Out

Trying out new alternative content in your pay-per-click ads can bring about dramatically better results in both click-through rates and conversion rates. Ad testing is a continual process, which should never be stopped, so we hope you’ll find our adsaurus helpful in your constant pursuit of the best possible performance.

This blog post is focused on Google AdWords advertising in the United States.  Please note that other search engines and other countries have different rules.

What you can do:

You can use your competitor’s name and other trademarks as target keywords in your ppc campaign.  Competitive ads can bring in relevant traffic that is really affordable, so it’s almost always worth exploring.

Your competitor might call you to complain about this, or send you threatening e-mails.  You should feel free to ignore these requests.

What you can’t do:

You cannot use your competitors name or trademarks in your ad copy.  Google will automatically disapprove the ad if it catches someone else’s trademark in your ad copy that you are not approved to use.  This also means you should not try using dynamic keyword insert to have your competitor’s trademark appear in your ad copy.

How to get the best results:

Since your keywords and ad copy will appear unrelated to Google, you should expect a low quality score.  But even with a low quality score, the cost per click for competitive advertising is usually significantly lower than other keywords.  Following are some tips on how to get the best results:

Ad Copy: The “usual offers” such as a free trial or free shipping won’t be effective here.  Instead, try a complementary offer that can lure in everyone – even prospects who think they have already decided to go with your competitor.  Ideas here are a kit or guide they can download, a whitepaper on a hot industry topic, or access to reviews and comparisons.  Offering substantial discounts can also be effective.  Whatever it is, in this case even more than others, your ad must stand out more and your offer and call to action must be much stronger than the trademark owner’s.

Keywords:  Using only your competitor’s trademark may have limited effectiveness.  But, there are a couple areas where you are likely to find much better performance.  1) Keyword phrases which imply the searcher is still researching and hasn’t yet chosen to go with your competitor.  For example, if I were selling saleforce automation software, I would target the keyword “Salesforce reviews.”  2) Keyword phrases which imply the searcher is frustrated with your competitor.  For example, if I were advertising for Google Chrome, I would target the keyword phrase “IE is slow.”

Just be sure to do unto yourself as you do unto others…. so if someone out there is searching for your own trademark and expressing frustration or skepticism of a scam, be sure that you are the first ad that appears, not your competitor’s!

Are you satisfied with the click-through rate of your Google Adwords campaign?

If you’ve taken the time to target relevant keywords and feel you have a compelling offer in your ad copy, it can be incredibly frustrating when the CTR for your campaign just isn’t at an acceptable level.

If you want to give your click-through rate on Google AdWords a boost, here are five super fast moves you can make:

1)      Try out Modified Broad Match. Look for keywords with a low CTR that are on broad match.  Start using modified broad match for these keywords.  You can do this by putting a + sign before the most important words in the keyword phrase.  Here’s more on how it works from Google AdWords.

2)      Target the same geographic area, but at a lower level. Target all the individual states instead of the United States, or target all the individual cities instead of a state.  This will get you an extra line on your ad copy and make you appear more relevant to searchers.

3)      Add in Negative Keywords. Weed out irrelevant impressions by adding in negative keywords.  Go to Keywords – See Search Terms.  Identify any words that aren’t relevant and add them in as negative keywords.

4)      Fine-tune where your ads display. Change your campaign settings to show ads on Search network only (rather than Search & Content network).  Also, set your campaign device setting to show your ads on computers only instead of computers and mobile devices.

5)      Give your ad some more bold. Copy your best performing ad.  Add it to the ad group with keywords with the lowest CTR.  Put the main keywords from the ad group into the page title, once in the description lines and preceding or trailing the URL display (separated by dashes.)  After adding in this ad, pause the worst-performing ad in the ad group.

Improving your CTR has a direct impact on your quality score and therefore your ad position and cost you pay per click.  So it’s important to shoot for the moon by making regular adjustments to continually improve your performance.

We commonly hear complaints from clients that the conversion numbers reported by Google Adwords and Google Analytics are not accurate.  Most commonly we hear:  “Google AdWords conversions don’t match my transaction log” and “the conversions in Google AdWords and the conversions in Google Analytics don’t match.”  This usually leads to distrust and frustration on the part of the advertiser.  Our standard answer is “no, they won’t match, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t accurate”

Here’s a quick explanation of how conversion reporting works in Google AdWords and Google Analytics.  Once you understand what they are tracking and how they are reporting the data, you’ll be able to look at the data in a whole new light.

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking:

First click attribution:  The keyword that triggers your ad the first time the searcher visits your site will be credited with the conversion (even if they converted on a subsequent visit through a different search).  The conversion date will be recorded on the first day the searcher clicked on your ad (which may be earlier than the actual day the conversion occurred.)  This is why AdWords conversions will not match your transaction log and why the data you see for previous time periods continues to change even after that time period has passed.

30-day cookie: Google AdWords tracks a visitor for 30 days after they click on your ad.

3^rd party cookie:  Google AdWords conversion tracking uses a 3^rd party cookie, which means it’s more vulnerable to being blocked and removed.

Filters invalid clicks.  If you receive invalid clicks that have associated conversions, those conversions will be removed from your AdWords reporting.

Google Analytics:

Last click attribution.  The last keyword the searcher used to access your site when they converted is given credit for the conversion.  The conversion is recorded on the actual day of the conversion event.

6 month cookie.  By default, Google Analytics tracks a visitor for 6 months after they visit your site.

^1st party cookie.  This means it’s a bit less vulnerable to being blocked or removed.

Does not filter invalid clicks.  If you have invalid clicks that led to a conversion being recorded, they are not removed from your Analytics account.

But wait, there’s more!  Knowing only the first clicks and last clicks which led to a conversion is just a small part of the story.  What about all those clicks and impressions in between?

When you have Adwords and Google Analytics sharing data, you can see first clicks, last clicks and all the clicks and impressions in between (referred to as Assists) that resulted in a conversion on your website.  To see these reports, go to your Adwords account and select Reporting -> Conversions.  In the pane on the left-hand side click on the Search Funnels link.

There are several fantastic reports here that will show you all of the clicks and impressions, along with paths and time lags for your conversions.

Using these reports, you can easily get a picture of the role that each of your keywords play in the conversion story to make improvements that will truly improve the performance of your pay-per-click campaign.

Let’s face it: taking on a client’s legacy pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is a little like the tortures of the damned.  Most agencies starting with a new client will instinctively want to just start fresh — make a clean break from the past and just build something perfect from the word go.

But remember the old adage “no pain, no gain.”

Even though your client’s old, poorly-built pay-per-click campaign may cause a gag reflex, an “incremental improvement” approach is still best.  Making incremental changes provides the ability to effectively track the impact of each one while avoiding the kinds of radical end-results that may feel too extreme to the client.  This approach also clearly demonstrates your value to the client.

Here’s some rules we’ve learned along the way to on-board your new client’s PPC campaigns smoothly and efficiently:

1)  Set expectations. Unrealistic expectations pertaining to online advertising still abound.  Many clients expect extremely low click costs and 100 percent of visitors to their website to convert.  Make sure to at least do level-setting on cost, conversions and how long it will take before the campaign will get to target goals.

2) Set-up campaign monitoring and review schedules. Unrealistic expectations about PPC advertising are usually accompanied by ignorance on how to view and judge campaign performance.  Create custom reports for your clients to keep them focused on the same metrics you’ll be focusing on.  It’s also helpful to set up frequent review calls initially to guide the client on how to interpret results.

3)  Adjust the campaign settings. This is an easy place to start after importing a client’s campaign and is an important foundation to have in place before attempting other optimizations.  Some common mistakes we see in the settings are targeting in the search and content networks, targeting computers and mobile devices, targeting more than one language, targeting too big of a geographic area and not taking advantage of ad extensions. Here’s a blog post on some commonly overlooked PPC campaign settings that will help make an impact.

4)  Build-out an exhaustive negative keywords list. This is another crucial element to have in place before you start to judge the performance of other keywords.  One easy place to start to find negative keywords (aside from our own Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies application) is to look inside of AdWords at the keyword list and clicking the “See Search Terms” button.  This shows all of the actual search queries that triggered an ad and then a click.   Having negative keyword lists of at least several hundred (if not a couple thousand) keywords is most effective.

5)  Turn off poor performing keywords. Get rid of the low hanging fruit.  Usually we’ll find some single term keywords set to broad match with a horrible quality score, low CTR, poor traffic quality, no assists and really high cost per conversion.  Eliminate all the budget hogs that just don’t deliver.  (Watch this carefully, however.  Many poorly-built campaigns may, nevertheless, have been delivering traffic that converts by phone or upon repeat visits that don’t show up in conversion reports.  If you delete what appears to be a poor-performing keyword and traffic or offline conversions tank, be the first to spot this and make corrections as appropriate!)

6)  Organize tight-knit ad groups with highly relevant ad copy and landing pages. Organize the “keeper” keywords from the campaign into very small ad groups.  As part of this process, we re-write the ads for each ad group using basic, solid copy along with snippets that have performed well in the past.  Tailor the ad copy and landing pages for each of the ad groups as much as practicable.

7)  Expand on keyword areas that perform. Now that all the ducks are in a row, you can start to build out robust keyword lists for the areas that have shown performance potential.  This can include adding new match types and singular / plural variations into the ad groups you set up in step 5, or expanding in new directions for performing keyword themes and with new ad groups.

Once you’re done, you’ll have a campaign that is delivering results, and easy to monitor and continually improve.  And you’ll also have a client who remained heart attack-free throughout the process!

When’s the last time you’ve reviewed the settings for your pay-per-click campaign?  There are some default settings you’ll want to modify and also some new features you don’t want to miss out on.

1)  Networks. This one is more well-known, but I mention it here because the recommendations in this blog post focus on the search network only.  No campaign should even run on both the Search and Display Networks (which is the default setting).  Check the “Let me choose…” option to target only one network per campaign.

2)  Devices. By default Google sets your campaign to run on computers and mobile devices with full internet browsers such as the iPhone.  We recommend targeting only one device type per campaign.  Set your campaign to run on desktop and laptop computers only.  If you want to target mobile devices, create a separate campaign.  Mobile behaviors are different, so mobile performance should be viewed and optimized separately.

3) Ad Extensions. Ad Extensions have made such a huge lift in the CTR of ads that AdWords has moved these settings to their own tab.  There are 4 different types of ad extensions you can have displayed with your ads:

Sitelinks Extensions. These are the extra links to your website that appear beneath your ad when you have a great quality score and appear in one of the top ad spots.  Everyone should be using these.  There is no campaign that can’t benefit from the CTR boost that Sitelinks provide.  For more information on how to make the most of your Sitelinks, check out these Sitelinks Recommendations.

Location Extensions.  This setting creates an extra address line that appears beneath your ad.  The address will appear with a link to show a map if it’s in a top ad spot.  Otherwise the address will appear as an extra line of text beneath your ad.  If you are a local business, or trying to drive people to a location, enter your addresses here, or hook to your Google Places account.  We recommend that anyone with a business address use this extension.  The address only displays when it’s within a reasonable distance of the searcher and everyone like to do business with someone close by even if you are a national company.

Phone Extensions.  If you are targeting mobile devices and want to have your phone number displayed and click-to-call enabled, add your phone number here.

Product Extensions.  This setting will enable the searcher to preview your products within your PPC ad.  If you have a product feed that can be visualized, hook up your Google Merchant account here.  We recommend thinking beyond the typical retailer here – pictures of software products, pictures of homes for sale, pictures of hotel rooms – all kinds of businesses can benefit from a Google Merchant Product Feed.

4)  Ad Scheduling.  Every campaign can benefit from Ad Scheduling.  Google Analytics has now made it super easy for you to view your campaign’s performance by day of the week and hour of the day.  Go to Google Analytics -> Traffic Sources -> AdWords -> Day Parts.

Here you will see the performance of your campaign by day of the week within the chart.

And by hour of the day within the table.

There are 2 things you are looking for here:

Any day of the week, or hours of the day that consistently underperform.  You’ll want to either turn these off or lower your bids for these times.

Any day of the week, or hours of the day that have amazing performance.  You can increase your bids for these times so you get the most exposure during the peak performing times.

Once you have top and bottom day and hour performers, go back to your AdWords campaign to the Advanced Settings Ad Scheduling option.

In the ad scheduling popup, make 2 adjustments at the top.  Select the Bid adjustment link and select the 24 hour link.

Click on any days that you want to you identified as over-achievers or under-performers in you Analytics analysis.

To turn them off, just enter the hours you don’t want them to run and select the Not Running option – you can copy them to other days of the week if you want to.

To increase bids, just enter the hours and enter the increased bid percentage for your best performing hours – for example 120%.

To decrease bids for those time periods which perform less well, but you still want your ads to run, you can enter a percentage less that 100% here for those day parts.

For example, common settings for a B2B company are turning off ads on the weekends, bumping up bids during peak hours during the day and lowering bids for off-hours in the middle of the night on week days.  Ad Scheduling is a great way to only pay a premium when you expect to get premium results.

If you’re not using one or more of these features in AdWords with your PPC campaigns, you should start immediately.  (If you’re not already using the Yield Web Marketing Suite, we can help.)

Even advanced PPC ad campaign managers can get a little flummoxed by ad groups.  But by setting up campaigns that include tightly-focused ad groups you can greatly improve quality scores, lower costs-per-click, increase click-through rates and reduce bounce rates.  What follows is a high-level Q & A followed by three advanced tips for managing ad groups.

Q: Why do ad groups exist?

A: The purpose of pay-per-click ad groups is to ensure that the most relevant ad appears for a keyword search; and that upon clicking on any given ad, the searcher will arrive at the most relevant landing page.

Q: Won’t Google automatically pick the most relevant keyword from a PPC campaign and show the most closely-related ad?

A: Sadly, No.  If you have any keyword overlap in your campaign (which almost everyone does) factors such as varying bids and quality scores frequently cause a more generic keyword to trigger an ad rather than the more specific one.

Q: How can you set up ad groups to ensure the most relevant ad always appears?

A: Following are three techniques to ensure that your most relevant keyword will be triggered and therefore your most relevant ad (with the most relevant landing page) will be shown.

1) Extremely Fine-Grained Ad Groups

Use separate ad groups for all differences in terminology, concept and “tail size”.  This will often translate into 1-5 keywords per ad group, but allows you to write very relevant ad copy and associate the most specific landing page.  In our example below organic coffee, fair trade coffee and organic fair trade coffee each get their own ad group.  The ads for each of these ad groups will re-use the keyword text and the landing page will be focused on what the user has typed in as the search – highlighting organic or the fair trade aspect, or both.

2) Ad-Group Level Negative Keywords

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m not referring to the keywords which are irrelevant to your business, but rather keywords which are used in other ad groups.  In our example we have ad groups which contain broader head terms (organic coffee and fair trade coffee) and ad groups which contain long-tail terms (organic fair trade coffee).  We use the long-tail additions as negatives in the head terms ad group to ensure that if a searcher enters the longer tail term, the long tail keyword and ad will be triggered.  In our example we added fair trade as a negative for the organic groups and organic as a negative for the fair trade groups to ensure that the longer tail term organic fair trade coffee will be triggered when appropriate.

3) Ad Groups By Match Type

For broad match keywords, your ad copy is likely to be somewhat more generic and your landing page may be more general; whereas when a searcher enters a more exact phrase or exact search term, you can make your ad copy and landing page much more specific.  To control the keyword match type that is triggered, break out your match types into separate ad groups and use negative exact and negative phrase keywords to ensure that the most specific keyword match is triggered.  You can see in our example above that each of the match type has its own ad group, with the match types from the other groups used as negatives.

While it is time-consuming to fine-tune your ad groups, having control of the ad that appears (and the associated landing page the searcher is brought to) is a critical component to PPC success.  This advanced set up will also help you to judge your keyword performance in a much more accurate fashion.

One of the major touted benefits of Google AdWords’ Quality Score system for advertisers is that the “little guys” should be able to compete with the “big guys” on a level playing field.

However, 99 percent of the small and medium-sized business that we work with come to us with such low quality scores, they are the ones being punished by the very system that is supposed to help them out.

Many small businesses don’t even know about Quality Score.  Of the businesses that do know about it, most are only familiar with the high-level requirements that keywords, ads and landing pages should all be relevant.  In the mind of the small advertiser, they have created a relevant ad campaign.  Small advertisers lack the time and resources to figure out quality score on their own, and also lack the budget to pay an expert to get them a great quality score.

Big advertisers know about Quality Score, and pay someone to take care of it for them.  So the big advertisers end up with the winning combination of great quality scores and large budgets.

So: how much does Quality Score matter? A ton. Quality Score is a direct factor in determining:

If your ad is eligible to be shown. Keyword / ad combinations with very low quality scores are not always shown.

What position your ad will appear in. Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score

How much you pay per click. Actual CPC = (Ad Rank to beat ÷ Quality Score) + $0.01

What’s Quality Score should advertisers be striving for?

First, make sure you are keeping track of your quality score.  Quality Score are actually based on keyword and ad combinations, but in AdWords they are shown at the keyword level   The Quality Score column is hidden by default, so you’ll need to click on the columns option and to add it in.

Google shows a simplified score within AdWords based on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the worst rating and 10 being the best.  They do add some qualitative descriptors to the scores “Poor”, “OK” and “Great.”

You should strive to have all of your keywords show a quality score between 7-10.

For any keywords with a quality score of 1-3.  You’ll need to give some long, hard thought as to how important these are to your advertising campaign.  Most of the time it’s easiest to just delete these and start fresh with new variations.  Keywords with quality scores of 4-6 are usually pretty easily repaired.

The Fastest, Easiest Way to Improve Your Quality Score

Don’t advertise on any single-word keywords. These are too vague, get them out of your account.

Create super small ad groups, so that you can repeat the keywords inside of your ad copy multiple times. Here’s an example:

Getting the picture?  It’s not rocket science, but it is a data entry nightmare.

Check the call out button next to your quality score within AdWords to see if it says anything about your landing page.  If it does, the landing page issue (often speed) needs to be fixed.  If not, don’t worry about your landing page.

Start to use negative keywords.  This will weed out unwanted ad impressions.  Here are two great resources for getting started:

In AdWords, select the Keywords tab, set the date range to view a couple months worth of data.  In the menu select to sell all of the search terms.  Look through this list and add any words that aren’t relevant to your website as negative keywords.

Think about all of the basic types of searches done that include your target keywords, but aren’t relevant: (1) People hunting for jobs (job, jobs, employment, resume, salaries, etc.); people hunting for pictures or presentations (pic, pics, pictures, ppt, etc.); or people hunting for reading material (news, industry, market, blog, blogs, forum, forums, etc.)

So if you are a “little guy” we recommend you start to monitor your quality score and make steps towards having a great quality score to help level your playing field.

We’ve been busy at Yield Software — this is the second big announcement in as many weeks, and there’s more to come — and today’s announcement is going to make a lot of businesses happy. Today we released the newest version of our flagship offering, which we’re calling Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite. It’s a completely free version focused just on PPC campaign management for smaller budgets.

Advertisers continue to shift from more traditional advertising channels, such as direct mail, spot cable, radio, and print ads, to online marketing channels, especially search engine marketing (SEM). However, many are unsuccessful in their SEM efforts and fail to generate the desired returns from their marketing campaigns.

Search engine marketing is a competitive and dynamic marketplace. Manually managing SEM campaigns requires significant domain knowledge and expertise, including understanding bid and competitive dynamics, keyword selection, geo-targeting, conversion tracking, traffic analytics and many other factors.

The Yield Web Marketing Suite automates SEM campaigns using our proprietary bid optimization algorithm, enabling businesses to better compete in PPC advertising. With the introduction of Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite, it’s now also the only algorithmically-driven bid management solution that optimizes campaigns across all three major search engines simultaneously and is completely free. Advertisers can manage up to $500 per month in PPC advertising at no charge. For those who choose to increase their monthly ad budgets or who wish to also use the other two modules in the Yield Web Marketing Suite (Natural Search Optimizer and Landing Page Optimizer) can simply upgrade to our standard system.  Together with our free SEO Analyzer, companies operating under tight marketing budgets now have two important tools to better their web marketing performance at no cost to them.

Check it out and let us know what you think.