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!

As our customer base has grown from mainly smaller business to larger and more complex enterprises and agencies who conduct equally complex search marketing campaigns, the team here at Yield Software responded with the creation of two new features, which I think you’ll love instantly: Power Editing and Custom Reporting.  Now, those who manage more sophisticated search marketing campaigns are able to leverage the many features and options already available to them in the Yield Web Marketing Suite, but with even greater speed and efficiency.

Power Editing is a new part of the Paid Search Optimizer module in the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  It enables managers of PPC campaigns to quickly and efficiently establish and then edit very large, complex campaigns of up to thousands of ad groups, with multiple ads in each group targeting many thousands of keywords or more across Google, Yahoo and Bing.

New Custom Reporting expands on the already robust tracking and reporting infrastructure in the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  Search engine marketers can now customize reports to display exactly the data and analytics they need to be successful in every aspect of their search marketing and search engine optimization efforts.

Yield Software Custom Reporting enables users of the Yield Web Marketing Suite to design reports; save those report definitions;  share reports; generate reports; and schedule reports to be delivered via email on a periodic basis.  I know many of our agency customers, in particular, have been anxiously awaiting this new feature and I look forward to hearing how you like it.

If you have any questions about these new features or would like to see a demonstration of how to put them to best use, don’t hesitate to contact a customer success rep either at support[at]yieldsoftware[dot]com or 1-877-943-5379.

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!

Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR interviews Matt Malden, CEO of Yield Software and an exhibitor at last month’s SES San Francisco 2010.  Here’s a synopsys of Jamie’s reporting:

Yield Software’s Yield Web Marketing Suite handles three aspects of automated web marketing. It has a pay-per-click (PPC) bid management module that includes spending on the three major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  Second, the Yield Web Marketing Suite offers automated SEO or natural search engine optimization. Using the Yield Web Marketing Suite, Web marketers can get higher organic search rankings for their important keywords and learn how to improve their landing pages, link building, on-page and off-page optimization. Finally, the Yield Web Marketing Suite offers Web marketers a landing page optimization module. Using Yield, marketers can conduct complex multivariate testing of landing pages, using a visual drag and drop interface to automatically implement recommendations.

Yield Software is great for advertisers who want to be more effective in the search space, particularly medium and large-sized companies. Yield Software has also been adopted by digital and interactive media agencies that are conducting bid management, natural search optimization and email campaigns in order to help them generate better search marketing results.

Yield Software empowers any organization in the world to attract high-value customers at the lowest cost. Using advanced algorithms and techniques, the Yield Web Marketing Suite optimizes internet marketing expenditures, attracts visitors to a web site and tunes web page content to have the greatest impact.

For more information about exhibiting at SES, please visit: http://searchenginestrategies.com

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.

This morning we officially announced the availability of a new call tracking feature in our Yield Web Marketing Suite for Advertisers and for Agencies through an integration with Marchex Call Analytics.  This is a feature many of our users have been eagerly awaiting so we’re pretty excited to announce that it’s live for all users.  For those who don’t know about Marchex, what this means is search marketers and their agencies can now track and optimize sales and conversions from search engine pay-per-click (PPC) ads or natural search results that lead to a telephone call as opposed to an online transaction.

For many of our users, a call to a telephone number is the conversion event inspired by their search engine ad or natural search result.  By integrating with Marchex, the leader in call analytics, search marketing professionals or their agencies managing campaigns in the Yield Web Marketing Suite are now able to effectively track and evaluate the efficacy of their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns with a call conversion event.  Many of you have told us the reason your company or agency clients love PPC advertising is the ability to effectively track ROI on campaigns, but, of course, those who’ve relied on telephone calls as the conversion event have often been frustrated at the inability to attribute those calls to the advertising source.  The Yield Software–Marchex integration eliminates this ROI tracking gap in SEM.

One of our customers, Michael Cody at Directory Assistants, Inc., was a beta-tester of the new feature and here’s the feedback he gave me:

“As specialists in search and directional marketing for small and mid-size businesses, a disproportionate number of our clients rely on calls as their conversion event for PPC advertising.  Now we’re able to effectively manage PPC campaigns across Google, Yahoo! and Bing search engines on behalf of our clients while accurately attributing each conversion – no matter how those might occur – to the right campaign source.”

We’ve also included built-in reporting tools and analyses in the Yield Web Marketing Suite, so both our advertiser and agency customers now have greater visibility into the impact of your marketing initiatives, which means you can more effectively leverage SEM as a key component of your larger marketing mix.

For current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite, simply:

Login.

Click on either the Paid Search Optimizer tab.

In the Paid Search Optimizer module, click into an existing campaign or set up a new campaign.

Under “Quick Links” in the right-hand column, click on “Set Up Conversion Events”.

In the Conversion Events page, scroll down to the “Marchex Conversion Events” section and click on “Create a Marchex Conversion Event” link.

Follow the simple instructions; once your conversion event is set up, you’ll be able to track all your call conversion events in the Reports tab, along side all your other conversion event tracking data.

As always, our customer success reps are available to help you out if you questions or require assistance.  Let us know what you think of this new feature–we built it for you and hope you get great results from it.

First off, just in case you are not yet using them, Sitelinks ad extensions are now available to all AdWords advertisers.   These extra links to your website display with your ad when 1) your keyword and ad combo has an awesome quality score and 2) your ad appears in the top positions of the search page.

Google, and many others have seen CTRs increase an average of 30% with Sitelinks, so they are really an incredible opportunity to boost the performance of your AdWords advertising.

AdWords allows you to enter up to 10 additional Sitelinks.  When creating your Sitelinks, it’s important to be mindful of the order in which you enter them.  The first two that you enter will get the most impressions, so be sure to make those your most compelling.  It’s also quite rare to see more than 4-6 display with an ad, so there’s no need to spend much effort going beyond six links.

In analyzing how Sitelinks are being used, many advertisers have started out by just including category type links highlighting different sections of their website.

These ads still stand out more than the average ad due to their increased size and coloring.  But, we are advertisers after all, so why miss out on an additional opportunity to advertise and sell, sell, sell!

Each of the Sitelinks can include up to 35 characters, so this is not an advertising opportunity to take lightly.  Here are some tips on how to put those Sitelinks to strong advertising use:

Incorporate offers.   Not only does it make the offers and ads stand out, but it’s also super easy to maintain.  Be sure when the searcher clicks on link they are taken to a page that includes the promotional offer.

Include your phone number. Numbers always stand out in ads and on search pages, so why not have your phone number in bright blue directly underneath your ad?  This is a good opportunity to link to your contact us page.

• Offers with numbers. While we are on the subject of numbers, incorporating the details of your offer in numbers can really stand out.  Here we see some repetition that makes the ad stand out quite a bit.

• Incorporate all ad best practices.  Initial caps, strong calls to action, exclamation points, numbers… this is just another place to use all those pieces of flair that have been successful in your text ads in the past.

A few words of caution:

• Less can be more. While advertisers jump at the chance for all this extra ad text, going overboard can end up making your ad be too hard to digest in the split second that a searcher wants to dedicate to deciphering if it’s worth a click.

• Stay current. Keep Sitelinks up to date for the season and current offers.

While in the beginning of summer grills, patio furniture and air conditioners were hot items, as fall approaches these might be what the searcher is most interested in.

Start getting crafty with your Sitelinks today and watch your CTRs climb.

Most companies we talk to spend their time coming up with keyword lists and writing ads.  But when it comes time to setting bids, they either don’t have the time or knowledge to come up with the best bids.

A typical account we look at has set the same bid for almost all of their keywords (with maybe a handful of higher bids for super important keywords).  They randomly pick how much they think a click should cost and then wait for Google to perform.  Usually anger ensues if performance does not occur immediately.

Let’s analyze what happens to accounts that don’t have an optimal bid established for their keywords.

What is the cost of a bid that is too low?

Interestingly enough, a bid that is below its optimum is much more detrimental to your account than a bid that is too high.  Bidding too low can actually end up sabotaging your entire account if you let it.

Here are the negative repercussions of a bid that’s too low:

Lost impressions due to rank. If your bid can’t get you into a reasonable rank on the first page, your ad won’t appear every time a searcher is looking for what you have to offer.  You can add this column to your Campaigns view in Google AdWords to see if you are losing impressions due to rank.

Quality Score Death Spiral. Your ongoing CTR is one of the biggest drivers of your quality score.  While Google technically says it tempers its expectations by ad position, we find that it can have pretty outrageous expectations for lower positions.  Almost every time we see a campaign with keyword running in the lower ad positions for a length of period of time, we usually see quality scores of 2-4 throughout the account.  Which is a truly horrible hole to dig yourself out of.  Quality scores this low, make it almost impossible for an advertiser to get into the higher ad positions without forking over a lot more money.

Not the best position for conversions. When thinking about your bid, think about the ad position that gets you the best results.  This is where you want your ad to appear.  For most advertisers we work with, this is above the fold on the first page of the results.

Losing leads to competition. When your bid is too low, odds are your competition is out there with higher bids.  So, not only are you not getting found, but you are losing business to your competition.

What is the cost of a big that’s too high?

While a bid that is too low is quite damaging, we are not by any means suggesting that you overspend!

Paying for unnecessary clicks. Lots of searchers are known to just click on the top result if it looks anywhere near relevant.  If your ad position is too high, especially for broad head terms, you are likely to pay for a bunch of clicks that will just turn into bounces.

Not the best position for conversions. Same story as with a bid that’s too low, you need to determine the ad positions where you perform best as related to your bottom line.  That might not be ad position #1.

Double high presence. We usually find that having a double presence (a paid and natural search listing) on a page has a strong benefit.  However, if you have a very high natural search presence, you might not need to be bidding for the very top paid search position as well.

Paying too much per click. Do you get as good of performance (CTR and conversions) in ad position 3 as you do in ad position 1?  Then no need to overpay!

Lost impressions due to budget. If you have all of your bids set too high, many times your budget won’t be able to support all the possible clicks your campaign might receive.  In this case, your ad won’t be able to appear all the time for your keywords since it will be limited by the budget.  You don’t want to miss out on impressions for top performing keywords, so it’s not good to lose impressions due to your budget.

In summary, it’s a little like what poor Goldilocks struggled with: how to find that bowl of porridge that is just right.  In terms of your PPC bids, too low is very bad and too high is no good either.  You literally need a bid that is just right.  Having bids that are just right can be a key determining factor in whether or not your PPC campaigns deliver ROI.  How to manage that?  You can start to review your analytics and adjust bids yourself, you can try out some of the bid optimization capabilities built directly into the search engines, or you can sign-up for a third-party bid management software like Yield Software, which does all the work for you.

But don’t stop there.  It’s very easy these days to set up advanced bidding, especially with the much better AdWords reporting now available inside of Google Analytics.  You can very quickly get a feel for days of the week and day part performance without having to create custom reports.

In AdWords, pause or lower your bids for lesser performing segments and increase your bids for the days and times that bring you the most benefit.  Give it a try – you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to set up!

If you have some positions that you know work to bring you the best results, you can also use the campaign position preference settings to fine-tune where your ads will appear.

Happy Just Right Bidding!