Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Google PPC - Hints from the google gurus...

At SES Miami, in addition to the organic search people, I had time with Lina Goldberg & Ashley Buehn from the ppc team.

I use to be a bigtime adwords spender (see my google frig) but have reduced it to a much smaller spend in the last six months and done very little management of it. Face-to-face with the optimizers, this is what I learned.

Negative Keywords - Use Them!!!
They will change your life. And your account.
- Lina Goldberg
Heres what I retained from the session (other than they are pretty nice to anybody who has earned a refrigerator).
1. Look up my terms and explore them using the adwords word term. Find negative keywords, use them. I had used some (ie for reading, I had negative keywords for Pennsylvania, UK, astrology, future, medical, public etc) but not alot. Lina says Use them Alot. Personally, while I see how it would improve my CTR, the real problem has always been conversions, not click-thrus and I think my ads make it clear that I'm a kids literacy tool, not a way of telling the future or of speed reading. But, I'll give it a try.
2. Get Organized. My learning PPC campaign is a messy disorganized hodgepodge. This makes analysis very difficult.
3. Try the nifty new adwords interface. This is a software package to download to use to analyze and manage my account. Still beta but pretty exciting they say.
I also campaigned for my pet peeves as changes.

1. I set up my campaign with the conversion tracking a mix of email sign-ups and customer registrations so the conversion data in the account is useless. I set up the sales count data accurately. But the adwords interface is setup so that to look at my conversion rate (the sales count variable) by keyword or campaign, I need to go to the report center and generate reports and analyse spreadsheets. Why can't I change the variables that the account shows in its default reports?

2. Effective analysis means being able to aggregate data across a number of different variables to get patterns and to find statistically meaningful data. A pool tool would allow you to do all the analysis that we now do using sorts and filters in spreadsheets. For more info, the pool tool.

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