Official News–

I would like to see an official news feature in the adwords admin that keeps me up to date with all the feature releases and betas. I don’t want to scour the internet for adwords updates. Just tell me when there is something I need to know…or may want to know. Put it in the notifications.

I Hate The Notifications.

(Note the scroll bar).

Our bosses read these. They don’t know what they mean. When you send us a red highlighted error message that states that one of my 10k ads had an error my boss might think that is an actual problem that needs immediate attention. It doesn’t. You know it.  Especially since I am testing 5 other ads for the same keywords. AND most of the campaigns are paused. Why do you do this to me? I have dealt with this issue with every boss and every client so I know this is not an issue of my bosses simply being crazy. Well…regardless…it still needs to be addressed.

Other red error messages that are worthless: “Your campaign has ended”…no kidding, I wanted it to end. I don’t mind a reminder but come on.

“Your campaign can use campaign optimizer”…yeah, I know that too. I don’t want to use it. Is that an urgent message?

“Keyword conflicts”…thank you…this is an important one.

The lightbulb sign on every campaign that tells me how to improve my campaign is annoying. I realize that if I “add broad keywords” “raise the bid to the first page” and “add more keywords” my campaign may “improve”. Ill also be spending more money…that’s not mentioned. Almost every campaign has a lightbulb…it makes it look like I am not doing my job. Trust me- you want to please me just as much as the executives or I will stop singing your praises and start spending my money elsewhere.

Think of all the time I have to spend re-educating my bosses every month. I could be spending that time optimizing my campaigns. And when my campaigns do better, we’ll probably spend more money. Help me help you.

The Adwords Editor Needs To Report ROI

The editor shows all sorts of information, but why not revenue and ROI? I won’t spend much time on this because there must be some bizarre technical reason this isn’t being done. It would be very valuable to have this info. Please make it happen.

Adult Content and Ads

Currently the Adwords team reviews ads to see if they are family material. If they are not, they restrict the content to show only to adult audiences. For example, if I use the word “sexy” in an ad it is likely to get marked as adult. But not always. When something gets marked adult it limits the audience. Impressions go down and my reach is significantly lower. Sometimes I actually DO WANT my ad to be marked as adult. If I am selling something for an audience of 18+ year olds, sometimes I do not want kids to see my ads. Otherwise my CPA goes crazy and I can’t afford to bid on these keywords.

Currently there is no way to mark an ad as adult by myself. I have to try to get you (Google) to flag it. It is very inefficient trying to guess what will get pass your automatic filters so that your human screeners can mark this as adult. Here is an example of me trying to get something flagged as adult, but I got flagged before it got to the human screeners:

Oops.

See my problem? I am selling bikinis for women and I don’t want people who are looking for bikinis for kids using a keyword like “bikinis” to see my ad. A great solution would be to allow me to check a box to only show a particular ad to an adult audience. Does that make sense? I have tried to explain it to three people on your team but they didn’t seem to get it.

And yes, I would consider employment as a product manager for adwords.

Take a look at this list of great companies. What do they all have in common? I believe each of these companies (and yours too) is being swindled- and I’ll show you how. A lot of people don’t think there is anything wrong with the practice I will show you. That is, they don’t think it is a scam. You decide.

companies with ad problems

Here’s the downloadable list

..There are many more companies, but I have to stop somewhere. What these companies all have in common is that they do business over the internet, use ppc advertising, and are part of at least one affiliate network.

Though, perhaps that describes most companies.

Intro
The scam involves the display URL in your pay per click ads. I am arguing that this ad should direct traffic to Amazon.com.

Regular ppc ad. When you click it, what site do you expect to go to?

It doesn’t necessarily.

I can publish an ad right now that replaces it and sends the traffic to my site. I can “highjack”  Amazon’s traffic and send it to my site. That is happening to all of these companies, or at least it has happened to them in the past–I have proof, though I won’t publish it here.  I doubt all of these companies know about ad hijacking.

The Background
Every one of those companies is involved in e-commerce: they are companies that do business over the internet. These types of companies usually participate in affiliate marketing. It just so happens, each of these 170+ companies do.* Affiliates usually get paid a percentage of the total sale for each customer you refer to a site. For example, if I was an Amazon affiliate, you could click on this Amazon link, then go purchase something, and then I get 10% of the total.

So far no problems.
Most internet companies also use pay-per-click advertising to advertise their product. Google, Yahoo and Bing are the big ones. Every-time you search for a “blue t-shirt”, or “mobile phone”, etc, I can pay a couple bucks per click to show my ad in the search results for any keyword search. You can clearly see the company that is advertising…that is called the display URL. You can’t see is the destination URL- the page on the site that the ad is going to.

Everyone should recognize ads like this. You probably don’t know the vocabulary. Depending on your job title you probably don’t need to. However, to understand the scam you will.

The Scam- Ad High-jacking
In the ad above you expect to visit Amazon.com after you click the ad, right? Of course. The problem is, there is no certainty that this is an Amazon ad. Watch, I’ll “steal” Amazon’s traffic right now. Here is the Google Ad Editor interface:

Pic of Google Editor: Note different Diplay and Destination URL

Pretty easy, right? Mysite.com will now get Amazon.com traffic for whatever keyword I bid on. I just have to press “upload”. Note that my display URL is Amazon.com and the destination URL is Mysite.com. In other words, I am writing an ad saying that I am Amazon, but sending you to my site. The display URL amazon.com can only appear in the search results once, so there is a 50% chance that my ad will show- thus sending traffic to mysite.com, and a 50% chance that Amazon’s ad will show sending traffic to Amazon.com.*

In other words, anyone can write an ad in the search engines saying that they are your company.

It troubles me that I can do this. Only Amazon should be able to decide who writes an ad for them. I am the type of person that likes to control what my ads say. That is why I hire someone qualified to write ads rather than allowing my 13-year-old neighbor to write ads for my company. That alone, should allow me to have control over my company’s display URL.

Google does not agree with me. I have talked to them about it. They consider this a feature! Their argument is that they are protecting the affiliates. Something about the searcher’s experience. (Which I think is made worse.) In any case, Google has known about this hack for years and has no intention of changing it. If you feel it things should change, call your account exec. I’ll discuss what specifically should change in the conclusion. (Interestingly, it is hurting Google’s bottom line—which might not be apparent to them– so it is even a more bizarre policy.)*

I encourage the reader to stop here if you can foresee the implications of having your traffic diverted to another site—even an affiliate. Traffic can be diverted from your site, and it can be monetized, and you will make less money. But there is a lot of minutiae involved.
And I am very thorough!

How To Monetize Ad High-jacking
Thus far in the scam, I am just diverting traffic. I suppose I have to prove to you that it is possible for me to monetize this traffic to the detriment of Amazon’s bottom line.
Right now I am paying for Amazon’s traffic. They have a bigger wallet then me. Good thing I signed up Mysite.com to be an Amazon.com affiliate! Now on Mysite.com, I’ll put a link to Amazon. When people click-through to shop on Amazon, I get 10% of their sales. Now I will make money. If I bid on the right keywords, I’ll make more than I spend.

FAQ
Surely, customers will feel something is fishy when they don’t go to Amazon right?
I think so, but enough people will purchase to make this scam worthwhile. There are even ways around this. I will redirect customers instantly from Google.com to Mysite.com to Amazon.com…the customers won’t even see that they were ever on my site.  It will take a millisecond longer for the customer to go from Google to Amazon.com, and I get 10% of all sales for 30 days. Regardless, once someone is on my site, I can put an affiliate cookie on their computer.
Why don’t I just look at the affiliate ID, and just kick those affiliates out of the program?
You should. But it is a hassle to monitor.  My company has thousands of affiliates. Also, there are ways for the affiliates to hide their IDs.

How can I tell if I am being scammed?
First, if you don’t participate in an affiliate program, there is nothing to look for. Secondly, do a search for your company name in Google and see if you recognize the ad. Click the ad, and see if there is a redirect*.  Make sure you recognize all your referrel traffic in your analytic package!
What keywords do the affiliates bid on?
Always your company name. E.g, I would do “Amazon”, “Amazon.com”, “Amazon coupons”, “Amazns jewelry”, etc. Never “Canada Goose jackets”. Too expensive.

I don’t see any fake ads. You’re wrong. It didn’t happen to me.
Just because you don’t see an ad doesn’t mean you are safe. In order to hide my scam from Amazon, I just need to make sure no one at corporate sees these shenanigans. So, I will not put up my suspicious ads in Washington…that is where Amazon corporate is. To be super safe, I could always just run my ads only at night, or only on mobile devices.

Aren’t I just attributing traffic/revenue to the affiliate channel rather than the ppc channel? Does that really matter? I am still making a sale.
Yes, it really matters. The primary reason this is a “scam” and not an “inconvenience” is that you end up paying your affiliates a greater commission than you normally pay for PPC costs. If the amount you are paying to your affiliates from these ads is greater than the amount you spend on clicks from that traffic, you are losing money. And of course it is! If it wasn’t, the affiliates would not have the money to do it. There are other financial implications I don’t have space for.

How do you know that those specific companies were targeted?
I won’t say that here. Obviously, you could just do a search for their company name and see if there are redirects and phony ads.

You’re making a big deal out of this. This isn’t a big deal.
Perhaps.

So you’re admitting you’re stealing from Amazon? Why is it okay for you to do it?
It was a literary device to try to simply the explanation. I am not stealing from Amazon. Perhaps I should have made it simpler.

Is there anything that can distinguish a real ad from a fake ad?
As far as I can tell, there are a couple things. In Google, you might see a map, or product pics or product rankings. I don’t think those can be faked. The problem is that not everyone has those or is able to implement those. Anyways, these legit ads can still be over-ridden with a bogus ad.

In Yahoo/MSN there is a special “Official Site” designation sometimes.

So this happens in Yahoo/MSN too?
Yes.

You just caused us a lot more work! You’re making this scam public! You’re costing us money!
A)The affiliates already know about this, you should too. B) Is that what you tell your IT guys when they find a hole in your security? C) This is fixable.

Obviously Amazon wouldn’t have this problem. They’d just call Google and Google would fix it for them, right?
I don’t know. Sears, Kohl’s, Kmart, Mattel etc are having this problem. They are pretty big companies.

Are all redirects between google and the destination site a sign that something is fishy?
No, your ppc company might be using some sort of tracking mechanism that uses redirects. Most are fishy.

Are you saying all affiliates are evil?
No. Many are affiliates are great. All scammer-affiliates are evil.

What can I do?

I want to emphasize the purpose of this post. I want this problem fixed. It can cause a lot of lost man- hours and financial loss. The search engine companies are aware of this problem, though they consider it a feature not a bug… Perhaps if other companies see what is happening they will complain and the search engines will change.

Google, Bing, Yahoo could fix this in an hour. There are a couple ways. The best solution is to only allow one PPC account to use one display URL.* A company should be able to have an official adwords account. Google requires you to verify your Google Plus account, your webmaster account, your analytics account, your google places account… but for some reason not your Adwords account? That’s the only one that really matters.

Perhaps there is an even more elegant solution. We need to recognize that it is a problem first. Write your google account rep if this concerns you.
In the meantime you could monitor your affiliates, and kick them out when they violate this policy. Also, there is a company that can check all of this stuff for you, so you don’t have to hunt down the scammers. It is BrandVerity.com. They are expensive, but they work. (no-I am not an affiliate). The search engines should offer this service for free though, for all the billions they make.

I still have questions.
Write me.
Eric(dot)zwickler(at)gmail(dot)com

This is really long.
That’s not a question.

Footnotes

*I was going to say “stolen from”, “scammed”, but I’ll let you decide what word is most appropriate. Maybe neither.
*maybe I got one wrong, probably not.
*Okay, technically not 50/50, but I am trying to write this for executives, so work with me.
*If anyone at Google wants to talk about how this hurts your bottom line, I am here.
*linked accounts count as one.

Remarketing is hot in the internet marketing world. It is becoming easier and cheaper to implement, thus lowering the barrier to entry. In the online world, the term “remarketing” is used to discuss efforts to acquire customers who have already visited your site or opened an email. If someone has never visited your site, you cannot “RE-market to them”.

As of today, remarketing is only used on the display network. However, it seems that Google or MSN could use that data to customize your search network ads sometime in the future. With the focus on “personalized search” I would think this is on its way.

Facts about Remarketing
The segment of traffic that comes to our site and leaves without converting will be the target of most remarketing campaigns. Since these visitors have already shown a previous interest in our site we can make three assumptions about them:

1. Remarketing segments will always be a subset of the general population. Thus, the impressions and traffic you receive are likely to be small.

2. Remarketing campaigns will cost less to convert since this segment has already demonstrated interest in your brand. We might think of their prior exposure to our brand as a kind of micro-conversion. If your brand is worth anything, remarketing should cost less than the general segment.

3. Remarketing segments are worth more to us than the general population. Feel free to spend more to insure these visitors see your ads.

Tips and More Details on Remarketing
Two other quick things that you need to know about remarketing. One, this remarketing “magic” is created done by using tagging in your analytics/ ppc/ display tool. Your analytics /ppc /display guy should be able to help you.

Keep it simple. There are many more advanced ways to use remarketing which are beyond the scope of this article. If you are not using remarketing, feel free to use it as I described. Even this is way beyond most companies’ capabilities (because they don’t get enough traffic, or lack the resources to analyze the data).

* There are some exceptions to this case. In ecommerce, often time customers need to be reacquired each time they search for a new product. However, let’s ignore this situation for the sake of simplicity.

1) What should I be spending per month
2) What will my setup costs be if I don’t already have an account.

What Should I Spend Per Month?
There are several ways to answer this question. You may want to consider these answers before you hire a pay per click management team. Some popular answers to this question are “what you can afford to lose”, “it depends on the industry”, and “about whatever you think you can afford to spend”. Those are all reasonable answers for some clients.

For advanced businessmen and women I think the following answer is better: “If you could buy one dollar bills for $.99, how many would you buy?” Obviously you would want to buy as many as possible, or spend infinite amounts. Even though margins are low (in this example), the more you spend, the more you make.

Would you still be interested in this deal if you had to pay someone else to arrange this service for you? Again, the answer would be yes. While this eats into your margins (again), you are still in a position to make a ton of money if you put up the money.

Lets bring this back to pay per click. Due to advances in tracking technology, we are able to calculate the amount of money you are spending and the amount of money you are making directly from pay per click ads. If this is a positive number, it is no different than the above example, where you are buying dollar bills for $.99.

This advice has is limitations, but not in the ways you might expect. The obvious limitation is that there is not an infinite supply of customers. This manifests itself in the following way: the more you spend, the higher the cost of acquisition, which will eat into your margins. However, if you do not yet have a solid account, you probably do not need to be concerned about this.

Setup Costs
The other limitation to this advice is that it will cost you money to get your account to a profitable state. Accounts are rarely profitable on day one. You will have to invest some money upfront in your advertising, just like all other forms of advertising. This cost varies from company to company. A pharmaceutical company that advertises to every country will pay a lot more than a mom-and-pop button-making shop that serves only San Diego.

Thus, there are two variables to keep in mind that will affect your startup costs (not to be confused with “setup costs”, which is the cost your ppc company charges you to setup the account): How competitive your industry is and how large the geographic region you want to advertise to is.

An advertiser spends $100 every day of the week except for Wednesdays. On Wednesdays, the company spends $250. Currently Adwords does not allow you to easily account for this scenario. The closest they come is Google offers you the ability to bid a certain percentage higher or lower on certain days.
That is not what we want.

We could wake up at 12am on Wednesday and change the spend from $100 to $250 and then change it back at midnight. However that seems like a lot of work, with not enough return.
However, there is another way. An Adwords hack, if you will. It ads a lot of complexity to the account, so I only recommend this solution for advertisers that anticipate a great discrepancy in daily spending (based on the day of the week).

Here is how it works: (We will pretend you have an account with one campaign for simplicity sake.)

1) Turn off all spending on Wednesdays by bidding on keywords at 0% on Wednesdays.
2) In Google Adwords Editor copy the campaign and repaste it. Rename the new Campaign “Wednesdays”.
3) In the “Wednesdays” campaign, turn off spending on all days except Wednesday. Set the daily spend to $250.

The result is that campaign one will bid $100/day mon, tue, thur, fri, sat, sun. Your new “Wednesday” campaign will bid on the exact same keywords on Wednesdays but the daily spend will be $250 on Wednesdays.

You can repeat this process for multiple campaigns if you have more than one.

Ideally, this seems like a feature that would be should be addressed by Google’s people. Perhaps it could be added to the interface to save time and avoid confusion.
If you need help with this procedure contact me.

The List

1) Common sense-This one is often overlooked. If a discount glasses company solicited my help I know a ton of their keywords because I have shopped for glasses online in the past.

2) Keyword tools- Google Adwords Keywords tool and Yahoo both have free keyword tools with real data from searches people have performed. There are also good paid alternatives.

3) Website analysis. Look at the content of the webpage. There are also tools that can extract that data. The navigation and breadcrumbs can be helpful.

4) Competitors- Look at the content of the webpage of the competition.

5) Yahoo’s search home page- do a couple “bad” searches and Yahoo will show a list of related searches. Those are keywords.

6) Analytics-In your analytics. You are running analytics right? It will send you the keyword people are searching for when then used a search engine to get to your site.

7) Internal search-what are people searching for on your site? Those are keywords.

8 Competitive intelligence reports-Companies like Compete.com sell information on you and your company that may be useful.

9) The company-I listen to the language the stakeholders and employees use in our correspondence. Also, it never hurts to ask them if they thought I missed anything, but that is always at the end of the keyword expansion phase and campaign building phase.

Perhaps a new product might come in or a new corporate trend might develop that is outside the scope of analytics.

10) My experience-I have built umpteen campaigns and I have a certain feel for it.

(You may only recreate portions of this list if you keep the text and links unchanged and attribute the list to RoseOspreyMarketing.com.)

No! We don’t want exposure in itself (since we are paying for this exposure); we want exposure to potential customers.
There are really two challenges here:
1) limiting the exposure of your ads so as to save money
2) Only showing your ads to potential customers.
While you may not have experience in the pay per click field with this strategy, you have experienced it in your everyday TV-viewing life.

Filtering by Language and Location
The first large filter in advertising is language. When I am watching TV, I never receive ads from pepsi in Farsi. It is in English. Or your Lingua-Franca. The second large filter is location. I don’t see commercials for British restaurants. Though they speak the same language as I do, the physical distance is too great for me to be considered a potential customer.
This level of filtering in advertising is as simple as it gets. The same rules that apply to TV advertising apply to ppc advertising.

In many cases, you can go right now to your campaigns and click the “off” button for non-English languages, and countries outside the U.S. (or wherever you live). Your conversion rates will improve instantly. Check your settings now.

Filtering by Using Negative Keywords in PPC
Have you ever been watching a football game and there is a commercial for tampons? It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is pretty entertaining. This is an example of advertisers wasting money by targeting the wrong audience. This happens ALL THE TIME in ppc advertising.
One of the more difficult aspects of ppc advertising is deciding who I should block from seeing my ads.
I am currently running a campaign for a hotel in Minneapolis*. How would I describe it if I were to be honest with you: It is a small hotel, not luxurious or expensive, not what I would call a 5 star hotel or suite. It is not the type of hotel you would find valet parking or limos.
Notice that I listed several qualities that the hotel lacks. That is not because I am (necessarily) a negative person, it is because this is a tool I use in ppc.  I can now take that list of qualities that my product does not have and add them to the negative (also called excluded) keyword list.
-limo
-expensive
-luxury
-suite
-five star

Now if anyone does a search with any of those words, my ad automatically cannot appear. So if someone searches for “inexpensive Minneapolis hotel with limo” I don’t want to show my ad.
But I have so many of the desirable qualities this person is searching for. Maybe we should show them the ad just in case.

No.
They will find an inexpensive hotel with limo services or they will perform a different search. Perhaps our ad will show up then. We do not want people clicking our ads for services we do not sell.

Conclusion
So, do your campaigns have negative keywords? Think of all the words that DON’T describe your product or business and write them down in a spreadsheet. Add them as negative words. Your conversion rates will improve, your quality scores will improve and you will be spending less.

*Details changed slightly

Organic is “free” traffic, in a sense. Organic’s only cost is the  labor put in to optimizing your site. Pay-per-click traffic costs you labor plus the cost of a click. That is, you are charged each time someone clicks on your ad.

This shows the search results for a random term "topaz jewelry".

Key

• The red areas are pay per click.
• The purple area is organic search.
• The green area (shopping results) is referred to as “paid inclusion”; it is managed through Google Base. This is usually managed by a feed. It is fairly cost effective, but you have very little control over when and where your products are shown.

While it is easier to stick all keywords into one ad it is not cost effective. Your ROI will be lower because you will pay more per click than a person who segments their ads. High quality ads are rewarded with lower costs per click.

Each of the Big three pay per click companies (MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Google Adwords) use quality score as a way to reduce your cost per click. Most second-tier search engines use quality score as well.

Creating PPC Campaigns
Sometimes it can be hard to think of a logical way to create adgroups, especially for those new to PPC or for agencies that are working with a company for the first time. Here is one technique that I use that is very helpful:

Imagine that you have a client or you are a company with thousands of SKUs, across several verticals, like Bestbuy.com. If I was asked to start their campaign from scratch, it seems like a very daunting task. So where would I begin? I would look at their websites’ navigation.

Selecting and Ordering PPC Campaigns
Just like PPC advertising, one of the aspects of good website design is grouping products into a logical order. Taking a look at the top-level navigation shows us the categories that the company uses to separate their products.

I would start by creating a separate campaign for each of the top level categories. TV & Video would be 1 campaign, “Audio” would be another campaign, etc. (The TV AND Video is a hint that these might be two individual categories as well. So I would create one campaign for TV and one for Video.)

Think of campaigns like the departments in the store. If the campaigns are the departments then adgroups are the rows. Keywords are the products.

Selecting and Ordering Adgroups
I want to select adgroups that are quite narrow so as to keep a high quality score. How narrow? For a large store like Bestbuy this can be a little tricky. The adgroups will consist of groupings that are smaller than campaigns but larger than keywords. Where can I find information on a big site like this?

Once again we are helped out by the fact that Bestbuy is a well-designed site.

Take a close look at the “breadcrumbs”:

The furthest down on the navigation level will always (usually?) be the product (or service to buy or product to download, etc). The trail of breadcrumbs shows the path we used to get from the category which is the most general group to the product. The levels in between the product and the category are good candidates for adgroups.

If a site doesn’t have breadcrumbs you might be able to use a similar “trick” by looking at the product URL. A site that does this well is Calloway Golf. Here is the URL for product called an “X tour Wedge”; a type of gold club:

http://www.callawaygolf.com/Global/en-US/Products/Clubs/Wedges/X-TourWedges.html

Keyword: X tour wedge
Adgroup: Wedges
Campaign: clubs

Keywords
If you have used the method I have described, this is the easy part. By that I mean, you will now know where to put those keywords you have been wanting to bid on!

In summary, these are not necessarily the recommendations I would recommend to Calloway or BestBuy, but this provides a useful starting point for tackling a large project. Using a websites’ navigation, breadcrumbs and URL are great tools to help create your PPC campaigns achieve high quality scores.