This past Summer, Google had implemented a NEW feature called Automatic Matching that is automatically implemented on many campaigns without permission.

Here is what Google said;

I’m excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new Automatic Matching feature which will be starting on February 28th. Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign’s reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists.  By analyzing the structure and content of your website and AdWords campaigns, we deliver more impressions and clicks while maintaining your current CTRs and CPCs.For example, If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as: “shoes” “adidas” “athletic”, etc., and less obvious ones such as “slippers” that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion on your site.Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget. If you’re already meeting your daily budgets, automatic matching will have a minimal effect on your account.  ;

7 days ago, Google removed this feature for undeclared reasons. Probably a smart move on their part as Google, without permission would be responsible for spending $millions without advertiser permission. Many advertisers noticed decreases in business and lowered Conversion figures as it produced irrelevant searched from false search queries.We spent a great deal of time educating the advertisers that it would not be wise to leave this feature on. The biggest concern was that advertisers were losing out on clicks. A rough education dispensing the differences between click and conversion quickly brought light to the table and reassured advertisers that the leaving the feature off was a smarter decision.Google constantly implements new beta testing inside the Adwords program. Keyword Search Pros will continue to monitor these changes and see which ones provide value and which ones need to be left alone.

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Getting your ad’s CTR to go higher is another tricky thing. There’s a couple ways to look at it. One is to do A/B split testing of ad variations. This will stairstep your CTR and QS (quality score) to higher levels. Another way to get higher CTR is to keep your ads in the Top Positions. If you increase your quality scores, you won’t have to pay as much to be there. Third, pick keywords that generate traffic. This will also help out your quality scores.

Lastly, the best known way to increase quality scores is to write highly attractive ads as mentioned earlier in the previous email. Create an irristable offer, something catchy, something hard to pass up.

To answer your question about time and how long it takes to build overall total impressions: Yes, it takes time to build impressions.

Remember, we also want to qualify your buyers and make sure that they are qualified to buy from you. By doing this, you will probably lower your CTR and your ad description becomes more specific to your customer but at least you don’t pick up junk traffic. It is more important not to spend money on clicks than it is to have that incremental increase in CTR. CTR shouldn’t mean much to you if its not relavant traffic.

Hope this helps.

I do provide a service to advertisers that is very hands-on. We can go into your account and work our magic? What is your exisiting daily/monthly budget for this campaign?

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Dale,

How can you simplify writing ad copy in ad groups? Great question! I’ll answer it and I’ll be happy to show a few examples as well.

But first, let’s start from the top. When we write ad copy, we are trying to increase relevancy between the ad copy and the search queries (or keywords) because it improves the quality score of the keyphrase. Quality Scores determine the lowest CPC you can pay. By pointing the ad to the most appropriate (richest in keyword content) landing page, or destination URL, you are also improving your keyphrases’ quality score. Also, higher CTR’s will boost your quality scores, hence lowering your actual CPC.

As we are writing ads now, we want to make sure we keep these things in mind because it will cost you less later on. So let’s look at the steps in writing an effective ad.

Keep in mind before writing the ad that we want to prioritize our goals we have in writing these ads.

To prioritize in order from highest to lowest, we have:

1) Keyphrase/Ad relevancy (Quality Score)- Make sure you are including the bulk of similar keywords in the ad.
2) Highest Click Thru Ratio (CTR)-Write something catchy that will attract your buyers.
3) Qualify your Customers-Make sure that if you are using your ad to keep particular search querying parties away, that you use the ad to do so.

More than ever, Google and Yahoo! are rewarding advertisers who seem to put the most effort and thought into the careful organization of a search campaign. In other words, the more relative your search findings are to the person searching, the less you pay. Isn’t that great? Everyday, advertisers on Google set up campaigns and overlook much of these techniques because they are unaware of what quality scores do and how they determine the lowest CPC you can pay for a keyphrase.

I am about to tell you one of the most important things advertiser’s overlook when setting up their campaigns. I think I learned this mistake early when setting up an account because I too was receiving CPC’s above $5 for key terms that should have been below $1-$2. It was very costly, and I paid dearly for it. Dale, with all my experience (through trial and error) I hope this save you time and monetary resources. When creating ad groups, make sure you don’t over look this first step you are about to hear…

Earlier, we said that as our first priority in creating ads, we want to make the ad text copy as relevant to the keyphrases or search query as possible. Well, here’s the BIG TRICK behind it…

PUT VERY FEW KEYPHRASES IN EACH AD GROUP! I personally recommend you include less that 5-7 per group. Think about this. The more phrases we put into each ad group, the less relevant the ad becomes to each “individual” keyphrase. The best analogy I can give is that of a classroom. If you have one teacher (the ad) per classroom (the ad group), the fewer students (keyphrases) in the classroom, the better education (quality score) each child will receive individually. Pardon my analogy but I hope it helps make sense of this concept. This is one of the hardest to overcome in Adwords.

So the fewer phrases you have in each group, the better. The best is to put in 1-2 phrases per group. Though if you are trying to utilize a few hundred words, you will have a lot of work cut out for you. Just do the best you can so that it doesn’t take you months to set up a campaign. A good campaign might take a week or longer to get the initial phases implemented. Make sure you aren’t hasty about it. Google only rewards those advertisers that took the time to make these implementations.

Want to write ads now that you know how to organize adgroups? Okay, recall the ad priority list above and here are some givens:

a) Some of Your Keywords: Adwords manager, Adwords management service, Adwords professional, Adwords professional company, Adwords professional help.
b) Who your customers are: People who need help/ consulting with their campaigns.
c) Who your customers are not: People who want to hire an Adwords manager in-house to work for their company.

Let’s get to work.

Step 1) Segment your keywords into as many separate adgroups as necessary.

Adgroup-1
Adwords manager
Adwords management service,

Adgroup-2
Adwords professional,
Adwords professional company,
Adwords professional help

That was easy. See the similarities of phrases between adgroups?

Step 2)

Write Ads. Make sure that you write a catchy ad that qualifies your customers. In this case, we want to make sure the person who clicks this ad wants a service and is not looking to hire a technician inside their office.

Adwords Manager
Adwords Management Service
Free eBook , No Contracts, Live Help.
http://www.RealSearchPros.com/Adwords

Adwords Professional
Adwords Professional Company
Free eBook, No Contracts, Live Help
http://www.RealSearchPros.com/Service

Notice, how the ads contain the search queries and also offer something irresistible to the person searching for this service. Keep a lot of keywords out of these ads and you will create for yourself the winning campaign. Sometimes, high competition pitches the bid prices high above our comfort level. But for those that our determined to get the lowest possible Cost per Click, this will assure that you are doing just that.

Dale, I hope this explanation helps out. I kind of gave you a crash course on how to effective write and create adgroups. In return, if you could simply spread the word around the WA forum, that you received great information from me, I would certainly appreciate that. Let me know if I can assist you any further.

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Quality Scores determine the lowest actual CPC (cost per click) that you can pay at any given time for a keyword. It also helps determine how high your ads get ranked on Google. Don’t you think it’s important to understand this concept if your goals are focused on lowering CPC?A Quality Score by Google’s definition is “Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query.”In a nutshell, your keywords Quality score helps determine how high your ad gets ranked and also the lowest dollar amount you pay for a click-thru onto your site. These two things are a few of the most important factors surrounding advertiser success on the search engines. It’s probably responsible for the most downfalls because this concept encompasses so many other areas of the campaign.According to Google Adwords help file, here’s how Quality scores are derived:For calculating a keyword’s minimum bid:

• The keyword’s historical click through rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered.
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group.
• The quality of your landing page.
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account.
• Other relevance factors

For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position on a search result page:

• The historical CTR of the ad and of the matched keyword on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered.
• The relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query.
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account.
• Other relevance factors

Notice in calculating the QS for minimum bid, the keyword relevancy to landing pages are the third factor. This factor along with keyword relevancy to ad text and account CTR (click through ratio) are the only factors that are shown that we really have any control over. The historical CTR of the keyword on Google can only be controlled by its participation in the campaign all together. So now you are left with:

1. The keyword’s relevancy to the ad text.
2. The keyword’s relevancy to the landing page on your website.
3. The overall CTR of keywords and ads in your whole account.

These are the only three things that we can really do something about today that will help you lower costs tomorrow. Here is what we recommend to start:

1. Group or segment similar keywords in to AdGroups. By sticking them into separate AdGroups with similar ad text, it increases the relevancy between the search query and the ads. Make sure not to stick in an over-abundance of keywords into each unless the majority of them generate substantial CTRs. Having too many underperforming keywords plaque the AdGroup and to some extent, the whole account. I haven’t personally found too much documentation on this phenomenon. However from my own eyes; I’ve seen campaigns suffer because they tossed in a whole lot of non-performing keywords. This inevitably tossed the CTR on the whole account and plagued ad ranking from that day forward. Once the algorithm flagged it, the damage was irreparable and the account had to be recreated from scratch. Stick to only relevant and performing keywords. Keep this criterion close and you can’t go wrong.
2. Play “king of the hill” with ad variations. Advertisers often overlook the quality of their ad text copy because they don’t properly weigh its potential to attract or not attract customers. When you write ad copy, you want to make sure that we are attracting buyers, qualifying buyers, and relating the search query. Segmenting keywords into specialized AdGroups helps to relate the ads to keywords. So you always want to try and include some of the common words from the keyphrases in the actual ad text copy. Secondly, you have to get those CTRs up. By writing compelling ads that attract buyers and qualify them for your products or services, you can get more relevant traffic clicking through to your site and increase your CTR at the same time. Have 2 ad variations running at the same time. If you set the ads to be equally visible, in the ad settings, you can quickly gage after you’ve had some traffic; which one is the better performing ad. This tells you that it’s attracting your customers more often and the underperforming ad should be deleted and a new one should be created. Play “king of the hill” with your ads for as long as it takes you to decide you don’t know how to write more effective ads. And even then try doing it from time to time. Maintaining high CTRs equals maintaining higher quality scores. And that equals better positioning for lower costs.
3. Lastly, point your ads to the most relevant landing page on your website. This will both increase your quality score and make your customers more likely to buy from you. You will know your landing page is the most relevant to your AdGroup when it contains the most readable content about the keywords in that group. Save your site viewers time in having to search for information. Make it readily available to them and they will reward you for it. 

This is the first “real” blog posting to the RSP website. We really wanted to come in with a bang. We know giving you this much information can be very overwhelming, especially if you’re not sure what to do with it. The purpose of this blog is to create awareness and promote search engine adverting in general. The advice is free but we must disclaim, we only offer it as a professional opinion and not fact. The references taken from Google in this posting are directly from the Google Adwords Help file available online. You get see them here: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215 RealSearch Pros certainly looks forward to your feedback and welcome any questions you might have about Google Adwords, Analytics, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or MSN Adcenter.

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