Internationalize Your PPC campaigns with Google Translator Toolkit

Have you ever thought of selling your product or service in other countries beside the countries you advertise in now? This option could mean more sources of revenue, and who wouldn’t like that?

For a PPC manager/optimizer, it’s important to be able to target more than the English speaking countries. This is something that is getting more and more attention as the world of PPC and online marketing in general evolves.  By not holding the skills of multilingual PPC marketing you are missing really big clients and you are very limited. The internet is all about being global, so why can’t you?

To help us with that Google has released a new feature to the Google translator toolkit. Why Google is helping us with that? well, obviously if you target more countries and more languages, Google is making more money.

The new feature is intended to help you translate your PPC campaigns into other languages in a fast and easy way. All you need to do is export the campaign from your AdWords Editor with the “export backup” option (AEA file) and upload it to Google translator toolkit. After that it should be easy to follow the instruction and translate your campaign.

The interface is not perfect, and I think a bulk edit of some kind is a must here, but it’s still pretty impressive.

You should be really really careful though, since although Google is translating the keywords fairly well, full sentences are not translated well, so the text ads translation is far than perfect, and for some languages I checked, the translation doesn’t make sense at all. I suggest that you won’t count on this machine and send your text ads to a professional translator.

Image by Patrick Q.

Google is Changing Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) program

I got an email from Google’s representative saying that Google is planning to change the Google Advertising Professionals program.

This is part of the email:

“We’re launching a more advanced training curriculum and have partnered with industry experts to build a more rigorous set of exams with an increased focus on best practices techniques and application of knowledge.

The changes begin with replacement of the existing exam in Q1 with a new Advertising Fundamentals Exam. This will be followed with a set of Advanced Exams allowing professionals to showcase additional skills and expertise.

Passing the new Advertising Fundamentals Exam along with one of the advanced exams will be a requirement of retaining certification under the new program.”

Basically, this means that the GAP exams, that are required in order to get a Google Adwords Certified Professional, are going to be changed. I’m not sure if it’s going to be harder & more complicated, or perhaps we’re just going to see less questions about billing options and questions like “where I can see who has access to the account” and more questions about best practices and bidding management.

Another big change is that from 2010 onwards, there are going to be more than 1 exam. Is Google planning on creating exams for specific topics? like one exam for “bidding management” and one exam for “understanding AdWords algorithm and quality score”?

If some of you know, please share it with me. Anyway, we will all find out soon since no matter when your certification is suppose to be terminated, you will need to take these exams on Q1 in order to renew it. Good luck everyone!

AdWords View through conversion

I Don’t know if you have noticed, but 2 weeks ago Google has added a new column of data to your “networks” view on the interface. This new data is view-through conversion.

What is view through conversion?

view through conversion data tells you how many conversions occured in the last 30 days from visitors who viewed you image ad on the content network but didn’t click it. So if someone saw your banner ad on a certain site, and then, sometimes in the next 30 days got to your site and  converted into a lead/sale, you will see this conversion on the new column.

This change will probably also effect the placements report. Since until now Google showed only sites that generated clicks, but maybe now we will see sites with no clicks but with conversions.

Note that if someone, after seeing your ad, clicked on another one of your PPC ad, you wouldn’t see this conversion as a view-through conversion, rather the regular click-through conversion.

Google is collecting this data using the AdSense cookie. This is the first time Google is using a cookie of a different Google porperty in order to collect and show data on AdWords. Can you think of new ways of using other cookies that will benefit the advertisers?

How can you use view-through conversion?

This new data now allows you to better understand the performance of your content network campaign. Now, you might not exclude sites that are not converting users into sales with click-through conversion because this sites users mighht be converting without clicking the ad.

But I’m not sure you can fully trust it and claim the sale. First, this is something that of course will benefit Google since now the advertisers think that their money is being spent on more conversions and that their CPA is now much better. Thinking that, of course the advertisers will go ahead and spend more money. Also, luck is playing a role here – a user might have noticed your ad but didn’t click it since he didn’t need what you are offering at that point or didn’t think it’s worth it, but then he gets a recommendation from a friend telling him to go and purchase your product. There is the option that since your image ad was on the buttom of the site (below the fold), the user didn’t even see your ad, but eventually, just by chance, after 2 weeks he needed your service and found you through organic search.

Overall I think it’s a nice data to see and it does help you understand better the performance of your campaign, but since the volume of view-through conversion that I’m seeing is very high, I have doubts on how accurate is this data and if I should really trust it. What do you think?

5 Things to remember when adding negative keywords

Negative keywords are used to prevent from certain queries to trigger your add. Adding negative keywords to your account is an important part of your optimization and it’s a great tool to save money by cutting off the irrelevant clicks. Also, this list is helping you to control the beast that is the broad match (read here).

Seems pretty easy but there are few things you have to remember when creating your negative keywords list:

1)      Using negative keywords you can exclude queries that are on the research part of the buying cycle. I don’t necessarily suggest you do that, but if you are an affiliate trying to save money on your first campaigns, it might be something you want to do.

2)      Expanded match doesn’t exist in negative broad match. You will need all variants of the keyword – past, future, plural, single, etc. The negative broad match is working the same as the regular broad match used to work before Google introduced us with “expanded match”. For example, using the negative “free laptop” won’t prevent your ad showing for “free laptops”.

3)      Don’t just add negative keywords to the whole campaign. Drill down into specific ad groups and check if there are negatives that you can add on the ad group level but won’t make sense on a campaign level.

4)      If you are pausing keywords that didn’t perform well you might want to consider adding them as a negative keywords, otherwise your broad match keywords might trigger these queries. For example, if you are running a PPC campaign in order to sell shoes, and you’ve notices that the exact keyword [shoes] is not converting, if you won’t add it to your negative list it might be triggered by the broad match keyword ‘buy shoes’.

5)      Every now and then go over your negative keywords list on make sure there is no keyword there that can prevent your ad from showing on relevant queries.

Creating a comprehensive negative keywords list is a MUST in every PPC account and it should be maintained often.

If you think I left something out, let me know and I will post it right away.

Don’t hate the broad match – Use tough love

Most people hate the broad match. It’s spending you money on keywords that are sometimes irrelevant (thanks to expanded match), and overall it’s much harder to control.
Many affiliate marketers will actually suggest you not to use broad match at all. I really don’t agree. It’s like saying that you know all search queries relevant to your product. Not using the broad match is actually leaving money on the table. I understand that for affiliates, especially newbies, that are very tight with their money, it feels safer to not use the broad match, but doing that is giving up on the less obvious keywords that are less competitive and thus less expansive, and running just the obvious – competitive and expansive keywords. So do you really save money by doing that?
The better way to go is to use broad match keywords and use a really good list of negative keywords . Use all keyword tools out there and try to find the irrelevant keywords before launching the campaign. After the campaign is live and gained some clicks, run a search query report and add more negative keywords. Do that every certain period of time.

Of course that counting on just broad match keywords is not recommended. Broad match is harder to control since you don’t get the full picture on your keywords performance – you get the average performance of all search queries that was triggered by the broad match, so you can actually miss out important data like the position of your ad on the exact query matching your keyword.

To summarize, using just broad match or not using it at all means that you can’t reach the full potential of your account – you’re always missing something. The solution though doesn’t mean using all match types on all keywords. Having many phrase and exact match keywords with low search volume also makes your account harder to control and monitor. Imagine that you have 1000′s of keywords or even more (I know accounts with a million) and then multiply it by 3. That’s a lot of keywords, and gaining enough data on all these keywords will take a lot of time. Also, Google prefer you to have less long tails with low search volume since they don’t want their database to be filled with keywords lists of millions. Ask their representatives if you don’t believe me.

So after I claimed that everything you might do with broad match is wrong, what should you do?
The solution is to do everything – but with balance: use all match types just when there is enough traffic on these keywords or when you have important keywords that you want better control on their performance (For example, if you are doing PPC for a forex company, you rather have all match types of the keyword “forex”). Otherwise, use broad match with a comprehensive negative keywords list. That way you can get the best of all worlds.
Broad match is important to find more relevant keywords and will able you to compete on more relevant keywords that you do not currently bid on. Don’t miss it.

Think differently? Tell me. And go ahead and read Craig Danuloff’s post on search engine land in which he is telling the world why he hates the broad match. Read my comment as well.

Google is Warning and Banning PPC Advertisers

You might have heard that last month Google sent emails to many AdWords account owners, warning them that they are not following AdWords guidelines and next time they do it they will get banned. Some accounts didn’t even get this warning and Google immediately shut down their accounts.

In the email Google is mentioning that the advertisers submitted many ads with low quality score landing pages. These landing pages might be:

• Those free trials scams.
• Sites claiming to give away free stuff in order to get user’s details.
• Site promoting “make money with Google” offers.
• Any other site with no added value to the user (duplicate content).

For you guys with the warning, go ahead and delete all your low quality score ads and landing pages and make sure you won’t advertise anymore scam or low quality websites again. For those of you that got banned, good luck with getting a new credit card with a new company name on it – this is your only chance.

To read the official Google response for those email, go to SERoundTable.com

BTW, did only affiliates get this email? or also more “conservative” advertisers? let me know please.

AdWords Editor Bug – Adding www.

In the last month I’m experiencing a problem that when I upload placements to my campaigns through AdWords Editor, in the interface is see that “www.” has been added to the domain, so the placements looks like this: “www.www.site.com”

That happens only if you upload a placement that looks like this: “www.site.com”. It doesn’t happen if you try to upload placements like this: “site.com”

The problem with this issue is when you add negative placements to your campaign, thinking you won’t get traffic from these domains anymore, but unfortunately AdWords system can’t recognize the negative placement that you have added since “www.” has been appended to it, so you keep getting traffic from sites that spent you precious money.

I bet a lot of people are wasting their money right now because of that bug.

Until it is fixed make sure that you upload your placements and negative placements without the “www.” .

A way to get traffic from ig.gmodules.com

A week ago I’ve notced that my content ads in a certain account are showing in this domain ig.gmodules.com . As you can see for yourself, this eventually leads you to Google.com . I found that to be very weird – how can my content network ads show on Google.com ?

Well, I asked AdWords help that, and I got this answer:

“‘www.ig.gmodules.com‘ is a part of Google.com where mainly flash, gadget,

and rich media ads are shown. If your report says that your ad was showing

here, it means in all probability that your gadget ads were shown here. It

is just like a rendering engine where mini sites are hosted.“

The reason I decided to post it here is that before I asked AdWords help, I searched Google for an answer, but couldn’t find an answer, just more people asking the same question. So I thought to my self, “hey, if I post something on it I might get traffic from people searching for it”. That’s what I meant in the post title.

Another bonus is that it took me like 5 minutes to write it