Author Archive: Joseph Vivolo

I’ve found that once people have determined what their ideal campaign settings are for a particular client they usually go into set it and forget it mode.  I’m going to go into detail about how we can use one specific section to get a little bit more out of our campaign settings.

Giving National Campaigns a Local Flavor

Normally when choosing to serve ads to the United States you’d simply pick the United States bundle under the Locations and Languages tab in the campaign settings.  Instead, try manually choosing each state from the list one by one.  ... Read the full post

It’s important to differentiate between a time-saving shortcut and one that has some serious drawbacks to the quality of your work or your relationship with your advertiser.

Here are a few “shortcuts” that I’ve found are important to avoid:

Failing to Use a Unique Login (Or Your Master Client Center) To Access the Account

The first thing you should do when you build an account for an advertiser or take over as the primary manager of an existing account is to associate a unique user name to all of your interactions.  This is important for several reason:  ... Read the full post

Keyword insertion is a tactic used for creating ad copy, where rather than display a specifically crafted headline you choose to import the search query.  Due to character limit restraints not all searches can be imported as the headline, so a reserve or backup headline needs to be crafted.  Only keyword phrases that are under 25 total characters can be shown, and when the search query is too long, the pre-generated message would be displayed.

So using the above ad text as an example, if the search phrase was  PPC Management the ad would read:

 ... Read the full post

Sometimes you don’t need to use a limousine to get somewhere when a bicycle will do the trick.

… and sometimes you just might not have an advanced analytics tool and your only options are AdWords and Google Analytics.  I was setting up some basic revenue tracking for a low impact project of mine and I was amazed at the lack of instruction in the help center on how to track variable shopping cart revenues, namely revenue that is generated from a sales action that does not have a static value.  So I thought I’d take a few minutes and lay out instructions here.  ... Read the full post

The fact that you can apply geographic constraints to more accurately target searchers in a specific region makes PPC an obvious partner for a local search strategy. Here the term ‘local’ is defined purely as the area in which an advertiser operates business.  For a scrap metal recycling firm in Springfield, Massachusetts local may be defined as Hampden county, a the entire state of Massachusetts, or a certain area radius where the operation, transportation, and labor costs are low enough for the transaction to be profitable.  ... Read the full post

Google has allowed us to use its new interface for a long enough period of time for me to begin forming opinions about it.  I’ve listed below three of my favorite updates that are included in the new AdWords interface.

Better Access to Your Content Network Sites

The new interface has streamlined the site exclusion process for us!  Not only that, but we can view the performance of all of the site we hand pick (via placements) as well as all of the automatic placements that are paired to us through the content network.  This easily gives us the ability to view the success of different sites and different placement strategies, and we can get a better feel for what each campaign or ad group is doing on the content network without having to run multiple reports.  ... Read the full post

Google has released a white paper touting the benefits of the Content Network. The paper provides the following analysis:

Ads on the Google Content Network can be an effective way to gain additional conversion beyond those you get via search.

• When used in combination with Search, the median advertiser has a content CPA that’s within approximately 2% of their Search CPA.
• The Content Network drives nearly 20% of total conversions for the median advertiser.

Conversion rates are higher for advertisers who used either of two AdWords campaign management controls: the Conversion Optimizer and site exclusion.  ... Read the full post

The AdWords blog has recently published a post about how they are changing their conversion metrics.

Directly from their post:

Today we’ve taken the first step by clarifying the conversion terminology on the AdWords Report Center and conversion tracking tool pages. “Conversions” columns are now labeled Conversions (1-per-click), while “Transactions” columns are now called Conversions (many-per-click). The current AdWords campaign management pages display 1-per-click conversions, so if one click leads to multiple conversions, they’re counted only once. On the other hand, many-per-click conversions count each conversion that occurs after a click on your ad.  ... Read the full post

Your Master Account in Yahoo functions similarly to the Master Client Center in AdWords.

Whenever you join an account to your Master Account, you gain administrative and editorial control to these accounts.  You then have the option to log in as your master account ID, the original account ID, or you  can create a new user and give this ID access to the joined account.

Once the account is joined you can access their campaigns, data, run reports, and pursue all the functionality of these linked accounts as if you created the account yourself. You can set certain login IDs to “manage” specific accounts and give roles to them related to the account in question.  ... Read the full post