KeyRelevance’s Recommendations:

1. Use CPA Bidding instead, if that is an option.
2. Make small adjustments (e.g. 5-10%, $0.05 – $0.10)
3. Make sure to set upper and lower limits to bound the changes that can be made
4. Make the automation rules at the appropriate level. They can be set at the campaign, adgroup, or keyword level.
5. Use overlapping rules to handle exceptions. Note that when multiple rules apply, ALL will trigger, so approach this techinque with caution.
6. Running rules during a campaign’s “off” time makes sense for a cleaner transition. I have my rules set up to run at 1am using the previous day’s data.

Note: Using CPA bidding eliminates the need to make these finer-grained adjustments all together.

Example: I have a campaign using Position Preference, and I am typically using a 3-6 position preference (avoiding the Top 2). To set up an Automated Rule to approximate this, I would add the following rules.

The first rule raises bids if my avg pos is too low:

At the Ad Group Level, add a “Change Max CPC Bids When…” rule to boost a “poor” Avg Pos:

A similar rule should then be set up to Adjust downwards if the Avg Pos gets too “good”.

Limitations of Automated Rules

1. Editing Automation Rules is like editing ads: the old version is deleted and the new one inserted, but the old rule lingers as a “deleted” rule. Changing the Notifications setting counts as changing the rule, even if the triggers and effects don’t change. The good news is that there are no bidding history issues created by this swap-out.
2. The Automated Rules Management Section lumps ALL rules for the Account together in one huge list, so good naming conventions for organizing the rules is a good idea. (see below).
3. Rules at multiple levels might apply within an adgroup/for a specific KW. Example, you might target Position 3-6 for most of the KW in an adgroup, but exceptions for just one highly competitive term. This KW’s rules might have different avg. position triggers, or a higher max CPC with the same triggers.
4. Rules might not run:
   • Google downtime might prevent a rule from running.
   • Timeouts in pulling data for the account might cause the rule to abort.
   • Finally, rules have a 1 year lifespan after which they won’t continue, unless you manually update the ads (see Caveat #1). You will be warned as this anniversary approaches.
     (Seehttps://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188713"> https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188713 for details on Rules Execution).

Naming Rules Well Will Make Make Maintenance Managable

Multiple Adjustments per Day
The above discussion suggests making bidding adjustments at most 1 time per day. In practice, you could do two updates per day: the first update would use a pair of rules as outlined above. Then, you could add a 2nd pair of rules that would trigger perhaps in mid-afternoon, and which used only TODAY’s positioning information to adjust. We recommend that this 2nd set of rules make smaller adjustments since they are operating on a small data set, and therefore more sensitive to noise in the data. Where your primary adjustment rules might make a 5% change, this 2nd set of rules could make a smaller 2% adjustment. This would make your rules more responsive to changes in the marketplace without causing your spend to bounce all over the place.

Generating the Reports

Generating the report is straightforward: after logging in to your Yahoo PPC account, click on the “Reports” Tab, then on the “Ad Delivery Report” link under “Traffic Quality Reports” in the left-hand navigation.

Merits of the New Ad Delivery Report

I recommend downloading the report into Excel (or other spreadsheet) to make the data easier to manipulate. Once downloaded, the report provides a wealth of information to the advertiser. You can see a domain-by-domain breakdown of all the usual PPC metrics (impressions, clicks, CPC, CTR, etc.). The best part of using this report is that it provides a list of impressions as well as clicks, so you can identify where your ads are being displayed but NOT being clicked on. This helps in a couple of ways:

• you can determine sites which generate impressions but not clicks can drag down your CTR, and
• you can identify sites that are inappropriate for your ad campaign and block that domain even before paying for clicks.

Using the Ad Delivery Reports to your advantage

You can use the report to:

Identify poorly performing sites – Sites with a very low CTR can be identified and blocked. Similarly, sites with a high Cost Per Conversion could be culled.

Avoiding unnecessary impressions – Poor targeting may cause ads to display without generating clicks. This lowers the CTR performance. Sort the data by CTR and consider culling the lower performers, assuming you have given them a chance (say 200+ impressions) to generate some clicks.

Block out of area delivery – Geo-targeting is based on the IP address of the searcher, but consider that if you have a US-based offer, searchers on Canadian or UK sites (both of which showed up on the US-limited ad campaign in the report above) are probably not your target demographic.

Suspicious behavior – Sites with a very low CTR are not helping your campaign, but sites with an extremely high CTR are also suspicious. If your typical CTR is 5%, and you are seeing 100% CTR from a site with many impressions, this could be a red flag. Note that a site with 1 impression could have 1 click and 100% CTR, so make sure you have multiple impressions to confirm any suspicious behavior. I recommend culling these domains, and if the behavior is egregious (say 10+ impressions and a 100% CTR) consider reporting the domain to Yahoo.

 

Adding poor performers to the Blocked Domains list

Once you have identified domains on which you would prefer your ads NOT be displayed, you can add them to the “Blocked Domains” list for your account. To do this, click on the Administration tab, then on the Submit Domains link. We recommend adding the 2nd level domain (e.g. somesite.com) rather than the 3rd level domain (e.g. http://www.somesite.com, search.somesite.com, etc.). If you provide a 2nd level domain, ALL matching 3rd level domains under that domain will be blocked as well. FYI, Yahoo also supports blocking specific subdirectories (e.g. http://www.somesite.com/news) from being used, but since the Ad Delivery Report only reports on the domain (not the path), this would require the use of a 3rd party click tracking tool (like http://www.PPCProbe.com) or manual investigation of each domain to see where the ads might be displayed on the site.

 

Limitations and Caveats

There are a few limitations and caveats that you need to be aware of:

Blocked Domains List Limitations – there is a limit of 500 domains that can be blocked per account

Delayed Implementation – Yahoo says it may take up to seven days for a block request to propagate. In practice, I have seen it take as much as 30 days, so track your requests to make sure they are implemented. Submitting a domain that is already on the list won’t hurt, and the system will warn you if you make a duplicate request.

More Sites Waiting in the Wings – In some industries, the Yahoo Search Network sites work fine. In some very competitive areas, however, there are a lot of “domainer” sites with no real content that capture significant traffic. Blocking these sites can become a persistent problem, as new sites move into the rotation as others are blocked. Keeping on top of the issue is key to making sure that only the best, on target sites are used for your ad delivery.

Automatic Match is Google’s new feature that allows AdWords managers to receive clicks in their PPC campaigns without the need to select specific keywords. According to Google:

 

In two previous posts, Jim took a somewhat negative shot at Google’s “Automatic Match” feature, with little to go on but past experience with “new features”.

Well, we’re back and have the results of our real-life testing of this new feature.

After a fairly lengthy process of testing “Automatic Match”, we can now report these facts — Facts at the time of this writing, but Google can always change at any moment without warning or notice.

Facts:

1. The following statement is still true, so be on the lookout for when Google rolls “Automatic Match” out to your account!
   Quote from an Official Google email dated 23May2008: “The feature will be enabled by default..” – see Automatic Match to be Default
2. Automatic Match does not start spending immediately… once activated, it takes up to a couple weeks for it to learn what it thinks it should do. So, don’t get complacent if it does don’t start spending on Day One — KEEP TABS — it could take off like a rocket at any time.
3. Google’s “Automatic Match” IS greedier than expanded broad match! See our original post at: More Greedy than Expanded Broad Match
4. Still true (if you notice when it shows up): But there is GOOD news — you can OPT out!

   Look for this in your Campaign Settings:

   
   

5. Automatic Match is especially invasive in adgroups that have relatively few keywords.
6. You can “negate” bad impressions and clicks with negative keywords — if you keep very, very close tabs on them. We use the PPCProbe keyword tool to allow us real-time tracking of the search phrases.

NOW, some actual results:

The Scenario:
One adgroup with 1 PHRASE match keyword, residing in a campaign enabled for automatic match.

The Results:

• Adgroup spend increased 600%! That’s right… 600%!

While the increase in spend in and of itself is not a bad thing (assuming that’s why we were using Automatic Match in the first place), there is a problem with ther results of our test: spending more money is a good thing only if it is bringing targeted traffic to the site. One of the shortcomings of using Automatic Match is that you don’t get to see the search terms that the searchers are using in the Campaign/AdGroups management screen. We used PPCProbe to allow us to gain the insight into the actual search terms that Automatic Match was matching to in real time.

• 88% of all clicks were from “Automatic Match”. Only 12% were from the actual phrase match keyword. The CPC of the Automatic Match keywords was a little cheaper than the CPC of the actual phrase in the account, but…
• The majority (4 out of 5) of “Automatic Match” clicks came from keywords I consider to be not relevant. As we shall see, this makes the Effective CPC much worse in our case.

We ran our test with a single phrase match term in the AdGroup: “wedding table decorations”. Of the clicks collected during our test, clicks for the phrases in the AdGroup broke down as follows:

 

As result, if we consider the Actual Phrases, the Automatch Hits, and the Near Misses (to give the benefit of the doubt – it is just a computer making these KW decisions and we are being lazy by using Automatic Match in the first place), you can see that only 28.4% of the ad spend generated relevant traffic to the site. This effectively made the CPC of the KW buys in this AdGroup 3.5 times more expensive with Automatic Match turned on compared to manually selecting keywords because of the ad spend wasted on the mis-targeted Keyword clicks.

So, where are these mismatched keywords coming from? Are chocolates, flowers and wedding gowns featured on the landing page for the AdGroup? The short answer is “No”. The word “flower” is mentioned once in the plain text of the page, the words “hershey” and “chocolate” appear in the sidebar navigation that points to other pages of the site, and the words “gown” and “dress” are not on the page at all. None of these off-target keywords appeared in the AdWords Ad Copy or anywhere else in the AdGroup. A new AdGroup was created for this test, so no deleted words were previously in the AdGroup. From this we conclude that Automatic Match seems to be using a variation of the Expanded Broad Match algorithm.

Recommendations

• Turn Automatic Matching off until you understand the ramifications of what it will do to your ad spend, traffic, and conversions.
• If you should decide to use it, watch it closely, and track the actual phrases that are being used to drive traffic to the site.
• Be prepared for nothing to happen on the Automatic Match lines of your AdGroups immediately – Automatic Match takes some time to “kick in”.
• Compute an “effective CPC” [total $$ / (total clicks - off-target Automatch clicks)] for the AdGroup. Once you discount the off-target traffic you will be better able to determine the real cost of using Automatic Matching in your ad campaign.

Pay Per Click

Google announced some upcoming AdWords changes that affect the way that they handle the Quality Score calculations. These changes have been made to improve the accuracy of the Quality Score calculations and to improve the usability of the AdWords accounts. They were announced on 21 August 2008, and will initially be rolled out to a few PPC customers for feedback, with the rollout to the full AdWords client base occurring over the next two months.

There are four enhancements announced:

Quality Score Timeliness

Google will now be calculating the Quality Score for your ad each time it matches a search query. In the past, the Quality Score was only recalculated periodically, which could cause some lag in the improvement to Quality Score once the problems were corrected. By calculating the Quality Score “on-the-fly” your ads will be more likely to display when relevant (and less likely to display when not).

“Minimum Bid” to be Retired (but not really)

The Minimum Bid calculation was added to Google AdWords about three years ago (July 2005), and has been the bane of many PPC advertisers. We believe that the Minimum Bid calculation was a work-saving measure that allowed Google to limit the number of phrases to be considered for a particular search query and provide better speed-of-service to the searcher. As a result, though, many phases would be turned off, and an inattentive PPC manager could be caught unawares. Users of the Google API and the offline AdWords Editor will still see the Minimum Bid field until these tools are updated, so while they no longer show in the Google GUI, they are still being calculated (based on the new Quality Score calculations).

As a part of the real-time Quality Score improvements, in the GUI, the Minimum Bid metric is being replaced with….

“First Page Bid” Calculation

Google will now provide an estimate of the bid needed for your ad to be displayed on the first page of the search results. There are a couple of factors in play here: The ad’s Quality Score, the Exact Match version of the keyword (even if you are using broad or phrase matching), and what your competitors are up to.

Keyword Search Deactivation Removed

The final change that Google is implementing is the removal of the “inactive for search” flagging. In the past, when the Quality Score and max bid factors were too low, Google would mark a keyword phrase as inactive, and ads would never be displayed for those phrases. When these changes roll out to your PPC campaigns, keywords will no longer be marked as “inactive for search.” Note that this means that keywords marked as inactive today will become active again (unless already paused or deleted). Google indicates that the same reasons that caused the keywords to be marked as inactive in the past will likely keep the phrases from generating much traffic.

What does this mean to you?

In the very short term, nothing. Google will be rolling these features out to existing PPC accounts over the next two months, so you might not see these changes in your campaigns immediately. In the mean time, we recommend reviewing your accounts for “inactive for search” keyword phrases, and consider whether these phrases should remain in your accounts or be paused/deleted.

The “First Page Bid” metric is a welcome addition, and will make managing campaigns and evaluating popular keywords much easier.

The real time Quality Score calculation should make your PPC account more responsive to changes in ad copy, which in turn should make the accounts perform better quicker.

Finally, note that these changes affect keywords, ads, and bids in the Search Network – the Content Network is unaffected.

If you have advertised on Yahoo’s Panama for any length of time or managed multiple accounts there, you may have seen (in many account cases) a deterioration in conversion performance in search.

We are talking search here — not the content network.

I just finished investigating this issue on several accounts today and found a very interesting fact:

Of all the clicks coming from these accounts on Yahoo Panama, only 33.7% were actually from Yahoo — the rest (66.3%) were from Yahoo’s Search Network!

So Yahoo’s search network delivers more traffic than Yahoo search? Yep, in many cases this appears to be an absolute fact.

“So who cares”, you say?

You should! Yahoo’s search network (and Google’s for that matter) is not chunked full of brand name properties to put it politely — to be a bit rude many are “scummy”. So, conversion performance from Yahoo is 66.3% search network which just DOES NOT convert as well as search.

WELL… YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST and WE WARNED YOU!

See our original article at:
googles-automatic-match-more-greedy-than-expanded-broad-match

 
If you need the quick summary and don’t have time to read our original article, here you go:

• If your Adwords keywords (Exact, Phrase and Broad match types — including expanded broad match) don’t make your ads show… Automatic Match Will!

Call me somewhat of a cynic, but I have a very tough time relating this to “producing better relevance”. I have personally seen what broad match (with expanded broad match) can do when it gets out of control and have found ways to prevent the excessive spend from occurring. Thank goodness…

But there is GOOD news — you can OPT out!

For the moment the Beta description is still available (Automatic Match Beta),

 
BUT
 
Try using the AdWords help function (while logged in) searching for “Automatic Match” and you get this:
Your search — “automatic match” — did not match any answers in the AdWords Help Center.

 

Why is it hidden? Go Figure!

By Scott Morrison, Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES reports a top Google executive (Tim Armstrong, Google’s North American president for advertising and commerce.) of saying:

“Speaking at the Bear Stearns Media Conference in Palm Beach, Fla., Armstrong said Google’s advertising platform will evolve over time so that it won’t distinguish between search and display ads.”

Anyone care to comment on what the heck that means?

WELL… YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST and WE WARNED YOU!
Quote from an Official Google email dated 23May2008:

“The feature will be enabled by default, although it
won’t begin to affect your accounts until June 3, 2008.”

UPDATE! 23May2008 — Automatic Match to be the DEFAULT! see the full update at: Automatic Match to be Default

So far this “Automatic Match” option is only a beta and accessible by invitation only. BUT, If this monster goes live and removes our ability to “opt out” (like in Expanded Broad Match), something very, very ugly may happen:

•   No matter how large your budgets, they WILL be spent — every penny (and dollar)!

I was going to let you read the Beta help file, but it disappeared… IT’S BACK, but you will have to be logged into an AdWords account to get to it: Automatic Match

Summarizing:

Just build your campaigns and they will come. Heck, you no longer even have to offer any keywords — Google will look at your ad and your site and make sure your ads show for any search query that even “smells” relevant.

Did Google’s revenue drop in January scare them that badly?

Pay Per Click

There has been a lot of discussion on Google’s recent changes to the way that they handle expanded broad match (at WebMasterWorld , High Rankings Forum and other places).

We have come across a different issue that relates to the investigation of expanded broad match, and has wider-reaching repercussions for your PPC campaigns, as well as understanding oddities in interpreting Analytics. We have been seeing this issue for the last month or so (since Aug-Sep 2007), and according to the Google engineers with which I have discussed this: “the search results […] are the result intended behavior. When determining which ads to show on a Google search result page, the AdWords system evaluates the user’s previous search query as well as the current search query.”

The Google Match Problem

Google is combining the search queries from two successive searches when serving up the PPC ads. If a Google visitor makes a search, then uses the search box on the first search’s results page, the original query AND the second query are BOTH used to determine the ad to display. My colleague Jim Gilbert refers to this as the “Google 1-2 Punch”, and it can end up costing you money and leaving you confused if you don’t take steps to combat this new algorithm change.

Why is this a problem? Ads may be displayed for inappropriate searches, resulting in unnecessary expense for the advertiser.

Examples:
Using Google, search for:
Golf clubs
Then on that results page, search for:
Women’s perfume

Here is what I see:

In another example, I searched for:
mp3

And got these results:

These results look substantially different if I search for:
accessories
And then search for:
mp3

What Is Happening with Google AdWords

If the Google visitor uses the search box from one search to make a second search, when the second request is sent to the Google site, the HTTP_REFERER field is filled in with the URL of the first search request. In this second example, this means that the HTTP_REFERER line in the header would look like this:


GET /search?hl=en&q=mp3&btnG=Search HTTP/1.1
Referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=accessories


(There are other lines in the HTTP Request, but these two are the relevant ones.)

I believe that the Google site is seeing the q= parameter from the HTTP_REFERER in addition to the q= parameter from the actual GET request, and is using BOTH terms to determine the relevant PPC ads to display. Note that this issue is NOT reflected in the organic search results.

Try it for Yourself and See

It is easy to reproduce this issue for yourself: Search in one of your current PPC campaigns for a phrase match KW that is at least 3-4 words long (let’s say “Okra ice cream sundae”). (It also works for two word phrases, but this is my example). We want to select a phrase that does not include a shorter phrase that might trigger your PPC campaign. Therefore, insure that the phrase consisting of only the last half of the KW (e.g. “cream sundae”) does not trigger one of your ads. Starting with a newly opened browser, search for the first half of your KW phrase (“okra ice”). Then, using the search box on the results of that query, search for the 2nd half of your KW phrase (“cream sundae”). Your ad should appear (assuming the campaign is active, has remaining budget, etc.,etc.).

This is a factor for broad, phrase, and exact match KW phrases in your AdWords campaigns.

Why do I think it is the HTTP_REFERER field?

The problem is only seen if the visitor uses the form on the results of the first search to perform the second search. If you pass the same two URLs requesting the two searches, but either type the queries manually, cut and paste them, or use a bookmarked query, the organic search results are the same, but the PPC search results reflect ONLY the second query’s terms. In all three of these cases, the HTTP_REFERER is not filled in by the browser when sending the search request.

Insidious Part

Search engine marketers (SEMs) researching the effects of Expanded Broad Match tend to make a lot of back-to-back queries to see which of their PPC ads are being displayed. Since this effect only comes in to play when you make a 2nd search within the search box on the results page of an earlier search, SEMs are likely to have been tripped up by the Google 1-2 punch.

Both expanded broad match and the 1-2 punch have the effect of having an ad displayed for words that are not in the current search query, so many SEMs researching expanded broad match may actually have been seeing the effects of the 1-2 punch instead (or in addition).

What Can You Do About It?

Unfortunately, not a lot. There is nothing in the Google AdWords user interface that allows you to opt out of this new feature (nor the expanded broad match feature, which is dearly desired by many, but is unlikely to happen (See related artcile on Expanded Broad match)

There is a partial defense: the traditional defense against expanded broad match is to use negatives in the campaign to explicitly request that your ad NOT be displayed when one of those related terms is searched for. Thus, if I were selling stainless steel knives, I might include “pots” and “pans” in my negative list to keep my ad from matching to searches for stainless steel pots.

With the Google 1-2 punch, it appears that using a negative exact match phrase in the adgroup may prevent the ad from being displayed – even if that negated phrase is NOT the phrase being searched for in the second case!

For example, I set up a test PPC campaign with a single phrase match KW “okra ice cream sundae”. Searching for “okra ice” followed by “cream sundae” caused my ad to display (as expected). Here is the good news: Adding “–[sundae]” to my negatives list (which should prevent my ad from displaying if someone searched just for sundae also keeps my ad from displaying for the Google 1-2 punch. Curiously, using “-[ice]” keeps the Google 1-2 punch from happening, even if “ice” is not a part of the second search.

This is a work-around, and it will add needless complexity to your PPC campaigns. It will also increase the processing for the Google servers as customers’ negative lists expand extensively to counteract this issue. I firmly believe that the best solution is for Google to give AdWords customers the option of opting out of both expanded broad match and the Google 1-2 punch, and have the Google AdWords system work as advertised.

We will continue to research this issue, and provide updates as we learn more.