Adwords Expanded Broad Match - Friend or Foe?

Back in 2003, Google introduced something known as "Expanded Broad Matching" to their Adwords advertisers. This Expanded Broad Match essentially replaced standard Adwords broad matching, and brought a whole new batch of search terms into play for keywords within advertiser accounts.....

Traditionally, back when things were simple and transparent in PPC, a search term had to include all the keywords within your Adwords keyphrase in order to trigger your broad match keyword. So, if you had the keyphrase "big red shoes" in your account, it would only be triggered if someone typed in a search phrase that included all three of these words. If they types in "buy big red shoes" your ad would show; if they typed in "red shoes" it wouldn't. Simple. However, somewhere along the line, the waters got well and truly muddied by Google.

Nowadays, your ads can show for just about any search phrase that is in any way related to your keywords. Sometimes, Google cutting you this kind of slack and flexibility is good. Take the example above. You would want your ad to show up if someone typed in "large red shoes", rather than "big red shoes", as they really mean the same thing. So this type of broad matching is good. However, Google have taken the idea of what is "relevant" too far.

I've seen some absolutely crazy examples of broad matching in my time. For example, the keyword "plane tickets" getting triggered by the search term "train schedules", the keyword "dyslexia" being triggered by "diarrohea", and even the keyword "kangol hats" being triggered by "san diego zoo".

Some have a very cynical view of expanded broad matching, feeling it's simply a way for Google to show more ads for more search terms, and therefore make more money. My grumpy side agrees with this. However, the happier, Friday afternoon side, thinks that the algorithm for matching keywords to search terms just isn't quite right. I think Google is trying to be helpful here, but has just gone slightly overboard with its matching formula.

They need to reign things in. At present, our ads are showing for too many irrelevant searches. Even if they don't get clicks, the low CTR is harming our quality score and effectively costing us money through higher CPCs. So, Google, can we please go back to just "Broad Match" and leave the expanded stuff to the lazy advertisers? Or, at the very least, allow us to opt out of the expanded broad match and defer instead to simple broad match.

In either case, something needs to change. If they don't, we'll spend our whole lives running Search Query Reports and adding negative keywords......

Trusted Feeds - PPC or SEO?

There are increasing levels of cross-over between SEO and PPC these days. Many would pinpoint landing page quality score as being the main point of similarity between the two search channels. However, we should also consider the hybrid beast that is Yahoo! Search Submit Pro in this equation.

Yahoo! SSP is a system that allows advertisers to "force-feed" URLs to Yahoo, to be included in their organic listings, but subsequently billed on a cost per click basis. Confused? You might well be.

Basically, this is a product that works for those with:

a) very large websites, with thousands of pages

OR

b) websites that just aren't search engine friendly.

Advertisers create XML feeds (one for each webpage), and then submit these to Yahoo for inclusion in their organic index. Now, there's no guarantee that they'll get good positions, but they will be included in the index. This is of benefit to those in a hurry to get their pages indexed (and can't wait around for spiders to find them) or those whose pages are not likely to be read and indexed at all (perhaps those with a lot of flash, images or Javascript on their site).

One submitted, the advertiser is charged each time someone clicks on their listing. In this way, it's very similar to PPC ads. However, the listings appear in the organic results, not the sponsored listings. Thus making it a real hybrid channel in the world of search.

You can then optimise your feeds based on ROI using Yahoo's SSP interface, which is much like the regular sponsored search interface (now known as Panama). It can be a good way to get tricky-to-optimise sites included in Yahoo's index. However, it's no substitute for natural organic optimisation and indexing. You'd be far better off sorting out your spiderability than getting involved in paid inclusion, in my opinion anyway. Leave CPC models where they belong - in the sponsored listings ;-)

To find out more about Yahoo! Search Submit Pro, check out their information pages: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/ssp.php.

Read Only Access Level Now in Adwords

Google have today introduced a new feature to Adwords that allows account managers to assign different levels of access to users of that Adwords account. This full roll out comes hot on the heels of the Adwords Access Levels Beta that I discussed last month.

From today, the following message will be displayed in all Adwords accounts:

New! You can now assign three new access levels --
administrative, standard, and reports -- to other users in the account. This new
feature increases security by allowing only administrative access users to
grant, modify, or remove account access of other users. Also, this feature
maintains privacy by ensuring recipients get email communications appropriate to the user's access level. If you are the primary administrator of this account,
please take time now to set up access levels for all users in this account, as
all users will have administrative access by default.

This feature will be of particular use to agencies, where clients want access to their Adwords accounts. Previously, to give them this means risking changes being made to the account without the campaign manager's knowledge. Now the person running the account can grant read-only access to these users, allowing full transparency without risking campaign performance.

Google Adwords Landing Page Quality Score

As we keep hearing, the lines between PPC and SEO are becoming increasingly blurry. On-site optimisation is now a major factor in the success of a PPC campaign - a marked change from the one-dimensional days when the only factor that counted was your bid. Nowadays, all the engines are incorporating a quality score system into their PPC landscapes, the latest of which is Yahoo (with the launch of Panama). Factors such as advert text relevance and click through rate play a key role in your positions in the listings, and the consequent CPC you will pay for that position. However, another factor is at work - landing page quality. How does landing page quality affect your PPC campaign? And what aspects of your landing pages are called into account? Find out below......

Landing page does not affect your position in the listings. That's the first thing. Yes, it's part of your quality score, but it does not affect your score in the same way CTR and ad relevance does. Rather, it impacts your minimum bid on Adwords. Thus, if you have a poor quality landing page, you can expect to have a high minimum bid. I've seen minimum bids of as much as £10 ($20), and it's solely down to the fact the landing page isn't up to scratch.

So what factors does Google's Adbot (the Adwords version of the organic search Googlebot) take into account when assigning a landing page a quality score? Below are the main ones:

• Quality Content - as with organic search, it's vital to include your target keywords within your page content. By target keywords, I mean the search terms you're appearing for and also the main words within your ad text. It should all link up nicely. Note here that images with keywords in them don't count - Adbot will see an image as an image, not as text, so keywords within your images will not help you!
• Basic on-page opimisation - although we don't know how much of a factor it is, it's likely basic SEO practices such as including decent meta tags on your page, as well as having a relevant page title, can help boost the perceived "relevance" of your page
• Decent Navigation - as with organic search, you will be penalised if your landing page is an "island". It's vital that Adbot can navigate to other areas of your site once it lands on your PPC destination page, otherwise it will see your site as a whole as low quality and judge you as such. This factor harms lots of affiliate campaigns, where the affiliate has not properly linked up their custom landing page with the client site proper
• Clutter-Free Zone - having too many ads on your landing page, or simply having a page with too much going on (Javascript, widgets, etc), is likely to lower your page score. Simplicity is likely to be favoured by Adbot, much as it is by Googlebot.
• Robots are banned - if your site has a robots.txt file, make sure it doesn't ban Adbot from entering your PPC landing pages. If this happens, you'll automatically get a poor landing page score, as Adbot can't get into the pages to judge for itself.

These are the main factors Adbot will look at when scoring your landing pages. However, there are undoubtedly other elements in play here, such as whether your site includes the pages Google regards as key (e.g. Contact Us, Site Map, etc) and whether your page is viewed as an authority in the community. Just like the organic search algorithm, Google will never reveal exactly how they score landing pages in PPC. However, follow the above guidelines and you'll be on track to receive that oh-so-scientific rating of "Great" for the keywords in your Adwords account, and well on your way to lower minimum bids :-)