Recently Google has increased their already robust Change History Reporting. Previously, the feature let you look back a maximum of 3 months to see what changes had been done and by whom. Now the feature shows changes up to 2 years back, starting January 1, 2006.

What does this mean to advertisers?

1. You can retrace your steps and compare analytical data with the changes you have made in order to determine which were good and bad decisions.
2. If you have an agency, you can easily check what they have been doing over the past 2 years.

Here’s how:

1. Go to the campaign management tab
2. Click on the tools sub tab and find the “my change history” link
3. Select the desired date range to start with
4. Select how far back you would like to look
5. Select which types of changes you would like to view
6. View all the changes that have been made

There are many options to play with here. You can filter the changes to see more specific changes:

1. The changes made by certain people
2. Changes made to a certain area of your account

It’s a great way to learn about your past and keep whoever is handling your account honest.

Steven recently posted about map plus boxes showing in organic Google results from addresses off third-party websites. It shouldn’t be surprising that Google has found yet another place to add the little plus boxes, they’ve been tweaking local business listings since its introduction in 2006.

Paid search local business ads got a little plus box lovin’ (officially) just last year. If you’re running a paid search campaign, you know that real estate on Google is a precious (and valuable!) commodity. So when Google offers to add an extra line (and option to expand a map underneath your ad) for free, why not jump on it?

Local Business Ads in the Search Network

Don’t get local business ads confused with free listings in Google’s Local Business Center. Local business ads are essentially enhanced paid text ads, with keywords lists, ad groups, bids, and the whole schebang. They’re eligible to appear in Google’s Search Network and Google Map local business searches, among other places. We’re just going to focus on what happens in the Search Network, however.

Unlike in Google Maps, where local business ads get precedence over regular text ads, local business ads in the Search Network must compete with regular text ads based on Ad Rank.

When local business ads are triggered in the search network, the business address appears below the text ad. If your local business ad shows up in one of the top paid positions, that’s when the little expander plus box appears.

You don’t get charged for people clicking to expand the box, clicking on the actual map, or clicking to get directions to the business location, which is nice.

The extra attention you put into making local business ad campaigns can pay off if location is important to your business, like a hotel or a restaurant. If you’re in these sorts of industries, you might consider making at least an ad group with location terms, branded terms and a local business ad or two to help searchers easily find you.

When working with national and international Fortune 1000 clients, I often observe that their brand is so strong that it provides 80% of the conversions at 20% of the total budget spent (the Pereto principal at its finest). This is where the Internet marketer enjoys the fruits of the traditional marketer’s labor. No, all of those overpriced archaic billboards on the side of the freeway were not a total waste. Those expensive advertising agencies who charge like a battalion of lawyers to come up with a tag line of three simple God-like words (Just Do It) will help your Pay Per Click efforts immensely. First we must see what all the fuss is about, and then we can see when one should abstain from branded terms.

Paid Search for the household name is all about synergy. Headlines in your text ad like “As Seen on TV” and “Found at Your Local Mall” are usually great indicators that your branded terms will successfully carry the weight of the paid search efforts. These branded terms give you an ROI buffer to go after those terms with higher volume and lower return of investment.

Just because your brand logo isn’t more recognizable than the Son of God doesn’t mean you should not be bidding on your own name. Just expect a much lower search volume. Your brand name is arguably still the most qualified bucket of keywords to bid on. It indicates that someone has already heard of you or even done business with you in the past. Even if you are ranked number one in the natural listings, it is a good idea to have a paid search listing. It gives you the chance to say exactly what you want to say to the searcher at a moment’s notice. You could run a special promotion in an instant instead of having to wait for the spiders to re-crawl your site with no guarantee that your Meta description will turn out the way you have planned.

So we have explored when branded terms do a great job; let’s dive into when they may not be your best bet. There is a very specific behavior that is the scourge of paid search marketers. If one of your clients has a service that warrants daily revisiting of your site (once the client is acquired), then branded terms might turn out to be a big waste of money. What the heck am I talking about? To clarify we will start with an example:

A company offers a free email service. Terms like “free email” work very well for this client. They have a high conversion rate because that is exactly what they offer. But their brand name does not lead to a high conversion rate because these people who are visiting the site are actually members, and are just looking to sign into their email account. They happen to click on a paid search ad because they don’t know the difference between the organic listing and the one you just paid for. Yes, there are some people looking for email services with this particular client by name, but this is a case where branded terms do not yield the rewards expected.

It’s rare to come across exceptions to the rules, but I always like to share them with the community who might find them interesting.

Paid search doesn’t need to be complicated. Sure, you could test text ads to death (and it works). You can also use multi-variant landing page technology to squeeze out higher conversion rates (and please do). You can even have ROI-based bid management software. These things all help in the process of getting the highest return on your paid search investment. As far as Google and Yahoo paid search account architecture is concerned, simplicity is king.

In order to understand why, we need to look into the exact purposes of each level of organization in an account. A common mistake that many of our clients have is using campaigns instead of Ad Groups.

Campaigns are for 4 things:

Geo-Targeting

Many times in-house paid search people mistakenly make a campaign for every state or every city for their national product. The problem is that it creates a budgeting nightmare, since budgets are typically set at the campaign level.

A good time to have separate campaigns for each state would be when you have certain services or products offered in specific states. We have some clients that offer services in only a few states and some services in single states. This would be a great case to have multiple campaigns:

Ad–Scheduling

Some Clients only want to show their ads at certain times of the day. This job is generally taken care of at the campaign level. It’s pretty straight forward and we haven’t run into many in-house massacres that were caused by ad- scheduling confusion.

Budgeting

This is one of the major features that cause non-professionals problems. Sometimes people go hog wild in making tons of campaigns based on a geo-targeting strategy. If a company wanted to split their budget into two specific regions (let’s just say west coast east coast campaigns), then doing so at the campaign level is very useful. If a company carries a product nationally, 99.99% of the time there is no need for 50 state specific campaigns. Remember to keep it simple.

Search network/Content Network

This is an excellent time to use additional campaigns. The mistake people make here is not using more campaigns to take advantage of crafting a special campaign for the content network.

Adgroups: They designate which ad shows for which keyword.

Seem too simple? Well, that is the theme here. If someone wants to speak to their specific audience, they can do so more effectively with ad groups. You can go hog wild here and be richly rewarded for it.

One client came to us with 6 ACCOUNTS with over 100 campaigns per; that’s 600+ campaigns. Believe it or not we consolidated all of this into ONE campaign with 151 Ad Groups. What are the results?

Simple enough?

In response to this well written post by Apollo SEM “Visible Quality Scores are Similar to TBPR!“, I would like to clear up a couple of factors in his equation that nullify his findings. Though his blog is one of my favorites as a highly useful and unique article database, with articles such as: “NUDE: Create Dynamic Landing Pages In 15 Minutes Or Less” and “Getting Conversion Data With Your New Analytics Profile“, this last particular article is irrelevant. He makes many assumptions about quality score using his dynamically generated landing page theory. The problem is that he uses “homestar poopsmith” as the test keyword.

Click Photo to Enlarge

Quite simply, this is far too obscure of a word to make any true assessment of the effectiveness of his dynamic landing page technique. Try this technique on the keyword “mortgage” and see if you still get a minimum bid of 4 cents.

Here is an example of an obscure keyword that we use and get away with a 4 cent bid, without mentioning the keyword in the adtext: hosted exchange. Other than Bay Area, hosted exchange is not mentioned anywhere else.

The point is that advertiser competition has a huge impact on quality score. You can do everything right and still not get a great quality score if the term is competitive and the difference is CTR.

So let’s talk about CTR. Notice that the “homestar poopsmith” keyword has two impressions and two clicks. This is without doubt 2 clicks from Apollo SEM. This provides a perfect CTR which makes this test keyword inaccurate as well. Not only is the word obscure, the CTR is fraudulently perfect. Since he has launched his blog article he will now have random readers search for this keyword and click on the ad to see the example of the Dynamic landing page technique.

I think that it is a great technique but the test keyword makes all the findings irrelevant. Apollo SEM should put his money where his mouth is and use the technique on a highly competitive keyword. I am fully confident that the method will work and my hats off to them for figuring it out in the first place. My only concern is why they would use such an irrelevant method of testing when they obviously demonstrate a great PPC knowledge.

As for his ultimate conclusions from the test:

“… Visible Quality Score is similar to Visible (Tool Bar) PageRank - it really doesn’t mean anything. It is simply a visible indicator that can give you a vague idea of how relevant your keywords are.”

His test tries to find a relation between Quality Score and actual cost per click. Upon finding that his actual cost per click jumped around while quality score remained the same, he concludes that Quality Score “doesn’t mean anything”. We all know this is not true.

If you have a broadly matched keyword, of course the cost per clicks will jump around depending on what the actual query was, because using broad match is like bidding on multiple different keywords at once. However, you can’t extend this statement to conclude that Quality Score doesn’t matter to cost per click. Quality score does affect your cost per click, because it affects what your minimum bid must be for your ads to appear. If your ad can’t appear for 4 cents a click, you obviously have to pay more.

Quality score is officially determined by the relevancy of your keywords to your ads, your landing page, and your click-through rate of the ads. When speaking with Google representatives on the phone and at conferences, they always say that the click-through rate is only a small part of the quality score formula. Not only that, but there has been much industry speculation on the element of keyword relevancy in quality score. Many say that using a keyword in the headline of your ad text will only help your quality score before it has a chance to perform in the market. I have used landing pages that are uncrawl-able by search engine spiders and had great quality scores on all the keywords I am using. So where is the truth in all of this experience? What really determines what your quality score will be?

To better understand the illusive quality score, one would have to get into the mind of who created it. Google, as a business, is first and foremost interested in making money. The good thing about that is the way they make money actually provides a quality service to their consumers (a novel approach many businesses could learn from). So it’s as easy as this- provide a superior product and enjoy success. In the search engine business, bringing the most relevant results to the searcher is the Holy Grail. But how could Google possibly remain omniscient in an ever growing market? They don’t hire thousands of college students to manually look through every landing page. They use leading indicators like click-through rate and keywords being mentioned in the ad text. Think about it; would you want to keep products in your store that never sell? That would be a waste of space. The same goes for Google and their first couple pages of search results. Theoretically the more someone clicks on an ad, the more relevant that ad is to the average searcher’s life. Google gets to provide the most relevant search result (sponsored and natural) which continues to broaden their market share and perpetuate success.

Sound good till now? Here is the flaw in the current quality score model. Click-through rate is not the Holy Grail to the advertiser. After all, we are the ones paying the bills. We could care less if our click-through rate is terrible; we only care about the conversion rate. Since we have to pay for every click, we don’t want just anyone to enter our website. In a perfect world we would have ten clicks with ten conversions.

Let’s take the high-end web design firm, for example.

One of our clients designs and develops high-end websites starting at about $50K. They drive a lot of their business through paid search listings. The majority of their competitors in the sponsored listings are firms who sell cookie cutter templates for websites. Their prices are hovering around $500 for a website. We use negative keywords like affordable and template to try and weed out people looking for a cheap website. Unfortunately, most people don’t enter anything more specific than “website design.” Most people are not market-minded enough to conveniently pre-qualify themselves with search queries like “high end web development” or “professional custom web design.” Unfortunately, both the mind of a CEO of a national company and a small struggling business works the same when searching the internet. Each one of them will enter “web design.”

What we are left with is the flaw in the quality score model; it falls short when advertisers try to qualify the visitor in the ad text. If I qualify someone in the ad text “Professional High End Websites” instead of using a CTR booster like “$500 fully custom website,” I will have a much lower CTR (which is what I want at $7-$13 per click) because the fact is true there are much fewer executives searching the internet than mom and pops with shoe string budgets. When those executives finally see our ads, they are much more compelled to click than the spam-like $500 website offer. We are offering the right people a service. The problem is that we are using Google’s shelf space for the people who are searching for cheesy websites as well. If the CEO knew that they were looking for a “high end professionally designed website” then the quality score model would be virtually flawless. In the mean time, we get a less than perfect quality score for doing what we are supposed to.

So what does this mean for your business?

Weigh out the pros and cons. You will be paying more for each click, but you will be paying for fewer clicks. Do a month to month analysis. We did, and found that paying more per click (using a class qualifier in the ad text) was much more worth it in terms of bottom line.

So how big a role does CTR really play? Well in the case of the premier website design firm, CTR was king. We grouped their keywords ultra tightly in ad groups with highly relevant ad text and still received an “ok” if not sometimes “poor” quality score. In addition, we used highly relevant, highly crawl-able landing pages that all mentioned relevant keywords. All of the elements of quality score were in line but CTR and the quality score was severely affected.

We ran an experiment to see if taking out the qualifier in the ad text could up the CTR and lower the CPC enough to offset for the undoubted drop in conversion rate. Over the next month the quality of leads dramatically dropped and our client pleaded for us to change things back to the way they were with the qualifier in the ad text. In this case, quality score is not doing a service to the advertiser; only Google.