SEM Punch

I received the following question the other day, which I would like to discuss in more depth:

What is the maximum amount of copies in and AdWords AdGroup?

The straight answer is “I don’t know.” I have never reached a copy limit within the same adgroup. But let me paraphrase the question slightly to highlight what I think the a good question to ponder about:

How many copies should I have in my AdGroup?

Purpose of ad copy optimization

When thinking about submitting new copies into an AdGroup and quantity is even a concern that comes up, it is worthwhile taking a step back and asking “What do I want to acheive by submitting many copies into the same AdGroup?”

The purpose of any copy submission or copy optmimization should be to find the one that performs best. But what does “best” really mean in the context of ad text optimization? Naturally, click through rate (CTR) is a good starting point. If you compare the ctrs of all your copies within the same adgroup over the same period of time , you might notice that some ad text has clearly higher ctr than the others. However, when you jufge strictly by ctr you might be making one of the common AdWords mistakes I have mentioned in a previous post.

Don’t forget the serving rate

Important information about the quality of your copy is the serving rate - if Google serves one copy more often relative to the others in that adgroup, it usually means that Google expects that copy to perform better. The serving rate, however, is not always dependent on the copy’s ctr or avg. cpc. I have seen copies with the highest serving rate in an adgroup that neither had the highest ctr nor avg. cpc. So good ad text is one that has a relatively high ctr and high serving rate.

Limit number of copies in one adgroup

Coming back to the quantity…it is not beneficial to submit many copies at the same time, because Google needs longer to determine for each one whether it is a good copy or not. In other words, Google’s ad optimizer kicks in later. This ad optimizer depends on an impression threshold for each copy, which I think is about 1,000. If your copies haven’t received 1,000 impresions yet, the serving rates are not being optimized and impressions are distributed equally across all your copies in an adgroup.

If you dump 20 copies into an adgroup, it will take you 20,000 impressions just to get the optimizer started. 20k impressions per adgroup can take quite some time to accummulate. However, if you only submit 3 copies at first, your adgroup only needs 3k impressions for you to know which one of the 3 is the best (this is not always true, of course, but bear with me here). Remove the 2 poor performing copies, and add 2 new ones. Benchmark the performance of the 2 new copies against the surviving copy from the previous test. Repeat. Repeat. This methodology ensures that you find a good copy quickly and you always benchmark new copies against it. You might be able to roll out the best copy to all your adgroups much faster - the lift to your campaigns can be quite significant.

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I have finally finished working on the AOL search data tool that I hinted at in a previous post. I didn’t just want to throw out something that queries the AOL user searches and returns a flat list of results, although it is available.

The main goal for me to build this tool was to give marketers a tool that lets them research keywords or industry segments on a more aggregate level. I think it is very useful to do keyword research, understand user search behavior as well as doing industry research.

What’s the tool doing?

For a given search query, the tool queries against 36+ million records and retrieves the searches performed by AOL users. It then gives you the option of aggregating the result set a little bit. It’s nothing fancy, but you stumble over some interesting stuff when rolling up data.

Key Features

1. Keywords are aggregated and the total number of queries & clicks are counted; along with it, the tool calculates the click though rate for every unique keyword.
2. Click through rate by rank: this is an aggregation view by broken down by rank. Basically, for every position the tool counts the number of keywords and calculates a click through rate by position.
3. Click through rate by page: similar to the CTR by rank aggregation/calculation, just that it is broken down by the page number. So you can compare what the aggregate click through rate was for keywords on the first page, versus keywords that appeared on the second or third page.

Please let me know if you would like to have additional functionality and I am happy to build it in.

Tip: You can exclude words from appearing in the result set by using a “-”. For example, if you wanted to look at all keywords that contain the term mortgage, but not calculator, you could search for “mortgage -calculator”

What’s next?

Admittedly, the tool is not lightning fast as it should be, depending on how broad your initial query is. I will start working on speeding it up, so stay tuned! If you are a DB guru and can help, please drop me a note.

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eBay & Google announced a partnership in which Google is the exclusive provider of text-based ads to eBay’s international properties. Yahoo has struck a similar deal with eBay in the US, but with the difference that Yahoo will be able to provide image based advertising as well and will support PayPal as a payment platform, according to the Financial Times.

This seems to be yet another big deal for Google, especially after reaching an agreement with MySpace. After Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook, it’s clear that search engines are grabbing for traffic to support their advertiser base with web properties. One big difference between the eBay & Google partnership however is, that displaying advertising to eBay users is probably of much higher value than displayong it to a roaming MySpace crowd. Ebay customers are willing to spend money and clearly searching for products, so the value to Google advertisers of having their ads thrown up infront of those users is high.

To be honest, though, I think this is rather bad news for the search marketing space - competition is healthy for bringing out innovative products. And when checking Google’s product offering, specifically AdWords & their API, it has been a follower rather than an innovator. The incentive to innovate is likely to decrease as market share of Google increases, so in the long-run that might leaves marketers with relatively poor products they have to deal with.

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In a previous post I mentioned the launch of a black hat seo forum. Back then, I didn’t give away too much information about the forum itself, because it was new and there wasn’t much going on in it. Now that it had some time to attract not only links, but also registered users, I would like to quickly talk a bit about what you will get at $100/month.

The forum has 4 broad sections of which only 2 are worth mentioning:

Create sites

A lot of blackhat’s “SEO” efforts seems to evolve around pumping out tons of websites; the art appears to get them indexed by Google, keep them in the index for as long as possible and then start the whole process all over again. Of course, the traffic that is generated in this process is monetaized, presumably with Adsense.

When generating thousands of websites and filling them up with content, the blackhat community is looking for content sources and automated tools to produce the websites. Tools that are used range from simple screenscrapers, data dumps from wikipedia or language mutation software that makes use of Markov chains and Bayesain filters. I would have liked to find out a bit more about language mutation, but the posts in this particular section were rather thin. Discussions about site builders focused around content generators such as RSSGM (Realy Simple Site Generator Modified) or competing products.

Get Traffic

This section was a real disappointment. Discussions mainly focused around link bait strategies and sites that can be used for link dumping. Example sites, among others, include newsvine.com or slashdot.com - what a tip! The $100 were worth it just for these two tips alone…yaaaaaaawn.

Other strategies of traffic acquisition include hoax news stories - these are really just made up, sensational stories to get a lot of dig or reddit clicks. The effort put into thesde fake stories os quite extensive; it includes building a fake news site (with some scraped content from real news sites), writing press releases and building up MySpace profiles.

Conclusion

The forum is not particularly active - perhaps it is too early to judge and the community grows a bit. However, having people pay $100/month isn’t really a great growth driver. But that was probably the intention of the founder.

In any case, I find the forum rather boring and not very insightful. To be fair, the reason why I was so bored was because of personal preference - I just wouldn’t enjoy throwing out a gazillion junk sites, making a few pennies or dollars on each, shutting them down and starting all over. Sure, some people make a lot of money with this. I personally cannot think of many jobs that are more unfulfilling.

My recommendation is to save your dough and focus on more viable business ideas, unless you are deeply entrenched in the blackhat seo stuff already. However, if you are just hoping to find a few quick tips on how to rank #1 on Google for your widget site, this is clearly the wrong space.

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