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These days Ask.com seems to be flailing, desperately trying to control the bleeding of is its’ visitor base and PPC advertisers.

In the world of PPC search engine marketing, I have found increasingly less value from Ask’s paid search advertising program and stopped using their service altogether for several clients.

• If you cannot get a keyword to convert in 2008, one that easily converted in 2007, and especially during the keyword’s peak season, something is terribly wrong.
• Another issue I am experiencing is Ask double serving ads:  One is from Google, as a Content Network partner. The other comes from the Ask.com account. Ask should implement a stronger filter to discontinue this issue. Could it be on purpose? Might there be so few advertisers that they’re showing everything all the time, any time?
• Ask3D, which I have found little use for, does not seem to be working. The results fall far short and they insert sponsored ads between the natural results like little land mines.
• Spending my monthly budget on Ask.com is not the problem. It’s the part about getting conversions that keeps proving difficult. Folks click on PPC ads, do not find what they want then quickly bounce away.

The days of asking Jeeves the dumbest questions you can think of are far behind us. Even though, their new innovations look like watered down versions of Google results pages. It’s still better than MSN. MSN seems to almost consciously do the exact opposite of Google. But when it comes to pay-per-click advertising Ask.com keeps pushing me away.

Earlier this year rumors predicted that Ask.com might re-brand itself into a women’s focused search engine. Ask squashed that one; maybe they shouldn’t have. Choosing a narrower target audience might help them. Is it too late?  Hey Ask! Do us a favor. Run the idea past your execs again. Make yourself an authority then model your PPC display advertising accordingly.

Come on Ask. We can still be friends. Stop making me take my PPC advertising dollars elsewhere. Make me want to buy clicks from you again.

Oh yeah, one last thing. Bring back Jeeves. I have some questions to ask that guy.

Much like the mystery of the Big Mac’s secret sauce and Colonel Sanders 11 herbs and spices, we’ve all speculated what exactly makes up the closely guarded formula that determines Google’s PPC Quality Score.

• What are all the factors?
• How much weight does each factors carry?
• How can I exploit this to my advantage?!

Last week Search Engine Journal posted screen shots of tiny suspicious text beneath Google AdWords ads. The text icluded pScore, mCPC and thresh.

This spurred much discussion concerning what these terms mean and why they appeared. Google issued a statement to Search Engine Journal citing a "technical error." The company admitted the data displayed was indeed AdWords ranking information, but refused to share what the statistics meant. (Well obviously.) The discrepancy was not limited to any one country. This Search Engine Roundtable post shows the Netherlands saw AdWords quality score text too.

One day, after eons of research, we may decipher AdWords’s secret sauce. Perhaps it will simply fall into our laps. Who knows? It may turn out to be as simple as discovering the secret sauce for a Krusty Burger:

Let mayonnaise sit out in the sun. (Okay, okay...the Krusty-AdWords connection is highly unlikely.)

I suppose that it’s best for the AdWords Quality Score to remain a secret. It keeps the playing field level and encourages good sportsmanship and all that.

*Sigh*

Once in awhile you get a client who’s site offers a lot of little specific products that is great for niche keywords but low traffic. Those keywords are great when they convert, but the real traffic is in the high competitive keywords that bring the visitors to the site. These visitors that search by the broad terms most of the time don’t actually know what they are looking for yet. It’s a “I’ll know it when I see it” type of shopping mentality.

So, the question is: how do you get the most out of those big terms you have to bid on to get the traffic?

For example: Your client sells bridesmaid gifts. The keywords to get traffic to the site related to bridesmaids gifts are going to be expensive, but the problem is the bride is shopping around and isn’t exactly sure what to get yet.

So in the meantime, we have to be smart with the spend while waiting for that bride to find what she wants.

First off, look at your keywords. Could they be segmented out further for increased relevancy and a lower cost per click? Do you need to separate “gifts” keywords and “presents” into different ad groups? Can you break out keywords that include “suggestions” or “ideas”?
And at the most granular level, check out your keywords letter by letter. Find out if while “bridesmaid gifts” converts, “bridesmaids gift” does not and act accordingly.

Second, look at your revenue generating keywords. What are those? Would it be a benefit to break those into a separate ad group or even campaign by itself? If they were in their own campaign, you could increase or decrease the budget as needed to make sure they’re receiving the funds they need . Or adjust the campaign settings to show during peak times of the day or incrementally increase the bids during those times only.

This one’s a keeper!

Third, look at your non-revenue generating keywords. Those terms that are just bleeding money. Do you really need them? Try pausing them, deleting them, lowering the bids of even throwing them in their own ad group or campaign to better control the cost.

Some revenue, but over time this one hurts.

Fourth, look at your match types and negatives. If they keyword is showing thousands upon thousands of times a day, it may be a little too broad and out of control. Try upping the ante with phrase or exact. At the very least you should be running search query reports and searching on the terms yourself and seeing what else is showing up with your ads. Filter out those irrelevant and over inclusive searches.

Fifth, and most certainly not last, ad copy. Use those revenue generating terms in your headlines and again in the body. Make those search terms bold so that they catch the eye of the potential visitor.

If you’re account doesn’t pull in much revenue yet, use bounce rates, pageviews and time on site to evaluate the relevancy of the keyword. If the bounce rate is much higher than 50%, people are not finding what they are looking for when they come to the site. If they’re only spending a few seconds or looking at a couple of pages, you have your answer on that particular keyword.

Get rid of it!

PPC, at times, can feel a bit like going to Vegas and pumping nickels into the slot machines. Except imagine the nickels are dollars, or sometimes several dollars. Ouch! Pretty soon you’ve squandered your dinner money, and the forgiving 7-7-7 has eluded your grasp all night.

Fortunately, there’s a way to hedge your bets in Pay-Per-Click Marketing. A way to avoid the slot machines and move your money over to the poker tables, so to speak – where at least you can influence whether you win or lose.

You can’t make people click your ads and you can’t make them buy your products, but you can put your monetary resources where they’re more likely to. That’s where geo-targeting for revenue comes in.

But give the actual interface a star and a half. (On a scale of four stars, Google being four.)

Almost every time I call MSN adCenter support for my various issues, be it basic account editing, billing, ad approval, keyword status or a general “what just happened?!”, I get top notch support and “I’m sorries”. While I find the helpful, apologetic and even sometimes even humorous answers great, I just wish I didn’t have to call them so much. Here is a short list of fun items that I have had to call about and have the support specialist come to my rescue for:

• Opening an ad group and finding no ads there, even though I know darn well there are ads somewhere. There are clicks on keywords, I remember writing them, where did they go? Apparently there was a xml update that needed to be download and run. Surprise!
  
• Credit card was rejected, I got the card cleared off, but now what? You have to call and ask the support representative to manually re-try the card. There is no “retry card” button.
  
• Used the copy campaign feature to create additional ad groups/campaigns. But every time I changed an ad in group A, the ad in group B changed to the text from group A and vice-versa. I suspected this had to do with the copying tool and sure enough, adCenter automatically assigns them the same ID, which means they are the same ad. Sure this is great if you were say, geo-targeting across several states, wanted to run the same ad, change it once and the rest of the ad groups pick it up automatically. The issue was why would I assume that would be the case? Why would that be intuitive? Where was the warning, disclaimer, ANYthing informing me that this might happen? I asked the representative if they could add that to the list of things that weren’t such a good idea, that I know they have there, and she laughed. A lot. That list must fill an entire filing cabinet.
  
• Haven’t called for this one yet, I just really like it. The error page when adCenter just simply stops working,
  “Microsoft adCenter is experiencing problems.” Really? I would say that’s just the tip of the iceberg....

Per my post last week regarding Solving the (not set) in Google Analytics and Yahoo, we’ll continue this week bridging the gap between MSN AdCenter and Google Analytics. I did ask a MSN AdCenter representative once how come my two biggest keywords (in impressions, spend and clicks) didn’t register at all in Google Analytics, but yet I can see several of the keywords in other ad groups just fine. I was informed that MSN cannot be responsible (or apparently helpful) for anything involving 3rd party software or programs. And if I wanted transparency into my AdCenter accounts I should use their cupcake answer to Google Analytics’ 7-layer cake, Gatineau.

But I digress. Today I offer up Alex L. Cohen’s workaround to the AdCenter fog, along with the PPC Hero version. I’ve implemented Cohen’s suggestion of simply adding {QuerySting} into my already existing tracking URLs that were picking up medium, source and campaign just fine.

Examples:

Old UTM code:

http://www.monkeyparts.com/ Campaign ID (if you used them): ?utm_id=400
Source: &utm_source=msn
Medium: &utm_medium=ppc
Campaign: &utm_campaign=monkey+brains

New UTM code:

http://www.monkeyparts.com
Campaign ID: ?utm_id=400
Source: &utm_source=msn
Medium: &utm_medium=ppc
Term: &utm_term={QueryString}
Campaign: &utm_campaign=monkey+brains

As you can see, not much of a difference, and yes, I should be pointing my ads directly to the product page for monkey brains and not the home page, but for the sake of example, let it go.

Bottom Line: This works and it rocks. Use it.

Today’s tip comes from two sources: Alex L. Cohen and PPC Hero, with their mystery solving and publicly sharing their solution on how to import data and increasing compatibility between Yahoo PPC and Google Analytics. As with any search engine that isn’t Google, you have to expect a certain amount of disparity in reporting data imported into Google Analytics since the two were not created by the same company, nor made to fit together the way that AdWords and GA do.

However, there is a workaround that will allow you to gather more data from your Yahoo paid search campaigns and cut down on those (not set) results we see so often in Google Analytics with those other search engines. Supposedly, to collect all the data that you can, you’re already tagging all your ads and destination keywords manually with a UTM generated specifically for that campaign, ad group or keyword. In this case, it is still a UTM thrown onto the back end after your destination URL, but instead of having to generate a specific one, you throw the same generic UTM code on, using Yahoo’s dynamic variables.

The Bottom Line: Jury is still out on this one: while I have seen a significant decrease in (not set) in my Yahoo keyword results, I do have a lot of {ovkey} results instead. I do have questions in to the blog authors for further deliberations. Stay tuned!
--See “Comments” section for the resolution!

We all know that the biggest part of attracting a potential customer to clicking on your ad is the headline. They see that bold text, what they searched for and are drawn in like a moth to a flame. But in the continual quest that is a PPC Analyst’s career, we have to think of innovative or employ new tactics to entice those visitors. So let me ask you this: have you tried using your display URL, rather the address of your website as a headline?

Face it, a lot of people actually type the destination URL in the search field and hit “search” rather than type it directly into the browser. If your website address includes your most popular or type of product/service you can not only increase branding, but the visitor will see that URL and think “Yes! That’s what I was looking for!” This works particularly well if you have a client with an established presence as a brand and you receive lots of searches each month just on their name.

Examples:

Client sells blue stationery. Website URL is www.bluestationery.com. Nice and easy because the URL is short enough to include a space between “blue” and “stationery”. Client sells striped stationery. Website URL is www.stripedstationery.com. Just long enough as the entire URL, too long if you add any spaces. Client sells polka dot stationery. Website URL is: www.polkadotstationery.com but the URL is too long for a headline, so drop the “www”.

Pretty simple, yet highly overlooked.

Give it a try!

Once upon a time, the Content Network seemed eternally damned to represent hundreds of thousands of impressions, a few too many hundred clicks, no sales or leads and no idea where in the universe your ads were showing up. I used to just opt out the content network every time since it just seemed to suck up dollars into the black depths of the intranet, never to be seen again.

Then Google AdWords came through and provided transparency into the content network. (Since I don’t advertise ring tones, My Space bling or temporary tattoos, I never thought that I would use the content network again.) Yet here I sit today with profitable content network campaigns and no tattoos! Effectively blocking impression generating and budget eating black holes, seeing exactly what sites are bringing sales, budgeting appropriately and enjoying some very low cpcs.