Quality Score - Know More About It

Since I was thinking about PPC and how incredibly mixed up and difficult it has become, it seemed like a good time to write about it.

My team and I are trying to figure out ways to look at PPC campaigns differently, finding a way to automate some of the grunt work while still delivering great campaigns. I know everyone and their brother has done this, but we’re convinced we can do it better. Just let me live in this dream world, ok?

In considering the best ways to evaluate campaigns, we’ve begun a very thorough and detailed investigation of Quality Score.

While you can do a search on Quality Score and find plenty of people who have quoted Google’s Quality Score Guidelines, I haven’t seen that many articles about how it really works, and no one is willing to share their “secrets” to playing the game.

Here is what we’ve found, and while I can’t share the details publicly, it’s all backed by solid data and testing.

Google’s Assault On Keyword Data

First, let’s begin with a quick review of (not set) keyword data. This is often linked with (not provided), but it’s actually very different. Not set results occur when something is lost between the AdWords click and the tracking on the analytics side.

It occurs most often with auto-tagging, or if there’s duplicate code on pages or duplicate analytics profiles connected to AdWords. Not provided is returned when a user performed a search with https://www.google.com and clicked on an organic result.

In a nutshell:

Differences in “Not Set” and “Not Provided” Keywords Reported by Google

The End Of Display URLs

No, display URLs aren’t going away. Google’s made a big change this year though that impacts what you can put on the end of your display URL. Forcing a subdomain (like www) onto each display URL cuts down your space by 4 characters. Here’s the catch: you can fudge this with three different techniques:

1. If your URL plus your keyword is exactly 35 characters, Google will display it as you wrote it. For example: domainislong.com/keywrd-is-alsolong (note how it doesn’t have the www on it?). If your requested display URL is shorter than 35 characters, they’ll shoehorn a www. in front of it. Anyone who’s done a lot of AdWords testing knows that presenting a URL without www increases clickthrough rate.
2. If your URL is longer than 35 characters by just a couple, they’ll adjust just enough to fit it. For example, the display URL in the screenshot below is 37 characters:
3. If you have a lot of really long keywords, consider using keyword insertion to get around the character limits for them. If a display URL is longer than 35 characters, Google will shorten it automatically. This can help you get some additional real estate in extreme cases; but you’ll want to watch it carefully, since Google will decide how to shorten it, and it might create a branding issue for you.

Since a major component of Quality Score is the clickthrough rate of your ads, you’ll want to maximize every available opportunity to increase clickthrough, including the techniques described above.

Random Quality Scores Of 10

Everyone’s thrilled beyond words when their campaigns suddenly start showing QS of 10. But, take a closer look. We’re seeing many keywords with 10s that have never had an impression or a click. Never. In the history of the account. As soon as they are shown, the QS drops.

My question is: is there benefit to having some “empty” 10s in an ad group even if you never plan for them to be clicked on? Will this raise your average QS for the ad group, and therefore, your perceived value in the auction? We’re testing it, but we’d love to hear your feedback as well.

Pre-loaded Quality Scores

Another thing we’ve seen consistently in our tests is that our keywords and ad groups are receiving quality scores before they’re launched, which is remarkably consistent with what they end up being post-launch. More on this as it develops, but it would seem that you can tweak your campaign architecture, bids, keywords and other facets to maximize your opportunity before you even launch.

I’ve heard from other PPC experts that this is simply based on competitor data for the same keywords. We have a client with a completely unique service that is new to the market who saw QS in her account before we launched. And they weren’t all 10s, suggesting that it was at least partly based on campaign architecture.

Keyword Match Type Targeting

The final thing that we’re noticing has a significant positive impact on campaigns is matching keyword types within ad groups. By creating multiple copies of each ad group for all of the match types we want to target, we can maximize opportunity for impressions.

Add that to the pre-testing that we’ve been able to do with the pre-loaded quality score data, and our campaigns are really humming.

Bid Management & Why We Don’t Use It – At Least At First

The final key that we found is that bid management doesn’t work for newly launched campaigns. Owners of bid management programs will tell you it’s best to launch in the program and let the program “learn” the campaign.

While it’s true that the programs learn incredibly well, they have to have a good foundation to start from, or they’re learning the wrong things. We’ve found a significantly higher return on the campaigns that we launched and optimized manually at first.

It’s a ton of time and expense, but the per-keyword return is much higher in the long run if the bid management program is introduced after the campaign has been live for a few days or weeks (depending on volume).

The Future Of Quality Score?

As Quality Score gets more obtuse and confusing, we’re seeing a lot of bouncing around. For example, we had one keyword that didn’t get any impressions yesterday at all, but bounced quality score from a 10 to a 3 and back again several times.

Couple that with the recent changes in impression reporting, match types, display URLs and more, and I have to wonder… could we be seeing the first steps of phasing out QS altogether?

The last time I saw this kind of volatility in a metric from Google, it was back in 2007 when Toolbar PageRank was getting discredited and phased out. If you think about it, Google doesn’t really need to show us QS. We’ve gotten spoiled. They could just as easily decide not to show it anymore, even though they use it internally. What do you think is the future of Quality Score?

About The Author: Jenny Halasz is a former agency executive turned consultant. Her consultancyJLH Marketing, Inc. is based in Raleigh, NC and specializes in search strategy, with an emphasis on intuitive user experience and successful customer acquisition.

Source : http://searchengineland.com

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How To Perform A/B Testing From Search To Conversion

As I mentioned in a previous post, search marketers should work on finding the middle ground between a high CTR (appealing ads) and a high conversion rate (qualified traffic). This process is trickier than it seems because of the inverse relationship between those two metrics.

In this article, I’ll share a couple of thoughts which I hope you’ll find helpful when testing multiple ad copy and landing pages for your PPC program.

Get Your Campaign & Ad Group Ready

Once you have a fairly mature keyword list, you should be able to easily identify those top cost keywords with a Quality Score lower than 7/10. From my experience, 7/10 is definitely decent for non-branded keywords, while anything below 7 usually results in greater CPCs and greater first-page bid estimates.

By top cost keywords, I basically mean generic keywords – those guys where any slight Quality Score improvement can make a huge difference. You might want to isolate these keywords in specific ad groups so you can fine-tune specific ads and landing pages specifically for them – and you want to take care of this before getting the A/B test started.

This test might be a good opportunity to break down your top campaigns by device and/or geo so you can potentially look into device and/or geo specific data and come up with the best creatives not only for each top keyword, but also by device and/or location. This breakdown might be time-consuming and dilute the data; that’s why you might want to tier your campaigns.

Last, but not least, you want to make sure you’re using the “Rotate evenly” feature at the campaign level to give equal preference to all active ads in your ad groups. Keep in mind that “if ads in an ad group are unchanged for 90 days, the ad rotation in this ad group will automatically begin to optimize for either clicks or conversions” (see AdWords page).

Watch The Competition

As a numbers person, I wish I could come up with a formula to determine the best ad copy based on historical data and combinations of headlines, descriptions, display URLs and landing pages. The reality is that your search program success not only comes from your ability to draw conclusions looking at numbers, but also from your awareness of the competition.

More specifically, you should definitely search for your top keywords in Google and Bing on a regular basis, and see what the competition is doing in SEM and also SEO, then identify opportunities in terms of unique positioning: price, quality, free shipping, etc. You can useAdWords AdPreview tool to see “unbiased” search results.

Set Up New Ads & Landing Pages

This is definitely not a one-time thing, but rather, an on-going process with a 90-day limitation coming from AdWords.

1. Start with significantly different ad copy; each ad should boast a unique differentiator (price, quality, etc.)

2. Once you’ve determined the best axis of communication, fine-tune your headline without touching the description and display URL

3. Now that you’ve determined the best headline, test different descriptions

4. You can now focus on testing different display URLs

The scheme below represents this process in a simplified way:

Those tests will impact your CTR, Quality Score, rank, average CPC. They might impact your conversion rate, too. Ideally, you want your test to be as clean as possible, which means that you want to touch just one component at a time: headline, description, display URL, or landing page. This will help isolate every factor when determining what the champ ad is.

However, because of the relationship between CTR and conversion rate, you might want to test multiple ad copy and landing pages at the same time. You can rotate four ad copies per ad group with two unique ads and two unique landing pages so you can still get a good sense of the ad copy with the best CTR and conversion rate.

Top vs. Right-Hand Side Distribution

When testing multiple ads and landing pages, you definitely want to keep an eye on the distribution by “Segment: Top vs. Other” in AdWords, which simply indicates whether your ads are shown as the top of the search results, or on the right-hand side. In the example below, we tested different strategies for one of our clients from a CTR to a conversion rate focus, until we found the balance between “good enough” CTR and strong conversion rate.

The bottom line is that a successful A/B test is a blend of “appealing enough” ad copies to secure a high Quality Score and top positions as a result, and a strong conversion rate. Search marketers should work on determining what is the lowest CTR to secure premium positions, then maximize the conversion rate while maintaining this minimum CTR level.

About The Author: Benjamin Vigneron is Director of Analytics & Automation for eSearchVision, a global search marketing software developer and agency. He currently leads eSearchVision’s Creative and Analytics team.

Source : http://searchengineland.com

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How to Leverage Your PPC Data?

According to Google, a whopping 89% of consumers research products online, and 67% of Internet users have gone online to search for a product advertised offline. What does this mean to advertisers and agencies? Digital has become a key component of the consumer ecosystem, and PPC is a big testing (play)ground.
Depending on the nature of your program, PPC campaigns can produce an overwhelming amount of data. Embrace it. Most of the campaigns I have managed over the past eight years have been directly or indirectly driven by return on investment, or ROI metrics. The majority of advertisers I have worked with position PPC as below-the-line (BTL) activities, and allocate their budget accordingly. I would argue that PPC is a through-the-line (TTL) form of marketing. Key performance metrics aside, there is more to PPC than meets the eye.

So how can you leverage the gold mine of data you are collecting beyond the point of conversion? To start, I’m going to walk you through four potential approaches to doing so.

Monitor brand and product interest. Google has developed fantastic tools to help advertisers gauge opportunities and follow the market trends.

Trend Reports Over Time:

Is the consumer interest around your brand, products, and category increasing or decreasing? A Google Trends report can (and hopefully will) lead to a larger discussion about last click attribution and its impact on upper funnel queries — be ready to ask yourself those questions before opening the Pandora box.
Because PPC is data driven, it is very tempting and natural for advertisers to optimize towards conversions and focus on terms that generate a high/positive ROI. I will argue, however, that the majority of advertisers are still attributing the conversion to the last click instead of assigning credit to different touchpoints throughout the search funnel.
This strategy usually translates into a budget centered on brand, products, and longer tail terms. The downfall is that ads are not showing when a user is starting the research process using more generic terms (e.g., “laptop,” leading to “small laptop,” and eventually converting on “laptop 14” brand X”). The questions to ask are:

• How many conversions are you losing because users went from a generic to a competitor query without a chance of seeing your ads?
• Is your brand favorability declining because of this strategy? I’ve conducted two studies around this topic over a three- to four-year span leveraging the Google Trend report and PPC data — and the answer was invariably, yes.

Sample of Google Trend Results
Brand: ACME
Date Range: January 2009 through January 2012
Goal: Gauge the search demand overtime around the ACME brand

Impression Share Report (also referred to as Share of Voice):

What is the percentage of impressions you are currently capturing out of the total impressions available in the market(s) you are targeting? More importantly, what is the percentage of ad impressions you may be losing? Once you know the volume of impressions you are currently leaving on the table, you can calculate the approximate volume of clicks and conversions based on your historical data.
Understanding the PPC opportunity will allow you to refine your media plan and answer some important questions:

• Is my current budget in line with market growth? The search landscape is anything but static — blink once and you might fall behind the curve. For instance, Adobe’s  Q3 2012 Global Digital Advertising Update shows that search marketing spend in the U.S. grew 11% year over year. You might want to ask yourself, has my share of impression decreased or increased over time? Is the competition closing in, or am I driving the cost-per-click up by being too dominant?
• How do I want to position my company against the competition? Am I capturing enough share of impression to sustain this goal?
• Can I extrapolate the PPC data to determine the desirable budget across the other channels?

ROI-related metrics are usually the main focus of a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, but monitoring the share of impressions is a good indicator of where you stand against the competition. The key to success is to find the right balance between achieving your ROI goals, staying competitive on the search result page (SERP), and maintaining your volume of conversions.
Note that Google provides the impression share at the campaign and ad group levels only. Inactive keywords are not part of the calculation in the AdWords interface, but your Google Account Manager can usually help paint a more “customized” picture. Alternatively, Bing and Yahoo! can also provide this type of data, but you might have to reach out directly to your account team instead of accessing it through the user interface.

Finding the Impression Share Data in AdWords:

Determining impression share in markets such as China, Russia, and Korea will require more work since Google is not the dominant search engine in these markets. First, look for Google’s most recent market share in each country, then apply the appropriate multiplier to calculate the full opportunity:

Example: The spend opportunity on Google China is $100,000 and Google represents 15% of the market share in this market; the calculation is as follows:
$100,000/0.15 = $666,667 total opportunity for China (assuming a similar average CPC)

Leverage SEM real-time capabilities to test the potential success of messaging through aggressive A/B testing. Protip: I always recommend to clients that they launch a PPC campaign a few months prior to a major product launch.

It might be truer for some verticals than others, but chances are the “word” is already out, so why not capitalize on the buzz without revealing too much? A recent Google “Launch Predictor Study” focused on the technology vertical found that 34% of searches happened before a product launch. Remember that your pay-per-click campaigns leave you in total control of the budget, messaging, and landing page environment. The upstream traffic you capture can be invaluable to fine-tuning your cross-channel initiatives.

Example: Your creative agency has produced three storyboards and you need to choose a winner before going into production for TV, billboards, radio, print:

Scenario #1: Price centric
Scenario #2: Product features focused
Scenario #3: Environmentally friendly (social responsibility)

You could use your gut feeling or you could leverage your PPC data to make an informed decision. Once you have decided to use PPC as a testing ground, it just becomes a planning exercise. First, understand the end goal (e.g., increase the quality of your reach vs. increasing frequency); and the questions you are trying to answer (e.g., which message resonates best with my audience(s)? Are consumers associating the product to the brand?); and then build a SEM strategy to help fill in the gaps.

At this point, you know how much you want to invest, where you want to invest it, and which message carries the most weight. But is your website ready to convert your highly qualified PPC traffic into sales, leads, or brand advocates? Whether your SEM program is mature and just needs a boost to reach to next the level of performance, or it’s in the infancy phase and you want to accelerate the learning curve, landing page optimization is critical to success. This is a complex topic deserving of its own post, but you need five things before getting started:

• Relevant user experience (search query to landing page)
• Consistent messaging from copy to call to action on the landing page
• Optimal design to maximize conversion rate
• Robust web analytics implementation (quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the traffic)
• Ongoing split A/B testing strategy (e.g., champion vs. challenger pages)

Once those five stars align, you can leverage your PPC campaigns to drive traffic to select pages, as well as track back-end metrics (also known as post-click metrics), such as: conversion rate, pageviews per visitor, time on site, bounce rate, average value of an order, etc. Each value point will tell a story and give you the ability to course correct or amplify your efforts.

Measuring the impact of offline activities is a challenge for advertisers, but website and PPC traffic data can provide invaluable information. Do you observe a correlation between offline investment and volume of related search queries? Is the conversion rate on your site higher during or just after a big offline media burst? You will need a robust web analytics implementation and enough PPC data to draw relevant observations, but the findings are well worth the effort.

Isn’t the ability to validate your offline spend gratifying? Why stop there? Let’s move on to social media signals and SEO. Over the last two years, advertisers have gone through several phases:

• Building a fan base
• Monetizing their fan base
• Retaining their fans

I think we can push the envelope and extract deeper knowledge — we are in the optimization business after all! The search query report in AdWords, for example, will give you information on how your audience is evolving.

• Are your keywords and ad copies up to date?
• Have the social signals influenced the user behavior? (e.g., which search platforms are most commonly used by your audience, what factors contribute to the decision process, etc.)
• Has brand exposure through social media impacted your key performance indicators (KPIs)? In the 2011 PPC Edition, MarketingSherpa reported the average click-through rate (CTR) doubled for organizations that had integrated their paid search and social media campaigns. Various case studies also show improvements in conversion rate.

The same questions and methodology can be applied to SEO/SEM integration. The reality is that most advertisers don’t have the budget to capture 100% of impressions on 100% of their core terms. Your PPC data and integrated reporting will help you build a cohesive strategy and guide you through the weeding process. Where should you allocate your paid media budget? You have limited SEO resources, what should you focus on? Based on your business and marketing objectives, the SEM numbers will point you to:

• High ROI terms
• High conversion terms (those could potentially yield a negative ROI)
• Brand awareness terms to build your upper funnel

Testing is fun. Looking at the performance trending upward, and collaborating with other agencies to improve the overarching program’s bottom line are exhilarating, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

• You need a statistically relevant set of data to make informed decisions. No matter how tempting it is to make tweaks on the fly, they will be detrimental if you try to go too fast.
• The higher the volume of data your campaigns produce, the more quickly you will be able to reach the end zone. In terms of conversions, a higher price point usually means fewer conversions (e.g., selling a CRM vs. a pair of socks) — it will take more time to collect sufficient data and optimize.
• Data is volatile and metrics directly impact one another. One change will cascade–sometimes as expected, sometimes not.
• Data is great, but data can also be overwhelming. Start small.
• If not formatted properly and applied with context, the data will not tell you the real story and will be meaningless.

Pay-per-click is a powerful tool for both online and offline marketers. I have worked with a lot of agencies – big and small – throughout the years, and one of the challenges was to not only share the data, but make sense of it. I have seen 30MB Excel spreadsheets (also known as “wall of data”), but without context, without collaboration between the campaign managers, that data is not actionable.

by Stephanie McClintock 

Source : http://www.blueglass.com/blog/

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PPC in 2012

Q1: What was your favorite PPC Chat of 2012? Why?

• Mine was Recent one on Product Listing ads. – Manoj Pandey (@_MAN0J)
• My favorite chats related to Google Shopping – lots of great info shared during these chats and awesome discussion. – Matt Umbro (@Matt_Umbro)
• I’d have to say the Google Shopping PLA week. Learned a lot, good conversations. – Ginny Marvin (@GinnyMarvin)
• I think the one about Dynamic Search Ads was very helpful. Great to get a feel for a brand new feature. – Martin Rottgerding (@bloomarty)
  • Utilizing this feature a lot more because of this chat. – Matt Umbro
• Every #PPCcusschat – Neil Sorenson (@iNeils)
• Don’t have a favorite. I learned from many. But the ones abt PLA are prolly least fave b/c we have no client who qualifies 4 that. – Eric Bryant (@GnosisArts)
• I enjoyed the perspectives on bidding on branded terms. – Nicole Mintiens (@Tregesy)
• Conversion attribution. (Add me to those who don’t have a PLA client.) – Theresa Zook (@I_Marketer)
• The last #ppcchat about PLAs was very helpful, too. Missed this one and was thankful for @PaulKragthorpe‘s work once again. – Martin Rottgerding
• Remarketing was very intriguing as well – that’s been a tough nut to crack for us. So has DSA. – Eric Bryant
• I got a lot out of the holiday#ppcchat ’s both for holiday and post-holiday strategies. – Mark Kennedy (@markkennedysem)
• Google Shopping was good, but I really thought the one on Dynamic Search Ads was very insightful. – Brian Gaspar (@BGaspar)

Q2: What do you believe was the biggest PPC story of 2012? Why?

• Probably the product feed going to a paid platform. – Mark Kennedy
• Google rolling Local Places into G+? I think the impact of that is yet to be really felt, though. – Theresa Zook
• There are so many elements now: Youtube ads, remktg, DSAs, PLAs, TVads & all becoming more specialized in themselves. – Eric Bryant
• Have to say paid Google Shopping. – Ginny Marvin
• Changes to Adwords Display Network targeting. Bidding now available at the KW level… fundamental change. – Luke Alley (@LukeAlley)
• Paid inclusion in Shopping results – biggest shift toward a pay to play system. – Timothy Jensen (@timothyjjensen)
• Google Shopping going to a completely pay per click model…by far the biggest story IMHO. – Matt Umbro
• Definitely PLA & Shopping to a paid platform. Anything that effects budget, CTRs, posiioning, etc etc is HUGE. – Jeff Loquist (@jmloquist)
• Totally agree with you@timothyjjensen - the shift has been tremendous this year with analytics & google shopping. – Logical Media Group (@LogicalMediaGr)
• Definitely rolling YouTube into AdWords. – Doug Thomas (@ferkungamaboobo)
• For me the main reason PLAs was so huge was the conv impact. Without the results it wouldn’t have been as big a deal. – Ginny Marvin
• Have to say Retargeting is at the top of my list as well. – Ginny Marvin
• Google’s continued emphasis on promoting established brands, and transferring all historical free services to paid. – Jesse Semchuck (@jessesem)
• PLAs have definitely been a game changer. Huge search inventory swing. – Jeremy Brown (@JBGuru)

Q3: What 2012 PPC prediction of yours came true? What did not?

• I really thought they would do the adgroup-level sitelinks this year. – Rick Galan (@RickGalan)
  • Currently in beta, FYI. – Neil Sorenson
• Don’t recall making predictions, BUT we should do that at the start of ’13 and look back at it in Dec. ’13. – Luke Alley
• Didn’t come true…. yet. Targeting advertising (through Adwords) to Google+ profiles. – Jesse Semchuck
• That revision of PLA campaign helped to increase overall non-branded profitability. That DSA’s at launch were not successful. – Brian Gaspar
• No ad-group level geotargeting yet. One major advantage Bing Ads holds. – Timothy Jensen
• There are many betas I would’ve expected to go public already: search partner bids, adgroup sitelinks, product retargeting, Scheduling ads – that’s what automated rules and scripts are for. – Martin Rottgerding
• Sitelinks/Ad Extensions. Little brother is growing up fast! – Nicole Mintiens
• I don’t predict–when I do, I fall in love w/some imaginary feature or ability and have to cry when I don’t get it. – Theresa Zook
• The fiasco that ensued when Google initially eliminated the rotate ads evenly option. – Brian Gaspar
• Youtube adwords – super beneficial for a lot of our clients! Geotargeting not being available has been upsetting. – Logical Media Group
• The ability to schedule turning on and off certain ads. – Brian Gaspar
• That it would be near impossible to get a true ROI on facebook advertising. (also my prediction for the next few years) – Jeff Loquist
• Still disappointed that we don’t have greater visibility into Google Search Partners… time to provide more transparency Google. – Matt Umbro
  • And separate bids for search partners. – Melissa Mackey (@Mel66)
  • I think the transparency is *mostly* there, it’s just a giant pain to sort out. – Jesse Semchuck
    • Yes, you can setup a hack in GA to find the partners, but you can’t do anything with the info. – Matt Umbro
  • I just wish I had the option of having a campaign run on JUST search partners. – Robert Brady (@robert_brady)

Q4: How did PPC evolve in 2012 (good or bad)?

• Overall for the better. More features, ways to capture real estate, images, etc. – Mark Kennedy
• It seems like Bing Ads gained some ground this year. – Tom Wright (@tomwri)
• I think it evolved positively for@BingAds . Not so sure about AWds. – Eric Bryant
• More real estate to show ads, putting an importance of organic rankings. More supply can mean more demand and higher costs. - Brian Gaspar
• PPC is stealing a lot of spotlight from organic. I love it. – Robert Brady
• This year showed us (more than ever) how important PPC is compared to organic. In fact, PPC may now be even more important than organic. – Matt Umbro
• Definitely think with the Analytics upgrades the visibility in PPC has improved, so definitely a good thing this year. – Jeff Loquist
  • Agree, analytics integrations have been big this year for ease of visibility/reporting. – Ginny Marvin
• Bing a bigger player; search ads without keywords; lots more data to use for optimization & insight. – Melissa Mackey
• Google listened to the professionals and quickly reversed a change – That’s a serious evolution IMO. – Rick Galan
• 2012 made me thank my lucky stars I didn’t choose SEO almost 5 years ago. – Neil Sorenson
• Progress not perfection. Both platforms rolled out helpful updates to test/adopt. Progress not perfection. – Nicole Mintiens
• We even got our very own PPC conference in 2012! – Matt Umbro
• I feel it’s more a necessity to integrate campaigns cross-platform as opposed to “this is social, this is organic, this is ppc” – Doug Thomas
• Facebook is doing remarketing now which is definitely huge. – Logical Media Group

Q5: What was the most important tip/tactic you learned in PPC Chat in 2012?

• Creative ways to use negative keywords to capture the most relavent traffic. – Nicole Mintiens
• (1) How to use multichannel funnels (2) (and I’m embarrassed to admit this one) How to use pivot tables. – Melissa Mackey
• Honestly, when in doubt trust your network…especially those within. – Brian Gaspar
• Using Calls to action in the sitelinks was a good one. eg – Sitelink = 20% Off All Products. – Mark Kennedy
• @CarrieHill ’s fixing kwd position based on revenue was without a doubt the most valuable @Sew blog post for me in 2012. – Eric Bryant
• You’re never more than a tweet away from help. – Robert Brady
• I can’t think of a “specific”, but definitely how to look at data in different ways. – Jeff Loquist
• Creative ways to use negative keywords as well as knowing there’s a community to query when in doubt. – Nicole Mintiens

Q6: What updates and/or improvements can be made to make PPC Chat better in 2013?

• Getting rid of the spambots. – Martin Rottgerding
• Would love to see Google designate a knowledgeable rep to participate. – Robert Brady
• Google Meetups. Video chat is where it’s at! – Nicole Mintiens
  •  I’ve always thought regional#ppcchat meetups would be cool. – Brian Gaspar
• Perhaps advance polls to determine future topics? – Brian Gaspar
• Honestly I wouldn’t change much. I’ve learned so much this year! – Melissa Mackey
• The more people the better. Perhaps figuring out ways to get our name out more?? – Luke Alley
• How about a raffle each week to a participant for a prize for taking part? I see #ppcchat T-Shirts, Mugs and Mouse pads oh my. – Brian Gaspar
• Ocassionally going past 1 pm on the east coast. – James Svoboda (@Realicity)

Resources

• Google AdWords Editor (version as of today’s PPCChat 9.9.0)
• Microsoft adCenter Desktop
• http://www.google.com/ads/answers/
• PPCChat Member List (Twitter)
• adCenter Feature Suggestion
• Bing Keyword Research Too
• PPC Tuesday – 3 PPC Predicitons for 2012

Source : The PPC Blog by Matthew Umbro

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Correct Markup for Supporting Multiple Languages on Websites

The world is shrinking and with it the need to support content for more users means supporting more languages.

Supporting multiple languages on websites is nothing new, but with browser and search engine technology starting to rely on structured data, it has never been more important to make sure you are using the correct markup.

This is where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" comes in handy.

Simply put, when used correctly, this specification element helps Google index and serve the localized version of your content to users who require an alternate language version.

The best use of this tag is in instances where you have the same or regionally specific content in another language on the same website.

Google recommends use in the following three scenarios:

• You have a completely alternate version of your site translated in a different language.

• You translate only the navigational components of a page, like the navigation, sidebar, or footer, but the main content remains in only one language. This is commonly used on pages that include user-generated content.

• Your pages have very similar content within a single language with regional variations, for example you have Spanish language content targeted at readers in Spain and also South America.

Multilingual vs. Multiregional

• Multilingual: A website offering its content in more than one language. An example would include a Canadian business with separate websites on the same domain for both the English and French versions of its content.
• Multiregional: Google defines multiregional content as a website that “explicitly targets users in different countries.” This gets a bit difficult to wrap your head around because websites can be both multilingual and multi-regional, for example you could have a soccer (futbol) site with different versions for the USA and for South America, and both Spanish and Portuguese versions of the South American content.

Managing Multilingual Versions of Your Site

The first rule of thumb is to make sure you present your pages so that the default language is clear, both to user’s and search engines. This is best achieved by maintaining a consistent base language throughout your website and declaring the default language in the header markup of each page.

Important note: You should never, ever use automated translation – but if you must due to the nature of your industry or the size of your website, then make sure you use your robots.txt file to block search engines from crawling any auto-translated pages, especially since auto-translated pages can be viewed as spam.

Also, consider the general user experience implications of your URLs. This is something you should always look at closely.

For localized URLs it best to utilize subdirectories whenever possible, and only use subdomains when there is no other option, as subdomains require significantly more configuration including DNS, Ip, etc.

Example of a localized subdirectory:

http://www.example.domain-extension/local-extension/

Example of a localized subdomains:

http://local-extension.example.domain-extension

Also, it’s fine to translate words in the URL to the local language, but make sure to use the UTF-8encoding in the URL.

Escaping a URL

This is a critical component that really isn't talked about much in international SEO.

Escaping a URL means to make sure you encode any illegal characters in your URL to their UTF-8 equivalent. This isn’t illegal in the sense that you’re going to get arrested, but more so in terms ofproper accepted syntax.

For example, a non-breaking space (or  ) is an illegal character in a URL, so if you tried entering a URL like http://somedomain.com/here-comes-a space, this would be encoded as either http://somedomain.com/Here-Comes-a%20space or http://somedomain.com/Here-Comes-a+space where both %20 and ‘+’ are the UTF-8 supported encodings for the illegal syntax.

Targeting Specific Countries

This is perhaps one of the most overlooked areas of managing multilingual websites.

Google generally uses the following elements to help determine a website’s targeted country:

• Server location (through IP address of server). Servers are most likely becoming a decreasingly important signal to search engines as more websites are beginning to move to distributed hosting solutions like virtual servers and cloud-based networks.
• Top-Level Domains. Also referred to as ccTLDs or country-code specific top-level domains. These are representative of the specific countries they are targeted for, so .ca for Canada or .jp for Japan. This makes them a strong signaling property to both users and search engines that the content on your site is intended for users within that country.
• Geotargeting. This is a setting in your Google webmaster tools that can be used to indicate that your site is targeted for a specific country.
• Additional signals. Localization signals have been expanded to now include elements like addresses and phone numbers on pages, local language and currency, and even links from other websites.

Structuring Your URLs

It’s extremely important to carefully plan your site’s information architecture to maximize its benefits for SEO, and structuring your URLs accordingly.

So when it comes to structuring your URLs for localized content, you have a few options ranging from most ideal to least ideal:

Image Source: Google

Duplicate Content and Its Implications

Duplicate content is bad. This is simple to understand and relatively simple to avoid.

One specific scenario to watch out for is placing the same content on two different URLs, even if these URLs are targeted for the same local audience.

Having the same content on example.jp and example.com/jp/ will be treated as duplicate content and carry with it a negative SEO effect. If it is necessary that these pages both exist, make sure you take steps to not compete against yourself for organic rankings.

You have two options:

1. Use a 301 redirect
2. Use rel="canonical"

Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x"

Simply put, the best use of this specification element is in instances where you have the same content in another language on the same website.

So let’s say you have an English website at http://www.example.com

You also have a Japanese version of that webpage at http://www.example.com/ja/

Google has created three ways for you to indicate that the Japanese URL is the Japanese-language equivalent of the English page:

HTML Link Element

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />

HTTP Header

If you have non-HTML content on your web pages, a good example is a PDF file, you can use rel=”canonical” HTTP headers to indicate the canonical URL for HTML documents.

Link: <http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es"

Sitemap

Instead of using markup, you can submit a language specific version via a sitemap.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
 xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <url>
   <loc>http://www.example.com/english/</loc>
   <xhtml:link
                rel="alternate"
                hreflang="de"
                href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/"
                />
   <xhtml:link
                rel="alternate"
                hreflang="de-ch"
                href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/"
                />

Each supported language must be set using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" to identify all the language versions including itself.

Coming back to regional specific content, this gets a bit tricky (but not too tricky) when specifying content for a specific language and a specific region.

For example: a website that serves the U.S., Germany, and Japan could very well have the following regional variations:

• http://www.example.com/en/page (Generic English version of content - language specific; English)
• http://www.example.com/en-gb/page (English language, displays prices in pounds, example of regional specific content)
• http://www.example.com/en-us/page (English language displays prices in U.S. dollars, example of regional specific content)
• http://www.example.com/ja/page (Japanese version of content)

Markup

This is what the actual tag markup should look like:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en"
href="http://www.example.com/en/page" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us"
href="http://www.example.com/en-us/page" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ja"
href="http://www.example.com/ja/page" />

You need to update the HTML for each URL in the set of alternates. The markup above tells Google to consider all of these pages as alternate versions of one another.

Supported Values

There are specific values for both languages and regions, which fall into the ISO 6391-1 format for languages and the ISO 3166-1 format for regions.

Make sure you use the proper syntax for both countries and regions to ensure proper functionality of your rel=“alternate” tags.

Summary

There are three scenarios where you should be using rel=“alternate” hreflang=“x”. You need to structure your data and specify tags for both the language and the region, when applicable.

Pay close attention to how you build your URL’s and use the recommended signaling factors to properly target the countries your content is meant to serve.

By Nick Eubanks
Source : Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

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