Make’em click!
I originally thought that the main thing you need to worry about with pay per click (PPC) advertising is how to understand which keywords and creative copies bring you quality visitors that eventually convert. You could then keep these quality keywords and even increase maximum bids for them, and dump all the others that do not perform. That’s why we’ve even created our own conversion tracking software.
My latest experience with Google AdWords shows that I was wrong wrong wrong. As it turns out the main problem that you face when starting your first PPC campaign is how to make people click on your adverts at all. That’s right, you don’t have to worry about keywords performance or conversion rates, because you need to make these damn people click at first! No click = no love = no point to measure conversion.
Not so broad
The next thing that came as a surprise to me were “broad matches”. This is a term that Google uses to describe keywords that you can specify in you ad campaign:
If you include general keyword or keyword phrases — such as tennis shoes — in your keyword list, your ads will appear when a user’s query contains tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads will also automatically show for expanded matches, including plurals and relevant variations.
The description above is from Google’s own FAQ. What they don’t tell you is that broad matches do not always work as, well.. broad matches. For example, if I will enter “conversion tracking” in the list of keywords, my ad will appear when someone is searching for “conversion tracking”, but nothing is displayed when someone is searching for “conversion tracking software”!
I couldn’t believe this at first, I thought I was doing something wrong. But it appears that this is a normal Google’s behavior. There is an Ads Diagnostic Tool that shows to you the reason why your ad is not displayed for some keywords, so for “conversion tracking software” I got the following response:
Ad not shown. Reason: The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement.
Yeah, well, whatever (more information about this at webmasterworld.com).
The funny thing is — I can always specify “conversion tracking software” as a new keyword for my ad group and then my ad would display for this keywords too. So what the hell are they talking about with this message about low clickthrough rate for this keyword? I don’t get it.
No redirects allowed on Overture
Finally, as it turns out in Overture redirects are not allowed as target URLs for the ads. They don’t have a specific rule that says this, but they insist that the “Back” button in the visitor’s browser should take the visitor back to the search results after he or she clicks on my ad. Apparently redirect URLs break the “Back” button? Why Google accepts them then?
Anyway, all of my 20 or so new listing on Overture got rejected almost immediately after submission with a remark that the URL is bad. So it seems that it is not possible to use split tests with Overture at all, since redirect URL is a requirement with any split test. Oh well…
Much later: I was wrong. Overture does accept redirect URLs. Read details in the comments.
Thanks Sergey.
This was a very curious information I will have in mind. I hope that Google won’t stop accepting the split tests procedure.
And talking about Google can you tell me whether if I use on some website URL http://www.my-domain-name.com/?s=1 (for split test) or (?c=1 for campaign) will this contribute to my Google PR or it will not add any points as it doesn’t link especially to the domain.
Thank you for your great blog!
Chris,
Sorry, I really don’t know how this will influence your page rank. I recommend asking about this at http://www.webmasterworld.com forums. You can find some real experts there, including Google’s employees.
I’m interested in purchasing your excellent looking product. I am particularly enthusiastic about the split tracking capbilities. I was heartbroken to read that split tests with your product may not work with Overture. Is there a workaround? Or should I just know that split tests with Stuffed Tracker can’t be done with some PPC sites?
Thanks.
Jack,
This is not Stuffed Tracker specific. Overture just don’t seem to like a redirect target URL. Any other split testing software should have the same problem with them.
We are currently investigating any possible solutions to this problem.
Here are two suggestions, although I wouldn’t be surprised if you looked at them already:
header(’Location: pageA.htm’);
or
include ‘pageA.htm’;
Jack,
Thanks for the suggestion. Stuffed Tracker already uses the standard “Location:” method when it performs split tests. And include the page idea seems to be incovenient, since then the page will be served with the tracker’s URL in the browser’s location field, which is misleading for the visitor and probably is not what you want anyway.
To be honest, this blog entry was written in frustration because of the different limitations that I’ve encountered when starting to advertise via PPC. I’ve never really studied the real reasons why Overture declined my listings with a split testing URL. I just thought that the problem might appear because of a redirect used in the split test.
Now, that you’ve showed your concern about this as our potential customer I will get to the bottom of this. I am currently waiting for Overture editorial team to review my new target URLs again pointing to a split test.
I’ll post here what I will find out.
Cool. Looking forward to giving your software a run through… just found you today.
I am happy to report that my new split testing URLs were now accepted by Overture.
But at first they’ve got rejected again. I was persistent this time. I’ve changed the secure split testing URLs to non-secure identical ones and, what do you know, this time they were accepted.
So 2 conclusions:
1. Stuffed Tracker split testing URLs work in Overute (yay!).
2. As I understand the problem was very specific to the SSL certificate that we use on our own secure site. It is not pre-installed in Internet Explorer prior to version 5.5.
In our own Stuffed Tracker I can see the test click that someone from Overture editorial staff has made (or this could have been a robot as well) and they use a browser that identifies itself as:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) RPT-HTTPClient/0.3-3E
This looks more like a robot.
So again, problem solved. Or rather there was no problem in the first place. Sorry for misleading information.