5 steps to creating believable online ad reports

Your online ads are working, but does anyone believe it?

web report pie chartAs a marketer you spend a great deal of time planning, executing, and monitoring the results of your online campaigns. You watch CTRs, CPCs, and Conversion rates. Then create monthly reports that are supposed to demonstrate the value these campaigns bring to your organization. Unless you are running a sole proprietorship, this means convincing others that all of these numbers and percentages translates into a net gain for your organization. The following steps will make sure that your creating reports that are convincing and have the support of your entire team: Continue reading

Google Adwords "Quality Score"

Adwords Quality ScoreI watch our company’s current Adwords account very closely and yesterday I was surprised to see that all of our campaigns had stopped running. Drilling down into the ad groups, each of the keywords were “inactive” for search. Our maximum CPC is usually set to $.40 per click, but Adwords was recommending that we increase my Maximum CPC to $10.00 per click!

I spoke with a Google Adword’s support specialist and she explained that it was my quality score that had affected the Maximum CPC. I assured her that our ads were well targeted, but she was insistent on trying to “enlighten” me how Google Adwords quality score works. By the end of the phone call she had agreed to have a technical team member look into it further, but I would have to increase my Maxiumum CPC if I wanted my ads to appear.

This morning I checked our Adwords campaigns and they were back up and running without any changes. A few hours later I received this email from Google: Continue reading

Google AdWords Pay-Per-Action Program

Google has introduced a new beta program for their AdWords customers. Pay-per-action ads are part of a new pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when specific actions that they define are completed by a user on their site. Rather than paying for clicks or impressions, advertisers can choose to pay when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action that they choose. Pay-per-action ads are eligible to appear on publisher sites in the Google content network, either in publisher-selected ad units or in standard AdSense for content ad units.

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