AdWords Impression Share Reports

I’ve been looking at ways to evaluate PPC campaigns outside the usual Cost/Revenue/ROI reports. I can also add CPCs, Conversion and Bounce Rates, but then I’m still looking at the same picture. What I’ve recently started doing is Impression Share reports and I think they are useful additional metrics to generate or ask agencies to supply. Here’s what it’s all about.

What’s An Impression Share Report

If you imagine how people google online and trigger ads on the search results pages, then this report tells you how often your ads were there to be seen. It’s a simple way to track an aspect of campagins’ performance – it can alert you if your budgets are too low, or quality score is bad, or CPCs are not adequate.

How To Create An Impression Share Report

In AdWords go to Reporting => Reports => Create A New Report and then add the four Impression Share (IS) metrics available in Advanced Settings.

Impression Share Metrics

Impression Share – The percentage of impressions your ads recieve out of the total number of triggered impressions.

Lost IS (Rank) – Share of impressions not shown due to poor ad quality or low bid.

Lost IS (Budget) – Impression share lost due to limiting daily budget.

Exact Match IS – Impression Share assuming all your keywords are set to Exact Match.

It’s hard to tell what these figures should be for a good set of campaigns. In any case, IS lost to Budget should be 0%. If you aim to exact and phrase match, then your IS should be similar to your Exact Match IS. Overall, if your total IS is around 80% then you’re doing a good job. Of course that depends on the campaign you’re looking at – 70% would be fine for a Generic campaign, but you should be aiming at 95% for Brand.

How To Improve A Low Impression Share

First, have a look at your Exact Match IS which can help you determine what the issue may be. If the Exact share is high, then it means that you don’t appear on some of the keyword variations. Do a search query report and add the relevant keywords in and job’s done. If the Exact Match IS is low, however, you’d need to look at your Ad Quality or Budget.

Budget is easy to fix. Have a look at your campaigns and see if your daily spend frequently hits your daily budget. A positive Lost IS (Budget) number is also an indicator of this. In this case simply increase your budget. Don’t worry about losing money here – I do not think Budget is the tool to control ROI. More on ROI later..

Ad Quality is harder to fix. Start with the usual best practice – use phrase or exact match, make separate ad groups for each keyword, try out various ad copy and landing pages, make sure the keyword is included in the copy, etc, etc. Lastly, you may need to increase your CPCs. How flexible you are with those depends entirely on your conversion rate and ROI – on your business as a whole. Obviously you don’t want to be losing money (easy to say, I know!) so you can increase CPCs only up to a certain ROI point. In fact, CPC is your main instrument for controlling ROI. It’s therefore worth testing different CPCs and finding out what ROI and Sales Volume they generate.

Pulp Fiction, The Google Wave Way

Still confused about what Google Wave is all about? Even after my reading my post on it? Then there’s only one last chance for you to get it – the Google Wave Cinema: Pulp Fiction video. As far as demos go, that’s the most fun and surprisingly useful one I’ve seen. Enjoy!

What Are Your Visitors Up To?

I recently found out about ClickTale, a company that intriguingly calls its product a “Web Analytics Revolution”. It is a web-based platform for tracking what your visitors are doing on your site – which links they click on, where does their mouse hover and how are forms being interacted with. All this data is recorded and then presented to you in the form of movies, heatmaps and funnels. It is pretty informative and very easy to set up (just like getting Google Analytics) so I encourage you to try ClickTale’s free demo. It is quite limited, as most demos are, but about enough to get an idea about the product and to make me move a button on one of my hobby sites.

Now, this is not a paid article. Maybe I should swear here to prove the point? Or maybe not. In any case, what I really like about ClickTale is that it’s web based. Until now I imagined Usability Testing as an expensive, time-consuming, infrequent excercise. At IWOOT we did one with Webcredible (shit, I’m doing it again!) and it was extremely valuable. Still, it is not feasable to keep running a full-scale test every other month – even the polite Webcredibles would probably not want us permenantly in the lab eating their crisps. In comes ClickTale, or any other similar tool. It can let you to keep an eye on your usability performance in-house in between expert reviews at quite a competitive cost. So well done to ClickTale for filling in this gap, their solution looks nifty indeed.

UPDATE: It seems that other people are thinking along the lines of ClickTale. Paul Smith has highlighted a free script that tracks clicks over on his blog. A quick Google search reveals that there is a  number of solutions available, from free and paid scripts, to paid services like ClickTale. Webmasters have never been so spoiled!

Puppies Will Destroy The Earth

They will indeed, according to the authors of a new book called Time to Eat the Dog?. They’ve investigated various pets and their ecological pawprints and compared them to more traditional evils such as cars. It turns out that our furry friends, especially bigger dogs such as German Shepherds and Saint Bernards, can use up more resources than a big manly Toyota Land Cruiser. And a Volkswagen Golf is about as bad as a cat. It’s all in the graph above.

How do they know that? Well, the way an Ecological Footprint of say a hamster is measured is by looking at how much food it eats and estimating how much land you need to produce it, per year. The footprint units are therefore hectares. Similarly for a car, they work out the materials needed, the various bits of metal and plastic, plus an average annual fuel consumption, to find out an equivalent measure of land use. Put all these on a graph and pets look quite environmentally unfriendly.

I think it just goes to show that nearly everything you do is bad for the environment, unless you ride your Cocker Spaniel for the daily commute. In which case you should be reading this behind bars.

PS: I’ve looked at the same stats for people too, you can see the graph here. There is a huge variation between countries with the average Bangladeshi needing the same resources as a cat, a Bulgarian is equivalent to a Toyota-driving Doberman, while an American is all of those combined.

A Great Affiliate Incentive From IWOOT

Following a series of cool affiliate incentives, IWOOT has set the bar higher with their latest affiliate competition. They’ll take 6 very lucky affiliates on a 10-day action-packed adventure on a luxury boat on the coast of Malaysia. All that affiliates need to do is do a great job this Christmas and dig out their swimming shorts. Interested? Read more on IWOOT’s affiliate blog.

Yahoo Ends Paid Inclusion

You’ve probably heard the news already – Yahoo announced that “both the “Search Submit Basic” program that charged an annual fee per URL and the “Search Submit Pro” cost-per-click program will end as of Dec. 31, 2009.” Which gives me mixed feelings. On one hand I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but then on the other I didn’t have a chance to try it out myself, I was just in the process of setting it up.

Why didn’t I like it? My main issue was cost. If SSP was to become the norm then we, the advertisers, would pay on all clicks, sponsored and organic. Here’s an example. The screenshot below is showing Vodafone with a top organic listing through SSP (you can tell by the missing Cached link) for their brand term. Surely that’s a click they would’ve got for free anyway? Imagine if all search engines decided that paid organic listings are a good idea – and you can see the attraction – then we’d all have a nasty meeting with our finance officers asking for a doubling of the budgets. We wouldn’t have much choice but pay either since the search market is such a tight oligopoly.

To be fair to Yahoo, SSP has its pretty sides. It allows for quick and easy change of copy and links. It may even help with ranking for generic terms that are so important for acquiring new customers. In fact, it is entirely possible to have a different tactic to Vodafone and go ahead with SSP for generic and product-related terms only and avoid paying for brand. But still, these are things that can be done through good SEO and don’t necessarily need SSP. I’m glad Yahoo have decided (for whatever reason) to go a step back and not try to monetise every inch of their page. Financial officers, you can sleep peacefully! For know.

Quitting Things

Reading Paul Smith’s post on his (very foolish) idea not drink alcohol made me think. For me, Paul and a beer are two connected ends of the same thing, so it won’t be easy for him. Actually I wish him best of luck – he will of course lose many friends and business partners, but he will end up healthier. His post reminded me of my attempts to quit various habits and here’s the shortlist:

• Cigarettes. Quit for 6 months. After that I assumed I’ve proved my will power already and promptly started smoking again. In my defence I smoke a pack a week so it can’t be worse for me than London air.

• Alcohol. 40 days. It does feel interesting, this non-drinking business, because it prohibits one of my (and the nation’s) favourite past times. I did it just because, but I quickly got annoyed with everyone around me asking “what’s wrong with you?” or “come on, just have one!” On the 41st day I had the best beer ever!

• Meat. 40 days, as part of the alcohol-free scheme above. This one was easy and I found it quite interesting to come up with different vegetable dishes to have. Since then, and it has been two years, I’ve reduced my meat intake considerably as I do feel lighter and leaner when having veggies.

• Coffee. 2 years. I used to love coffee – especially espresso and turkish – but while drinking a cup one day I thought that this murky black stuff can’t be good for you. I wondered what would happen if I just don’t drink it. I did and surprisingly I haven’t gone mad or grown a third arm, so I’ve kept this one.

• Facebook. 2 years. On my birthday a couple of years ago I lost a bet and that involved deleting my Facebook account. Far from threatening my social life, it actually kept me away from the computer and freed up a lot of my time.

Other things to quit. Well, obviously work; or at least Fridays. I also heard that James Dyson wanted to ban emails in his company, which is an interesting thought. Travel is also good – the idea is that by not travelling, we’ll eliminate evils like commuting, traffic jams, pollution, and will live closer to our friends and family. In any case, I think that changing something in your life, especially something that you’re very comfortable with, can be an interesting experience. Change is always good, plus you can always go back!

Google Wave

You must’ve seen all the hype around Google’s latest baby, Google Wave. It is described as an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration and they just released 100,000 invites for it. After extensive begging to my account manager, I got one of them. My first thoughts are that Google Wave is over-hyped but quite useful nonetheless – but let’s start from the beginning.

Right now if I want to manage a half-complex project I end up with tons of emails and attachments. Administration can end up more time-consuming than “real” work. The nature of collaboration over distance simply requires hefty communication.

Google Wave sets out to remedy this problem. We can now use a wave which, to quote Google, can be “both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together”. It facilitates neat and organised collaborative work that is easy to access and share. Each person can then contribute blips to expand the wave and progress with the project.

Here are three main points that I so far see as benefits of Google Wave:

1. A single information point. The wave sits on Google’s server and can be updated by anyone involved simultaniously. No more emails cluttering our inboxes, updated files being attached and CCed across and getting stuck in corporate Spam filters. A wave not only saves disk space, it also makes it easy to find the most up-to-date version and contribute to it.

2. A full record of changes is kept. If any undesirable changes were made by anyone, just use the Playback scrollbar to go back. Every drop of wisdom is always saved and easy to access.

3. Multimedia. Images and videos can be inserted into the wave, using drag and drop. You can also add gadgets such as polls and maps. All of these sit within the wave, in one location.

Overall, I quite like Google Wave. I haven’t used it properly yet, simply because I don’t know anyone else with an account due to the limited invites. But I love the idea and aim to be the first to start saying “I’ll wave you” and “can you blip me?”.

A Pint Of SEO Please

If you’re into SEO and beer, and let’s face it – what else is there really? – then you will be glad to hear that Rand from SEOmoz and Will from Distilled will be buying the rounds tonight. This is happening as part of their Pro SEO Training in London, but this evening the hosts are taking anyone and everyone out to the Crown & Sceptre (on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Foley Street, near Goodge Street Station) to have a drink and talk SEO from 6pm onwards. Click here for more.

I have other arrangements tonight, involving a guitar and a tutor that never loses hope, so I can’t make it to the pub unfortunately. But if you can, you should.

One More

I recently wrote about the fascinating world of custom error pages and since then I see them everywhere! The one pictured below by Pattern Tap stood out as original and funny, certainly engaging content in itself. It goes to show that a few witty words and a couple of cheap iStockphoto images can go a long way.