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Looks like "china seo" and "baidu" are hot topics right now!

I think it makes sense to do this when using the PPC channel in order to test out page design, layout, keywords, etc... However, once you find a better-converting page for PPC you should also test it out on organic traffic. Assuming you can continue to rank well for your top keywords and the page converts organic visitors better it is best to send PPC traffic to an organic page due to the quality score issue described by Ron. Plenty of businesses have separate landing pages for their PPC traffic though. As much as I would like to say that having a high-converting page is best for both, the truth is that sometimes the highest converting page is not at all SEO-friendly in terms of content (e.g. one image and a big fat CTA button). You can often meet in the middle by incorporating drop-down content divs, jquery sliders, etc... but not in all cases.

I found out about these data result issues a few days ago, but only when I was logged into my AdWords account. I logged out, and you are then using the old and more familiar keyword tool we are all used to. The significant drawback to this is that only 100 keyword ideas are presented at a time. Doing "blind" tests not only would be frustrating, but you will also be considering for yourself, or worse, presenting "blind" data to your clients about the best keywords to target and why. I'm going to stay logged out until I see or read that this issue has been resolved. Hope it does soon and hope this helps you out in the short-term.

Hi Mark I'm assuming it only banner ads which you are looking advice with. We started banner ads a few weeks ago, with mixed success (so far).  I would recommend remarketing, it converts well.  I would guess there is a little bit of cannibalation going on, but I still think it works (reminds customers of you, and make you look like a big brand) Because of our industry the categories/topic are usless to us.  (In my last job in the furniture industry, we found the categories/topic more useful) The Keywords are very tricky because you will find you ads appearing on sites that have little to do with you business, just happens to have the word on the page. So far we have not had a conversion yet from keywords, but a free "ad seen and converted".  I'm also having problems with analytics's picking up all the banner clicks, but I think its because of a quick bounce (analytic does not even get loaded to record the bounce) I would start with a very small range of keywords and monitor it closely and use negative keywords and block site that are no good to you (flash game site are the worst for 100% bounce rate). We started in on region, and once we are happy with the banner campaigns we are going to expand them out (we are already going to expand the remarketing campaign as its working) Hope this helps

If your website has no issues and your product is good. You should start making money after 1 month.  The biggest problem is not to waste money. Learning curve costs money. plan it carefully arithmetic is your best friend. Regards Igor

Hi Darin, What you said does make sense. With the information you provided to me, I think I can figure out how to get approved sitelinks. 1. If I have an ad linking to URL A, then do not have the sitelink go to URL A as well. 2. If I have a sitelink going to URL A in AdGroup 1, then do not have a sitelink going to URL A in AdGroup 2.

Thanks for all your useful insights. I am pretty adept at managing my own time and have always favored a self managed teaching method so I think I'm prepared to execute and manage this project. Of course at times I will need to out source much of the SEO as I am aware how extremely technical it can become. My main focus will be more on the content side of things. If any of you have any tips on how to build my content directly into SEO be sure to get in touch. Thanks Guys

I am in the middle of re-vamping my PPC marketing campaigns. Once I have more data on the results of my changes, I may take you up on that offer for a free review. Thank you for all of your help! Regards, Meghan

If you're not tagging your destination URLs in Adwords, you will need to turn on auto-tagging so that Google Analytics can track clicks from Adwords.  When you log into Adwords, click on the "My Account" tab, and choose "Preferences".  If auto-tagging is not enabled, enable it.  What this will do is when someone clicks on an ad to your site, you'll see a parameter added, called gclid.  This parameter encodes all the data that you'd normally have in your utm parameters (if you build URLs like these from here), so that Google Analytics can properly track your ad campaigns. Also, like Chris mentions, make sure in the admin settings in Google Analytics that your account is linked to that Adwords account.

Vista Print and Office Depot don't have Quality Score of 10 for all of their keywords...but I imagine they have QS 7-10 for tons of keywords.  They have a huge budget to test things with, many PPC tools (marin, hubspot, mongoose, analytics, omniture, etc) and a team of PPC managers/designers/programmers who have been optimizing their campaigns for years.  They also have a high CTR because of their brand name recognition, which raises their QS.  However you can compete and win!!  You just need to pick your battles.  What are your advantages over Vista and Office Depot?  Higher quality, faster turnaround, local service?  Focus on the areas you beat the big players.  Do you get a lot of business from local companies?  Create campaigns focused on local geography.  If your business is well known in your hometown, Office Max/Vista print don't have an advantage. QS is the most important long term metric, which is primarily based on CTR.  Create compelling text ads that get people to click them.  Use as many extensions as you can.... site-link, phone extension, location extension, social extension, etc....these all help increase CTR & QS.  When I am trying to increase QS, I only use exact, phrase & broad modified match type...no broad match type.  This will generate more targeted keyword traffic and increase CTR and conversions.  I also use dynamic keyword insertion, which increases CTR & QS.  Also remember that QS is a long term metric, so if you increase your CTR today, you QS will increase in a few weeks/months.

yes Devanur is correct, Google will not serve 2 ads for the same keyword in 1 account..  The solution is to create a new AdWords account ...1 AdWords account for each domain. With 2 accounts , you can have your ads appear in position 1 & 2, and yes you will be competing against yourself.  This is a really aggressive tactic, but it can be successful.  Just be aware that you can drive up your own costs.  Make sure to look at both your bids and Quality Scores.  The keyword with a higher quality score should have a bid that generates position 1.5.  The keywords with a lower quality score should have a bid that generates position 2.5.  If you closely monitor your bids & positions, you can be successful.

There was just a really great piece on how QS is estimated in Bing on SEJ by Ping Jen. I would definitely recommend a read through!

Thanks for all your replies, like the idea of seetiing up an adwords account not hooked up to credit card Grazie tanto

If you have a specific design in mind, you could just create a new page layout in WordPress that doesn't include menus or navigation. Then you'd just create a page using that page layout whenever you need a landing page.

I'm not completely familiar with how PLAs are incorporated into GA. When you say the conversions are coming back as organic traffic - is it for brand or non-brand? If you're analyzing the data in GA by the last non-direct channel attribution then this could definitely have an impact on how many conversions appear if the funnel is more complicated. Are your items rather expensive? Is there a longer research phase to your products?

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you. I don't think there's anything you can do against this, but I do have a few questions just to get a better understanding of what was going on, if you don't mind sharing. How much was your budget? For what match type? What was your CPC?  What location were you targeting?  What niche are you in?

I'm mostly backing up everything David has already mentioned. There's no shortcut, and you really want to have specific adgroups to specific location pages for more reasons than just CTR (but it's still a really good reason). You also will never have location specific data to improve upon, which is the entire reason you would want to send PPC there anyway - to be able to improve and measure. If the page you are sending people to dynamically changes based on their IP then you can easily duplicate one adgroup structure for one city into several by using the adwords editor. Then use the replace feature to cut out the city information you're looking for and insert the next location. Also, you can use the term "[City] area" to help generalize. Also when I've done location specific targeting using adgroups targeted just around the term "local" is also helpful. Then you can set the radius of your targeting out further and capture a wider audience.

Thank you, Branden, for your advice. Telling me specifically what I need to do is exactly what I wanted to hear. My company used to work with a PPC agency, but they were horrible in every way possible. That is when I decided to manage the Adwords in house. I am the senior copywriter for my company (I studied professional writing in school), but the AdWords work sort of fell into my lap. With a new copywriting assistant, I have more time to focus on Adwords. I just never knew where to begin after the basic framework of launching a simple campaign. I have metrics that show me what ads work well for my specific industry, but I do not yet know how to use keywords differently, such as negative keywords and exact phrases. Your information will most definitely be coming in handy over the coming weeks and months. I am truly grateful to the both of you who responded. Regards, Meghan

Thanks Branden, this is what i suspected then, and there is no way to set alternate URLs within same AdGroup/Ad based on device. Completley agree Respnsive design is the way to go, we have allready rebuilt a clients site like this for them and plan to do more, The mobile version of this site is not even on a sub domain or sub directory, its on a totally different domain which is less than ideal. They have recently hired a new head of online however who is working closley with us to turn this around so hopefully this shall improve soon! Thanks for the response.

I use Marin also.  You can setup sub MCCs for various access...Marin, Adobe, HubSpot, etc. I have run into a few issues doing this, as AdWords has limits on how many managers can be linked thru an MCC.  Or you can also create individual email accounts for each account, and grant Marin access to each account individually.