Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Paid Search Marketing

Examine the impact of paid search marketing and its relationship with organic search.


  • anyone has any experience with youtube for adwords and how its converting, etc? tips on how to really narrow it down to keyword level and making sure impressions are based on your preferences? Thanks

    | PaulDylan
    0

  • I recently launched a trial of a retargeting campaign but after a month I have only 100 impressions and 0 clickthroughs. I am working in a competitive space but I placed a relatively low bid because I read that retargeting campaign banner ads should cost less. The number of people who have been added to the retargeting list by visiting the site is under 10,000. What do you think is most likely to be the problem causing a low number of impressions and clickthroughs? Can a retargeting campaign be successful with a small audience size?

    | ProjectLabs
    0

  • When evaluating a PPC landing page for Quality Score, does Google evaluate the other pages that the landing page is linked to? For example, if we have a well optimized page on the site for "Widgets", can it outscore a well optimized  PPC landing page that is isolated in a "disallow" directory with no links into or out of the page? I'm not sure if I am making myself clear...

    | CsmBill
    0

  • This is a hypothetical question, we're pitching to a potential client tomorrow and I noticed they currently rely almost entirely on AdWords but engage in some pretty sketchy link building schemes. And so that got me thinking, is there any evidence to show that when a site is penalised for their organic results it has an affect of any kind of paid searches?

    | AndieF
    0

  • Is there a way to retarget in Bing Ads?

    | jhinchcliffe
    0

  • Hello, I'm running a sale promotion on a brand only Adwords campaign (I have the only account with trademark authorization) and have noticed that my ads are appearing at the bottom of the first page on Google. This happened last week so I split the campaign into three Adgroups and that fixed the problem but today I'm running brand only and there is no way to separate them. CPC has also increased dramatically. Normally it's less than 10 cents and now it's sitting at between $2-$4. Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas/advice on how to stop this happening? It's playing havoc with my CTR and conversions. Much thanks,
    Davinia

    | Unity
    2

  • Was having a discussion with someone so I am going to write this up as neutral as possible and let you guys decide. We have a large keyword list and they are all setup as phrase. Should we go back and add the word buy in front of all those keywords? Even though they are setup as phrase already. Example: "Widget" (as a phrase) Should we go back and add "Buy Widget" as a keyword?

    | EcommerceSite
    0

  • Hi, Is there any tool that tells you if a domain has paid results in Google? I need to find out if a certain domain is showing in the paid search results for any keyword. I tried to from the question clear enough, I don't know how to explain it better.

    | cvissi
    0

  • On Google analytics for our clients when you check the Matched Search Query under Traffic Sources > Overview, it says "There is no data for this view.". I have Google searched it and i am not finding my answer to why this is not displaying my information. On my personal analytics account when i clicked on matched search query it displays exactly what the person searched when it trigered my adwords ad. I have no idea why this account doesn't display the same info when it appears to be setup in the same way. Example: If i am broad match targeting the keyword "outdoor sports", and someone searched "Canadian outdoor sports for kids" It would show exactly what they searched under Matched Search Query. Anyone know how to resolve this issue?

    | VITALBGS
    0

  • Hello, We know that buying links is bad and can get you in a lot of trouble. What about paying to have RSS feeds syndicated by sites like this: http://feedfury.com/submit Thanks, Alex

    | Anti-Alex
    0

  • Hi There, We're about to develop a new website for a small company who operates in both New Zealand and Australia. The company has a foot in the door with major Australian distribution so is keen to build their brand there - almost all of the marketing budget will go into Australia this year. 1. Domains and websites: We're thinking of using separate country domains (.co.nz and .com.au) along with the CMS to create 2 sites that will have: Content common to both countries and sites (about, story, product info) Country specific content (contacts, tastings, competitions and other promo) Headers and footers of each page will contain different content for each site I guess we're worried about creating a duplicate content issue as both sites will have several pages that are identical (although different info will be in the headers and footers on every page). Also, using www.brand.com/aus might not be a great option (perception-wise) when the competition will be using .com.au. And creating and maintaining different content for both sites will drain too much budget away from Adwords and marketing. 2. The effect on SEO and Adwords: If the www.brand.com/aus approach is simply better, are there any implications if all the advertised domains (especially in Adwords) redirect like this?
    www.brand.com.au -> www.brand.com/aus
    www.brand.co.nz -> www.brand.com/nz How would everyone recommend approaching this? As you can tell, we're a bit unsure and want to get this right from the start - any pointers in the right direction would be very much appreciated. Cheers Ben

    | cmscss
    0

  • In Google Adwords, one ad group can have multiple landing pages, yet keywords are shared. So when I look at the keywords, they use one of the landing pages from ads, but which one? Shall we create separate ad groups and set only one landing page per group to avoid this problem? If this is the way then how come landing page is not a shared property like the keywords in ad groups? I hope someone with enough Google Adwords experience can help me here. Thanks,

    | fguru
    0

  • Can anyone provide sources for gathering paid search advertising spend for competitors, preferably by category? Thank you.

    | JoeAmadon
    0

  • Hi there, Is there a Google Product feed company you've used and can recommend? We're not looking for anyone to manage the Adwords end of it, just help set-up/submit the data feed. I'm NOT looking for a free option, I'm looking for a reliable, efficient way to get the feeds set-up and updated. Thanks!

    | marketingcupcake
    0

  • Hello All - I am currently using acquisio for campaign management. Monthly spend is +$200k. I am looking for a PPC management platform that can produce the automated but lovely / elegant reports acquisio can. Any advice would be most welcome. Thanks in advance. CJ.

    | momentum-249741
    0

  • I know this is paid search but since Moz had a section for it, I thought it would be ok to ask. 🙂 According to: http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497836?hl=en Broad match modifier +tennis +shoes Ads may show on searches for tennis shoes
    buy tennis shoes
    best shoes for tennis Ads won't show on searches for running shoes
    tennis sneakers I'm using (for a client) +wedding +photographer.  It should show on wedding photographer hire a wedding photographer best wedding photographer in dallas It should not show on photographer in Dallas become a photographer dallas pictures But it is.  Why would this happen?  Isn't that exactly what it says it won't show up on? Also, Google writes: Don't leave space between the plus sign (+) prefix and the word you're modifying! •Correct: +leather +shoes
    •Incorrect: + leather + shoes
    •Incorrect: +leather+shoes Yet the client was told by Google the opposite.  "I spoke with Google and they confirmed that the space after the plus and before wedding (“+ wedding”) would notrequire “wedding” to show up." How on Earth does this reconcile or make ANY sense? ETA:  This is fairly clear to me: Be sure there are no spaces between the + and modified words, but do leave spaces between words. The right way to do it: +formal +shoes. The wrong way to do it: +formal+shoes. http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/bmm.html

    | MattAntonino
    0

  • Not sure how many people here also do PPC, but I thought it couldn't hurt to ask. Since we added a call extension to one of our AdWords campaigns a few months ago, we have gotten a crazy amount of misdials/wrong numbers. I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this. Here's what happens: We choose one of the numbers we own, say 888-123-4567, and set it up so it displays ADWORDS on the phone's screen when it rings. This way, our customer service and sales reps will know when they are taking an AdWords call. We type that number into the call extension settings. AdWords then assigns a different number to us, which will appear on our ads and forward to our number. Say it's 888-234-5678. Then for months, every "ADWORDS" call we get is someone trying to reach a different company at 888-234-5679 or 888-235-5678. In other words, the number they're trying to dial is one digit off from the number AdWords assigned to us. When we first reported this to AdWords before Christmas, they simply assigned us a new number. It did not help. Now we just get misdials for different companies. So are we alone in this wrong-number phenomenon?

    | CMC-SD
    0

  • Hi guys, I have been using an excellent script that showed me the keywords I was bidding on and the keywords they were matched on by Adwords. I was using the following script: http://www.getelastic.com/exact-keywords-google-analytics/ But I'm under the impression Google changed the way these data can be matched. I now have multiple questions: Does anyone have another script that gives me the same results? Has anyone seen an announcement on why Google has changed this? Might this js solution still be working? http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2008/02/exact_keyword_tracking_with_gajs.php Cheers and thanks for all the suggestions! Arnout

    | hellemans
    0

  • Just doing some research for a potential PPC campaign. For the search terms I'm looking to target, no paid results appear wither above or to the right of the organic SERPs. Does anyone know the reason for this? Search term "Cigar Merchants" Is this because the search term is smoking related? Thanks!

    | underscorelive
    0

  • We have a client that was originally based out of Orlando and the entire website is SEO'ed for Orlando. In the long term we will start SEO'ing for Tampa. But In the short term, we want to drive traffic from Tampa to the website but we want that traffic to know the business specializes in Tampa service (he has local teams there). We are already using a ?_vsrefdom=changemynumber to change the phone number dynamically to a tampa area code for tracking purposes. We want to dynamically change all iterations of 'Orlando' with 'Tampa' using the same javascript.  Does this cause any SEO problems or trip any alarms with Google?

    | Highforge
    0

  • I have an e-commerce site with a small product line which an on-going organic SEO campaign. As a side project, I'm planning on doing some PPC testing with a highly converting product squeeze page, which I'll run Google ads to gain traffic. (this is PPC only and for this page I am not concerned with organic SEO traffic - although of course the page itself will be fully optimized). I am wondering whether to run this squeeze page on a sub-domain or sub-directory of the existing site, OR to host it on a completely fresh domain? I would like to know if as side-effect my existing Website benefit 'organically' from some of the PPC traffic, helping with it's domain authority, etc.,? or could this possibly do any harm? p.s. Bear in mind this is not going to be a page visible on the on the main site itself, it's a separate entity for PPC. Would be great to have some expert Moz eyes on this and opinions. Thanks!

    | GregDixson
    0

  • Does a "Facebook  Promoted Offer" increase the count of the "Like" on a Facebook Page?

    | YESdesign
    0

  • Hi I'm just wondering how specific the targeting can be for an adwords campaign that targets youtube videos. Specifically if the following scenario is possible... If I was to promote a car alarm, is it possible to have my adverts show up before news stories of car thefts? i.e. can I pick and choose individual videos? Thanks

    | adamlcasey
    0

  • This will end up being a two part question: We have been running a search marketing campaign for about 45 days.  It seems no matter how many negative keywords we add (over 300 right now), we still are receiving borderline relevant traffic to the broad match ad group. We are in the printing industry and I think this in itself presents a challenge since there are thousands of competitors in our market, national & local.  People also search for a variety of items, most of which end up having nothing to do with our business (i.e. animal prints, zebra prints etc.) We are running several different ad groups: one exact match, one broad and one phrase match. Does anyone have a resource or links they are willing to share that has general negative terms they use before creating any new campaign? I have ones I have found, but wondering if there is a very good master resource out there. How many key phrases do you typically add to an 'Exact Match' ad group? Thank you!

    | SEOSponge
    0

  • Hi there I have been optimising an e-commerce site snowsupermarket.co.uk and it's range of products available to B2C customers. I have now been asked to do the same for the B2B site  shop.snowbusiness.com which sells the same products but also, many more. My question is, Should i use completely different meta information or choose keywords that are my second choice? Both sites are also on the same IP - would this be a problem with potential duplicate content? Many thanks in advance, Ben

    | SnowFX
    0

  • Hello there, given that in the banners we offer a promotion with "some bonus if you sign up", what is from your experience a good CTR for a Google AdWords Remarketing banner campaign? Many thanks to everyone that answers. YESdesign

    | YESdesign
    0

  • I have a customer that I did SEO work for.  I cleaned up title tags, content, image tags, the works.  Recently, they signed up with Reach Local to do some Pay Per Click.  The problem/question I have is that reach local completely copied the entire site and put it on their server.  So all my work for this company is now completely replicated.  Now there are two sites.  ex. windowname.com and windowname.reachlocal.net.  It appears they do this for all their customers.  Does Google view this as duplicate content? Does my regular website lose positioning to the more powerful ReachLocal?

    | smartlinksolutions
    0

  • I've got a client who is using a third party for cpc ads, to track these we need to give the third party admin access to google analytics.  Being that we are seeing massive discrepancies in reported cpc ads and refunds etc.. have been offered, I can't trust that as an admin they won't delete the profile with all data proving reason for refund. Can we create a second google analytics account (not profile) to protect the data? We want to give access to sensis to the new account so we can start seeing the cpc separation in traffic source from now while ensuring the existing account can't disappear.

    | salemtas
    0

  • Hello. How much of a difference does it make in click-throughs to be the first listing in Google Adwords versus the second or third (still at the top of the page)? Thank you!

    | nyc-seo
    0

  • Hello. If I have a keyword in Google Adwords that is using phrase match ("keyword"), could it be useful to add the keyword phrase "keyword nyc"? Even if I did not add the second keyword phrase, my ad would be triggered if someone searched for "keyword nyc." So would it be redundant to add the second keyword phrase? Thank you!

    | nyc-seo
    0

  • Thanks for any help on this, I wanted to know what are the most Important Local Business Directories for SEO? I have come a crossed a few sites that list tons of directories, but I wanted to know if anyone here is a top list. Also can it hurt to be on to many?

    | quailadv
    0

  • We have an relatively old ad group running (from 2009) with an okay history. The average CTR is 3,19% and average position of **4,2. ** But the conversion (on website) is not really great. This has to do with bad landing pages, on products we don't actually want to sell. It's complicated but we have a new, better, landing page that we would like to advertise. Some ads would have to be combined, and others will have to be removed. Also the URLs will change. It would probably be best to start a fresh, new, clean ad group with a better structure. It would also be less work. The problem is; would this be a waste of the age and history of the current ad group? How big of a factor is this?

    | Qon
    0

  • We offer several services (carpet cleaning, tile cleaning, fire & water restoration and rug cleaning and repair) in about a 50 mile geographic area (Puget Sound, WA.) We have optimized our main site, set up 4 microsites to support our main services and are now running 4 Adwords campaigns. We believe we are on the right track, but would like to hear from others who have multiple products/services to sell primarily in about 10 major city areas.  What has worked for you? Thanks.

    | ibizworks
    0

  • Hello. Is it worth running ads for both of the following keywords in Google Adwords (phrase match for both)? 1. "keyword one" 2. "keyword one nyc" If I don't run the second keyword, my ad will still be triggered by a search for "keyword one nyc." So is there a benefit to running both? By the way, the Google Adwords campaign is limited in geography to the NYC metropolitan area. Thank you!

    | nyc-seo
    0

  • Hi, I'm pretty new to this but I'm doing my best, so I've created a few campaigns such as 'Guitars' and 'Drums' and started to add keywords to each one such as 'buy guitars online' etc would it also be wise to add brands to this campaign? or should I create a completely different campaign focusing solely on brands? What would you recommend? Thanks, Dan

    | Sparkstone
    0

  • We have a google shopping feed setup for an existing ecommerce website.  We now have a new unrelated ecommerce website and want to setup a google shopping feed for that website. Is it best to add that feed to the same adwords account as the previous website or to create an entirely new adwords account login for the new site?

    | JGar-220371
    0

  • Hi, Just a quickie. Has anyone on here used Adspert, or a similar bid management tool? We are currently trialing it, but I have mixed feelings about it. Most of our campaigns have the option of using conversion optimiser and I wonder if I would be better using the Google tools. What are your thoughts? Thanks Steve

    | Steve25
    0

  • I thought this was weird and was wondering if anyone knows the answer to this... I attached the image so you can see what I mean. How does this company get away with having more characters than what Google Adwords allows? And why is there a "block ads from" thing underneath this ad, but not the others? Sorry for the bad arrow, I'm on Windows XP lol Thanks you 🙂 G2d9gIr.jpg

    | jhinchcliffe
    1

  • What is the best way to get a good cpc estimate other than actually running the campaign? I have had several people asking for budgets and wasn't sure how to answer. Any suggestions?

    | ClickIt
    0

  • Sorry in advance.... I've used search on the SEOMoz site and Google but not found an exact answer to my question. I am looking at starting PPC campaign - do I need all variations of these keywords or is google clever enough to work on dashes etc... I want the keyword phrase to come up with loads of different locations. Do I need to input them all separately like I have below? 1. Keyword Sample Phrase 2. Keyword-Sample Phrase 3. KeywordSample Phrase 4. Keyword Sample Phrases 5. Keyword Sample Phrase Location 6. Keyword-Sample Phrase Location 7. KeywordSample Phrase Location 8. Keyword Sample Phrases Location Thanks in advance....

    | JohnW-UK
    0

  • I "upgraded" one of my campaigns to Enhanced Campaigns. Now my text ads appears with a phone number to the right of the Headline. Can I turn this off for desktop and laptops and only show our phone number / click to call button on mobile devices? That's how I had it set up before. Now it seems like Enhanced Campaigns is forcing the phone number in your text ads across all devices. Thanks.

    | FSS
    0

  • If I have two company A and B. Company A: bid on key word exact [Nike and Jordan] Company B: bid on broad match Jordan shoesks Considering that broad match use related words I noted that google display both ads if I search Nike and Jordam (shoes is related with Nike). My question is: bid of B is competing with bid of A? therefore CPC of A increase because of B? Tks

    | fabrico23
    0

  • So I work in a very niche industry and compete very well with Google PPC. I was recently able to acquire domains of keywords that drive almost 40% of all our paid traffic and quite a bit of organic traffic as well. The problem is that these keyword domains carry no authority (obviously because i just bought them). Would i be best served to just do redirects with these names to my current site(s)? Or i was also thinking about setting up independent blog sites that would link back to my main site. I' was also thinking of changing the domains of my paid google ads to align with the recently acquired links.... Thanks in advance for your help!

    | ckonicek
    0

  • If you run an Adwords banner campaign with retargeting, how is the cost per click determined? My hunch is that it would be different than text ads in search result pages.

    | ProjectLabs
    0

  • This has come up recently internally as we are an agency that traditionally only focuses on SEO. However, when asked to articulate the benefits of how they can work together I normally see rather vague and non-actionable answers that don't really translate to real life always. I can understand how you can use SEO techniques to improve the ROAS of a PPC campaign by improving the quality of a landing page. I am also aware of a number of ways you can use Adwords data from your campaign to improve your SEO campaign but I am curious to know. How else can the two channels work together to help each other out?

    | SearchAcademy
    0

  • I am looking for the best blogs on Product listing ads and paid Google adwords. Let me know what you guys have for these Thanks!

    | Gordian
    0

  • Hi Mozzers! Our company has hundreds of PPC landing pages which are essentially request a quote forms. We also have a request a quote form on our website that is for regular traffic. Currently we just added the "noindex" meta tag to all our PPC landing pages, but I think we can improve this. Should we remove the "noindex" tag, and instead add a rel canonical link pointing to our "main" request a quote form? Thoughts?

    | Travis-W
    0

  • I have two pages for this example. http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes/ http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes-melbourne/ The first URL is an SEO optimised page. The second URL is 99% the same, except that it specifies a city. It's intended use of for a PPC campaign. The first page has major cities mentioned on the page so I don't have to build a separate page for every city variation. The second URL is designed to be city specific for a geographically targeted PPC campaign. The more specific, the higher the conversion rate. Should the second page (the PPC landing page) use a canonical URL (since it's 99% the same) or should it be noindex?

    | designquotes
    0

  • Hi, I am a new member and fairly new to PPC. I have a service based site (car detailing) and I have been using Adwords for quite sometime now. My primary question is about tracking conversions. I have dedicated landing pages for each one of my ad groups (and some kw specific landing pages). When a potential customer lands on one of my pages - lets say my "car wash" page, they have the option to: Call from that page to book a service (I have a trackable number on that pages) Book online (its a 3rd party booking app with no tracking functionality) Continue to my main site for find out about our other services (I have a few outbound links set up on the page) But, I am running into problems when it comes to conversion tracking. I am not doing any call tracking via Adwords, so what would be the most effective way for me to track conversions? A) Should I set up event tracking in order to count outbound clicks as conversions? B) Should I remove all outbound links from that landing page and use the custom phone number on that page? My fear with this option is that customers may want to see additional services that are on my primary site. Therefore, I don't want to limit them to that landing page only. C) Should I use Adwords call tracking? If I go this route, I would have to decrease my campaign budgets in order to offset the call tracking costs. Or maybe there is another option I should consider that someone with more experience could offer. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

    | Headwurdz
    0

  • I am playing with Adwords and want to use the broad match modifier, however I see some examples always using the + in front of every keyword and some with with it on just the secondary keyword or more e.g. personalised +towels
    +personalised +towels Does this give different results? And which is best practice

    | Towelsrus
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.