Google Adwords Click Through Rate. What is it and how does it work?

Part 1 in a 3 Part Series

When it comes to advertising on Google Adwords, everyone wants to pay less for each click, yet still rank high enough that you get great traffic to your site so that visitors can buy things, use your service etc. 

By now most advertisers know that just bidding the most for a keyword is not the way to reach number one and definitely not the way to stay profitable.  Google uses a quality based bidding system, specifically Quality Score and Click Through Rate.

Have you ever been puzzled at just how Google calculates Click Through Rate (CTR), Quality Score (QS) and how it affects where your ad shows?  This is the first in the three part series.  There's alot of good information here that will save you alot of headaches.  In this post, we'll give a basic idea of how CTR is calculated here.  A bit on how to use this information will come in a future post.

Click Through Rate.  How Much Do People Like your Ad?

Google Adwords uses click through rate as one of the factors to establish quality score.  Quality score in turn accounts for how much you'll spend on each click and where your ad will show vs. your competitors ads, whether #1, 3, 4, etc.  How do you calculate Click through rate (CTR)?  It is the amount of times your ad was clicked on divided by the total amount of times your ad was shown (impressions) to searchers.

CTR calcuation:  clicks divided by impressions. 

For example:

1000 clicks divided by 10000 impressions = 0.10 or 10 % CTR

500 clicks divided by 10000 impressions = 0.50 or 5 % CTR

100 clicks divided by 10000 impressions = 0.01 or 1 % CTR

As you can see all three ads showed up 10000 times (or 10000 impressions).  The more clicks, the higher the CTR, which is what you want.  Why?  CTR is one of the main factors in having great Quality Score.  And because  Google Adwords rewards those who have the best CTR with better quality score it is best to focus on getting that CTR up and not just upping your bids. 

Check out Google's simple video below to see this visually:

Click Through rate is a piece of the pie in Adwords but an important metric for success.  How does it relate to Quality Score?  And how can you use quality score to lower your cost per click, raise your ranking in the Adwords results and get people to your site profitably?  Next month we'll have a on the often mysterious topic of Quality Score:  

Understanding Adwords Part 2:  Google Adwords Quality Score. Decoding it (Somewhat)

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How to Setup Up Microsoft AdCenter to Manage Clients - Part 1

So your clients love the awesome work you did on the Google Adwords PPC accounts.  But they want more!  What next?  Its time to start advertising on Microsoft (Bing) AdCenter PPC plaform. 

Why Should They Advertise on Microsoft AdCenter?

Since about 2010 Microsoft not only provides search results for Yahoo! but also provides Pay Per Click ads for both Yahoo! & Bing.  So by having your clients advertise on MS AdCenter, you're getting them the other 25 or so percent of search traffic they don't reach by only using Google Adwords to advertise with.

Frustration turned to Happiness!

But how to set things up right at the beginning so you can manage all your clients AdCenter PPC accounts in one umbrella account just like you do using Google Adwords My Client Center (MCC)?  There are a few steps, and at times it doesn't make sense. 

I had to call Microsoft, spend hours figuring it out and this and the following few posts will help you to set things up right, avoid frustration and many hours of work.  

This series of 4 posts will explain:

1.  How to set up the main umbrella or shell account.

2.  How to have your clients invite this manager account to manage their accounts.

3.  How to set up users to manage the accounts you've been invited to manage.

4.  The last post will show how to import your clients Adwords campaigns into AdCenter.

How to Set Up the Master Client Manager Account

You'll have to first set up a master "shell" account.  So:

  1. Sign up for an Adcenter account.  Since you wont be using this account to actually run PPC campaigns, you really don't have to ad billing info.  
  2. Be sure to use not your personal name but something generic such as your business name so other people can log in if needed.
  3. Add all your company's relevant information. 

That's it!  And its the easiest part, in part two you'll have to create and assign users to actually manage the accounts.

Can You Have Multiple Adwords Remarketing Codes On A Page- Yes!

As many know, using Adwords Remarketing (also called retargeting) to get your message across to people who visited your site but did not convert is awesome.  It's a great way to market to people after they leave your site- and it works! 

However, a common question is in setting things up is:  How can I make sure that people who have converted (bought something, signed up for something, etc.) no longer see my Remarketing codes?  You'd set up a Custom Combination.  You could have this combination set up like so:  Show my ads to everyone who visited the site but did not convert.  So you'd put one code on your site that shows up on every page, and one code that shows up only on the "thank you" or "order confirmation" page. 

Here's the even more common question:  If you put the code on every page of the site and another code on the "thank you" page, wouldn't you have to make sure that the code that's on every page of the site is not on the thank you page, aka wouldn't that confuse Google's tracking to have them both on the same page, and how do you do that? 

This is a valid question as you don't want the two codes not working correctly.  Also, usually when you put a code so it shows up on every page of the site, you usually drop it in the footer, header or some part of a template that automatically shows up on every page on the site so you don't have to paste it in each page, one at a time.  Finally, if you did have to exclude a code that shows up on every page of the site from just one page such as a thank you page, it may be a paint to do this or impossible?  So with these thoughts in mind here's the answer right from Google regarding the question:

If you put the code on every page of the site and another code on the "thank you" page, wouldn't you have to make sure that the code that's on every page of the site is not on the thank you page, aka wouldn't that confuse Google's tracking to have them both on the same page? 

Answer:  No, you can multiple Remarketing codes on the same page.

Answer straight from the Google team:

Thanks for writing in.

Yes, you can have multiple remarketing codes on a single page as long as
they are tracking multiple actions. Thus in this case the codes will work
fine, since the 'all visitor' tag is placed on all pages. Thus a user
would be part of this list even before he lands on the thank you page.

Once on the Thank you page, the user gets added to the 'signed up' list.
The custom combination you have created is also perfect since it includes
all users in the all visitors list and excludes all users in the 'signed
up' list.

Some other cases where you can have multiple lists on same page:
1. Track users for multiple attributes - list for all users who visit the
website and all users who a certain page. Using this we can
create lists for users who visited the website but did not go to that certain
page.
2. Track users in specific duration - list for all users who visited the
website in last 60 days and another list for users who visited in last 30
days. Using this we can create custom list of users who visited the
website in between 60 and 30 days.

Thanks Google! 

So, in review:  If you need to put a remarketing code on every page on your site, paste that in.  It may also show up on the conversion page, no problem.  Then drop the code for the conversion page on that page only.  Wait until your audiences get 100 total visitors between the two codes.  Create a Custom Combination of everyone who visited the site but did not convert.  Make some ads- Start remarketing to those potentially lost visitors.  Done!

Knowing this definitely simplifies the putting of Adwords Remarketing codes in, doesn't it?

What has been your experience using remarketing?  Let us know!

Repeatable Remarketing Results Revealed- Meetup on 4/19/12

Great News!

Have you ever wondered how to use Google Adwords Remarketing to capture lost sales, or visitors to your website?  We'll, Hippo Internet Marketing & Training in Huntersville, NC (North of Charlotte) will be having a meetup to cover this exciting topic.  Here are the details:

This is going to be great stuff.  Hope you can make it!

Forex-ninjas.com & Other Refferal Sites- What You Need to Know.

You may have noticed in your Google Analytics reports of sites like the infamous forex-ninjas.com sending all sorts of traffic to your site. 

What's the deal with this and why is this happening?  Here's what you need to know:

Basically, when you see a site like forex-ninjas.com in your Google Analytics referrers its called referrer spam.  Here's how it work via a post by Martha Seroog:

  1. A website wants to increase its traffic artificially
  2. They visit your website, view your source code and grab your analytics code (yes, it's visible to anyone)
  3. They post your code onto their website (along with thousands of other site's codes)
  4. They visit their own site and ta-da...they appear in YOUR analytics report as a referring site.

What does this mean to you and what can you do about it?

You could perhaps make a filter for traffic from such sites.  But so many people have noticed this that you have to believe Google is on top of this and will be putting an end to forex-ninjas.com's sneakiness.

The down part of this is that all your clients will be asking you who forex-ninjas.com is and that it may artifically inflate your reports and/or make your bounce rates look strange. 

Any thoughts on how you are handling referrer spam?

p.s.:  Hat tip to these excellent posts.  Check them out:

http://dmjcomputerservices.com/blog/2012/01/13/forex-ninjas-in-your-analytics-you-have-referrer-spam/

http://www.sitepro.com/index.cfm/blog.entry/entryId/709/

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