With the release of the latest version of the AdWords API, Google advertisers have a hugely expanded array of keyword research tools at their fingertips. In the past, API users were able to get a list of keyword synonyms or a list of keywords Google associated with a specific url, along with the average monthly searches for the keyword. The problem was that only “broad match” counts were possible (through the API). And broad match counts differ significantly from exact match counts, which estimates of the actual number of searches that occurred on the keyword. While it was possible to get counts associated with the three types (broad, exact, and phrase) through the AdWords interface, keywords or urls had to be checked manually, one at a time. With the API, its possible to cycle through hundreds of urls, get keyword recommendations back from Googlebot which can be used as part of a deep linking AdWords campaign.

That issue is solved with the new release. Counts can be requested for broad, exact, or phrase match types. But that’s just a beginning.

The new keyword targeting service allows API users to request a much expanded list of search parameters, speficially:

* KeywordCategoryIdSearchParameter
* RelatedToKeywordSearchParameter
* RelatedToUrlSearchParameter
* SeedAdGroupIdSearchParameter
* AverageTargetedMonthlySearchesSearchParameter
* CompetitionSearchParameter
* CountryTargetSearchParameter
* ExcludedKeywordSearchParameter
* GlobalMonthlySearchesSearchParameter
* IncludeAdultContentSearchParameter
* KeywordCategoryIdSearchParameter
* KeywordMatchTypeSearchParameter
* LanguageTargetSearchParameter
* MobileSearchParameter
* NgramGroupsSearchParameter
* RelatedToKeywordSearchParameter
* RelatedToUrlSearchParameter
* SeedAdGroupIdSearchParameter

And, the new service supports a research into keywords associated with Google content network. User can create queries of the content network with selections include:

* AdTypeSearchParameter
* CountryTargetSearchParameter
* LanguageTargetSearchParameter
* PlacementTypeSearchParameter
* RelatedToKeywordSearchParameter
* RelatedToUrlSearchParameter

The list of outputs from the service is vastly expanded as well. It includes:

Expand AD_SHARE AD_SHARE
Represents the percentage of the time that the advertiser’s ad (if applicable) was shown for queries associated with the given keyword idea.

Expand APPROX_CONTENT_IMPRESSIONS_PER_DAY APPROX_CONTENT_IMPRESSIONS_PER_DAY
Represents the (approximate) number of impressions per day for this placement idea on the content network.

Expand AVERAGE_TARGETED_MONTHLY_SEARCHES AVERAGE_TARGETED_MONTHLY_SEARCHES
Represents the average number of searches (approximated) on this keyword idea, targeted to the specified geographies.

Expand COMPETITION COMPETITION
Represents the relative amount of competition associated with the given keyword idea, relative to other keywords. This value will be between 0 and 1 (inclusive).

Expand EXTRACTED_FROM_WEBPAGE EXTRACTED_FROM_WEBPAGE
Represents the webpage from which this keyword idea was extracted (if applicable.)

Expand FORMATS FORMATS
Represents the various types of ads & sizes of ads that may render within the given placement idea.

Expand GLOBAL_MONTHLY_SEARCHES GLOBAL_MONTHLY_SEARCHES
Represents the (approximate) number of searches for the given keyword idea, independant of any geo settings.

Expand IDEA_TYPE IDEA_TYPE
Represents the type of the given idea.

Expand IN_STREAM_AD_INFO IN_STREAM_AD_INFO
Represents the duration(s)/other instream information, for the given placement idea. (if applicable)

Expand KEYWORD KEYWORD
Represents the Keyword corresponding to the given keyword idea.

Expand KEYWORD_CATEGORY KEYWORD_CATEGORY
Represents a category id for a category within the category hierarchy for keyword ideas.

Expand NGRAM_GROUP NGRAM_GROUP
Represents the ngram group for the given keyword idea.

Expand PLACEMENT PLACEMENT
Represents the Placement corresponding to the given placement idea.

Expand PLACEMENT_NAME PLACEMENT_NAME
Represents the publisher given name of the given placement idea (if applicable).

Expand SAMPLE_URL SAMPLE_URL
Represents a sample page upon which the given placement idea shows from the content network.

Expand SEARCH_SHARE SEARCH_SHARE
Represents the percentage of the time that the advertiser’s webpage (if applicable) was shown for queries associated with the given keyword idea.

Expand PLACEMENT_CATEGORY PLACEMENT_CATEGORY
Represents a category id for a category within the category hierarchy for placement ideas. Resulting attribute is IntegerAttribute.

Expand PLACEMENT_TYPE PLACEMENT_TYPE
Represents the type of media of the given placement idea. Some examples of this could include: videos on the web, web sites, flash games on the content network, website feeds, etc.

Expand PUBLISHER_DESCRIPTION PUBLISHER_DESCRIPTION
Represents the publisher-supplied description of the given placement idea.

Expand TARGETED_MONTHLY_SEARCHES TARGETED_MONTHLY_SEARCHES

The capabilities of the new keyword service vastly expands what has been possible in the past. This should be enough for AdWords professional that haven’t used the API in the past to rush out and get their API tokens.

Writers and editors have to adopt a very different mindset when they set out to write headlines and titles that will attract search engine visits rather than catch the eye of a passerby at the newsstand or the book store. While clever headlines might sell newspapers, they won’t do much to attract the search engine user. That’s because search engines are very good at giving the user results that are related to their specific search query. A user interested in finding a job at Goldman Sachs is likely to type into a search box “Goldman Sachs jobs” or “Careers at Goldman Sachs.”

A professional writer or editor, on the other hand,  has been trained to think of a clever, non cliched turn of phrase rather than the ultra prosaic “Jobs at Goldman Sach.”  He or she might title an article about the rebound at Goldman Sachs like “Goldman Sachs Gold Rush is Back!” or something much more clever.  The problem is is that the more clever the headline or title, the less likely it is that anyone might be searching on that specific phrase. After all, it’s clever because it’s unique, not because it’s obvious.

The search engines give great weight to the “title tag” when trying to figure out what the content of the page is about.  The title tag is the content in the html source  that appears between the <title>this is the title</title> in the <head> section at the top of the page.  Although the title tag is invisible to users on the page, it appears in the blue horizontal row at the top of the browser.  A good compromise for clever writers and editors is provide a <title> that matches what a user interested in the subject might type in a search engine.  He or she can save that very clever turn of phrase for the title that actually appears on the page itself, usually in the form of a <h1> tag.

My advice to writers and editors who want to have their copy read by large numbers of internet users and who want to help their companies sell more advertising, is work closely with your webmaster or search marketing staff to find out what keywords or phrases that have been identified as important to building traffic to the site.  Often, there will a relatively small list of, perhaps 50 or fewer words and phrases, that are highly relevant to the website but which are most frequently entered into search engines.  These are the works and phrases that you want to see included in the title tags and even the <h> tags as well.

Search engine marketing, in the broadest sense, refers to a set of strategies and techniques designed to help companies benefit from the activity that takes place on internet search engines.  That activity is important because  internet search has increasingly become today’s equivalent of the “yellow pages”; buyers use their keyboards and mice to identify shops that want to visit rather than their fingers “doing the walking” flipping the yellow pages . Yellow page publishing was always been a very good business (although much less a good business since Google and the search engines came along)   because it combined the user’s specific and strong buyer interest with a set of product and service categories.  Google and search engines in general are able to do that in a much more efficient manner by matching the search query with advertisers (who needs print anymore?).

The rising new discipline  of search engine marketing has to do with activities,  both paid and unpaid, that attempt to garner a significant share of the links that a search engine user might use after getting a result page from a search engine.  Within the discipline, practitioners differentiate between “search engine optimization’ (SEO) which are techniques and practices designed to improve rankings within the search engine’s “free” or “organic” listings, and “search engine marketing” or SEM in the narrow sense which is management of the search engine’s paid advertising services.

Given the volume of traffic and revenue that can follow successful implementation of SEO and SEM strategies, it can safely be said that these new disciplines are among the most competitive marketing activities ever undertaken.  There are literally thousands of self-proclaimed experts in the field, and given that Google never reveals the secret algorithms that determines winner and losers, it makes it extremely difficult for a buyer of SEO and SEM services to fugure our there to turn.

At Resolute Digital, we offers a few words of advice.

1) Your SEM or SEO vendor has to extremely familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (or another major analytics package).  Without a detailed understanding of these tools, they (and you) will be “dancing in the dark: which will surely cost you money.  We’re not talking about finding vendors that are “Google certified” because we’d like our analysts to be independently trained.    We don’t think it makes a lot of sense to use vendors that are trained by the company selling you the advertising.

2) Your vendor should be very comfortable with the more robust analytics software like Omniture, Unica, or Clicktracks (Lyris) since you may decide to avoid the Google “free” packages [Google supplies the software free of charge but gives itself a license, if you accept the Ts&Cs  to your data].

3) Your vendor needs to have programmers who are familiar with the APIs (application programming interfaces) of Google, Yahoo , and MSN (Bing) since it is virtually impossible to find efficiencies in these systems without using large volumes of keywords which requires an automated interface to manage (image managing the bids of 10 million keywords manually!).

4) Your vendor needs to have programmers that are still active.  Don’t sign up for an agency that uses software written 10 years ago.

5) From an SEO (free) perspective, signing on with the wrong vendor can land you in a Google “doghouse” that might takes years to get out of.  The initial SEO activity is all about details: select the right keywords to optimize for,  getting unique title  tags and meta description associated with each distinct page or url, and rewriting urls to simple and memorable urls if needed.  After all that, it’s then a process of identfying the right sites to link to you, contacting them, and convincing them you are worth a link.   Any shortcut in this process of likely to get you in the dreaded doghouse.

There are obviously many more details and issues to consider, but the above tips are enough to get you started.  When you are ready to work with a professional, give us a call.

Google introduced the quality score algorithm a few years ago in order to give it more control over the prices AdWords advertisers paid for the clickthroughs to their websites. The first cost per click bidding system introduced by Overture nearly a decade ago allowed advertisers to bid against each other for position in the paid ad listings. Overture ad “auctions” were quite transparent, with Overture even publishing the bids paid by competitors for the same keyword. (Overture was later acquired by Yahoo).

When Google launched AdWords, it included the click through rate as a factor in cost per click. An advertiser whose ad was able to attract a 2 percent click through rate and who posted a bid of $0.51 would be shown ahead of another advertiser for that keyword bidding $1.00.click with a 1 percent click through on its ad.

Google’s system worked well for advertisers who were able to get high click through rates and worked very well for Google, which was able to get higher yields from the cost per click ads by avoiding displaying large volumes of ads with low click through rates. Unfortunately, the AdWords auction became opaque since Google did not publish the CTRs or the advertisers bids. Advertisers had to guess what their competitors might be paying.

The landing page and keyword quality algorithms introduced a whole host of new factors that Google claims were designed to improve the user experience by displaying the right kinds of ads and links to the right kinds of sites. The current system employs quality scores for each keyword. Google says:

“It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

The quality score is important because it directly affects the amount an advertiser must pay for a click through in relation to other advertises. For example, and advertiser with a keyword quality score of 1 might have to pay $20 per click through which a competitor with a quality score of 8 might only have to pay $2.00 for the same click through (quality scores range from 1 to 10 from poor to excellent)

We are always working to improve the quality scores of our clients’ AdWords campaigns. We use a very easy method of monitoring these scores. To do this, you will need AdWords Editor, Excel, and the ability to create a pivot table. Here’s the step by step process:

1) Open Adwords editor and update for any changes in the account.
2) Selecting the keywords tab, select all the row and paste in an Excel spreadsheet (if you have very large AdWords campaigns – more than 66,000 keywords – you will need Excel 2007 which allows up to one million rows and make sure your computer has lots of memory)
3) Create a pivot table (“Insert > Pivot Table”) and set the “Row Label” to quality score and the “Values” to “Count of Keywords”
4) Now you have created a Quality Score Distribution Table. Add another column which calculates the percentage for each quality score. Create a graph, date it, and compare your progress as you make changes to the landing page and ad text.

Ideally, 80 percent of your keywords should be quality scores of 7 or higher. In the case of highly competitive keywords, it’s extremely difficult to get higher than 8 since Google appears to take into the account the popularity of the keyword in AdWords auctions in setting the quality score. Keep track of all you experiments. As Dr. Arrowsmith learned from his mentor Max Gottleb, good scientists take great notes. Good luck.