Remarketing is hot in the internet marketing world. It is becoming easier and cheaper to implement, thus lowering the barrier to entry. In the online world, the term “remarketing” is used to discuss efforts to acquire customers who have already visited your site or opened an email. If someone has never visited your site, you cannot “RE-market to them”.

As of today, remarketing is only used on the display network. However, it seems that Google or MSN could use that data to customize your search network ads sometime in the future. With the focus on “personalized search” I would think this is on its way.

Facts about Remarketing
The segment of traffic that comes to our site and leaves without converting will be the target of most remarketing campaigns. Since these visitors have already shown a previous interest in our site we can make three assumptions about them:

1. Remarketing segments will always be a subset of the general population. Thus, the impressions and traffic you receive are likely to be small.

2. Remarketing campaigns will cost less to convert since this segment has already demonstrated interest in your brand. We might think of their prior exposure to our brand as a kind of micro-conversion. If your brand is worth anything, remarketing should cost less than the general segment.

3. Remarketing segments are worth more to us than the general population. Feel free to spend more to insure these visitors see your ads.

Tips and More Details on Remarketing
Two other quick things that you need to know about remarketing. One, this remarketing “magic” is created done by using tagging in your analytics/ ppc/ display tool. Your analytics /ppc /display guy should be able to help you.

Keep it simple. There are many more advanced ways to use remarketing which are beyond the scope of this article. If you are not using remarketing, feel free to use it as I described. Even this is way beyond most companies’ capabilities (because they don’t get enough traffic, or lack the resources to analyze the data).

* There are some exceptions to this case. In ecommerce, often time customers need to be reacquired each time they search for a new product. However, let’s ignore this situation for the sake of simplicity.

1) What should I be spending per month
2) What will my setup costs be if I don’t already have an account.

What Should I Spend Per Month?
There are several ways to answer this question. You may want to consider these answers before you hire a pay per click management team. Some popular answers to this question are “what you can afford to lose”, “it depends on the industry”, and “about whatever you think you can afford to spend”. Those are all reasonable answers for some clients.

For advanced businessmen and women I think the following answer is better: “If you could buy one dollar bills for $.99, how many would you buy?” Obviously you would want to buy as many as possible, or spend infinite amounts. Even though margins are low (in this example), the more you spend, the more you make.

Would you still be interested in this deal if you had to pay someone else to arrange this service for you? Again, the answer would be yes. While this eats into your margins (again), you are still in a position to make a ton of money if you put up the money.

Lets bring this back to pay per click. Due to advances in tracking technology, we are able to calculate the amount of money you are spending and the amount of money you are making directly from pay per click ads. If this is a positive number, it is no different than the above example, where you are buying dollar bills for $.99.

This advice has is limitations, but not in the ways you might expect. The obvious limitation is that there is not an infinite supply of customers. This manifests itself in the following way: the more you spend, the higher the cost of acquisition, which will eat into your margins. However, if you do not yet have a solid account, you probably do not need to be concerned about this.

Setup Costs
The other limitation to this advice is that it will cost you money to get your account to a profitable state. Accounts are rarely profitable on day one. You will have to invest some money upfront in your advertising, just like all other forms of advertising. This cost varies from company to company. A pharmaceutical company that advertises to every country will pay a lot more than a mom-and-pop button-making shop that serves only San Diego.

Thus, there are two variables to keep in mind that will affect your startup costs (not to be confused with “setup costs”, which is the cost your ppc company charges you to setup the account): How competitive your industry is and how large the geographic region you want to advertise to is.

An advertiser spends $100 every day of the week except for Wednesdays. On Wednesdays, the company spends $250. Currently Adwords does not allow you to easily account for this scenario. The closest they come is Google offers you the ability to bid a certain percentage higher or lower on certain days.
That is not what we want.

We could wake up at 12am on Wednesday and change the spend from $100 to $250 and then change it back at midnight. However that seems like a lot of work, with not enough return.
However, there is another way. An Adwords hack, if you will. It ads a lot of complexity to the account, so I only recommend this solution for advertisers that anticipate a great discrepancy in daily spending (based on the day of the week).

Here is how it works: (We will pretend you have an account with one campaign for simplicity sake.)

1) Turn off all spending on Wednesdays by bidding on keywords at 0% on Wednesdays.
2) In Google Adwords Editor copy the campaign and repaste it. Rename the new Campaign “Wednesdays”.
3) In the “Wednesdays” campaign, turn off spending on all days except Wednesday. Set the daily spend to $250.

The result is that campaign one will bid $100/day mon, tue, thur, fri, sat, sun. Your new “Wednesday” campaign will bid on the exact same keywords on Wednesdays but the daily spend will be $250 on Wednesdays.

You can repeat this process for multiple campaigns if you have more than one.

Ideally, this seems like a feature that would be should be addressed by Google’s people. Perhaps it could be added to the interface to save time and avoid confusion.
If you need help with this procedure contact me.

The List

1) Common sense-This one is often overlooked. If a grocery store solicited my help I know a ton of their keywords because I have seen a grocery store.

2) Keyword tools- Google Adwords Keywords tool and Yahoo both have free keyword tools with real data from searches people have performed. There are also good paid alternatives.

3) Website analysis. Look at the content of the webpage. There are also tools that can extract that data. The navigation and breadcrumbs can be helpful.

4) Competitors- Look at the content of the webpage of the competition.

5) Yahoo’s search home page- do a couple “bad” searches and Yahoo will show a list of related searches. Those are keywords.

6) Analytics-In your analytics. You are running analytics right? It will send you the keyword people are searching for when then used a search engine to get to your site.

7) Internal search-what are people searching for on your site? Those are keywords.

8 Competitive intelligence reports-Companies like Compete.com sell information on you and your company that may be useful.

9) The company-I listen to the language the stakeholders and employees use in our correspondence. Also, it never hurts to ask them if they thought I missed anything, but that is always at the end of the keyword expansion phase and campaign building phase.

Perhaps a new product might come in or a new corporate trend might develop that is outside the scope of analytics.

10) My experience-I have built umpteen campaigns and I have a certain feel for it.

(You may only recreate portions of this list if you keep the text and links unchanged and attribute the list to RoseOspreyMarketing.com.)

No! We don’t want exposure in itself (since we are paying for this exposure); we want exposure to potential customers.
There are really two challenges here:
1) limiting the exposure of your ads so as to save money
2) Only showing your ads to potential customers.
While you may not have experience in the pay per click field with this strategy, you have experienced it in your everyday TV-viewing life.

Filtering by Language and Location
The first large filter in advertising is language. When I am watching TV, I never receive ads from pepsi in Farsi. It is in English. Or your Lingua-Franca. The second large filter is location. I don’t see commercials for British restaurants. Though they speak the same language as I do, the physical distance is too great for me to be considered a potential customer.
This level of filtering in advertising is as simple as it gets. The same rules that apply to TV advertising apply to ppc advertising.

In many cases, you can go right now to your campaigns and click the “off” button for non-English languages, and countries outside the U.S. (or wherever you live). Your conversion rates will improve instantly. Check your settings now.

Filtering by Using Negative Keywords in PPC
Have you ever been watching a football game and there is a commercial for tampons? It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is pretty entertaining. This is an example of advertisers wasting money by targeting the wrong audience. This happens ALL THE TIME in ppc advertising.
One of the more difficult aspects of ppc advertising is deciding who I should block from seeing my ads.
I am currently running a campaign for a hotel in Minneapolis*. How would I describe it if I were to be honest with you: It is a small hotel, not luxurious or expensive, not what I would call a 5 star hotel or suite. It is not the type of hotel you would find valet parking or limos.
Notice that I listed several qualities that the hotel lacks. That is not because I am (necessarily) a negative person, it is because this is a tool I use in ppc.  I can now take that list of qualities that my product does not have and add them to the negative (also called excluded) keyword list.
-limo
-expensive
-luxury
-suite
-five star

Now if anyone does a search with any of those words, my ad automatically cannot appear. So if someone searches for “inexpensive Minneapolis hotel with limo” I don’t want to show my ad.
But I have so many of the desirable qualities this person is searching for. Maybe we should show them the ad just in case.

No.
They will find an inexpensive hotel with limo services or they will perform a different search. Perhaps our ad will show up then. We do not want people clicking our ads for services we do not sell.

Conclusion
So, do your campaigns have negative keywords? Think of all the words that DON’T describe your product or business and write them down in a spreadsheet. Add them as negative words. Your conversion rates will improve, your quality scores will improve and you will be spending less.

*Details changed slightly

Organic is “free” traffic, in a sense. Organic’s only cost is the  labor put in to optimizing your site. Pay-per-click traffic costs you labor plus the cost of a click. That is, you are charged each time someone clicks on your ad.

This shows the search results for a random term "topaz jewelry".

Key

• The red areas are pay per click.
• The purple area is organic search.
• The green area (shopping results) is referred to as “paid inclusion”; it is managed through Google Base. This is usually managed by a feed. It is fairly cost effective, but you have very little control over when and where your products are shown.

While it is easier to stick all keywords into one ad it is not cost effective. Your ROI will be lower because you will pay more per click than a person who segments their ads. High quality ads are rewarded with lower costs per click.

Each of the Big three pay per click companies (MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Google Adwords) use quality score as a way to reduce your cost per click. Most second-tier search engines use quality score as well.

Creating PPC Campaigns
Sometimes it can be hard to think of a logical way to create adgroups, especially for those new to PPC or for agencies that are working with a company for the first time. Here is one technique that I use that is very helpful:

Imagine that you have a client or you are a company with thousands of SKUs, across several verticals, like Bestbuy.com. If I was asked to start their campaign from scratch, it seems like a very daunting task. So where would I begin? I would look at their websites’ navigation.

Selecting and Ordering PPC Campaigns
Just like PPC advertising, one of the aspects of good website design is grouping products into a logical order. Taking a look at the top-level navigation shows us the categories that the company uses to separate their products.

I would start by creating a separate campaign for each of the top level categories. TV & Video would be 1 campaign, “Audio” would be another campaign, etc. (The TV AND Video is a hint that these might be two individual categories as well. So I would create one campaign for TV and one for Video.)

Think of campaigns like the departments in the store. If the campaigns are the departments then adgroups are the rows. Keywords are the products.

Selecting and Ordering Adgroups
I want to select adgroups that are quite narrow so as to keep a high quality score. How narrow? For a large store like Bestbuy this can be a little tricky. The adgroups will consist of groupings that are smaller than campaigns but larger than keywords. Where can I find information on a big site like this?

Once again we are helped out by the fact that Bestbuy is a well-designed site.

Take a close look at the “breadcrumbs”:

The furthest down on the navigation level will always (usually?) be the product (or service to buy or product to download, etc). The trail of breadcrumbs shows the path we used to get from the category which is the most general group to the product. The levels in between the product and the category are good candidates for adgroups.

If a site doesn’t have breadcrumbs you might be able to use a similar “trick” by looking at the product URL. A site that does this well is Calloway Golf. Here is the URL for product called an “X tour Wedge”; a type of gold club:

http://www.callawaygolf.com/Global/en-US/Products/Clubs/Wedges/X-TourWedges.html

Keyword: X tour wedge
Adgroup: Wedges
Campaign: clubs

Keywords
If you have used the method I have described, this is the easy part. By that I mean, you will now know where to put those keywords you have been wanting to bid on!

In summary, these are not necessarily the recommendations I would recommend to Calloway or BestBuy, but this provides a useful starting point for tackling a large project. Using a websites’ navigation, breadcrumbs and URL are great tools to help create your PPC campaigns achieve high quality scores.