Google recently created a search option for businesses to find Google Adwords Certified professionals and companies more easily.  The search engine lists all of the companies that have completed the Google Adwords certification tests and who have completed the business information in the Google Professional admin panel.

In addition to the badge that is available, like the image above, this search engine provides more credibility to Google Certified professionals and depending on how Google chooses to promote the search engine could lead to an increase in traffic and new business for many of the companies. Especially if Google chooses to advertise against some of the better keywords to promote their database of certified professionals.

I found it a little surprising that there are only 442 certified professionals and certified companies. Although the criteria is different to become a qualified individual versus becoming a qualified company, I would have guessed that there would have been more of each. The test is not very easy to pass and my guess is that many attempt to pass without reviewing the material beforehand and therefore are disappointed with the results. It is a course that I would recommend that all advertisers that are working with Google Adwords should take because it begins to give you an idea of how Google looks at advertising, how it prices clicks, and how it determines placement.

Hopefully, this search engine is promoted properly and has an impact for the professionals and companies who have taken and passed the Google Adwords Certification exam as that will lead to more people taking the exam and provide a good resource for businesses to find quality campaign assistance.

You can view my Google Adwords Certification or search the database of qualified professionals.

In order to continually improve your PPC campaigns, you should always have multiple ads running against each other so that you can test which one is the most effective and adjust accordingly. One of the elements that reduces your cost per click and improves the positioning of  your ad is your Click Through Rate(CTR). Click through rate is simple the number of times that your ad is shown(impressions) divided by the number of times a searcher clicked on your ads(click). The higher you can improve CTR, the overall improvement of your pricing and positioning.

One of the methods to improve CTR is to split test your ads and make small incremental changes to improve your CTR over time. While a lot of attention is focused on keywords and bid prices, ad copy is one element that is often neglected, but can have the same positive impact as all other elements. Small differences such as a change of a word or different punctuation have proven to have a significant impact for CTR.

To continually improve my ad copy performance, I use a program called Winner Alert. Winner Alert is simply a program that send you a report on a daily basis that identifies which ad copy is performing best for each of your ad groups. Winner Alert determines a winner after there have been a enough clicks to determine which ad is receiving a higher click through rate. This gives you a daily report that you can quickly login and make changes to your ads that are determined the loser. Using Winner Alert keeps ad copy at the top of your radar and will improve your overall campaign performance over time.

Setup of Winner Alert is easy. It requires that you setup a report to run daily in XML format, that is sent to an e-mail address that is specified in your account setup, so that they can monitor your account on a daily basis and send you a report. In order to get the most out of Winner Alert, your ppc campaigns need to be set to “run ads evenly.” If your campaign is set to run the best performing ad, then what I have found is that the new ads typically do not receive enough clicks to determine winners very quickly. When ads run evenly, the traffic is split to 50% and helps to improve ad performance much more quickly.

The only negative for Winner Alert from my perspective is the ability to change how frequently I want to receive the report. The option of receiving the report every other day or every third day would be plenty because depending on the size of the account and the number of clicks involved, most ad groups will not have a winner selected everyday or even every few days. This is more of a desire of mine, then a true need for the program. Besides that, Winner Alert has truly been helpful in improving campaign performance, but also not allowing ad copy to get lost in the many other tasks of managing campaigns. The cost is $19.95 for as many accounts as you have, therefore a small price to pay and one that should easily pay for itself with reduced click prices and improved performance.

Keywords are arguably the focal point of online marketing or at least the focal point for search engine marketing. There are tons of tools available for keyword research like the Google Keyword Tool, the SEOBook Keyword Tool, and Wordtracker, just to name a few.  All of these tools will give you a fairly exhaustive list of keywords related to a given topic that can be used for your pay per click or search engine optimization efforts. The problem with using these tools in the manner that most people use them is that there is little variation in your keywords, therefore your campaigns may mirror your competitors campaigns in a lot of regards. You need to differentiate yourself in order to get lower click prices.

One simple way to research new keywords that should be effective in your campaigns is to use Google’s Wonder Wheel. Wonder wheel is a tool that Google provides that gives you a deeper dive into search terms and the phrases that searchers use when they do not find the results they are looking for in their fist attempt. Microsoft Mutations is a similar product that has been around a few years, but does not work nearly as well as Wonder Wheel.

I will walk you through an example of how to use Google’s Wonder Wheel to find new keywords associated with the keyword phrase “Grocery Coupons.” From Google.com, after entering your keyword phrase, you must click on the the link labeled “Show Options.”

This will expand the window and create a new column on the left hand side. From there you need to click on “Wonder Wheel” which is a little more than half way down the left hand side of the page.

Once you have clicked on the wonder wheel link, the center column will change to a diagram that gives you several different keyword options that are related to your search term. These results are usually very general, but always closely related. to your term. The magic of this tool is it’s ability to give ideas of subsequent or more relevant searches that are being used that you can now consider for your PPC campaigns.

For this example, let’s focus on “online grocery coupons” as the keyword phrase that we want to drill down deeper with. Once we click on the phrase “online grocery coupons,” it gives us four more keyword phrases that we can consider adding to out campaigns. You can run these terms through the keyword tools mentioned above to see if they have a larger enough search volume to warrant the effort, but these are terms that give you an idea of how you can start to refine your keywords rather than just using “online grocery coupons.” Let’s go deeper into the results, this time let’s drill-down on “Kraft coupons.”

As you can see from these results we start to get into some heavily branded terms that could be used in your campaigns that are terms that searchers are using after they search for “Kraft coupons.” As a competitor to Kraft, these are terms that you could consider to try and grab business away from Kraft. Kraft can also use these terms to block competitors or increase their presence on certain terms so that they have presence on the search engine results pages in multiple places.

Testing the Wonder Wheel for a few minutes will give you plenty of ideas of different phrases that may want to add to your campaigns. Although, some of the terms will have low traffic volumes, the competition will also likely not be as intense as the general terms. You campaigns need a healthy mix of both. Wonder Wheel when used with other keywords tools gives you the keyword ideas to create that healthy mix.

After finishing yesterday’s post about negative keywords, I realized that there have been quite a few recent changes to the Google Adwords interface that have moved the location of some things. One of those changes was the location of the negative keywords. The new location is little more difficult to find and operates differently than in the past. Now you have theoption of adding negative keyword tabs a ad group level or at a campaign level. This is helpful if you are geographically targeting a campaign, but want to restrict certain terms from a particular ad group, you now do not have to create different campaigns for each. The recent changes have made it easier for you to manage your negative keywords.  I will cover two ways to ad negative keywords to your campaign, one option is to use the Google Adwords web interface and the other option is to use Google Adwords Editor which is a desktop application for managing your Google Adwords Account.

The first method I will cover is using the Google Adwords web interface:

To find the negative keywords, open one of your campaigns and click the “keywords” tab. This will take you to the individual keywords that are included in that ad group.

Once you have opened the keywords tab, scroll to the bottom until you the link that says “Negative Keywords.” This is where your negative keywords are located and where you will be able to add new negative keywords or delete existing negative keywords. Click on the “Negative Keywords” link to expand the menu.

Now you have the option of adding negative keywords at an ad group level or at a campaign level. You will have to determine this by how you have structured your campaigns and your ad groups. For many of my campaigns, I have them structured in a way that adding the negative keywords at a campaign level is sufficient because the negative keywords apply to all of the ad groups. This is not always the case, but much of the time.

To add negative keywords at the ad group level, click on “add’” and the list will expand to show you all of your ad groups. You have to select an ad group in which you want to add negative keywords. The downside of the web interface version is that you can only ad negative keywords to one ad group at a time. If you have a lot of ad groups in your campaign, you can easily see how this could become very time consuming and repetitive. Add your keywords in the box that is provided, one per line.

That is it. To continue to expand your keyword list and to ensure that your keywords are being excluded, you should schedule your “placement query” report to run either daily or weekly so that you can review the terms that triggered your ad ad caused people to click. You will often be very surprised at some of the search terms that people use.

To add negative keywords in Google Adwords is a little bit easier in my opinion. If yu are not using Google Adwords Editor, I suggest you download it here.  Once inside you will see that all of your campaigns are listed on the left. If you click on any of the campaigns, the list will expand and show all of your ad groups. This is how you will be able to add negative keywords at either the campaign level or the ad group level.

In my example below, I have decided to add negative keywords at an ad group level. Once you have clicked on the ad group in the left-hand column that you want to add, then click the tab titled “Negatives” in the main panel. Now you have the option to adding multiple negative keywords to your campaign adding them individually. You can also add negative sites from this menu if you are using the content network in your campaign. Google Adwords Editor also gives you the option of determining which match type you want your negative words to apply to. Your best bet is to make it broad so that it covers all match types and does not cause you to pay for unwanted clicks.

After you have added your negative keywords and made any other changes to your campaigns that are needed, then you have to post your changes. This is a simple step and once that must be followed whenever changes are made in Google Adwords Editor.

Developing your keyword list is very important to the success of your campaigns and producing a positive ROI. You can start with one of my negative keyword lists, but you should spend some time developing a thorough list for each of your campaigns. The cost savings and increased ROI will be well worth the effort.

One of the elements that Pay Per Click marketers often overlook in their quest to build massive keyword lists is the need to also build an equally massive negative keyword list for their PPC campaigns. If you are using broad match type in your PPC campaigns, then it is very likely that many of your ad impressions and clicks will come from keyword phrases that are not related to your business if your negative keyword list is not extensively built out.

An example is if you are advertising for the term “plastic surgery.” If using the broad match type for this keyword, your ad will appear when a person searches for “Dolly Parton Plastic Surgery” or “Madonna Plastic Surgery.” If the goal of your PPC campaign is to generate leads, then it is not very likely that a person that is searching for information about celebrity plastic surgeries will be a likely prospect for your business. This just unnecessarily inflates your impressions and probably decreases your Click Through Rate(CTR) which will have a negative impact on your click prices.

The list below is over 700 keywords that can be added to most consumer campaigns to help eliminate unwanted impressions and clicks. This list was compiled for a plastic surgery campaign that I was managing, but many of the terms that are included will apply to many other campaigns. This list was inspired by a post that I read that complied a list of 200 negative keywords for B2B campaigns. Many of the words were used in my list when they applied and I added many more. I also added different variations of many celebrity names so that is covered their full name as well as a single name if they are known by that.

Here is a small portion of the list:

travel
vacation
vacations
forum
forums
celebrities
celerity
Brooke Burns
Brook
Kate Walsh
Kate
statistics
Stats
pics
pictures
Photos
Images
Image
Sarah Jessica Parker
Sarah
Tourism
Tourist
Brooke Shields
Brooke
Britney Spears
Britney
Danger
Dangers
Addiction
Addicted
abroad
Katherine Heigl
Katherine
reviews
Christina Aguilera
Christina
Faith
Faith Hill
Madonna
Jennifer Love Hewitt
boards
board
Victoria Beckham
Beckham
Victoria
Spice Girls
Posh Spice
Scary Spice
Meg Ryan
Tori Spelling
Nikki Cox
Patricia Arquette
Patricia Heaton
Marg Helgenberger
Vanessa Williams
Neve Campbell
Teri Hatcher
Thora Birch
Salma Hayek
Hayek
Sharon Stone
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos
Rebecca Romijn
Phoebe Cates
Sigourney Weaver
Rashida Jones
Piper Perabo
Majandra Delfino
Lucy Liu
Lucy Lawless
Yasmine Bleeth
Gwyneth Paltrow
Paltrow
Gwyneth
Diane Lane
Amanda Peet
Kate Beckinsale
Angie Harmon
Goldie Hawn
Carrie Anne Moss
Hilary Swank
Lacey Chabert
Kim Basinger
Julia Stiles
Helen Hunt
Bridgette Wilson
Kelly Ripa
Christina Applegate
Demi Moore
Leila Arcieri
Keri Russell
Jennie Garth
Heather Locklear
Heidi Klum
Estella Warren
Lea Thompson
Jessica Biel
Laetitia Casta
Claire Forlani
Katie Holmes
Beyonce Knowles
Kate Winslet
Charlize Theron
Kate Hudson
Drew Barrymore
Alicia Silverstone
Will Smith
Emma Watson
Claudia Schiffer
Elsa Benitez

This is a small portion of the list and the entire list would have made this post much too long.  You can follow this link to download the entire negative keyword list.

For nationwide campaigns, there is a little used Google Adwords report that provides amazing insight into the perfomance of your campaign by geographic region. This report allows you to drill down to metro areas and determine which areas are producing the most conversions and leads or sales. This is beneficial because it allows you to separate poor performing metro areas from the better performing areas, which should decrease your cost per click and your cost per conversion. This also gives you the information needed to setup campaigns by regions in which you know there is stronger performance.

The performance statistics available on these geographic reports include impressions, clicks, CTR, average CPC and cost. The report offers these attributes, Country/Territory, Region, Metro, City, Ad Distribution, Daily Budget, Ad Variation, Ad Group Status, Campaign Status and Ad Delivery Channel. Plus it can be broken out into Campaign or Ad Group level. The one negative is that this report only allows for a daily breakdown where it would also be useful to view the weekly or monthly data over a long period of time.

The best way to analyze the data is to download the information into Microosft Excel and set up a pivot table. This will allow you to analyze all of the available metrics by geographic area. If you are not familiar with how to use pivot table, here is a short, detailed tutorial. Using the Google Adwords Geographical Performance Report will allow you to quickly focus your campaigns into smaller campaigns that perform better and provide a higher ROI for your PPC spend.