Paid Search

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Search marketers are often advised that they need to deploy advanced techniques to achieve superior results. What many don't realize is that some of the best time and money saving devices come built right into the main paid search interfaces. Costly third-party solutions are often redundant. Here are a few reminders of how powerful the platform can be if you just use it correctly.

Matching options

Although you probably won't fare well with a lot of single-word, broad match keywords, do remember that by using broad matching or phrase matching, you're covering a large keyword universe. There is only a slight benefit to loading up your campaign with obscure three- and four-word phrases. Matching options are slightly more transparent in Google than they are in Yahoo!. Read the documentation to be sure.

Bucket your keywords

There are many good reasons to think in terms of clumps or groups of thematically similar key phrases, rather than in terms of thousands of individual phrases. Treating groups of keywords as one allows you to gather usable sales conversion information faster, without overreacting to the happenstance that a particular low-volume phrase had, say, a 100% or 0% conversion rate. By assessing conversion rates in groups, you achieve a "smoothing" effect on the data. You can always get more granular later.

Making global changes

Google offers great power tools in the AdWords interface to do things like change ad copy or destination URL's across an account. You can even raise all bids by x% for, say, all keywords with average ad positions lower than 5.0. Just look in the upper right-hand corner of the AdWords interface, above the "Search My Campaigns" box. Click on the link to "Advanced Search." A menu of power tools is provided from there. Another handy time-saver is the AdWords Editor, an offline campaign management tool you download to your desktop. It will help you do your job faster if you have a significant campaign overhaul to accomplish.

Content bidding

No longer is it necessary to "mirror" campaigns if you want different bids on content targeting in Google. But you do need to make sure to go into Campaign Settings and enable "Content Bidding." Then, take care to set all of your content bids lower than your search bids, throughout your account. (You can use the little yellow arrow to enable the same bid for a full page of keywords.) Sometimes your differential bids don't take effect and you're left with the higher defaults, so be sure to double-check your bids.

Ad Scheduling

Do you feel (or know) that you have poor ROI performance at night, or on Fridays? Using the Ad Scheduling ("dayparting") feature from within AdWords campaign settings, you can turn campaigns off, or just reduce bids by say 40%, for any day or time period. Use "Advanced Mode" for maximum precision. Uncheck the scheduler in campaign settings if you want to revert to your standard bid scheme. MSN adCenter has a nice implementation of this feature -- more advanced than Google's because you can mix in demographic targeting to "boost" a bid for certain types of searchers. Yahoo! Search Marketing currently does not offer this.

Take the trouble to learn new features in the Big Three paid search platforms, and you'll be improving your accounts using custom techniques designed by you. No extra charge.

Andrew Goodman is Principal, Page Zero Media, and author, Winning Results with Google AdWords (McGraw-Hill, second edition due out Oct. 2007).