How to prevent competitors from seeing your AdWords ads
Feb 20, 2009 Pay Per Click
For whatever reason, you might decide you don’t want your competitors from seeing your AdWords ads. The reason can be as simple as suspecting your competitor might be clicking on your ads or perhaps a competitor keeps stealing your ad copy. Or you could just want your competitor to be searching for the golden keywords and not see any of your ads in sight, giving them the false sense of security that you must have pulled all your AdWords ads. And, of course, there are more nefarious reasons why one might want to do this 
By preventing your competitors from seeing your ads, it can also help preventing bidding wars for your best converting keywords. If Ad Ranks are equal between you and your competitor, top dollar wins. And if your competitors sit at their desks, checking their best keyword phrase and see themselves firmly planted at the top, they won’t bid higher and displace you from the top… even when the rest of the world clearly sees you at the top. It wouldn’t be the first time an advertiser sees their positioning data in AdWords and assume it must be some kind of glitch, or something to do with quality score, because when they search they can’t see anyone else’s ad above their own. And if they can’t see you are above them, they won’t start trying to outbid you, which means not only are you preventing your competitors from seeing your ads, you are also saving money by doing so.
So if you are wanting to block your competitors from seeing your AdWords ads, here are a couple of methods that will allow you to do this.
Geo-targeting against your competitors
Do you know were your competitors are located? Ideally, they are located in a less populated area where you can block a specific location or region from displaying your ads, or show your ads to other states only. However, if it is in a larger metropolitan area, such as New York City or Los Angeles, you have to take into account that you could be blocking a big chunk of potential traffic too.
There are two ways you can do this – by setting up campaigns for specific regions, or the far easier one of targeting all geographic locations, such as the entire United States, and then exclude specific regions. To exclude specific regions, you need to edit on a campaign level:
- On the Campaign Summary page, click the checkbox next to each campaign you wish to edit.
- Click Edit Settings.
- Click Edit next to Locations to change your campaign’s target locations.
- Once you’ve selected locations to target, click ‘Exclude areas within selected locations.’
- Browse the list of available areas and select those you’d like to exclude.
- Click Done excluding.
- Click Finished.
- Click Save Changes.
Don’t forget to take into account if your competitor has two partners located in completely different areas of the country, it is much more common than you think. If you aren’t sure, check whois data and “about us” pages. And if they have open profiles on LinkedIn or Facebook, many often list their locations, or if they are on Twitter, check and see if they have listed a location or have twittered something about their location recently. Or just ask others, someone is bound to know!
Do be aware there is the Ad Preview Tool which can work around your settings, as it allows advertisers to see ads in various countries and regions. But most advertisers tend to check regular Google results, and only use the Ad Preview Tool when making sure their own geo-targeting is working correctly.
IP Exclusion
You can exclude IPs two ways – by excluding a specific IP or my excluding an IP range. The first option is simple, just find out the IP of the person or company (many companies will share a single IP) and block that IP in each campaign. The option is somewhat hidden in your AdWords account if you don’t know where to look for it, but here is how to do it when you’ve signed into your AdWords account:
- Click Tools at the top of your Campaign Summary page.
- Click IP Exclusion under ‘Optimize Your Ads.’
- Select a campaign, and click Go.
- Enter the list of IP addresses to be excluded.
- Click Exclude IP Addresses.
The second option gives you the ability to block a larger group of IPs, since you Google only allows you to exclude 20 IP addresses per campaign. But of course, be careful that you don’t block an IP range that happens to cover half of your country, like this advertiser did So use the IP range option with caution.
If you don’t know your competitor’s IP address, go back and check your email in case they have ever emailed you about something (especially handy if you have ever spoken on a conference panel with any of them). If not, you can use an old trick advertisers used when trying to determine if a competitor was the one engaging in click fraud on ads – have someone send an email to the company asking something, and see what IP is on the response. But whatever you do, don’t send the email from your own (or your company’s) IP address, because you never know, they might know your IP is actually you 
You could also try sending an email with an embedded image and see what IP address(es) pull the image, but you will need a server not connected to your business to host the image and that also gives you access to the raw longs so you know the IPs that grab the image. But taking into account the number of email programs that automatically block all images, it isn’t that effective anymore.
You can also go through your logs and pull out any IPs that appear repeatedly over weeks, that always click your AdWords ad to get to the site. Even at one click a day, after a month that can really add up… and you can pretty much bet that it is a competitor (or someone that doesn’t like you!) who is doing the clicking. Regular traffic through AdWords will rarely show up to your site on such a regular basis, always using the ads to gain entrance to the site.
Some people suggest you block the IP the domain is not (ie. if I was a competitor, you would block the IP that jenniferslegg.com is on). However, this isn’t always very effective because in the broader scheme of things, just because my site sits on a particular IP doesn’t mean that it is the same IP I use to surf the net. It does work for some larger corporations depending on how their server and server access is set up.
Don’t forget that if competitors think you are being sneaky about your ads, there are always ways that they can discover what you are doing, although they might not realize you are doing it deliberately. If you have blocked by IP address, the IP could change, or perhaps they start working from home. It could even be something as simple as working from a coffee shop one day that means they will be using an unblocked IP, or working in a hotel room across the country. And with the 20 IP addresses limit, it would be nearly impossible to find all those IPs they are using.
Blocking on the server level
An old school solution was to block competitors on the server level by blocking their IP address. However, this will do nothing to actually prevent competitors from seeing your ad, and even if they click the ad but don’t actually end up on your landing page because you have blocked them at your server level, you will still get charged for the click. You could still use it if you are trying to prevent a competitor from swiping a landing page, but don’t forget that your cache copy in Google will still reveal it.
The bottom line is that if any competitor suspects you (or anyone else targeting the same keywords) are up to something and is determined to see your AdWords ads, they will. However, the hope is that they won’t know you’re up to something and happily continue running their ads – preferably below yours, because they won’t realize someone is actually bumping them out of the top spot (especially if you are also using Position Preference to secure your top spot) - and be none the wiser that you are in the actually right there in the game with them.
Is your web dev team losing your PPC conversions?
Feb 18, 2009 Advertising, Pay Per Click
I was on a conference call today and I had said how many people misunderstand what click fraud actually is, and some mistakenly believe that just because a click doesn’t convert that it has to be click fraud. But in many cases, it had zero to do with the quality of the click, but instead has everything to do with the quality of the landing page.
So when was the last time you took a look at your landing pages, especially if you work in a company where you might handle the PPC but someone else handles actual on-page content and issues? I am willing to bet that many people would probably be surprised to learn that their ROI is so low because what they are presenting their visitors is, well, lacking.
A few days ago, I noticed @rogerdooley who twittered the following:
Clicked on an Infiniti Adwords ad, got a redirect msg telling me the Infiniti site had moved & 2 update my bookmark. Nice.
So, I did what probably a few people did… I went and Googled “Infiniti”. But since I am in Canada, I was geotargeted (and rightly so) to the Canadian Infiniti site. However, what the Canadian Infiniti site was just as bad, if not worse. Consider the fact that Infiniti has just paid for me to go to their website, since I clicked an AdWords ad. It is in their best interest to give me the most bang for their buck, so they can squeeze every bit of ROI out of me as possible. So what do I get instead of the Infiniti homepage? Or even a specific page about Infiniti? I got this:
Um, okay. And that was it, nothing in the background, that was the entire page, Now, I don’t know how much they paid for my click, but this is not the kind of user experience you want to present to your paid visitor. But I am willing to bet that whoever does their PPC ad campaign manager has no idea that this is the page that visitors are getting when they click an AdWords ad. And its probably because the web design team decided they wanted feedback on the site, without thinking about how it could impact other aspects of their online presence and promotion. And obviously the team wasn’t thinking about usability, only how to get as many people to fill out that survey as possible.
Usually, this is the kind of thing you display after someone has visited at least one page (or preferably 5!) on the site – whether I am a paid visitor or not – because you know what this makes most visitors want to do? You got it, click the back button. And I won’t get started about the fact it is a five minute survey… I suspect the % of visitors who actually go to the trouble of filling it out are pretty low.
It is worth noting that they must be tracking the results of their advertising, as the URLs include the ?gclid parameter. But their results must be pretty poor compared to what it was before they started giving everyone the survey page as the initial entry page to the site.
So, I wondered what exactly it was that @rogerdooley saw, because it couldn’t be worse than my user experience.
So here is the ad:
A pretty standard automobile AdWords ad. Nothing fancy, and note the InfinitiUSA.com display URL.
And this is what he got when he clicked:
But at least in his case, the website was showing in the background, albiet quite delayed. Now, this isn’t a very good user experience either, especially for a paid click. But, and here is the kicker, the actual ad clicked was already going to the correct destination URL, InfinitiUSA.com, so it wasn’t a case of a visitor being redirected, everyone was getting it regardless of whether came into the site via an outdated bookmark or not (which is a whole new level of poor usability!)
So, of course, I had to go to the original Infiniti.com site and got the same pop-up, but since they use cookies, I had to use a second browser to see it (the same happened with the Infinity.ca site too). So, since the assumption is that anyone who is working on the Infiniti PPC and web design visits the site frequently, they are probably not aware that the pop-up is hitting every single person who visits the landing page, regardless of their original URL or whether it was an AdWords click or not.
So the moral of the story, make sure you always know what the web dev team is doing on your site that could impact your PPC conversion rates, because that team has certainly dropped down their PPC ROI significantly. Or better yet, have a dedicated landing page that the dev team has strict instuctions to not touch or mess with in any way without clearing it with you first. Because with a little conversation between the two teams (and yes, I know it is often easier said than done, especially if one or both is outsourced), you can prevent this kind of problem from happening.
It also makes the case that you might want to periodically click on your AdWords ad in the serps from a virgin computer that has never visited your website, just so you can see what happens from a user experience standpoint, and make sure there aren’t any of the mistakes plaguing the various Infiniti sites on your own or client sites.
And Infiniti, if you need a new PPC or usability specialist, let me know
Using geolocation targeted keywords in PPC ads for consumer confidence
Apr 4, 2008 Pay Per Click
It is a fact that when I am searching for any number of random products or services on the internet – those things where it doesn’t matter if the product is shipped from my hometown, across the country, or even in a different country – I tend to pay attention to those ads that are geospecific to me. I give them a second look, even if they don’t have the best PPC placement in the bunch of ads. I notice them because their use of geolocation jumps out at me.
First, consumers are driven by price, especially when looking at buying a product. But there is still the mentality of “support the little guy” and “support the local guy” and the desire to buy locally rather than from “big box” or “multi-national corporation”. Then there is consumer confidence and the feeling of value and service one gets from a local company versus a large corporate company. So if you are competitive on price – or even slightly higher – you can actually increase conversions by giving potential visitors the idea you are local, simply by using geolocation targeting in your ad copy.
Let’s use Seattle as an example. Now, first off, you don’t want to actually lie and tell people you are located in or shipping from Seattle, unless you really are. But there are many ways you can use to imply your service is targeting those in the Seattle area, which can then be replicated across many other cities and states. You could make your url seattle.greenwidgets.com. Your description could mention something about express or free “shipping to Seattle.” Or if your product is somehow customized for Seattle, you can use that in your description too.
That said, don’t go overboard You don’t need to be repititious and mention Seattle four times in a single PPC advertisement because not only does it waste space you could be putting to better use with more keyword-laden ad copy, but it also starts to sound a bit spammy and unprofessional if you have repeated the same word over and over again – especially if it isn’t the most important “widget” keyword. Once in the description or title and once in the URL would be fine. Or if you really need that ad copy space, start off testing with Seattle just in the URL.
Now, once you have created your Seattle-specific ad copy, you need to geotarget that campaign so that it just shows to Seattle. It isn’t as effective to show your Seattle ad to someone in Boston, and it will very likely cause your CTR rate to drop dramatically… not to mention the problems a low CTR rate can bring with it in Google AdWords. So you should specifically geotarget Seattle, and perhaps some areas outside Seattle as well. Then remember which areas you target, especially if you create ads for other other Washington State cities, or if you then create a specific one that covers Washington State as a whole.
If you product or service is world-wide, even creating a country-specific ad would get the attention of users, especially outside of the United States. When I am searching for products, those that mention Canada specifically will always get my clicks first, because if they mention Canada, odds are pretty good that they either ship to Canada or are located in Canada. And that has just cut my work significantly from hunting and clicking on sites where the second page I view is their shipping information to see if they ship to Canada.
When you create your campaigns, you should also do A/B testing with a generic non-location-specific ad copy. In AdWords, Google will automatically auto-optimize your ad copy by doing testing in rotation and then showing the one that performs best, so you don’t need to do that work. You might discover that your Seattle specific ad rocks, but for some reason, those in Boston prefer the non-location one.
Not sure where to start? Start by testing a metro area local to you, or maybe pick 3 or 4 locations throughout your country to test. And Google has anything and everything to do with AdWords location targeting and there is also information on Yahoo Search Marketing Geo-targeting and Microsoft adCenter’s geolation targeting. Funny how all three call the same thing something different
Increase pay per click conversions & ROI by including a price in your ad
Apr 1, 2008 Pay Per Click
Many people have the misconception that all PPC clicks are created equal when they come from the same source with the same keywords. But user intent plays a huge part in conversions, and if the people who click your ads are looky-loos without any intention of buying what your ad is advertising – at least not at the stage of the buying cycle they are in – then those clicks you have paid for don’t convert at all.
When you are selling a product that is not exclusive to your site, especially with high-ticket items or items that people tend to shop around for to find the best pricing, you end up paying for clicks from people who are just checking to see if you have the best price or not, and they don’t have the intention of buying from you right then… unless you were fortunate enough to be the last site they checked (which goes against regular PPC techniques where you want to be the first click) AND you had the best price. And obviously, you will have lower conversions and a low ROI (return on investment) when you do have a high percentage of non-buyers.
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How many angles are you looking at keyword research from?
Feb 27, 2008 Keywords, Pay Per Click
When doing keyword research it is important not to get in a rut and simply look at keyword research as “consumer” only… or worse, from the business point of view rather than the potential customer’s point of view. But smart keyword researchers realize there are many angles to consider when planning your keywords so that you don’t miss out on a particular segment which could equal clicks and conversions. And this is especially important because not all pay per click advertisers consider all the different angles that a searcher might search on, meaning less competition and lower cost per clicks for you. And if you are struggling to get more traffic on specific pay per click platforms, such as Microsoft adCenter, this can enable you to add some new keywords to your campaigns and get some additional traffic from any of these angles you weren’t previously bidding on.
Obviously, this shouldn’t take the place of your main keyword research, but to enhance what you currently have or to add to your repertoire when you do research for new campaigns.
So look at your keywords and market from some new angles, and see if you can’t enhance your pay per click campaigns by considering new or complimentary keywords from these angles:
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Building your list of cheap and free negative keywords
Feb 18, 2008 Keywords, Pay Per Click
There are always those people who are looking for things for free… even when you know that what they are looking for isn’t free (looking for a “Free iPod” or “Free XBox” anyone?). But when you are broad matching your PPC campaigns, you want to ensure you aren’t paying for ads when it is the freeloaders looking.
Here is a list of common freeloading keywords that you can add to your negative keyword list.
free
freebie
cheap
complimentary (and mispellings of the word)
“free download”
“free sample”
offers
comp
complimentary
gratis
pass
If you sell any kind of software or subscription service, you will also want to add these keywords to your negative keyword list too.
crack
crack
warez
cracked
keygen
keygen
torrent
password
p2p
hack
cheat
Now, if you are offering something for free, you need to take care that you aren’t actually losing traffic because if this, such as if you are offering a free consultation or free eBook!
Not sure if you are getting traffic from any of these freeloading keywords currently? If you are using dynamic keyword insertion in your URLs, you will be able to track the exact keywords people are using when they click your ad. So if you are selling iPods or XBoxes, you can see how many of those people were actually looking for free iPods or XBoxes, and not seriously looking to purchase one. People looking for freebies rarely convert, particularly when they are searching for these types of products.
Cheap can be a tricky one, because in some markets it can work well, but in others it is much harder to convert. If you are selling a service, for example, you don’t necessarily want to be known as “cheap”, especially if customers are paying a premium for your service… if you are good at what you do you can charge a premium for it that someone new or not as well known wouldn’t be able to do. If you are selling a product that you are pricing very competitively, this can be a good converting keyword for you. Remember people who are using the keyword “cheap” are usually shopping around for the best possible price and might hit 4 different advertisers looking for which one is the cheapest. So if you are the cheapest you have a much higher chance of converting… but if you aren’t, this is one you will want to either watch very carefully for conversions or add to your negative keyword list. Bottom line: “cheap” can be successful if whatever you are selling or offering is the cheapest, but people are looking for the cheapest above anything else you can offer and your conversion rate will reflect this.
Once you have selected which negative freebie keywords you need to add, simply cut and paste it into your PPC campaigns so that you will no longer be serving up broad match ads when they keywords searched for include those words.
Why you should bid on misspellings of your company name & brand
Jan 15, 2008 Advertising, Branding, Google, Pay Per Click, Yahoo
Not all of us have hit the household status we all wish our company names had. So if you aren’t a Sony or a WalMart, have you ever considered the fact that someone might be trying to find your company or product and either spelling it wrong or searching for a slight variation because the person who recommended you pronounced it incorrectly? And even the best SEO can’t rank your site number one for every single variation of your company name or brand. The last thing you want to do is lose those potential customers to competitors, when they were trying to find your site in the first place.
If you are lucky, Google might direct some of those misspellings to your site via their “Did you mean: ____” hint that it shows above the results when they believe there is a good chance that someone made a typo. But you have to be pretty well known to have Google do that for all your potential misspellings and typos of your company name.
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How to run Google AdWords ads and ensure zero conversions
Nov 19, 2007 Google, Pay Per Click
Sometimes I click on a Google ad when searching for something and run into a perfect example of a landing page that offers zero chance of converting, no matter how you slice or dice it. Usually it is an attrocious design or some sort of coding error that causes those 0% conversion landing pages to show up. Then you get the really, really bad 0% landing pages, the ones that not only won’t convert, but that also send those first-time visitors hitting the back button as quickly as humanly possible… because…. wait for it… the landing page is one that is threatening to report first-time visitors to the authorities with possible legal action being taken. The reason? The site is flagging completely legitimate clicks as fraudulent ones, and sending them off to a special landing page threatening legal action. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to shake the webmaster and say “What on earth were you thinking???”
Here is a perfect example of one of those landing pages (click for full-sized):
My friend sent this to me, wondering what she possibly could have done to get this kind of message accusing her of fraud after simply clicking a Google ad… because while those in the industry know what this means, Joe Surfer does not know what an “IP address” or what “fraudulent click activity” is, and instead focus on the part “reported to the proper authorities” and “legal action may be taken”. So of course, I think maybe there was a slow response and she inadvertantly double or triple clicked the ad. And since I am moving soon, I tried the same search: Victoria movers and clicked on the moveit.ca advertisement (that link is to the site’s homepage not a click through the ad), which happened to be the first on the list, sitting above the organic listings, being careful to only click it a single time. And sure enough, I was greeted with the same warning threatening me with legal action. Now, I have a static IP, and have had the same IP for eons. I have never searched for Victoria movers and have never seen the site before, yet I got this same warning message. The URL seems to automatically forward from http://www.moveit.ca/?cd=gle to http://www.moveit.ca/security.htm
Now, any click fraud detection system that is set to ship new users visiting a site for the first time off to a click fraud warning page is definitely flawed. I am on a fairly common Canadian ISP, so it is not an issue with multiple people from an obscure ISP possibly hitting the page multiple times. And with a static IP address, there shouldn’t be any issue with that tripping any click fraud detectors.
There are definitely lessons to be learned, especially for those pay per click advertisers who are concerned about click fraud and are using an automated solution to deal with it that might be too powerful or too outdated, either of which could be the problem in this case.
First, never send your pay per click traffic to a webpage threatening legal action unless you are 110% sure that person you are sending is truly engaged in click fraud, such as isolating a competitor’s IP address that seems to hit your site 5 times every morning at 9am and sending that one person off to that landing page. But when you threaten innocent surfers, you will discover that your seemingly low conversion rates in your Google AdWords pay per click campaigns are not because your landing page sucks or you have a high number of invalid clicks, it is simply because you are sending them to a page that is threatening them! Trust me, the vast majority of people really don’t like to be threatened, especially when they are in the role of customer! There are too many competitors out there vying for that customer to lose them this way. Remove the warning page and your conversions will go up since you won’t be alienating so many visitors from the very first page view. I can only imagine the stats for the number people who have landed on that threatening landing page in error.
Second, you are paying for the traffic through AdWords regardless of what landing page you send the visitor to… so you might as well send them to a page that has a chance of converting into a customer (which it likely would have done so with my friend) rather than having those people click the back button as quickly as they possibly can for the fear of having the authorities showing up!
Third, make sure if you use click fraud detection software that it isn’t wrongly flagging legitimate clicks. And likewise, ensure that your pay per click expert who is handing your campaigns actually knows what he/she is doing and is not sending people off to that threatening landing page in error (like is definitely the case in this instance!). When your click fraud detection software isn’t correctly identifying what is possibly invalid click activity, it will make applying for credits with Google, Yahoo & MSN much more difficult since there are so many legitimate clicks mixed in. In this case, I am guessing someone handling the detection software went and added a major Canadian ISP to the filter, and effectively blocked a huge % of Canadian web surfers, including a very high percentage of those who would be doing a search for “Victoria movers”.
Fourth, this could definitely cause issues with Google AdWords and the terms of service when you are not only sending visitors to an incorrect landing page, but also threatening those legitimate visitors with legal action. Not to mention the nasty things it can do to your quality score if the click fraud detection software sends the AdWords bot off to that threatening landing page too!
And fifth, remember that everything you present to a visitor makes an impression and doing something like this makes a big one, and not neccessarily the kind of impression most business want to make! As a result, my friend will not use MoveIt.ca to find a moving company, and neither will I. And I am open to suggestions for a good moving company in Victoria
Anyone else run across any AdWords/YSM/AdCenter ads that you know have zero chance of converting? Some of my favorite ads are the ones that were clearly done by people training others on creating AdWords ad, with “example” or “sample” used as the title and in the text, but with the company’s URL used because you know someone forgot to turn off the campaign after training was over
Using industry lingo & acronyms in your PPC ad copy
Oct 8, 2007 Keywords, Pay Per Click
So, the majority of people who read my blog (if not all of them) know that the PPC in the title means Pay Per Click. But have you considered the use of acronyms, abbreviations and industry lingo in your own PPC campaigns?
SEO? ROI? NHL? PDA? RPG? B2B? Yes, we all use shorthand abbreviations when writing IMs today, but I have definitely noticed it creeping into YSM (yes, that is Yahoo Search Marketing) & AdWords campaigns quite frequently. But should you let it encroach on yours? While using acronyms and industry jargon can be perfectly acceptable in some situations, in other cases all you will achieve is confusing your potential visitor and handing them over to your competitor on a silver platter. So here are some things to keep in mind when using industry jargon and acronyms in your pay per click campaigns.
The most important pay per click metric is not click through rate
Apr 23, 2007 Pay Per Click
It is still amazing to me the number of people who care most about what their AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing CTR is on their ads, while seemingly ignoring what is arguably the far more important – not to mention valuable – pay per click metric. Yes, CTR is valuable to know, but in reality, a higher CTR doesn’t necessarily equate to higher profits or sales.
