It’s finally here – the enterprise version of Google’s free tool. Today’s official announcement of Google Analytics Premium puts the rumors to rest and opens up a whole new set of questions. Leading the list: Will there be enough value added to make it worth the price?
Let’s look at what you’ll get for the fixed annual fee.
More Processing Power Sweeps Away Limits
Many of the limitations in the Standard Edition (the new name for free GA) are swept away by the sheer processing power behind GA Premium. And Google’s not fooling around – the increases are impressive.
With GA Premium, Google guarantees faster, intra-day processing for up to 1 billion hits per month. That’s two orders of magnitude beyond the current limits! Even though free GA’s hit limits are not strictly enforced, GA Premium’s guarantee seems to imply that even if your data is not processed on dedicated servers, it will be the practical equivalent.
Increased processing power also enables highly-requested features like unsampled advanced segmentation, unsampled report downloads, and large report downloads with up to 1 million rows of unaggregated data. Instead of 5 custom variable slots, you’ll get fifty.
The key word here is “processing” – we’re still not talking about access to raw data, only processed data. And no uploading of your own data into GA Premium. You get what they process into your reports. The good news is that those reports are bigger and better, too.
Fast-Paced Innovation Includes Attribution Modeling
One of the most exciting new reports will be (not yet included) Attribution Modeling for Multi-Channel Funnels. Sure, it’s great to see a 30-day path to conversion instead of the last click. That doesn’t mean every step of the path should get equal credit for the conversion. With this new tool you’ll be able to customize and test attribution models, built on top of your conversion paths.
Google says it will roll out innovations like this and more at a rapid pace in the coming months. This year’s overhaul of the underlying structure of the ga.js source apparently makes it easier for GA engineers to build in new features going forward.
The free product won’t be left behind either. In the last 3 months alone – and earlier today with Real-Time, Google’s added many great features to its Standard Edition. It makes sense though that only users of GA Premium will have access to the new features that require the most intensive processing.
Intuitive Interface Remains Easy to Learn
Do more advanced features mean GA Premium will be harder to learn? Au contraire, says Google. One of the biggest benefits of the free product is the intuitive interface, and the interface for GA Premium will be nearly identical.
Google’s betting that they’ll come out ahead in any comparison with other paid products if you can find actionable insights more quickly and easily. There’s undeniable value in being able to make better and more timely business decisions simply because your data is more accessible and usable.
Maybe the value of all the new features, combined with GA’s familiar interface, is still not enough for you to justify the expense? There’s one more big difference between free GA and GA Premium.
SLA Guarantees Up-Time and Data Freshness
With GA Premium, you finally get a Service Level Agreement backed by 24/7 emergency support from Google if its guarantees fail. Specifically guaranteed:
99.9% on Collection up-time
99% on Reporting up-time
98% on on-time Data Freshness (within 4 hours)
In addition, you get dedicated phone and email support 10 hours/day, 5 days/week (in your local time zone) from your GA Premium Authorized Reseller – a GA certified partner who’s been approved to support GA Premium.
If you’re already heavily invested in another paid analytics solution, GA Premium’s appeal undoubtedly depends on your level of satisfaction with your current solution. What’s your reaction to Google’s new offering and how do you think it will impact you (or your clients)? Please share in the comments.
GA has always been about what happened on your site yesterday or last week or last month. Wouldn’t you like to see what’s happening right now?
Okay then, right now, go to the Dashboard tab and look for the Real-Time section. You may need to look under the Home tab if you read this after the next interface design update.
If you don’t see the Real-Time section of reports yet, you will soon. Within 1-2 weeks following today’s announcement everyone should have access. In the meantime, check out our video of Real-Time timelines in action.
Same Code, New Timelines
Real-time data will automatically start to appear for any page you’re currently tracking with GA. You don’t have to add any new tracking code.
The most dramatic feature of Real-Time reports is the moving timeline on the right. It shows all the pageviews that started in the last 60 seconds. It’s moving because it’s continuously updating. You don’t even have to press a button to update.
If you happen to have a low-traffic site and no pageviews are showing up in that 60-second timeline, visit one of your own pages and watch for it. You could even time it to see how many seconds it takes to appear on the timeline, if you haven’t tried that already!
There’s another pageview activity timeline on the left. It moves too, and shows how many pageviews you had each minute for the last 30 minutes. Both timelines appear at the top of each Real-Time report.
The moving timelines can be mesmerizing, especially if you’re used to waiting for data in GA’s standard reports, which may take up to 24 hours to appear. It would be nice to be able to set up alerts, as we can do for GA Intelligence, but that feature is not available in this version of Real-Time.
Ways to Use Real-Time Data
Rather than keeping one eye glued to your Real-Time data, it’s most useful to monitor the impact on web traffic during events with specific times. And beyond the Real-Time Overview, there are three other Real-Time reports you can drill down into for a little more detail as you analyze on the fly. Here are some examples:
You launch a new ad campaign with an email blast. Check the Real-Time Content report shortly after you send the email, and drill down into your landing page. You’ll see active visitors on that page for your campaign source and medium.
You run a contest on social media that has followers looking for your periodic Tweets or Facebook status updates. After each tweet or update, watch the Real-Time Content report. Or even check out the Locations report to see where all those socially networked visitors are. You can drill down into any country and see a list of cities.
You run a TV commercial that may drive traffic to your website. Right after the spot airs, check the Real-Time Traffic Sources report to see visitors by medium. Even if you use a vanity URL that redirects to a campaign-tagged URL, visitors may simply search for you. You can drill down into organic or cpc to see search sources and keywords.
Watching real-time for the above types of events is more likely to lead to actionable insights than letting Real-Time run in the background all day and continually checking it.
What’s Not In Real-Time
Real-Time reports do not include profile filtering. That extra processing step is currently bypassed in the interest of optimizing speed. So even if you’re looking inside a filtered profile, keep in mind that no data is being filtered out of the Real-Time reports.
Let me emphasize that this doesn’t mean that all your GA data is now real-time. Some of GA’s standard reports have deep functionality that also requires too much processing to be reported instantly. You have to look in the Real-Time reports for real-time data.
How will you use real-time data? What do you like best? Are important features missing? Please share in the comments.
Geo-targeting Paid Search campaigns to attract a specific geographical audience is a practice that is implemented by advertisers in a plethora of industries. What many advertisers neglect doing, however, is separating geo-targeted campaigns from nationally targeted geo-modified campaigns. It is important to understand the difference between the two, and treat them just that way: differently
Geo-targeting (often referred to as “location targeting”): Campaigns target one or more specific locations, made up of keywords that do not contain location modifiers (e.g. “digital marketing agency” targeting the Pittsburgh area)
Geo-modifying: Nationally targeted campaigns made up of keywords with location modifiers (e.g. “Pittsburgh digital marketing agency” targeting nationally)
Different Strategies, Different Campaigns
Always keep in mind that geo-targeting and geo-modifying are two different strategies, and therefore should always be separated out into different campaigns. While advertisers may assume the search situation is the same, this is very often not the case. Geo-targeting works by showing ads to users in a specified location at the time that they perform that search. What if a user is currently performing searches while on business in Chicago, however, but interested in finding a digital marketing agency in the Pittsburgh area? Let’s say the search is “Pittsburgh digital marketing agency.” Your Pittsburgh geo-targeted campaigns will not trigger an ad to show, regardless of whether that campaign is made up of ad groups that contain geo-modified terms. Your ad will be triggered, however, by the nationally targeted campaign that contains “Pittsburgh digital marketing agency” keywords.
Aside from the above reasoning, another key reason to separate geo-targeted campaigns vs. geo-modified campaigns is budget management. As paid search professionals know, the more specific, transparent, and closely targeted your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords are, the more successful account management will be. Ensuring a handful of keywords doesn’t gobble up an entire campaign’s budget is an ongoing task for advertisers, and separating geo-targeted and geo-modified campaigns helps to alleviate this issue. Depending on your account and the locations you are targeting, either geo-modified campaigns or geo-targeted campaigns can pull in more traffic than the other, although the majority of the time, geo-modified campaigns will receive less traffic. It is an advertiser’s job to ensure both sets of keywords get a fair chance in the engines, and are not missing opportunities due to the other keywords using the majority of the budget. Separating geo-targeted and geo-modified campaigns allows for a more efficient method of budget management, and provides better indications of trends, search intent, etc.
Geo-Testing
In my post last week, The Many Faces of Negative Keywords, I detailed why every Paid Search account should utilize negative keywords, and how this match type can be used to manipulate your account to your liking. Geo-modifying and geo-targeting are a perfect example of how to use this negative keyword manipulation. While it is best to target geo-modified campaigns nationally, there will always be instances of searchers in a certain location including that location name in their search query; therefore, we run into the situation where an ad could be triggered by both the geo-targeted or the geo-modified campaign (depending on which match types are set up within the ad groups). While many advertisers will choose to let this be the case and allow the engine to decide which keyword/ad is best to match it to, I recommend testing out this scenario. Try adding, for example, “Pittsburgh” as a negative keyword within the geo-targeted campaign to allow the nationally targeted campaign to trigger “Pittsburgh digital marketing agency.” After sufficient data is gathered, remove the negative keywords to determine how the performance of each campaign changes, and which method is best for your account.
This past Wednesday, we had WAW here in Pittsburgh. Many thanks to Mike Ross, the head of WA at Dick’s Sporting Goods, who pushed me to do it, and Brian Collery, late of American Eagle and now at Omniture Adobe who convinced me to help with it.
The crowd was just large enough to be fun and just small enough to hear a lot of great stories. For example, one of the people who attended told me that his own sense of morality is ‘creative.’ But, he pointed out, even his creative morality was offended by the practices of his former employer, a company now being sued for fraud. (Drink and learn, it appears.)
Many thanks to Monetate, who sponsored. I listened to the speaker show how he didn’t get any lift from any of his tests, but saved his employer tens of thousands of dollars by showing them that a new home page was not the answer. And how about that awesome food!
So to Pittsburgh web analysts and would-be Pittsburgh analysts — we’ll be doing another WAW in January.
Many advertisers who may be unfamiliar with all of the positive effects that come as a result of negative keywords tend to shy away from implementing negative keywords within their account altogether; other advertisers may sporadically add negative keywords to their account, but not take enough advantage of just how much a little manipulation of these keywords can boost an account’s performance.
Regardless of Clicks, Get Rid of Those Irrelevant Searches
First and foremost, negative keyword “audits” should be performed on a regular basis, regardless of your industry, your results, or your budget. Discovering negative keywords is easy, and adding negative keywords is even easier. While some advertisers may not see the harm in appearing for irrelevant searches every so often, it is essential to recognize the negative effects this will have on your account in both the long and short term. The obvious is wasted spend – no one wants to waste clicks and money on visitors who were searching for something completely different than your ad is offering. Often I find myself answering the following question, however: “So what if my ad shows up, but no one clicks it? No money wasted, no harm done, right?” Wrong. It is an absolute must that any advertisers understand the harm that irrelevant ads can have on an account even when they are not clicked. Click-through rate is the largest (but not only) determinant of quality score, and your quality score is a large (but not only) determinant of your CPCs; therefore, negative keywords help us maintain a strong click-through rate, resulting in higher quality scores, and therefore lower CPCs (and more money to spend on the clicks that will convert!)
Negative Keywords Don’t Just “Block” Searches
The key element of adding this match type throughout the campaigns and ad groups in your account is not only ensuring your ads aren’t showing up for irrelevant searches, but also ensuring that the best and most relevant ad available in your account is triggered over another. Many people ignore this use of the negative match type, and focus solely on excluding irrelevant searches, when in reality one of the best uses of this match type is the ability to manipulate your account with makeshift “filters,” which are useful for virtually every advertiser.
Let’s say you have a generic campaigns set up for Vacuums, containing the broad match term “bagless vacuums,” while you have another campaign set up for specific vacuum brands containing the broad match keyword “bagless ABC vacuums.” Although these keywords are not identical, it is possible for either one of them to be triggered by the search “bagless ABC vacuums.” While many advertisers do not see any harm in a generic ad showing up for the search term “bagless ABC vacuums,” it is essential that you ensure a relevant ad containing the brand ABC is shown, vs. a generic one. This is where negative keywords come into play, filtering the keywords in our account to ensure the best ad is triggered. It’s simple – make sure the negative keyword “ABC” is added throughout all generic campaigns, ensuring that generic ads won’t be triggered by this branded search. Repeat this process through all of your campaigns, using the same rules to exclude generic search queries from triggering brand-specific ads and to set filters for the various vacuum-type keywords and ads. While this can be a lengthy process, it will pay off with higher click-through rates, higher quality scores, and lower CPCs. Don’t be afraid to add negative keywords on a regular basis, or fear that you’re limiting your traffic – remember the traffic that matters is traffic that’s relevant, no exceptions.
Testing a paid search ad is easy. You create two ad creatives, set your ad network to split traffic evenly between the two, and sit back and let the data collect. This isn’t tough to do because you have full control over what is displayed on the results page when a user searches. Once you’ve got enough data collected, you know what works and what doesn’t, and you can go in and change the ad creative appropriately.
The organic results pages are different, though. You can’t just tell Google to split between your two creatives. You can modify your titles and meta descriptions, but you have no idea when Google is going to crawl your site and update its index. And changes to your page titles can severely affect that page’s ranking.
So theoretically, if you were to modify your page’s meta description, and then find out when Google started running with the new description, you could check your data in Google Analytics and start analyzing which version was better at getting people to your site.
You can get a pretty good idea of when the Googlebot crawls your site with Google Webmaster Tools, but determining when the SERPs are updated with your site description is something you’ll need to do manually. One easy way to find out when Google updated your page in its index is by viewing the cached version.
Just do a search that will include your page in the results, and then click the “Cached” link to the right of the URL:
You’ll see a box at the top of this page that tells you when this snapshot occurred:
This is the most recent date and time that Google cached your site, which will allow you to annotate your Google Analytics data with the start of your “Version B” site description.
Now the fun begins. After a few weeks, do some date comparisons from before the new version went live versus after. Look at traffic from Google and analyze the effect that your new SEO “creative” has had on visits. Are they higher or lower quality visitors? Check out the keywords they’re using to find your site. Are there any queries that have had big jumps in traffic? Drastic declines?
Sure, a dedicated split-testing tool built into Google Webmaster Tools would be pretty sweet. But until then, we can hack it a bit and get a lot of insight into what draws searchers to our sites. Give it a try and see what you find out!
(Update: I have been corrected. This is not actually a split test, because it is run over two different periods of time. I’ve updated the article to reflect this. Regardless, I still think there’s some insight to be gained from running experiments like this, and until Google starts letting people do actual A/B tests, it’s one way to do it.)
Many brands, organizations and non-profits are looking to learn how the social media space best fits with their company’s existing goals. A plethora of firms and individuals offer corporate social media training packages, enabling you to comparison-shop and choose training that maximizes benefits and minimizes cost. It’s important to look for the following when choosing corporate social media based training:
Credibility of Both Company and Trainer
Trainers come from a variety of backgrounds, but one thing you want to be sure of is that the trainer is from a credible company, is a credible speaker on their own, or both. Look for solid social media credentials by asking questions like these before you sign up for a training:
1. Has the trainer trained previous clients in social media?
2. Does the company or speaker have references from other organizations?
3. Does the trainer have any existing videos or webinars of prior experience?
4. Is the company highly involved in social media?
5. Can the company provide examples of past social media based trainings?
An Industry Thought Leader
You want the company/trainer teaching you about social media to be a thought leader in the industry. Find out if the company/speaker has spoken at other industry events, conferences or expos. Some examples of these type of speaking engagements in the social media world are SXSW, WOMMA or through HubSpot. Research to see if they’ve been published in industry publications and social media news sources citing their insights about the field and about recent developments across a variety of platforms. Social media news sources like Mashable, AllFacebook, OPEN Forum, HubSpot and others are the types of websites where you want to see a social media expert published. This is an important step in determining if your trainer is a credible source for your corporate social media training needs.
Actionable Tips, Tricks and Techniques
One of the most important things to expect from a training is that you’ll leave with lasting tips, tricks and techniques for marketing your organization via social media. Define ahead of time which platforms matter most to your organization (like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or others). This will help give the trainer clear focus in their training, which in turn will give you as the trainee a more valuable training session. Every training you attend should provide you with at least 5 tips, tricks or techniques per platform that help you measure, market or better optimize your social presence. For instance, learning to add call to action keywords such as tell us, comment, share, like, etc. to your Facebook Page posts will help increase engagements per post. Insights like this are the kind of things you should be taking with you after a training, which is important to measure whether the training was beneficial or not.
Teaching By Example
Giving examples of other organizations, brands or non profits utilizing social media is an essential way to learn best practices. This is something you should come to expect from a training because it is so helpful in teaching what to do and what not to do, depending on the industry under discussion. Case studies give a face to best practices recommendations and help people comprehend tricks and techniques in comparison to something they understand, like another organization or brand.
Interested in social media training that’s got credibility, thought leaders as instructors, advanced techniques, and case studies highlighting best practices? Sign up for social media training with LunaMetrics this October!
It’s so easy to tag your campaigns for Google Analytics that you can quickly fill your reports with a mishmash of labels and end up with campaign tag soup! But what’s the best way to get organized? Even if you know what medium and source mean, it’s not always obvious how you should fit campaign info into those slots. And what about the extra slots we get for campaign tags like campaign and content and term?
Take these 4 steps to develop a coherent campaign tagging plan and start improving your data today:
1. Build On the Default Labels
Google Analytics already fills your Traffic Reports with values (labels) for medium and source. Any new labels you create for your campaign data will fill the same reports, so think about what you want to see together in the list of mediums or sources. Making old and new labels look like part of the same family is a good way to get organized.
Medium has four default labels: referral, organic, cpc for paid search, and (none) for direct traffic. Think of these as the big buckets of traffic, the highest level marketing channels. Create new channels at the same high level and don’t get too specific. For example:
email
social
banner (or display)
print
direct-mail
Source has three types of labels by default: website names for referrals, search engines, and (direct). Think of these as your target audiences – the users of specific websites or search engines, or people who already knew you and came directly. Describe who’s viewing your campaign content with source labels like:
newsletter-subscribers
facebook
partner.com = the website where you put your banner ad
industry-today = the name of a publication where you advertise
postcard-list = the name of the mailing list
Remember the default labels also make lots of tagging unnecessary. Turn auto-tagging on in AdWords and you automatically get medium=google and source=cpc along with all the other AdWords dimensions including your campaign names. You have to tag other paid search campaigns, but you don’t have to tag things like links from affiliate sites. They’re already in the Referrals report with medium=referral and source=your-affiliate-site-name.
2. Make Labels Answer Questions
Creating labels for campaign and content and term is easier if you think of them as answers to questions, following the same lines as medium and source.
Medium = What broad marketing channels are you using?
Source = Who is viewing your content or delivering the viewers?
Campaign = Why are you targeting these sources and (optional) when?
Content = Which marketing effort performs better?
Term = Which keywords perform better?
Campaign labels pull all the other labels together, identifying all the different mediums and sources you used for a particular purpose. Think about why you are targeting these audiences. It could be a product launch, a fundraising event, or an ongoing promotion. You might want to indicate the date or time of year here as well, since campaigns usually occur over some limited period of time.
Content labels help you compare how well different links perform within the same source, medium, or campaign. Which type of link persuades more people to click? Top or bottom of email? Different target text, maybe using different offers to see which is more attractive (free shipping or 20 percent off)? Text link or photo link? Or even a QR code!
Term looks like an extra slot for email or banner info, but should be used only for your paid search keywords. Whatever you tag with utm_term will end up in your Keywords reports! So let AdWords auto-tagging automatically capture your keywords, and work with any other paid search vendors to fill in utm_term with actual keywords as well.
3. Don’t Mix and Match
Consistency is everything. If you’re going to use email as a medium, don’t also use it as a source. Don’t put dates or seasonal info in any slot that seems convenient, pick one (like the campaign slot) and stick to it. When you need more granularity, consider adding it in the same slot like this example for sources:
newsletter-subscribers
newsletter-prospects
This still describes my target audience, so I think it makes sense to include it in the source label rather than bump it into the content label simply because that slot happens to be available. And being consistent has other benefits.
Using the same label across tags in the same slot also allows you to roll up data more easily. In the above example, I can search All Traffic sources for newsletter and see how the newsletter did overall as well as compare data for the two groups who received it. You can also compare performance across campaigns that had the same purpose but ran at different times, if you can search your Campaigns report for the label they have in common.
4. Document and Share
For best results, record everything in a campaign worksheet. Not only will it help you remember how you tagged prior campaigns to keep descriptions consistent, it’s absolutely essential as a guide for spelling and punctuation when more than one person is creating tags. Keep the worksheet in a shared space like Google Docs.
Another good thing about using a spreadsheet is that a formula can pull all your labels together into a campaign-tagged URL. Just make sure that utm_source comes first.
What’s your approach to campaign tagging? Have you developed a system that works for you? Please share in the comments.
Clients, it turns out, want to see how the efforts they’re paying for are working.We show clients lots of reports that indicate the success of their SEO campaigns, and KPIs are slightly different for ever client depending on what kind of a site they have, what their goals are, etc. However, there are three univeral SEO Key performance indicators that we use for everyone.
Traffic: Our major KPI for Search engine optimization is the increase of inbound organic, non-branded traffic month over month (or year over year etc.)
Rankings: A lot of clients come to us obsessing about rankings and to tell you the truth, we’re obsessed about rankings too. But it’s impossible, simply impossible, to use a 3rd party tool to figure out every single derivation of a short-tale key phrase that might possibly rank. Sure we track a select list of short tale key phrases in order to provide a barometer for the campaign, but the only purpose for getting higher rankings is to increase quality traffic to the website which brings us back to our main KPI.
Links: As we all know, increasing inbound links plays a huge role in getting a site ranked higher. Therefore, another SEO key performance indicator for us is the quantity of inbound links we generate. There are lots of external tools you can use to track these links like Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer, but you can use Google Analytics to keep tabs on them too, assuming you build quality links that get traffic as well as raise rankings.
Tracking Traffic In Google Analytics
This is usually ridiculously easy to track through Google Analytics if you use the old interface. If you use the NEW interface, the score card no longer shows comparisons with past data, only comparisons to the site average, which, in my opinion, is super, super lame. You just use Advanced segments to filter out everything but non-paid organic search traffic and run a keywords report and filter out the brand name. Easy right?
Well, what if you’re only responsible for optimizing a certain section of a site. For instance: For internal political reasons, one of our larger clients has a lot of editorial leeway on a specific section of their site where they can make all the on-page optimization changes (titles, metas, copy and headers) changes that we ask for.
For this reason, we’re optimizing just that section of their site. So how do you measure SEO success just for that section? For the purposes of protecting client information, I’m going to use LunaMetrics data instead for this instance. Say I’m responsible for optimizing the Blog section of the site. This section is www.lunametrics.com/blog. So in order to find traffic progress month over month, I’d do the following:
Step 1. Get the correct Date Comparison in Google Analytics. In order to make a clean comparison and take the weekly dips in traffic over the weekends into consideration, I start the date comparison on the same day of the week, even if it means going a bit into the previous month:
Google Analytics Date Comparison
Step 2. Under Traffic Sources, choose Keywords.
Google Analytics Keywords Report
Step 3. Make sure you click the “non-paid” link to make sure you’re filtering out any paid search. We don’t want to take paid search into consideration while we try to judge the efficacy of organic search efforts.
Non Paid Keyowrds
Step 4: Choose the Landing Page secondary dimension
Landing Page Secondary Dimension
Step 5: Using the advanced filter, filter out branded keywords and the landing pages that are in the section you’re considering.
Google Analytics Advanced Filter
Advanced Filter Example
Step 6: Enjoy your report which shows how many people landed on the page in the section you are concerned with through organic search and which keywords they found that page with. Both the number of visits and the quantity of keywords should go up month over month.
Blog Traffic Increases
Tracking Inbound Links in Google Analytics
We use the Referral report as one way to track inbound links from other sites. Get it? Cause the linking sites refer traffic? There are a couple ways to use the referral traffic data. If you’re keeping a list of sites that from which you’re pursuing links, you can simply filter the referrals page for those sites and see if you’ve started getting any traffic from them. Even one visit means someone came from a link on that site.
Referral Traffic in Google Analytics
If you’ve got a strong link-bait campaign going, you can track progress on that by choosing the secondary dimension “landing page” and then filtering for the page that you wrote as link bait.
Referral traffic to Link Bait
Hopefully this has given you some good insights into how to judge the efficacy of your SEO campaign using nice, free, easy-to-use Google Analytics. Happy Analysis!
two, and treat them just that way: differently
Aside from the above reasoning, another key reason to separate geo-targeted campaigns vs. geo-modified campaigns is budget management. As paid search professionals know, the more specific, transparent, and closely targeted your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords are, the more successful account management will be. Ensuring a handful of keywords doesn’t gobble up an entire campaign’s budget is an ongoing task for advertisers, and separating geo-targeted and geo-modified campaigns helps to alleviate this issue. Depending on your account and the locations you are targeting, either geo-modified campaigns or geo-targeted campaigns can pull in more traffic than the other, although the majority of the time, geo-modified campaigns will receive less traffic. It is an advertiser’s job to ensure both sets of keywords get a fair chance in the engines, and are not missing opportunities due to the other keywords using the majority of the budget. Separating geo-targeted and geo-modified campaigns allows for a more efficient method of budget management, and provides better indications of trends, search intent, etc.
The key element of adding this match type throughout the campaigns and ad groups in your account is not only ensuring your ads aren’t showing up for irrelevant searches, but also ensuring that the best and most relevant ad available in your account is triggered over another. Many people ignore this use of the negative match type, and focus solely on excluding irrelevant searches, when in reality one of the best uses of this match type is the ability to manipulate your account with makeshift “filters,” which are useful for virtually every advertiser.
The organic results pages are different, though. You can’t just tell Google to split between your two creatives. You can modify your titles and meta descriptions, but you have no idea when Google is going to crawl your site and update its index. And changes to your page titles can severely affect that page’s ranking.
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