Hey Crystal, how is this going? Are you still seeing 0% bounce rates?

The AdX network requires a significant amount of finessing to get it running smoothly. I know you make more money from DoubleClick but running Adsense allows you to stop spinning you wheels as frequently. It's a little less intensive to manage. With DoubleClick, you are going to need to do a lot more scheduling. Your settings may be restricting other advertisers from being able to appear on your site. I would play around more with the settings until you are serving more ads.

Competition does matter, and the landscape does change based on different keywords. Most head terms don't have significant amounts of competition because they are too vague. Something like Wedding Cakes is not a good PPC term when you are looking to make money on your money as fast as you can.

It's always best to try bidding on the term (especially on Broad Match Modified) to see how it performs for you, but it is highly likely you will receive a low QS and a low CTR and higher CPCs which make it not as important of a term when you are looking at everything from a returns or profits perspective.

As far as low v high volumes for keywords, it's not something that I take into significant consideration unless my client is trying to get close to a specific number or is very concerned about a specific keyword. PPC is about throwing out a wide net for low, mid and high volume keywords, bidding on all of them, and learning over time what creates good return for your particular niche. What works for my business might be a horrible strategy for your business.

For the reasons above, you should noindex them, but do make sure that the Google AdWords bot can crawl them - if this is the same bot as the organic bot, then don't noindex. I heard from a reliable source that noindexing will lower your ability to gain a higher Quality Score as google doesn't know what your page is about. If you are using Dynamic Search Ads then you will need to point those to the seo pages on your site, not your ppc pages.

There are several reasons why AdWords & GA data won't match up, and this is one of them, but don't ever expect them to be the same.

I know we keep harping that things need to be linked appropriately and I'm glad you've gotten it handled, Anna, but it's the most common reason for any real mis-attribution. And by most common I mean nearly everyone gets it wrong Glad you're on the right track here.

There is also an attribution modeling between GA & AdWords. AdWords is a first touch attribution interface while generally GA is last touch. Though your site is relatively new, if you have any return visitors at all from brand then they will appear as Organic and not PPC.

Knowing that GWT says you don't have any non-brand traffic and you are sure you don't rank for anything, where is the traffic going? What are the landing pages you are using for PPC? Are they different than the pages organic traffic is getting traffic on? (side note: please tell me that you aren't sending PPC traffic to the home page )

Hey Dev Dan!

Sorry for the late response times on my end. I know that has to be really frustrating. I've not had the opportunity to oversee the issues with switching to GTM so I've asked that we find someone else who may be able to help you. Hang in there! Hopefully we have someone who has run into a similar issue.

Might be a bit off base with your questions, Cole. Just wanted to make sure you aren't planning on using the GFN (Google Fowarding Number) as an offline means of call attribution. (more info below, but if you aren't then just ignore it )

Each call will be calculated as a conversion after you specify that you want that. In the Tools> Conversions tab, you will need to add a new conversion type and mark calls as a conversion. Here, you can set the call length by seconds to determine when you want to register a call length as a conversion. For instance, I was working with a company that saw conversions happen around 8 minutes on the phone, so we set the time to the equivalent of 8 minutes and filtered for just these conversions within the UI.

Why you shouldn't use Google Fowarding Numbers outside of AdWords
It's a bad idea to use google forwarding numbers because they are only intended for SEM use. If you start plugging them around elsewhere you're not going to have proper conversion attribution to your campaigns. Google has numerous numbers that it's going to use to properly attribute the calls to specific keywords. If you pull a number that actually is associated to a very poor performing keyword (ie, it still doesn't get you calls, you just stole the number and applied it to a mailer) then Google is going to start optimizing for that keyword's conversion performance even though it's actually a bad KW.

Also, there's a science involved to call tracking. I would highly suggest you speak with Call Tracking Metrics, Mongoose Metrics, or If By Phone for the technical understanding of how call tracking works and why you can't just plug numbers around.

It also says what type of account they are good for. If the account was activated recently, you might not be able to use more than one. Since you have an account that is older and has spent more money, it might be qualified for more discounts.

Max is definitely right that you need code. The most common attribution method is last non direct. The easiest way to determine PPC v SERPs is to try to grab the GCLID. If you end up growing your business and/or merging this information back to AdWords from the offline conversion tracking option they offer you will need the GCLID.

For the reasons above, you should noindex them, but do make sure that the Google AdWords bot can crawl them - if this is the same bot as the organic bot, then don't noindex. I heard from a reliable source that noindexing will lower your ability to gain a higher Quality Score as google doesn't know what your page is about. If you are using Dynamic Search Ads then you will need to point those to the seo pages on your site, not your ppc pages.

This is definitely a job for Analytics!

Typically you can see how important paid search is to your funnel by looking at the Assisted Conversion Funnel in the Conversions section of Analytics. The closer to 1.0 each channel gets means that it is more important to the completion of that funnel.

Or, here's a quick way I just worked out for you to see how many times PPC touches a converting funnel where Direct is also involved... I don't typically work this out from this direction so my math could be incorrect. You'll want to look to the Multi-Channel Funnel > Top Conversion Paths report, select the conversion metric you are most interested in viewing (we can only see multi-channel paths for conversions with this method), and set the lookback date to 90 days, and choose to list more than 10 instances. I chose all of mine for this experiment.

Download the Top Conversion Paths for your transaction. The sample size I had was 187 different conversion paths. But the client I was viewing also had a "greater than 5 min on site" goal and the number of paths to that was 4113. There are so many ways someone can come to your site, so don't forget to be open minded about the paths that people take!

I filtered this list of 187 paths to just PPC (66) then I used this function {=SUM(LEN(A192:A236)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A192:A236,"Direct","")))/LEN("Direct")}* to find all the instances of Direct within those (317). For this particular conversion type, we see 20.8% of conversion funnels that involved PPC and Direct, 16.8% that involved PPC and Direct and Organic. But this could have been a funnel that was as bizarre as: Social > Email > Direct > Organic > PPC > Email > Direct. It will take a lot more granularity & descriptive funnel naming to pick out what instances of these started or ended with NonBrand or Brand searches.

• This function must be entered as an Array, so instead of just hitting ENTER when you submit it to a cell, you must CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER to get it to work, thus the brackets will show in the cell.

Two domains can run in the same account. They cannot run in the same adgroup.

If you never plan on spending more than 15k/mo per domain then I think it's OK to keep them all in the same account. Just be sure to label them differently for each campaign.

If your brands will be bidding on the same keywords, then do not put them in the same account. Because they are two separate brands you can double serve ads, but it's not advisable. There are MANY things that can go wrong if you try to bid on the same terms with two different accounts. I would suggest hiring someone who knows what they're doing to help you set this up & possibly run it for you so you don't end up bidding against yourself and running up your own CPCs.

Google does have a TOS line against doorway pages: sending traffic to Domain1.com, but Domain1.com has no other purpose than to send its traffic based on any action to Domain2.com

Hey, great question about ranking, but let's back up for a minute. I think the content of the piece has more to do with the format than the desired ranking of that format. yes "Content is King" but only valuable & good content....

What is the content? Is it time sensitive? Is it a category? Do you plan on adding new information to this content? Do you want people to engage with it or take an action to benefit your company? What is the CTA?

Assuming you're using it for adwords, it has a direct business relation to your purpose. So I think it should be a static page on the site (or what you're referring to as a landing page) because blog posts typically allow for a wide variety of actions to be taken on the page whereas a strong PPC intended landing page will need to be more specific and directed. There might be a different type of page that works better for organic traffic than PPC traffic, but that should come from several rounds of testing.

Might be a bit off base with your questions, Cole. Just wanted to make sure you aren't planning on using the GFN (Google Fowarding Number) as an offline means of call attribution. (more info below, but if you aren't then just ignore it )

Each call will be calculated as a conversion after you specify that you want that. In the Tools> Conversions tab, you will need to add a new conversion type and mark calls as a conversion. Here, you can set the call length by seconds to determine when you want to register a call length as a conversion. For instance, I was working with a company that saw conversions happen around 8 minutes on the phone, so we set the time to the equivalent of 8 minutes and filtered for just these conversions within the UI.

Why you shouldn't use Google Fowarding Numbers outside of AdWords
It's a bad idea to use google forwarding numbers because they are only intended for SEM use. If you start plugging them around elsewhere you're not going to have proper conversion attribution to your campaigns. Google has numerous numbers that it's going to use to properly attribute the calls to specific keywords. If you pull a number that actually is associated to a very poor performing keyword (ie, it still doesn't get you calls, you just stole the number and applied it to a mailer) then Google is going to start optimizing for that keyword's conversion performance even though it's actually a bad KW.

Also, there's a science involved to call tracking. I would highly suggest you speak with Call Tracking Metrics, Mongoose Metrics, or If By Phone for the technical understanding of how call tracking works and why you can't just plug numbers around.

Yes. it's possible. I would look at their top pages from previous months and see if there's been a specific decline in traffic to those organically, then make sure that you aren't advertising on those pages. However - I would like to point out that it is bad news for them if their own ad can take away that much traffic. Someone else could advertise there and take away the same traffic.

Be sure it's not brand terms also. Double check negative keywords too.

Max is definitely right that you need code. The most common attribution method is last non direct. The easiest way to determine PPC v SERPs is to try to grab the GCLID. If you end up growing your business and/or merging this information back to AdWords from the offline conversion tracking option they offer you will need the GCLID.

Yes to what David & Dave have said.

To add, I think you should also not be targeting the term "widget" so generally. "buy" probably isn't the best modifier you could use, or the best use of your time if you have a lengthy list of one word keywords.

I would hope that you are advertising on more keywords than just broad head terms, like "HP" "Windows" "Widget" "Tech" "Money" "word" -- i went a little off topic there, but I'm sure you get the point.

You should rely minimally on big, broad terms like these but instead,  target longer 2-4 word phrases more frequently. It will improve your CPC and overall ROI.

Matthew, Joram & Branden have all provided really great answers, and it looks like you're on the right track.

Have you connected your analytics account with your adwords account? Here's how if you haven't yet. I know there's been some redesigning going on insight Analytics, but it should still be the majority of the same information. Might take a bit of trial & error though.

IF you've already set up GA & AW then you should be able to see AdWords conversions filtering into your current goals. Go to the Conversions section, then go to Overview. In the refreshed screen, select by Source / Medium. This will give you a decent idea of how AdWords has been helping.

Generally, I would say that if you don't know how AdWords has been contributing to your bottom line, then I wouldn't increase budget. Are you managing all online marketing for your company?