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.

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.

Bricegump & Laurean both have great insight to provide on location targeting. It's best to test different types of geo targeting & whole location targeting. There will be people who are not opted in to accept cookies and will still be searching.

So terms like "web design Surrey" are good to target the whole nation, then "web design" is a better term to focus in on at the more geo-specific level in a separate campaign. Of course, head terms like "web design" are still a bit vague and you will likely see a quality score decrease, but I'm sure you were just suggesting it as an example

Display network is absolutely worth it for small businesses! My first job was a lead gen position at a small business and display worked better for us than search (we were advertising on medical terms). I would arm yourself with some persona research first so you know what areas to target and set up very specific banner ads to preemptively engage those viewers. However, I have seen the GDN prices rising recently, so be cautious with your budgets.

I'm not familiar with any way that a shared library will be able to affect campaigns that it's not assigned to.

To remove them from campaigns, click on the name of the negative KW list, then scroll to the bottom and remove the campaigns you don't want. It's a little hidden from the normal way but it will still work!

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.

My experience backs up David's opinion. Google doesn't care if your NASA if you're trying to sell cheese & crackers. Since that's not what users are searching for it's not advantageous for Google to show people NASA ads. No one really wants astronaut cheese anyway (wait... is that string cheese? maybe they do)

Auction bids & quality score are based heavily on estimated click through rate, landing page experience, ad relevance, and ad formats. LP Experience can be measured in several ways and Google has always been really keen to keep that information under lock & key. There are theories that they look at time on site, bounce back rate, click through rate, conversion rates, etc. But there's no real answer - except that I am very confident that the specific page's authority is not a heavily weighted factor.

I know you came here for a customized response that's more in depth than static information on the web, but I'm going to direct you to this video anyway because it's seriously informative http://searchengineland.com/google-new-adwords-ad-rank-video-195049

It's legit. I see this happen every day.

There are many theories behind what goes into landing page relevance, but the authority of that page is insignificant. Thousands of companies use PPC specific landing pages that are excluded from robots.txt and have high QS.

I understand that 10% can make a huge difference when you're on the cusp of getting to an 8, 9, or 10, but overall there is more you will be able to do in the account that will impact QS than what you can do with your landing page. (that's not to say that CRO isn't beneficial, but that's CRO, not QSO - quality score optimisation)

I'd rather guide you in the direction of your negative keywords and keyword grouping techniques. the more specific your keywords are to your copy to your landing page the higher quality score you will receive. Note: I said specific. "Cheese" as a head term is not a specific query... "11 in bamboo cheese board" is a very specific query.

Got a little side tracked there. Hope this information is still useful to you!

As far as Google reports, there is no connection between links a page receives, what domain it's held on, and how the URL is constructed. You can definitely go with cheese.domain in the same campaign if that's where it's located --- I'm sure there are other SEO specific reasons that you wouldn't want to have a subdomain but I'm not that knowledgeable about them