Top Keyword Combos for PPC Retail Ads During Back to School [Data]

The back-to-school and back-to-college retail audience spent an estimated combined $72.5 billion in 2013 – this season is second only behind the holidays for highest spending.

The critical thing about the back-to-school shopping season is that it's long – about three months! This is because school start dates vary across the country, from as early as the first week of August (Hawaii's public schools) to mid-September (New York City public schools).

Shoppers time their back-to-school shopping to the school start date, with 73 percent of shoppers filling their carts three weeks to more than two months before school starts.

Does Advertiser Spend on Keywords Match Top Queries?

To get an indication of the search terms the back-to-school shopper is using, we can look at advertiser spending on keywords that are relevant to back-to-school. Our friends at AdGooroo aggregated this data from both Google AdWords and the Yahoo Bing Network. It shows ad spend and impressions served – giving you a peek into how the two match up:

Does Advertiser Spend on Keywords Match Top Queries?

To get some more excellent data points and research about the back-to-school shopping season, check out our deck of insights on SlideShare.

Bing Ads Gets Curious

Bing Ads wanted to get a closer look at what's happening with search advertising in retail during the back-to-school time period.

What is being most heavily advertised – and what is being most heavily clicked on by potential shoppers? What are the keyword combinations that are working best for search ads at this time?

Let's look at how word choice in retail PPC ads during the back-to-school season (July 15 to September 15) can impact your campaign success. (We've also looked at word choice for travel, education, and holiday retail.)

Key Takeaways

Three significant things knocked our dunce caps off right away:

In a vertical as broad as retail, we're bound to see some obvious favorites when it comes to ad copy. Word combinations getting the most clicks on both PC/tablet and mobile include "Official site" or "quality" in the title and some kind of promotion ("shipping") or superlative ("best," "new") in the description.

Offering discounts ("% off") appears more effective on PC/tablet than mobile, suggesting that the ease of price comparison via desktop makes it easier to hunt for the offers.

Keywords that hint at buyer options ("products," "top," "selection") are strong pulls for both device categories. Searches may start with broad terms, and narrow once the user finds the site offering the variety they're interested in.

Breaking Down the Study

The Bing Ads researchers looked at 39,000 search ads between July 15 and September 15, 2013, in the retail vertical. These ads generated more than 113 million impressions.

Heatmap: Ad Performance on PC/Tablet

Heatmap: Ad Performance on Mobile

Top Combinations for Mobile and PC/Tablet

Other Advertiser Insights

It might be time to go back to school, but it's also time for organized sports to kick off. "Sports" was a top keyword on both PC/tablet and mobile in either the ad title or description.

"Official site" performs better on PC/tablet than it does on mobile, where users are given fewer ad options and are more likely to click on the top choice regardless of whether it's "official."

School Us

When do you begin your back-to-school retail PPC campaigns? What are the trends you're seeing with your own products and services during this season? We'd love to hear from you!

Publishers Upset Over New Google AdSense Earnings Screen

A WebmasterWorld thread has several publishers upset over the new beta Google AdSense console. Their issue is, the overview screen is missing two data points they enjoy seeing.
Specifically, the data that is missing are:
(1) Last Month's Estimate Earnings
(2) This Month So Far Estimate Earnings
The new screen does not have these, but it does add data points such as:
(1) Last 7 Days Estimate Earnings
(2) Last 28 Days Estimate Earnings
It also shows percent change from previous periods, which the other screen did not have.
Here is a screen shot of the original design:

Here is a screen shot of the new beta design:

One publisher said, "the old version was much more helpful for me - any idea how I get back to that?"

With any change, people miss the old way, so I doubt this will cause many issues in the future.

Google Update: June 28th & July 5th?

I may have missed a small Google update, unconfirmed update, that happened on June 27th/28th and there may have been an update this weekend on July 5th.

There are two different threads at WebmasterWorld with discussion about both updates. This thread is talking about the June 27th/28th update and this thread is on the update from July 5th.

There is not a lot of chatter around it but there seems to be enough. It might be related to manual actions, but many say they do not have manual actions in Google Webmaster Tools. I doubt it was a big algorithm change because the chatter is not that high on either day. July 5th chatter may be specific to the July 4th weekend and less internet traffic happening. But June 27th/28th might be a link penalty or something else. I am unsure.

The tracking tools mostly show activity on the July 5th but very little on June 28th. Here are the charts from Mozcast, SERP Metrics, SERPs.com and Algoroo:

Not Ranking in Google: Is a Manual Penalty, Algorithmic Change, or Content to Blame?

Between major algorithms like Panda and Penguin, and just plain old everyday Google algorithmic changes, it can sometimes be hard for to figure out why your site isn't ranking in Google as highly as you would like.

So how can you know why exactly your site isn't a ranking well in Google? Is it Panda? Penguin? A regular search algo issue? Or does a competiting site simply have better content than you? This is the topic of the latest Google webmaster help video featuring Matt Cutts.

First, Cutts brings up the issue of a manual penalty and suggests users first check their Google Webmaster Tools account. Here they can see whether the problem has been detailed within the account and what the solution is.

"... It could very well be the case that, 'hey we thought there was some keyword stuffing or cloaking or whatever going on,' and that's a clear-cut case, you'll get a notification, you'll get a message, and then you can start to figure out and investigate, 'OK, where can I start to improve things or what can I change to make things better.'"

Google Webmaster Tools will also alert the webmaster to any issues such as crawl errors that may be impacting the crawlability of a site.

"We have seen sites that will launch a new development website that was previously noindexed, and forget to take off the noindex tag," Cutts said. "Or there's 404s or we can reach your site, or that sort of thing."

But what about other algorithmic issues? First, he explains is a lot more difficult to determine algorithmic "penalty" because Google doesn't really view it as being a penalty.

"Really, the web spam team writes all sorts of code but that goes into the holistic ranking we do, and so if you're affected by one algorithm do you call it penalty, and if you're affected by another algorithm do not call it a penalty, is a pretty tough call to make," Cutts explained. "Especially when the web spam team is working on more and more general quality changes, not necessarily things specifically related to web spam, and sometimes general quality people work on things related to web spam, so deciding which one to call which is kind of hard to do. So we typically just think about it as the holistic ranking."

Also coming into play is the vast number of changes and tweaks that Google makes to its search algorithms at any time. If every change was considered a penalty, it would quickly become a convoluted mess for webmasters trying to sort out each individual change made.

Some changes are more obvious than others, but some are such subtle tweaks that it can be really hard to notice the difference or to determine what exactly was impacted, especially if multiple changes are rolled out at once.

"We rolled out something like 665 different changes to how we rank search results in 2012, so any given day, the odds that we're rolling out some algorithmic change are pretty good. In fact we might rolling out a couple, if you just look the raw number of changes that we're doing," Cutts said.

Cutts said Google likes to give heads up when they are releasing some change to the algorithm that they think will have a pretty significant impact on a larger group of websites.

"For example the Penguin algorithm, which is targeted towards web spam, or the Panda algorithm, which is targeted towards quality content on the web. Whenever we have large-scale changes that will affect things, then we tend to do an announcement, that 'oh yeah this changed,' or 'you should look at this particular date,' and that can be a good indicator to know whether you're affected by one of those more jolting algorithms that has a big impact," Cutts said.

Why doesn't Google make a point of announcing more of these changes? Cutts said that sometimes the changes are subtle enough or only tweaked slightly that there is not really any point in announcing the changes, however they do when there is significant change.

"What you've seen is, for example, Panda has become more and more integrated into indexing and it has less of a jolting impact, and in fact we've gotten it so that it changes the index on a pretty regular basis, and it's built into the index rather than rolling out on a certain day, so it's less useful to announce or talk about Panda launches at this point," Cutts said. "Whereas Penguin is still a switch that flips, or it's something that starts rolling out a discrete time, and so we're a bit more willing to talk about those and let people know and have a heads up, 'hey you might be affected by the Penguin algorithm.'"

So what does this really mean for those still trying to figure out what kind of penalty or algorithm is impacting their site's rankings negatively?

"In general, if your site is not ranking where you want it to rank, the bad news is that it's a little hard and difficult to say whether you call the penalty or not, is just a part of ranking," Cutts said. "The good news is, it is algorithmic, so if you modify your site, if you change your site, if you apply your best guess about what the other site is doing that you should be doing or that it is doing well, then it's always possible for the algorithm to rescore your site or for us to recrawl and reindex the site and for it to start ranking highly again.

"So it's kind of tricky because we have a large amount of algorithms that all interact and whether you call something a penalty or ranking change, or any of those things can be really hard to draw a fine distinction between those different points," Cutts said. "But the nice thing is, as you change your site, you can always see that these algorithms can sort of rerun and reprocess the site, and then the site can regain in rankings many of the times."

Bottom line, it comes down the best practices. We can see what your competitors are doing better than you that are also outranking you in Google, and see if you can make some changes to improve the quality of your site and make it better in the eyes of Google.

There are very few sites that are totally perfect in every way, and there's almost always something that can be improved upon in order to increase or maintain rankings in the Google search index.

SEO 101: Google Keyword Planner, A Content Marketer’s Secret Weapon

Search engine marketers are more than familiar with the Google Keyword Planner, one of the newer elements to Google AdWords. But if you’re a content marketer, you may not have investigated this tool – and that could be a huge mistake. Although Google no longer reveals which keywords direct traffic to your site from a search query, the Keyword Planner tool offers powerful insight into which keywords are popular and pertinent to your brand. These keywords can become launching points for your content, providing value to your audience – and traffic to your site.

Need help getting started? Here’s how to make the Google Keyword Planner your secret weapon:

Step 1: Sign up for Google AdWords.

You can only access the Keyword Planner through an AdWords account. Once you’ve created yours, you can find the Keyword Planner tool under the “Tools and Analysis” tab in the navigation bar.

Step 2: Discover which keywords you should implement in your content.

If your brand is using SEO to help boost your online visibility (and if you’re not, you should be), you should already have a list of terms and keywords people are using when searching for information about your industry, brand, and products or services. These should be the keywords you use in your content marketing strategy to complement your SEO efforts.

However, if you need more terms, or haven’t done any other keyword research, the Keyword Planner is here to help. Look for the “new keyword or ad group ideas” function. Then, type in your seed keyword; this is the most common word that is associated with your brand’s purpose. For example, a software company would use the keyword “security software” as their seed keyword. Additional filters on the tab, such as selecting your brand category, will help the tool return the most relevant results.

The Keyword Planner will generate a list of related keywords for you to sift through. Choose the terms most relevant to your brand to create content around. For example, the software company above might get a list of keywords that include “encryption”, “data protection” and “information security”. Encryption might make a good content topic – you could write a blog post on the most important elements to consider when buying encryption software, or the ten attributes you need to pay attention to when deploying a new encryption software system in an organization. Those post ideas provide value to customers that content generated from the broad“security software” keyword alone wouldn’t.

Step 3: Evaluate which keywords you should implement in your content.

While Google will no longer show you direct traffic results, you can see which keywords generate high levels of search traffic. In the Keyword Planner, go to the “get search volume” section, and either manually type in or upload a list of keywords you have identified as relevant to your brand. The Keyword Planner will then show you the average amount of monthly searches for that term, as well as an estimate of the level of competition that keyword receives.

Step 4: Decide which opportunities to use in your content strategy.

The most ideal result is a keyword that has both a high number of searches and a low amount of competition, but these terms are few and far between. Most likely, you’ll have to make a decision based upon your goals; while a term with a low competition might be easier to get results for, that low competition usually means that there are less searches for the keyword. Conversely, a high competition keyword often has a much higher average number of searches than a low competition keyword, but your content will be vying against a large number of other content producers within those searches’ results pages. You’ll have to decide which method is best for your brand and the audience you are trying to reach.

The Keyword Planner Tool might have been originally designed to help SEM professionals optimize pay-per-click ads, but since most aspects of digital marketing perform best when integrated, using this tool to help inform your content marketing strategy means better results across your entire digital marketing strategy. Knowing which keywords are important to your brand – and are being searched for online – will help you create valuable, useful content for your audience, which is the main goal for any content marketing campaign.

While the Keyword Planner is the best free keyword research tool available, there are some other free alternatives: Wordpot offers a free keyword generator, although its index was last updated in 2011. SEO Book’s Keyword Tool is also free, and a little more robust; it generates suggested daily search volumes and price estimates from Google AdWords. No matter what tool you use, generating and incorporating keywords into your brand’s content marketing is crucial to distributing your content to relevant users.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101-google-keyword-planner-content-marketers-secret-weapon/94511/

Matt Cutts Isn't Amused by This Guy Selling Links on Twitter

It has been nearly 2 years since iAcquire was penalized by Google for participating in link buying schemes for their clients. At the time it was pretty significant because it was an SEO agency that had been banned for work they did for the clients, rather than work they did specifically for their own site.

However, iAcquire’s name has once again been linked to link buying, this time with a tweet from a former client who was selling links to iAcquire, a tweet that Google's chief spam fighter Matt Cutts happened to notice and respond to.

@VitaliyKolosWDL ಠ_ಠ

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 20, 2014

"Vince" from Web Design Library has been tweeting multiple companies about renewing their link buys that were expiring on the WebDesign.org website. The link seem to have been sold initially by iAcquire, but appear to no longer be doing so, as the company is performing the outreach to the individual link buyers.

This was one of the pages in question that was being used to sell links.

Search Engine Roundtable grabbed a screenshot of the entire conversation between "Vince" and T-Mobile before T-Mobile deleted the tweets:

As a self-proclaimed SEO, you really have to wonder why he is taking his link selling into such a public forum, where anyone from Google’s spam team could (and did) see his tweets.

"Vince" has placed on Twitter not only a page he is selling links on, but also the names of all those people and websites whom iAcquire was presumably selling links for as well. What is even more curious is the fact that the link seller hasn't deleted any of the offending tweets since Cutts (and many others) have commented on it.

It also caught the notice of Brian White, another member of the webspam team, who mocked the link seller along with a clever photo of himself using an Android cookie jar like a batphone.

@VitaliyKolosWDL I'm ready to talk about link building! Conference me in!pic.twitter.com/Ys0dwGK0lv

— Brian White (@brianwhite) March 21, 2014

Has Web Design Library been penalized? It now appears so, five days after Cutts' tweeted his response, though that wasn't the case just yesterday.

After ranking 8th on a search for [web design] yesterday, now the site is ranked 48th, Search Engine Land reported. And it no longer ranks first when you search for Web Design Library.

Google has been treating both link buyers and link sellers harshly of late, including cracking down on numerous link networks.

SEO for Startups & New Businesses: An 11 Step Plan

You're starting a new business. You have a great idea or product, some money to invest, eager customers, and great workers.

With the business model and process elements covered, now is the time plan out how to succeed in search and discovery digital contexts.

Many elements are required to do well nowadays need to be built-in to your site and off-site properties, so here is an outline on how to build a new business that will do SEO right.

Step 1: Know Your Concepts and Keywords

Start by determining what customer behaviors you want to be a part of and what concepts you want to be associated with.

This is bigger than just keywords and keyword research. People, content, functionality, open data, and a bunch of other things will get you business into the conversations you care about.

For the sake of clarity, let's say you're starting a new business based on selling new and used cars and operating car dealerships. Here's what a concept map might look like:

Take the concepts and behaviors you want to be associated with and build a list of strategic keywords. You will use these keywords for a lot of different purposes later.

Step 2: Plan Your Content Investments and Practice Content Marketing

Now that you have a handle on your key concepts and have built a strategic keyword list, you're ready to create a high-level plan for content creation. I say high-level because this will help inform your website user experience, the type of people you hire, and the kind of narrative, social, video, or other type of digital content you invest in.

Here's an example of a high-level editorial plan for a new and used car dealership business:

Note how core concepts inform multiple aspects of content and UX creation.

Step 3: Ensure Your Site is Technically Flawless

This is the world of technical SEO. It has two main components:

• Making sure you don't screw up your indexing by creating content that can't be seen or is duplicative.
• Making sure you create search-engine friendly code.

Modern content management systems do a pretty good job in this area, and if you are using WordPress you are really lucky as there are some great SEO plugins that make tuning the technical side of things easy.

Most content management systems can also create sitemaps – be sure to activate them, submit them to Google, and validate them using Google Webmaster Tools.

One emerging element of technical SEO is the creation of open data sets or APIs. If your business will thrive by getting your inventory or content into as many places as possible, consider creating data feeds or APIs for third-party developers to use.

Step 4: Get Your On-Page and Metadata Act in Order

Discrete content elements – web pages, images, PDFs, videos, social profiles and brand pages, local listings, and off-site (reviews) pages all require on-page optimization. This means knowing the target keyphrase for the content and getting it into the right places – the title, description, copy, etc.

This is too much ground to cover in detail in this one guide, but here are a few helpful optimization resources:

• Metadata & You: Best Practices, Benefits & Implementation Made Easy
• Image Optimization: How to Rank on Image Search
• 5 YouTube Video Optimization Tips
• SEO for Google+ Profiles, Pages, Local, Communities & Updates
• 5 Social Media Profile Optimization Tips for Brands

You need to make sure every piece of content is optimized before it goes out the door and is published, and that it has both social signal (tweets, Google +1's,) and inbound link support.

There are also a ton of emerging metadata schemas out there – Open Graph, Twitter Card, Google-specific (Authorship, etc.), Schema.org, and others. Best practice is to build this front-end metadata into your templates where appropriate and have them pull the right attributes from the database or have your writers enter the values into the CMS at the point of content creation.

Step 5: Develop Your Social Authority Plan

Social authority, in most cases measured by a given persons G+ profile, has the potential to become a major ranking factor in the emerging world of app-based or semantic knowledge engines.

This means you need to determine who in your company (maybe everybody?) will become active on Google+ and other key social graph and authority platforms like LinkedIn to champion your brand, create content, and get connected to other authoritative people. Google+ posts pass Page Rank, and Google+ profiles may show author attribution on results pages, so it's an especially important platform for SEO.

Some brands don't want every employee to represent their brand in social contexts, some are OK with that. For example, if you work for The Economist, don't expect to see you name appear on any of your articles. If you work at The New York Times, you may even get your Twitter handle in your byline.

Many companies net out in the middle – high profile executives and writers or product people are authorized, encourages, and reviewed and compensated based on their social authority and the metrics of the content they create and promote on 'earned' platforms.

Step 6: Mobilize, Localize, and Socialize Your Content and People

Search engines are geo-locating results more and more – not just the local results block but the core web results as well. This means you need to make your content as locally relevant as possible and to make it work great on mobile devices (where a ton of local searching is done).

Create geo-targeted evergreen pages, create geo-optimized profiles, location pages, support or reseller pages, whatever. No matter how abstract your business is you can find some way to make it locally relevant.

Here's an example of geo-located core web results:

I often tell clients that local is the "back door" into competitive search results pages. Making your site responsive or at least mobile-friendly for the major screen sizes will often help here.

If you have location or sell through the channel, get your locations or agents up on mobile geo-optimized landing pages and put inbound links from all the major social profile pages pointing to their profile page.

Step 7: Practice Distributed, Search-Informed Communications, and PR

Launching a new business is news-worthy, so make the most of the bursty nature of the event to get inbound links to deep pages using good anchor text.

It's not just press releases. It's interviews, it's getting your employees to link to deep pages from their Google+ profiles, and it's drawing attention to the deep functionality of the site so that bloggers and other folks will link to them and discuss them.

As noted above, empower some or all of your employees and make them a PR/social media army to drive social signals and inbound links around you launch.

Step 8: Train Editors, Publishers, and Writers on SEO and Linking

Be sure to put your writers and editors through SEO and social media bootcamp before you go live. Get them to understand content metrics and target keywords.

Make sure they push their content on Google+, LinkedIn, wherever it's relevant. The idea is to do content marketing, not content creation. If a particular writer gets a lot of inbound links or tweets, let them know rewards will follow.

Step 9: Put the Key Metrics, Reporting Tools, and Reporting Cadence in Place

Having a content metrics and inbound marketing reporting plan in place before you launch is a great way to ensure these elements don't get de-scoped or forgotten.

There are a ton of tools out there to help you evaluate content both from a social sharing as well as an SEO perspective. Add in traditional web analytics and you have a good idea of how well acquisition content is doing.

Look at things like organic landing pages, time on page, and pages viewed per session for a given entry page. Add in social metrics and you are good to go.

Look at this report at least once a week once you launch. You can also pay offshore resources peanuts to manually compile this data.

Linkdex has a great Content 360 report that aggregates SEO and social sharing metrics into one URL-level report. Nice!

Step 10: Allocate Dollars for Content Promotion and Syndication

At this point, you pretty much have a plan in place. Now you need to understand how you're going to promote, syndicate, and generally give you content a push out the door.

Taking a step back, you're enterprise content plan for the example used above might look something like this. At each stage, there are paid, social graph, or syndication options that go beyond traditional SEO and can work synergistically.

At the end of this process you have created an acquisition-focused enterprise content framework. Now ask yourself how paid media can support each element.

Staple your enterprise content plan right in front of you – that way you can see it all the time.

Step 11: Make it Somebody's Job

I've saved the best for last, because if nothing else I want you to remember this. Put SEO and content metrics on somebody's performance plan and make sure you have the resources in place to get the work done.

Writers aren't SEO people, neither are analytics people nor developers. You need an earned media person who will drive this project forward continually.

Hire them. Call them whatever your want – Content Champion, Inbound Marketing Strategist, Earned Media Manager – whatever – but put them in place and hold them accountable.

If you're the CEO, it's not really your job to do this. If you're a director of online marketing, it's likely you don't have the time to do this. You need somebody who will work cross-group and who can focus on this.

Conclusion

Whether it's for a startup or a new business, these 11 steps will help your SEO efforts be more successful. Of course, once you launch a business the keywords and content your care about may change, but the game remains the same.

Work at a startup or new business? Ask questions or share your own experiences in the comments!

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066757/SEO-for-Startups-New-Businesses-An-11-Step-Plan

Google AdWords Search Funnels Attribution Modeling: Think Hard Before You Act

You may have read about the introduction of attribution modeling into AdWords. This is a big deal.

I'm going to tell you why you should be excited, and why you shouldn't get carried away and try to use it too soon.

What is Attribution Modeling?

Attribution is any method of understanding the customer touchpoints before making a purchase, and deciding which touchpoints were influential. We've had attribution tools in AdWords in a long time in the form of Search Funnels, but the new introduction brings us attribution modeling.

Attribution modeling has become a fix-all term over the last few years. Companies offering it haven't been able to accurately articulate exactly what you'll do with it, and lots of companies have thought about it without taking the plunge.

At the moment it's half a solution. It gives you more information and more insight, but can offer little to no direction into what to do with it.

Attribution modeling is super valuable and the various tools that offer it do a lot. But, like all things, you need to have a plan first.

What's New in AdWords?

Modeling tools have been in Google Analytics for a while, so hopefully you've all had a chance to look at them a bit. The AdWords data includes only AdWords touchpoints, so it's a bit more limited. But let's look at that data in the context of a user's path to conversion.

Many users will interact with your ads (and site) more than once on their journey to converting. Not all of those touchpoints had any impact on their likelihood of making a purchase with you.

The goal of attribution modeling is to choose different weighting options that might reflect how a person interacts with your brand. By choosing one that fits better with the behavior of your users you can see which of your touchpoints were costing you a lot of money that was better spent elsewhere.

1. Last Click

Last click attribution is the standard. This model has already existed for a long time and will continue to do so. It gives the entire value of the conversion to the final click. Simple.

This is appropriate in a lot of cases. You might be in a market where people decide very quickly and easily, or make impulse purchases. You may be in a scenario where people research and then look for suppliers separately. If being present in the first stage wasn't important, then you want to know which keywords (and ads) were present as final-stage influencers.

The downside is that you lose all credit for keywords that generated the person's interest in your brand in the first place.

2. First Click

If you do credit all value to the final click then you might find your total conversion volumes dropping as you start turning down (or off) keywords that seemingly led to no conversions.

By using first click attribution instead you can see that the other way. Which keywords helped users learn about my brand in the first place? How did they originally find me, and let me make sure I give those keywords the credit they deserve.

It's compelling for some markets, particularly those where purchases might be delayed. If I sell a non-essential product that people might wait until payday to purchase (a new jacket, maybe?), then I could expect them to revisit my site several times in between finding the jacket (and making the decision) and finally purchasing.

Since the first click was the decision maker I would want to give that the credit.

But what if the first click was important, but not the decision maker? What if the user maybe wanted to compare prices?

3. Position-Based

This is confusing, because position-based attribution is actually the catch-all term for all of these kinds of attribution where the position in the funnel is the determining factor. But I'm going to gloss over that a bit and talk about the position-based model in AdWords.

In this model you will basically credit both the first and the last interactions, and downweight all the interactions in between. The result is that you see which keywords drove the awareness of your brand and which keywords they used to make the final decision. If you had missed either of those interactions (e.g., you weren't present on those searches) you would have missed the sale.

This makes sense when you talk about users who compare prices. This is a pretty clear and obvious research cycle:

"skiing holidays" > "skiing holidays in france" > "french ski break in march" > "france skiing march 10"

If the first click helped the user decide to go to France for their holiday, then I need to give that some credit. But if the final search was a price comparison, then if I'd missed that then I might have missed out on their booking.

But do we really want to downweight all intervening interactions so much?

4. Time Decay

If a research cycle is particularly long then which companies the user saw at the beginning might be fading from their memory.

Having had a presence early on could still build some credibility, but the later searches were the ones that really decided them.

Time decay models give more weight to more recent interactions, and reduce the credit given to earlier interactions.

It makes sense if the user is taking a long time to research and we want to be on shortlists but not over-prioritizing searches that aren't really very focused, but we still don't know which of our touchpoints was the decision maker. We might have removed it!

5. Linear

The most obvious of attribution models, linear attribution gives equal weight to every touchpoint.

It sounds good that we never lose the effect of any of our keywords. We don't know which ones we could have safely removed and still made the sale, so give them all something.

But how helpful is that? In this case we know definitelythat we're giving credit where it isn't due. Our best influencing keywords will look poorer and our worst influencing keywords will look better. So are we able to make good decisions from this?

What's Wrong With Attribution Models?

I don't like:

Choosing a Model Without Good Reason

Choosing a model is a case of luck. Every user is different. Every user's path to converting is different. Every user's influential touchpoint is different.

Whenever we act on the information from an attribution model we are always either: upweighting certain touchpoints that we think influenced people or downweighting those we think didn't.

So unless every user was influenced by the same touchpoints we are absolutely making our brand less visible for some users at key moments. What will attract more users like User A will definitely attract fewer users like User B.

That's bad. It might play out well overall and there might be more As than Bs. But we don't know that in advance and we can't split test it. Time-series testing is bad. Without a split-test you reallydon't know.

Before you can choose a model and act on it you absolutely must be confident that you're reflecting the most common paths your users are taking.

Position-Based Models in General

In the bigger picture terminology, position-based models refer to attribution models that credit interactions based on their position in the path. Every model in AdWords fits into this category.

But in reality attribution is a million times more complicated than that.

How much credit should your brand keywords get? Brand keywords are generally navigational (e.g., "take me to the page" rather than "show me people who can sell me X"). With that in mind, was brand ever an influencer for you?

So really you'd want to choose a model that downweights brand wherever it is in the path!

How about if the same touchpoint is used twice in a row? If they interacted with your brand then repeated the same search to come to your site that sounds like they are just trying to get back to you via the method they found you before. So should you downweight any repeat searches? If you do and you're not present the second time will you lose that person? Maybe. Sometimes.

What are your unique selling points vs your competitors? If you know you're the cheapest in the market, then you really want to be present for any searches that are obviously price-sensitive, right? That's where you're going to be more persuasive than they are. If you offer the best quality, then any searches including the term "best" would be worth upweighting in your model, because they probably reflect the more influential touchpoints.

What Should You Do?

This is the tricky bit.

Because AdWords attribution models only include paid search touchpoints, there's a part of me that says: nothing. Just go look at the data in Google Analytics instead.

But even if you do that, it isn't clear whether any actions you take as a result are genuinely safe.

Look at your attribution models in the context of your multi-channel funnels, your paths to conversion, etc. Use it as a tool to see which keywords did really well if you cut brand out of the equation. Or only credit X keywords if they're first click.

Most importantly, think before you act.

Make sure you can logically explain the reason behind anything you can see before you act on it, so you can understand why it would or wouldn't behave the way you expect it to. And remember that if you apply model A to the data then act, it will look better under model A. Not model B.

Don't expect optimizing for first click data to make your last click stats improve. They will not.