The Finch representative who helped you enter into your Finch agreement is your first point of contact.  There is a global team available to support your account depending on your needs.

You will only be responsible for the Ad Copy, Negative keyword insertion, and landing page optimization.

You do! If you decide to stop using Finch, you can keep the campaigns that we have set up. However, the campaigns are unlikely to keep performing over time if the Finch software is disconnected.

The important thing is to always work on the ads that have the most impact on your results.  Finch uses a highly granular ad group structure that may at first look like it makes it difficult to manage ad copy.  For global changes to ads, you can use AdWords Editor, or you can email the changes you want to Finch, and we will make the changes.

Optimizing the click through rate (CTR) for the ads in a campaign is best done with the following methodology in Google AdWords:

1. Click on the campaign you want to work on, then select the Ads tab, and set the data range to Last 30 days.
2. Click on the Impressions header to sort your ads to put the ads with the most impressions on top.
3. Among the top 25 ads, look for those with the lowest click through rate (CTR), click on the Ad Group link, pause the least performing ads, and add new ones.
4. Keep track of the ads you are changing (xls) and check next week for improvement (learning).
5. Every week do this same drill, and you will have a rapidly increasing CTR where it matters the most -- from the keywords with the most traffic/impressions.

You want your ad copy to get clicks that convert. Writing your ad so that it stands out from other ads on the search results page is the most critical task. And when your ad is relevant to the search term, this increases the probability that the click will convert, which helps both your cost and volume.

Four lines are available for your ad, and the best practice for each of the lines are as follows:

1. Dynamic {search term} insertion, combined with text
2. Benefits of buying from your and/or a snippet of what makes you different from others
3. Call to action (why buy now: discount, shipping, service, etc.)
4. URL

When you write your ad copy internally, it may be your most effective instant market research tool.  By changing what you offer as benefits, describing what makes you different, and supplying a “call to action,” in a few days you will learn how your target market is responding to the message you sent with your ad. When your ad has a good response, you should use that information in all of your other online promotions since it has proven to be successful.

When you pay attention to ad granularity and carefully select which ads to modify with the best practices described here (combined with following the instructions in the “How do I change and optimize my ads?" FAQ topic), you can, in most cases, dramatically improve your CTR and Quality score.

Similar Image Ads and Text Ads should be placed in separate AdGroups within the same campaign.

Text Ads and Image Ads compete with each other on placement. This means that it is best to put Image Ads into existing campaigns so that we can control the bidding on each for the most optimal outcome. And since Image Ads typically require higher bids, they should be in separate AdGroups within the campaign. (Image Ads often have a higher CTR and conversion rate, so their higher bidding costs even out.)

If you are adding Image Ads to a campaign that has only Text Ads, here are some helpful steps to follow:

1. Copy all of the current AdGroups.
2. Rename them to include the word Image at the end of the name.
3. In the new AdGroup, delete the Text Ads.
4. Put the new Image Ads into the AdGroup.

Note that for an Image Ad,  it is best to have one of each format, because placements will sometimes accept only certain formats.

When you see an ad for your business, and you see something on the ad that does not look familiar in the ad copy or extensions, an affiliate might be bidding on your domain and taking some of your clicks.

Follow these steps to find out if this is the case:

1. Navigate to the ad that you find suspicious by searching at Google using keywords found in your AdWords campaigns.

2. Right click a link in the ad, and select to copy the link. (Depending on your browser, when you right click you might see “Copy link,” “Copy link address,” or “Copy link location.”)

3. Paste the link that you just copied into a file so that you can read it.

4. Near the end of the link, look for the “adurl” parameter and pay attention to its value, which is the URL that the ad will redirect to from Google when clicked on.

If you see that the URL does not point to your website, and is not found in any of your AdWords campaigns or in any of your AdWords accounts, you know that an affiliate is taking your clicks. Usually you can determine which affiliate it is by looking at the domain in the URL.

Tell the affiliate to stop bidding on your business terms, because they are taking your low cost clicks and conversions, making the clicks more costly for you while diverting a substantial part of the branded/trademark traffic through their links.

Note that you must right click on the ad and copy the link. If you just click on the ad as normal, it will redirect you to the affiliate and then immediately to your website, so you will not be able to see the affiliate URL this way.

See more on this topic.

One-per-click means that Google will only register one conversion per click on an Ad.  This works great when there is only value in having one unique conversion per customer (i.e. a lead for a software client only has value the first time the form is filled out).

Many-per-Click means that conversions are recorded multiple times from the same customer after the first click.  This is always the way to record conversions for an eCommerce client, because the only way to trigger the conversion tracking script is by completing the shopping cart (meaning the client is making money for every conversion, and it should be tied to the initial ad spend).

Google's reporting matches up the cost of a click with the resulting conversions to the same day as the cost of the click.  Google keeps track of this by issuing a 30-day cookie that helps record any conversion resulting over the 30 days from the most recent click back to the day you paid for the initial click.  Google does this in order to match up your cost with the leads/revenue so you can more easily measure ROI and cost effectiveness.  When you are looking at Google reports that have data less than 30 days old, you need to know your lag history to be able to fully compare new performance data with older data.

Example:  You spend $1 on a click on January 1st.  The person clicking on your ad goes to your site but leaves after a few seconds.  If that person comes back to your site in the next 30 days and converts (purchase, lead, or other action), it will be recorded as a conversion for January 1st.  This is also the reason that Google data that is less than 30 days old keeps changing as lag conversions are recorded.

If you want to see your lag conversions (they are also shown in the Finch dashboard reports), log in to  your Google AdWords account, go to Reporting, Conversions, Search Funnel, Time Lags, and select First Click.

Read more about lag conversions in Finch's white paper, How do time lags affect conversion tracking?

Clients often have a strong resistance to pay Google for their own brand names.  “Why pay when I can get it for free via SEO” is a common question.  There are many reasons you want to include your branded terms:

• It is frequently the most effective keywords in terms of both cost and volume.
• Competitors are buying your branded terms, so you will likely be #1 because of Quality Score and allocation due to performance.
• When people do searches, some click on organic results, some on paid results, and some on both. You want all clicks as long as they are profitable clicks.
• Studies have shown that being above position #5 for both SEO and PPC gives you a 3.3 times chance, or better, of getting the click.
• The bottom line is this:  It’s about getting the click, not if you pay or not -- Finch makes sure the click is profitable.

The short answer is no. Finch does not work with interest-based advertising, which allows a way for you to reach out to people who have previously visited your website. Finch looks only at the keywords that lead to conversions.

You can run your own remarketing in parallel with Finch managing your campaigns.

Read more about remarketing by Google AdWords.