Adword Monster

Google Grants Bid Increase Shell Game

2013-01-30T17:05:26Z

Google Grants has always been an odd program. It comes with free money which is undoubtedly awesome. I don’t think you’ll find an advertiser that wouldn’t want a free $10,000 per month. This money is extremely difficult to spend due to various restrictions however which makes it decidedly less awesome. Google just announced a major increase in the bidding limit from $1 to $2 which was really exciting to me… until I read about the MAJOR catch.

Read the official announcement and see if you can find the problem:

First, as of January 28, 2013, Google Grantees may bid up to $2.00 USD on keywords. This is an increase from the previous CPC bid cap of $1.00 USD and may allow your ads to enter auctions previously unavailable at the $1.00 bid cap. Second, to balance the interests of businesses who pay to advertise on Google search, your ads will now appear below the ads of traditional AdWords advertisers.

Did you catch it? “your ads will now appear below the ads of traditional AdWords advertisers.”

Google is trying to appear friendly and benevolent by granting you a higher bid. Once you’ve been distracted by your good fortune they’ve gone ahead and relegated you to a murky sub-auction below the “real” advertisers. Congratulations, you’ve just become a second class Adwords citizen.

If you’re aiming for searches that only have other Grants advertisers on them your life isn’t going to change much. All of you are getting the same bid benefit which makes the whole thing meaningless. The only upside is your competitor may get caught sleeping and forget to move their bids from $1 to $2.

For those Grants advertisers that have been successful competing against “normal” advertisers, well you guys are screwed. The magic you may have worked by focusing on quality score to bring up the value of your $1 bid allowance has just been flushed. According to this announcement from Google you could be the most relevant ad with the highest bid and you’ll still lose top positions because of your Grant status.

My advice to you in February, watch your average position and traffic volume. If it makes a hard move in the wrong direction start complaining. As a Grant recipient you have no meaningful sway over Google as an individual, but if enough of you make some noise they may walk this unfriendly change back.

AdWords Secrets – Negative Keywords

2013-01-25T22:50:02Z

Everyone knows what keywords they want but they rarely consider the words they DO NOT want. Proper negative keyword management is often the key to unlocking the full potential of your AdWords Account.

Most keyword models will attract some traffic that is not related to your business. Keywords often cross into other industries and niches or end up with a modified intent depending on how the word was used in a query. This is usually not a surprise, but sometimes you’ll find out about a whole new subculture that uses your keywords after you start your account. For example with a home restoration company we work with we were fully prepared to defend against car and art restoration searches. We were not however expecting below the belt body part restoration! In another client it has taken 600+ negative keywords to get down to the traffic we really wanted for one positive keyword.

Impressions are NOT Free!

Some people think this is no big deal since the downside is that your ad shows up when it really does not fit. Their thinking is that this is pay per click so who cares? Well you should. What happens is that your click through rate is lower than it should be because the ad is off topic. This results in a low quality score which causes you to have to pay more for the clicks you buy. Remember that your ad rank is your bid times quality score so it does count. The end result is that there is a hidden cost in the formula for impressions. This is why you care -because it costs you money.

With Power comes Danger

Negative Keywords are a very powerful tool in AdWords and done properly they are the reason that paid traffic is generally better quality than organic. On the organic side you compete only for the keyword with no negative consideration so the traffic is a little sloppier. Negative keywords are also dangerous because unlike positive keywords there is currently no report on the search queries that were impacted by the negative. It is very easy to have a negative word removing good traffic with no real way to know this. I have been asking every Googler I meet for a negative keyword search query report for as long as I can remember but for some reason it just never has happened.

Qualifier Types

When you start to think about negative keywords you have to look at the goals of the website and generally what we find is that search queries have a base concept with various qualifiers. In a broad sense we often find that the qualifier moves the word into general classifications. While the qualifiers vary some of the common ones are products, services, employment, physical location, and DIY. In most cases a business will only want a subset of a base concept.

For example a lawyer might want the word “Personal Injury Lawyer” but a qualifier could make this a bad search term. For example “Personal Injury Lawyer Job” is probably a job seeker and “Personal Injury Lawyer Schools” is probably a student looking for a Law School. The term with no qualifier is probably the search the lawyer wants especially with words like “Best” in the search.

Sources of Negative Keywords

There are lots of sources for negative keyword ideas starting with the SQR (Search Query Report) in AdWords. This report shows the search terms that matched the keywords and it’s a great source of new keywords and negative keywords. I normally download the entire report and add a column for the negative terms and the start the review. This way I can sort by the negative keyword column and grab those and copy them back to the system.

The other tools I like to use for developing my negatives are Google Search and Google Trends. In search I run the base concept without a qualifier and I look for words that I would not want in the snippets. This generally picks up the easy ones and the ones that are most likely to create the most bad traffic.

In Trends I look at the related terms for traffic I am not interested in. With the word plumber for example we find lots of traffic for Joe the Plumber and since this is a political term from the 2008 election it is not likely to be good for my plumber clients. So Joe becomes a good negative word. When you look at the history you can see when that was really a big problem in 2008 but now it’s a much lower level problem.

Pick a level – Pick a method

Negative keywords can be implemented at the campaign or adgroup level and that can be done with individual words or lists. I favor the lists because it simplifies the maintenance but sometimes you need the control of the individual words. With word level control I can exclude Joe in one ad group but keep it in another. For example if I have a group targeted at my competitors and I have one whose name contains Joe or Joseph I certainly do not want Joe as a negative in that Adgroup but in general plumbing keyword I probably do.

Lists are newer in negative keywords but they have been around for over a year now. One list that I almost always have is an account wide negative. These are terms that I do not want anywhere in the account and common entries here are things like free, spam, cheap, but one persons trash is another’s treasure so if your offer is free make sure that’s not in your negative list. The cool thing about lists is that you can attach them to as many campaigns and adgroups as you want and you enter a new word once and everything thing is done. Adding keywords direct at the campaign or ad group means that a universe negative has to be entered many times and the risk of error grows with the complexity of the account.

Pick a type

Negative keyword come in broad, phase, and exact but they do not operate the same as the positive keywords of the same type. For example a broad positive keyword will jump to its plural form, stems, word order, just to name a few. On the negative broad it is limited to that keyword and the word order. If you want the plural and singular form excluded then it is two keywords. We suspect this is because in positive keywords Google benefits from the liberal matching but in negatives they do not. So as they say in Vegas the house or in this case Google always wins.

I could go on for days on the finer points of negatives but I will close with just a few words – Marketing is a game of inches and negatives are one of the key tools you have to beat your competitors so learn, experiment, and great things will happen.

Dear Saint Google,

2012-11-28T00:11:04Z

Every year in the fine tradition of the Christmas letter, I write an open letter for the things I want to see in Adwords. Before I get started with the details I would like to note that many of the things I asked for in prior years I actually got, so maybe this letter isn’t as silly as it seems.

Advanced Keyword Matching

Keyword matching in AdWords is too simplistic and needs additional functionality. Support for wildcards, broad word extenders, must be there, and list substitutions as a minimum. Wildcards should be expressed with an asterisk like normal SQL. The “must be there” function could be as easy as implementing mixed match types within the keywords. So a search could have a phase, broad, and exact mixed within the keyword. List substitutions should allow us to create a list and then extend the keyword by attaching the list to it. This would be very useful when you want to extend a keyword by a list of city names that localizes the keyword.

Drilling into Keywords

The Adwords interface stops at the keyword level and many times it would be useful to be able to drill into the keyword to see the chart pattern of traffic for that word. You can do this today with a filter but that is a lot of work and it could be reduced to a single click.

Search Query Report with 100% of the Data

In the olden days the SQR had an “Other Search Queries” record that made everyone crazy so Google did away with that only to have it return as a subtotal line “Other Search Terms”. Part of the reason for this is the search partners that cannot or will not report at a search query level and my thinking is they are not really search partners if they cannot provide the SQR data.

Negative Keyword Search Query Report

This one has been on our list since 2008 and it amazes us because this is a billion dollar suggestion that would go directly to Google’s bottom line. The report is simply the search queries that were lost because of a negative keyword. Right now a negative keyword just silently takes traffic away with no feedback of what is being removed. It is very likely that negative keywords are removing things that were not considered when it was first set up.

Give us back the location control

In the olden days the system had a position preference and it really worked but it was more like position rules. If you selected that you only wanted positions from 1-3 that was all you got and the rest were, we hope, counted toward the impression share. I am sure that someone in Google felt that this allowed people to opt out of the higher positions costing Google money but in many cases that was not true.

Give AdWords Control over Merchant Center

This year Google moved the Merchant Center from the organic to AdWords but they still left it out there as a standalone system. The merchant center needs to be connected to AdWords so people with access to one have access to the other. AdWords needs to be able to update the AdWords specific data elements like the grouping and labels.

Better Control Click Fraud Data

Click fraud is a danger to our entire industry and nearly impossible to completely solve but we could be give some controls that would help. Google will not give us the IP address data related to the traffic because of privacy concerns; even though every server on the planet has this in its logs. At least give us control over how many times the ad will appear for a specific IP address much as they do with Display Network limits.

Limit Analytics Accounts

This is my personal pet peeve and on my list of worst changes ever. Prior to the last update to Analytics when you used the tab inside of AdWords you got only the accounts connected to that AdWords account. Now you get all the analytics accounts connected to your profile forcing you to search for the one you want. This is fine if you only manage a few accounts but for people like me it means searching through over 300 accounts and I hate to even think how many profiles.

Unmask Quality Score

Most of the time Quality Score makes sense but sometimes it’s just crazy and there is no way to get to what is causing the problem. The system has recently added some break down of the quality score but it is too little. We need actionable recommendations not vague comments.

Competitor Matching

Now if Google really wants to make money they should implement this idea. Allow advertisers to bid on auctions that a specific website shows in the results – organic or PPC. To make this work you simply add the domain name just like a keyword and if that domain appears in the search results then your ad is eligible and subject to the normal ranking process. Then Google should send us 1% of the additional revenue this creates for them.

In closing… And to all a good night

Twas the night before Christmas and all though the interwebs not a page was stirring, not even in the cloud. The impressions were hung by the SERP with care, in hopes that Saint Google soon will be there. The AdWords Experts are nestled all snug in their beds while visions of conversions danced in their head and I am sure you know all the rest.

Despite All My Variant Rage, I Am Still Just A Link on A Page

2012-10-08T20:45:38Z

The Variant matching option is a vampire, set to drain the money from your budget and benefit Google and no one else. With all apologies to Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins, one of the keyword matching “improvements” introduced over the last few months has caused me to channel my 90s grunge based angry inner-child.

Various matching options (Broad, Phrase & Exact) have always allowed for advertisers to control the quality and quantity of the traffic they purchased. Broad match keywords only require that part of the user’s search query match to your keyword. Phrase match keywords, indicated by quotation marks, require a search to contain the given keyword in order at some point in the search. Exact match keywords, denoted with square brackets, requires the search to be exactly the same as the keyword.

A few months back they introduced a new option to phrase and exact match keywords that is known as close variants. Based on Google’s official documentation regarding this option written prior to its release, “phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations.” In reality this attempts to turn phrase and exact match keywords into glorified broad keywords in an effort to leave no money on the table at the end of the day. The detail Google is hoping people will gloss over is the concept of close variants. Our concern with the documentation is that beyond the basics there is no further clarification on what constitutes a close variant. Basically it is up to Google to determine this. Google’s loosely defined rules are a concern to us because they are focused on making themselves money which means spending yours. Close variants reduce the control of advertisers in regards to the quality of traffic they are receiving from AdWords.

Google says that they believe “these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers”. From what we have seen, the best case scenario is that account performances remain within historical ranges (i.e. no substantial improvement credited to close variants). The worst case scenario is Google picks up close variant traffic that isn’t actually good for you and it leads to an increase in Conversion costs.

For AdWords advertisers this new feature was automatically added to all accounts and you have to opt out if you don’t wish to be affected by it. The good news is that it’s not too difficult to turn off this option although you need to know where to look because it is hidden pretty well. To get to this area, you need to go to the Settings tab for the campaign(s) that you want to opt out of this setting for. After doing this, you need to scroll to the bottom of the page and open up plus box for Keyword Matching Options which will open the following prompt.

click for full size

To opt out of the settings, choose the “do not include close variants” option, ignore the last resort guilt trip, click save and get your phrase and exact matches back.

AdWords New Shared Budget Feature

2012-10-08T20:45:18Z

In Vegas the house always wins and so it is with many new Google AdWords features. Google’s newest budget tool fits this model quite nicely. Google rolled out a new Budget feature in AdWords that provides budget control over a collection of campaigns. Initially, we were excited that this would solve some of our budget dilemmas, but as we dug deeper we realized that it still has limitations.

The feature is found in the Shared Library tab on the left side of Adwords. Click on Budgets and there’s a button labeled +New Budget. Name your budget, set your budget, and then apply it to any or all of your campaigns. Google makes it pretty simple to set up. Undoing a budget isn’t quite as easy. One would think that deleting the shared campaign would do the trick – it doesn’t You can’t delete a shared budget as long as a campaign is applied to it. Before you delete a Shared Budget, you must opt out all campaigns from it. To opt out a campaign of the Shared Budget, click on your campaign and click the Settings tab. Go to your Budget, edit and select the Individual Budget button. Enter a daily budget for that campaign, save, and that campaign is out of the shared budget. It seems odd to us that Google did not bring all the budget setting tools together in one place, but for now these are separately maintained.

When Google rolled out this new feature, the way it was described was that if one campaign didn’t use its daily budget, the remaining budget would go to a campaign that had spent its budget. This seems like a great idea…but alas it has flaws. When you set up a Shared Budget it deletes the original budget. Now the system doesn’t know what you want that campaign to spend. So, you ask yourself, how does AdWords allocate the budget if it doesn’t know what the budget is for an individual campaign? Here’s where Google gets mischievous. We had to call Google to clear up this question. They told us that the allocation was based on “performance”. Well, “performance” is basically first come first served. If you group a very strong campaign with weaker ones in a shared budget that strong campaign is going to overrun your weaker campaigns and make it difficult for them to get traffic. Who does this scenario benefit? Just Google.

There are a couple things to keep in mind when playing with this feature. If you have a very strict budget, don’t activate the shared budget in the middle of the day. AdWords will assume you haven’t spent any money that day, and it will start off at $0. One side product of a shared budget is the ability to adjust bids past the original campaign budget. For example, if one of your campaign budgets is set to $10, the highest your bids could be set at is $10. Under a Shared Budget, you could set bids past that $10. If you need to bid higher than $10 to be competitive in your market, it’s a nice by-product of a Shared Budget but probably not worth it.

If you use your budgets to control the blended CPA cost then you need to stay away from this feature. As with most new features that Google rolls out, this new feature is there to make them money. You don’t have a campaign spending its budget, Google has a solution. Spend that money somewhere else! Just keep in mind a campaign that spends its budget slowly will get even less traffic under a shared budget. Google won’t tell you that however, they’ll just keep running your credit card.

No More Free Ride, Product Ads Migrate to Adwords

2012-08-29T19:27:03Z

First there was Froogle and it was good. Then there was Google Base and Google Product Search, and at least they were still free. Soon we’re getting Google Shopping, which for most advertisers will be a nice kick square in the teeth. For those of you that enjoyed a solid decade of free product listings, kiss that goodbye come October… Google wants its money and the house always wins.

So what’s the quick version of what’s going on here? After a decade of free product search results via a data feed THE ENTIRE system is moving to a paid model controlled via Adwords and the Google Merchant Center. This is the first time Google has taken an organic channel of traffic and completely switched it to a paid channel. Needless to say a lot of small and medium sized businesses that relied on this traffic to feed their websites are pretty hopping mad. On top of making this traffic cost money for the first time, the data feed has also gotten more complicated with more required attributes. This update is being taken easily in stride by major brands with large stores and lots of marketing budget, but it’s a harder pill to swallow for the little guys.

Now that I’m done catastrophizing over Google Shopping, it is worth mentioning that there are a few upsides. For starters, advertisers now have some control over their product listings via bidding. Before you just tossed your data feed into the wind and hoped for the best. The new product listing ads also create some interesting options in Adwords in terms of how you break things down for bidding. You can do an open all products ad group, or just focus on specific types of products and give them higher or lower bids based on their value to your business.

If Product Listing Ads are something of interest to you I recommend spending an hour going through the videos the Google Commerce team has put together to explain how the new system is going to work. The 4 videos available here:

http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2012/08/google-shopping-hangouts-on-air-recap.html

Once you’ve digested Google Shopping conceptually it’s time to start digging into the data feed documentation. Might want to budget the rest of your week for this one:

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#US

Once the data feed is complete Adwords implementation will be fairly simple, but you’re going to have to make a commitment to maintaining that feed and updating it regularly so as to not run afoul of Google’s desire for complete matching perfect listings.

Anyone want to take bets on when we’ll start needing a credit card to secure a Google Places listing?

Do You Have Access to Webmaster Tools?

2012-08-23T22:48:41Z

The first question you might ask here is why is an AdWords Expert writing about Webmaster Tools. The answer is because it is possible to have problems with your AdWords Account that can only be fixed by Webmaster tools. I know this is unexpected to most because Webmaster tools are not connected to AdWords and they are more of an organic focused traffic tool.
The problem surfaces when the site is hit with malware because while AdWords will be disabled and it can only be reset in Webmaster Tools. This requires that you have access to them and that requires that you have a verified connection. To do this first you need to go to:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
To get started you need to add a site to your webmaster tools account and then you have to verify your access. This verification process is done by uploading a file to the root directory of the website. To start click on the orange “Add A Site” button in the upper right hand section of the screen.
Once the site has been added you need to verify your access to this. This is done by uploading a file to the root directory of the site (where your home page is)

Recommended: HTML file upload Upload an HTML file to your site.
1. Download this HTML verification file. [google29efd3934a808ef2.html]
2. Upload the file to http://www.00000000.com/
3. Confirm successful upload by visiting http://www. 00000000.com/google29efd3934a808ef2.html in your browser.
4. Click Verify below.
To stay verified, don’t remove the HTML file, even after verification succeeds.

The file can be downloaded using the link on item one. You should then save this to your site directory. Once the file is there then you can confirm it using the link in step three. It is important that this file remain exactly as is. You cannot rename it to something that you think is better documentation and you need to make sure that the internals of the page remain as is.
Once the site is verified the really fun stuff starts to happen in that you can start learning what the data in Webmaster tools means to your business. Connecting your Webmaster tools to your Google Analytics also opens even more data in Analytics and that is done here after the site is verified.

Click on the Manage site button next to the site you want to connect to a Google Analytics profile. Then click on the Google Analytics property selection. This will give you a list of all the Google Analytics Accounts under your profile. Once you find the profile you want to connect to just click on the option dot and then go to the bottom and save the changes.

There is no tech support for Webmaster Tools that we can find inside Google, but if you are an active advertiser you might try that support line or if you are a client just give me a call. Otherwise you can try the email support.

Does Your Business Need an Email List?

2012-07-25T20:25:30Z

Mr. Obvious says that the answer to this question is “Yes” 99.9% of the time. There might be some odd situation where continued communication with your market is not desirable but that is extremely rare. If you are in a business that does not need to communicate with your customer or prospects then stop reading this right now because it will be a waste of your time. All the successful email lists we have seen, have one attribute in common, they create unique and valuable content that engages their audience. Creating engaging and valuable content isn’t particularly easy, so you have to be ready to commit.

Building an Email List

The first challenge is always to build the list. There are thousands of ways to do that, all of them hard. There are ways to cheat, like harvesting software or buying lists but those can result in branding your business as a spammer. Building an email list requires investment in both time and money. The first step is to gather up all your existing contacts and load them into an email system. Next, build subscription processes into your website so people can subscribe to your information. Then build a landing page to sell the value of your subscription. The problem here is that when you have done all these basics you will not be satisfied with your list because it will be too short. It’s not that you are unreasonable it’s just I know you will not be satisfied because nobody ever is.

Advertise Your Email List

If you have unique and valuable content then advertising should be straight forward and highly responsive. Since email subscriptions are normally a free offer, the conversion rate should be very high in Search assuming you are staying on topic with your keywords. In this area you need to make sure you consider the Display Network because free stuff can often work well in that world. One thing you need to do here is make sure that you figure out what a subscription is worth to your business so you know if this is a good investment.

Pick Up the Phone

Another tried and true method for building your email list is to use the phone to gain permission to email. To make this work you need to have a very quick offer of value that the person finds attractive. This is also a good way to start the conversation with potential customers or clients.

Why You Cannot Buy an Opt-in List

First let me get this out of the way, there is no way to buy an opt-in email list because any list you buy or harvest is spam. Even if the person opted-in to receive information they did not opt-in to receive your information. There are plenty of places to buy huge lists for some very cheap prices but just know that using that list clearly puts your business in the spam email business. Some people offer tools to gather up email addresses published in various parts of the Internet to build your list and again this is spam because you lack permission to send them email.

The world is not black and white and there is plenty of Gray in marketing

There is a gray area here where reasonable people disagree and that has to do with contacting a public email address for the purpose of obtaining permission. The purist will say this is spam but some believe that posting a public email address is an invitation to contact that email for business purposes. A public email address is an address published on the website specifically for the purpose of contacting the business. If the business took any steps to stop the gathering of the email, such as the use of a form rather than a public email address, then gathering that email is spam. Gathering any type of personal email from any source is spam.

You have an Email List – now what?

Share your knowledge and expertise with the world and build relationships. In this day and age it is nearly impossible to “Sell” the majority of the people and that is why direct sales efforts fail 98% of the time. What you can do is demonstrate your skills and expertise in your field. When they need what you do they will invite you to compete. Today people do business with those they trust; they trust those that help them understand.

The DIY Audience

Some people have expressed concern about sharing what they do because they think the customer will just do it themselves and to some degree that is true. However those DIYers (Do It Yourselfers) are never going to engage your business either way so the business you lost you never had. The DIY audience will try to do the job and sometimes fail. When that happens, they will turn to real experts to finish the job. We have seen businesses that actually play off this dynamic with tag lines like “We Repair What Your Husband Fixed”.

What if your writing skills are challenged?

Let’s face it not everyone is a great writer but that should not stop you from talking to your audience. You can engage a ghost writer that can add the words and prose to your thinking but you need to make sure that it stays within your voice and message. When you work with a writer make it clear what your values and beliefs are and that they express those in the written product. There is nothing worse than turning this over to someone that lacks your passion for your business.

List Maintenance

Your email list requires maintenance because the more you use it the more you lose from it. Losses come from many sources with the most common being unsubscribe requests and email address change. Email lists have different attrition rates driven by the quality of the content you send, the frequency of the use, and most importantly how the receiver feels at the moment of review. In many cases with a monthly distribution to a qualified list the loss will run from .5% to 2.0%. This varies widely but once you start sending your list it will settle into a range that you can plan from. Look at your monthly loss and use this to create your plan for replacing those losses.

Email Services

There are lots of great systems for authoring and sending your email content, our favorite is Constant Contact. It is a solid system with all the services most businesses need. A good system will help maintain multiple lists, monitor errors, and help track the result from your content. Some CMS (Content Management Systems) will include a simple email system but you want to make sure you check this out before committing to it. We have seen several CMS that do a fair job of publishing the site but a lousy job of managing an email list. There are some great services out there that are fairly cheap, like Constant Contact, so there is no good reason to compromise on the quality of your email system.

Quality Counts

The purpose of the email newsletter is to create an image of your business in the minds of your prospects and the paint for doing that is your content. If the stories you tell are of value to the audience and engaging, then email is doing its job and the sales will happen. It is nearly impossible to sell someone something they do not want and you are not going to change that. What you can change is who they contact when they want your product or service and in that game 50% of the battle is showing up and being top of mind. The newsletter gives you the opportunity to do that.

How to NOT Waste Money in AdWords

2012-07-25T19:43:45Z

AdWords is quite capable of setting your credit card on fire and wasting money at epic levels, but it can also create great value. The difference in these two outcomes is driven by how the account is managed and where the energies of the account are focused. Here are some pointers on how to avoid wasting money in AdWords.

Don’t Treat all Keywords the same

In almost every account keywords break down into winners, losers, and the silent majority. Each of these needs a separate strategy.

Winners are the keywords everyone loves to buy, but they never have enough volume. The strategy in this class is to buy all the traffic you can. Make sure these words are isolated and fully funded so you buy these first and fully.

Losers are equally easy to indentify because they have no regard for your money and spend it freely with zero return. The only tough part about the losers is deciding at what point they become a loser. Pull the trigger too early and you could kill a good word; too late and you waste lots of money. Our general rule of thumb for losers is when they reach a click level that has missed 4 conversions based on the account average. For example if your normal conversion rate is 1% and the keyword has had 400 clicks with zero conversions then it’s a loser. If it has 2 or more conversions and the cost is above your maximum target CPA then it’s a loser.

The Silent Majority is what makes or breaks most accounts and it has to be managed with averages. This includes lots of low volume words that never get enough traffic independently to be either a winner or a loser. The problem here is that if the word has had one or zero conversions then the probability of getting another conversion is pretty low. Each word in the list is just as likely to get a conversion as any other and none of them have the volume needed to become either a winner or loser.

Don’t Skip the Negative Keywords

An AdWords account without a good rich set of negative keywords is a crime of the financial type. Every month the Search Query Report needs to be reviewed for new negative words and that should go on forever. Everyone knows their primary keywords but very few know all the negatives they need to make their account really run at its highest level.

Don’t Try to Sell with Your Ad Copy

Let’s face the facts, it’s tough enough to earn a click with 95 letters and spaces (the limit of an AdWords Ad) so trying to sell something is just not going to happen. You need to focus on what is important, and what is important is getting the person to your website so you can better present your offer. About the only exception to this is the priced advertisement. If your big guns are the prices you offer then that can go into the ad. It does work, but you better be the low cost provider because your ads are going to appear price and all right next to your competitors.

Don’t Create Split Tests with More Than 2 ads

Split tests are simple to set up and complicated to analyze. The more variables in Ad Copy the worse this gets. You need to make sure that you test one thing at a time to cut the variables down to some reasonable level. You need to have a significant number of clicks to prove a click through rate and a significant number of conversions to prove performance and there is no shortcut to this. Depending on how close the results are the number required to be significant can be large so it can take time to gather that level of data.

Don’t Think that AdWords in Search Creates Demand

AdWords serves the demand of the searcher but it does not create demand. The proof of this statement is that the search query was created in the mind of the searcher before they ever saw your advertisement. To create demand you need to look at PR or advertising outside of AdWords Search.

Don’t Think You Know Something You Don’t

Let’s face it as humans we like to think we know why things do what they do, it is just our natural curiosity. Getting from correlation to causation is at best an art form, especially in AdWords. We have run dozens of split tests with no variables but with different results, which proves that split testing is a clue not a fact. The other things we like to do here is take a very tiny piece of data and try to draw a conclusion from it. I saw the results of a split test where the person drew a conclusion and talked at length about the facts of the test – with 11 clicks over 4 ads!!! Let’s just say this is stupid to monumental level.

Don’t Go it alone

AdWords combines psychology, marketing, math, and language – it’s complicated. One person operating in isolation cannot possibly think of all the different variables with all the perspectives. The more people you engage in your AdWords strategy the better your account is likely to run. This does not mean that we advocate multiple people maintain the account but you need diversity in thought for the strategy development.

In Closing

In business you can pay for things either Cash or Creativity; it’s your choice. In our marketing we spend the creativity first and the cash last and we recommend you do the same.

Who Am I Competing with in Adwords? Check Out Auction Insights

2012-07-25T17:53:00Z

Auction Insights is an interesting bit of competitive intelligence that frankly I’m very surprised was made available within Adwords. Adwords Insights is a good way to get a lot of competitive information one keyword at a time and see how you stack up against whom. I imagine a lot of advertisers are pretty displeased with this new report, assuming they know it exists and how to run it.

When using Auction Insights you only get to test out one word at a time, not horribly convenient if you want to jam through a lot of keywords or get an overall feel for how you’re doing and who you’re competing against. You’re also limited in that the keyword you’re testing needs to meet an undefined minimum volume threshold in order to generate a report. There used to be an icon that indicated which keywords were eligible but that has since gone away.

To view an Auction Insights report start by clicking the checkbox next to the ONE keyword you want to view data for.

Next click the “Keyword details” button and chose “Auction Insights” from the dropdown menu.

This will take you to the Auction Insights report itself. You can now see just who it is you’re competing with. The screen capture below shows the stats for a word taken out of our own account.

The report shows a few key metrics: Impression Share, Average Position, Overlap Rate, Position Above Rate, and Top of Page Rate. Impression Share and Average Position are old hat to most that have been managing Adwords accounts for some time, the other metrics are new just for this report.

The Overlap Rate is how often you share space with that competitor. Since our keyword in this report has 100% impression share, the impression share of our competitors and the overlap rate are the same number.

Position Above Rate shows you how often these competitors come in above you in a search result. You can see that although our ad has a higher impression share than anyone else there is one competitor that has been beating us out for the top spot regularly. Based on the extremely high cost of this particular keyword being 2nd is more of a strategic decision on our part.

Top of Page Rate shows how often your ad finds its way into the T-Positions which are above the organic search results. Oftentimes response rates are much, much stronger for ads in a T-Position so this is a great metric to be familiar with.

Now that we’ve talked about what Auction Insights will tell you, here’s what it won’t:

This report provides information on other advertisers that participated in the same auctions as you. This does not indicate that the other advertisers have the same keywords, match types, or other targeting settings as you. The other advertisers’ metrics shown are based only on instances when your ads were also estimated to be eligible to appear. These reports will not reveal the actual keywords, quality, or settings from your campaign, and it will not give you insight into the same information for others.

Basically Google will tell you who you’re sharing space with but not if they were there on purpose or are actually bidding on the same word as you are in the same geographic areas. There’s no info on competitor’s costs or quality scores, that remains a mystery.
Overall Auction Insights is a pretty good tool to understand what’s going on with an individual keyword. If you have a small handful of very important words that you put a lot of effort into managing this will be a great addition to the data you already have. If you’re looking for a bigger picture look at your account this report isn’t going to do anything for you unless you have an amazing amount of time on your hands.