At first look, it appears at least 40% of the screen is wasted! Where is all the information?

There are at least 15 campaigns on the left hand side and I can only see data for the top one. I know AdWords data is presented on different levels, but the same issues are apparent for each level.

This is the data age, with millions of amazing infographics floating around on the web; it seems there are great examples of design and data visualisation everywhere. You would have thought Google might invest some of its billions into creating a more user friendly interface for us?

I know a lot of the features are there to ensure we can see all the data we need within a few clicks. But surely there is a better way of presenting this data. Adobe Creative Suite has the right idea with resizable areas. You select which boxes you need and just click and drag to resize the area those boxes takes up. Imagine an AdWords interface with only the information you actually wanted!

The amount of redundant space on the screen is the main issue. Everything in orange is wasting space for me:

I didn’t want to complain about the AdWords interface without providing solutions, so I redesigned the interface myself.

I’m not known for my Photoshop skills, so please excuse the rough layout, but I think this is far superior to what Google currently offers.

Just think how this would look if you combined it with some new fonts and a bit of a colour overhaul. Google would have something at least twice as usable as the current layout.

Now all it takes is for Google to realise the limitations of the current interface and actually do something about it.

What are your thoughts? - @matt_buckley

AdWords Tracking

This is relatively simple to implement and well documented within several Google help centres. AdWords tracking should ideally be placed on a page that is representative of your websites goal. For many sites, the goal is usually a purchase/sign-up, thus the AdWords code will be placed on a transaction/sign-up confirmation page.

AdWords conversion code is required in the body text of the page, and once implemented, I recommend testing the code to ensure that conversions are accurately picked up.

When creating the code, there are a different options (first navigate to >>Tools & Analysis>>Conversions within AdWords, then “New Conversion”):

1. Decide if the code is to be placed on a web page (the majority of cases) or in a few cases, to track calls from mobile phones.
2. Then decide a conversion category (purchase, sign up, lead etc)
3. Choose the page security level (make sure this matches the page you are planning to place the code upon, otherwise the page will likely alert the user of a security issue).
4. A fixed conversion value can be added (e.g. if you were to drive leads worth £10 each, then a fixed £10 could be assigned to each lead).
5. As default, the AdWords tracking code adds a link that informs users they are being tracked, and explains how and why. This can be removed, but should only be done provided you have covered this in your website’s T+C’s.
6. A dynamic order value can be inserted, modifying the following line of code, so that the value 0 is replaced with the value of the sale: var google_conversion_value = 0;

Testing

The best way to test AdWords conversion tracking is to go through one of your paid search adverts, proceed to the conversion point and then check to see if the conversion has been recorded as expected.

As many conversion points are located on confirmation pages, this usually involves purchasing an item for it to be refunded (or if you’re lucky, using test credit card details that will allow you through the checkout process).

Further checks can be performed for the more technically minded, using a headers program (such as HTTP fox) to look for the response request generated on the confirmation page. This should tell you if conversion tracking is working (it will look along the lines of: www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion/xxxxxxxxx/).

Ghostery is a useful web browser plugin (at least for Firefox but it may be available for more browsers). The Ghostery plugin scans pages for tracking code, and lets you see what is in use by the page you are currently viewing. It also allows you to block certain tracking scripts if required.

AdWords & Google Analytics

If you are using Google Analytics to track AdWords stats, then it is possible to link together AdWords and Analytics accounts (see this article for more details on how to achieve this). Once the accounts are linked, ensure that auto-tagging has been enabled within the AdWords’ settings page. This will add a tracking variable onto the URL (?gclid=test) which will enable analytics to distinguish source data for AdWords driven traffic.

IMPORTANT

Testing Analytics Tracking

Again, the best method of testing is to complete the goal (usually purchase something) and ensure that your purchase tracks against the correct source.

If you append ?gclid=test onto a URL of your site that you plan to use as a landing page, then this should then be recorded within the analytics cookie (called UTMZ). A further check can then be performed, examining the cookies set for the page to ensure that the source is recorded as a test. Furthermore, this source should then remain in the cookie for subsequent pages that are viewed. If this is not the case, then it is likely that you have traversed through a page that did not have the analytics code present, or the analytics code has not been correctly set up to track across the site.

Once AdWords and analytics have been linked, it is possible to import goals from Google Analytics. Thus if you have a site already running analytics, you could import a goal into you AdWords account, rather than having to request code to be added to a page. This ability is also useful if any goals have been customised in any way, such as onclick actions, time on page, virtual page views etc.

There are further customisations that can be made to Google’s analytics code to track a variety of sources be it display, Yahoo, Bing, affiliates etc., although this is a discussion for a different blog post.

Useful Programs

HTTP Fox – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/httpfox/

Ghostery – http://www.ghostery.com/

What are your thoughts on tracking? - @JamesMHolding

1)    Going into battle without the knowledge and tools of the trade at your disposal isn’t a good idea. You may be able to hack and slash your way through a few bandits, but you’re going to get your posterior handed to you a number of times as you learn what you’re doing. There are plenty of guides to help you to avoid the common mistakes in AdWords (and a book for Skyrim), and it’s a much less painful way to learn the ropes.

There are obvious similarities between a good shield or defensive spell, and understanding how to adjust your bids to reflect the value of your clicks. If things aren’t going well, cutting your bids intelligently can be as effective as a top quality shield to protect you from losing money if your conversion rate dips (or somebody tries to cut your head off).

2)    Dragon slaying isn’t just a child’s dream anymore – you really can do it (well – not really, but you know what I mean). On Skyrim, the dragons are standing between you and progress through the game. In AdWords, the dragons are more metaphorical – big advertisers with long teeth (financially speaking).

AdWords gives you the tools you need to bring them down – if your clicks generate more revenue than the dragons, you can outbid them, and if you can write more compelling adverts, you can level up your Quality Score.

3)    It has to be said, it’s very easy to lose sight of your goal in Skyrim. Whether you’re chasing butterflies, beating up bandits or simply accosting innocent travellers (come on – we’ve all done it), you can spend days heading off in completely the wrong direction. If you’re going to kill the big scary dragon that’s causing all the trouble, you’re going to have to keep your eyes on the prize.

AdWords is very similar (sort of). You are advertising in order to make money. There are lots of distractions, like Quality Score, maximising your click through rate, the various advertising options, search query reports, bidding options and others. But whilst you should be taking advantage of these things if they push you towards your objective, they should never be mistaken for the objective – to make money.

4)    I loved Oblivion (the previous Elder Scrolls game). I put many, many hours into it, and I wasn’t totally convinced that improved graphics on Skyrim would add much to the experience. It’s a bit like watching a football match in high definition – you love the picture quality for the first couple of minutes, but after that, you completely lose yourself in the game, and don’t notice it any more.

However, so far, I haven’t become used to the improved detail in Skyrim – it’s still impressing me, and I think it’ll continue to do so for a long time to come. And again, this is comparable to AdWords.

The level of detail that you can get on the performance of your AdWords account is improving all the time, and it’s really improving the user experience. It wasn’t that long ago that you couldn’t split out the performance of Mobile Phones, see how your adverts performed in the top positions compared to the side positions, or see an hourly breakdown of conversions. To be fair, on Skyrim the differences don’t actually make it any easier to achieve your objective as far as I can see, whereas on AdWords it can potentially help you to improve your performance.

5)    The scope of each successive Elder Scrolls game is a step beyond what I’ve seen previously. I had thought that the size and scale of Oblivion was staggering, but already it’s looking limited compared to what I’m seeing on Skyrim.

AdWords is a bit like that – over time, it’s becoming bigger and bigger. At first, you simply advertised on Google Search, but over time, they added the Display Network, Search Partners, Remarketing, YouTube, Interest Targeting, Topic Targeting and many others to expend the reach and targeting of your advertising.

I recently blogged (on another site) about how AdWords could threaten the big banner advertising networks, if they can persuade advertisers to view the Display Network the way that they do the rest of their advertising spend. Who else can put your adverts on Google Mail and You Tube?

6)    There’s nothing more enjoyable than a jaunt into a mine (on Skyrim, not AdWords). There are treasures to be uncovered, and who knows what manner of beasties and baddies you may come across.

Obviously, this is just like looking at a list of your search queries. Who knows what little gem of a profitable search query you may find, and add to your keyword list? And those nasty little goblin-esque irrelevant search queries that waste your money and attack you (metaphorically speaking).

Mining your searches is clearly similar to searching mines – whilst you can achieve your objective without doing it, it can be a profitable and enjoyable way to spend some time.

Clearly, there are many more ways in which optimising AdWords accounts is just like playing Skyrim – these are just a few examples. Hopefully these comparisons will be helpful to you whether you are playing Skyrim, optimising an AdWords account, or both.

What are your thoughts? Please leave them below.

The campaign goes live, and within a few weeks, you’re seeing click data for a number of your terms. However, a large majority of your long-tail keywords haven’t even registered a single impression which surprises you. As a result, you run a couple of test searches for some of the terms, and find that your adverts aren’t even showing in results. You push your bids up a little, assuming they were previously too low to trigger a first page search. You search again, and still no sign of your adverts. Is quality score an issue, you ask yourself? Nope – all of the terms are 7/10 – certainly high enough to trigger your adverts. So you ask yourself, what is the issue?

Next to a number of these long-tail terms, you notice the term ‘Low search volume’. Upon hovering over the keyword status icon, the following pop-up appears, which explains why:

Users don’t search for this term very often on Google properties, so it’s not eligible to trigger your ads. If this is a term that you expect to increase in popularity soon (like a new brand name), then you don’t need to do anything; the keyword will start triggering ads automatically.

So in a nutshell, you won’t start seeing impressions for quite a lot of your terms, until people start searching for them on a more regular basis. Well that’s a bit annoying, isn’t it? Particularly when you have a few thousand keywords that could easily fall into this category, and combined, could represent a large portion of click spend (and potentially conversions).

In my opinion, whether someone searches for a term 100 times a day, or once every three months, you want to see my advert appearing for that term. When you’ve put a lot of effort into your keyword research and account structure, it is very frustrating when your perfectly good adverts aren’t appearing for searches that are highly relevant to your business.

What’s most surprising to me, as an advertiser in paid search, is the potential revenue Google will be missing out on by adopting this approach.

More impressions = More Clicks = More Revenue

So why do Google do it?

There are a couple of theories. First: with billions and billions of terms out there, to minimise the strain on server space, Google restricts advertisers from bidding on every single type of keyword, particularly those that are infrequently searched for. When a term reaches a certain threshold of searches, it is upgraded to allow PPC activity.

Second (and the one I personally feel is most likely): Google prefers for advertisers to bid on shorter tail terms, particularly those on phrase of broad match.

For example, imagine you are bidding on the following term on exact match: “cheap televisions 42 inch freeview built in”. A term you wouldn’t expect a great deal of impressions for, but when they do come, a tailored advert and landing page with 42-inch televisions with freeview built in could well entice a few conversions over time. It’s highly unlikely that such an exact term will have much competition from other advertisers, and as such, average cost per clicks could be very low – perfect from an advertiser’s perspective. However, it’s for this reason, that Google is unlikely to enjoy advertisers bidding on such keywords. Instead, they’d much prefer that you bid on ‘cheap televisions 42 inch’ or even ‘cheap televisions’ on phrase or broad match. Not only would that term be picked up using that method, but you’re going to show for even more terms that way.

Here are those SERPs:

With a range of adverts mentioning 42-inch televisions, cheap televisions or even just televisions in a general sense, this would certainly seem to back up the theory that most of these advertisers are using short-tail terms on phrase or broad match. I cannot be completely certain, but I would imagine that if I were to bid on ‘cheap televisions 42 inch freeview built in’, I would see the dreaded ‘Low Search Volume’ message. Instead, my only hope of showing in results for this term, is by being more broad, as seen above.

Broader terms = Greater Impression Numbers = Greater Click Numbers = Greater Revenue.

Very disappointing – particularly as a well-structured AdWords campaign with highly relevant ad groups, adverts and tailored landing pages is the key to delivering a high ROI.

So what can you do about low search volumes in Google? Not a great deal I’m afraid! Either go broader, or hope that these terms naturally increase in volume. I hope however that this post has helped educate about the issue, and to tell you that you’re not alone in being frustrated about it!

Have you seen similar patterns in your Adwords campaigns? What steps have you taken to combat them?

-@PeterGould83

Used in a contextually-targeted display network campaign, the ad will feature the most relevant products from your stock feed, based on the website where the ad is being shown. The example that Google gives is that the ad should show a dress on a fashion website and a backpack on an travel-themed site.

In a further and potentially very interesting development, CDC ads can also be used in conjunction with remarketing. To date, remarketing via AdWords has been limited compared to the offerings of specialist remarketing companies, in that there has been no opportunity for personalisation. Without this beta, the best that you can do is uniquely tag each sub-category of your website, and re-market with ads featuring example products or best sellers from a category that visitors have viewed.

However for large e-commerce websites,  implementation could be complicated and it would be completely impractical to do anything at the product level.

With a CDC ad, a single tag (implemented site-wide) would be all that is needed. If someone visits the site without purchasing, the ad that they will then see around the Google Display Network will automatically be composed of a selection of products that they were specifically viewing, massively increasing the relevancy and potential click-through rate of the ad.

Has anyone managed to get onto this beta yet? What kind of results have you seen? Please share them below.

Their announcement in full reads as follows:

When searching on Google, users appreciate results that are relevant and deliver a great experience after they click. In August, we announced trials in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal¹ that increased the weight given to relevance and landing page quality in determining Quality Score and how ads are ranked on Google. The goal was to improve the user experience with search ads. Based on the results we’ve been seeing, we’re now rolling these changes out globally over the coming weeks.

As the changes roll out, some campaigns will see variation in keyword Quality Scores and typical ad position. Within a couple weeks, things should stabilize and we expect most campaigns will not see a significant change in overall performance.

Just like today, campaigns with better-performing ads for user queries will continue to see higher Quality Scores, lower average cost per click and higher position on results pages. The 1-10 Quality Score in the AdWords interface will continue to represent the general quality of your keyword when exactly matching a search on Google. Increases in bid and Quality Score will continue to increase Ad Rank, and the same basic approach to improving your results with AdWords applies.

This is interesting, as this is effectively the same as saying that they are reducing the role of the click through rate in the ranking algorithm. But the use of click through rate is critical to Google – this is what they use to maximise their revenue from Adwords.

By promoting adverts that are more likely to get clicks and demoting those less likely to get clicks, Google ensures that the adverts that appear in the top positions (with the highest cost per click) are the ones most likely to generate clicks, and that an advert with a lower click through rate has to effectively make up the loss of revenue for Google by bidding higher, in order to get the position.

This isn’t a criticism of Google at all – I believe that it’s generally in the user’s interest to see adverts that they are likely to click on – this is a strong indicator that the advert is relevant to the user. So by moving the focus of the algorithm from pre-click to post-click, Google are likely to cost themselves money. But does this really improve the user experience?

Certainly, if the keyword matches the search query, it’s an indication of a more diligently managed account – a campaign that utilises Exact Match extensively rather than relying on Broad Match requires more work. And more targeted landing pages can be achieved by effective keyword grouping – but does this mean that user gets a better experience?

To be honest, I’m not convinced. I doubt that it will make any discernible difference to users, but anything that encourages PPC account managers to manage their keyword lists effectively (or rewards those of us that do) can’t be a bad thing.

-CustardMite

You can now see whether your advert has a stronger click-through rate and conversion rate in the top positions and if so, how much you will need to bid to ensure you are achieving those results more often by putting your advert at the top.

For example, the screen shot below shows that the ads at the top generate a much higher click-through rate as you would expect, but also when the ads are shown on the right hand side, this ad group doesn’t generate as many conversions. Therefore, it is better for this particular account to have the adverts for this keyword in the top position more often.

You can then select the Est. top page bid option from the column choices and this will show up next to each keyword. This shows the top of page bid to be £3.75, which is quite a lot higher than the current bid of £2.41. This then gives you a stronger idea of what effect different bid adjustments could have on the position of your adverts for each keyword.

Questions or comments? I’d love to hear from you either below or on Twitter - @aimee_roberts

The campaign is maturing, and you’re looking for new avenues in which to bring in greater traffic and conversion volumes – Display advertising looks like a very logical step to take.

Your search orientated campaigns bring in high volumes of traffic, and conversions at around a £1 CPA.

You set up a Display campaign with a range of images in different sizes, and run it for two weeks to allow it enough time to build up some data before reviewing the results. After this period, the results look something like this:

As you can see, whilst the campaign is driving healthy click numbers and conversions, the average CPA is way in excess of the £1 target you’re looking for. A big factor in this is the average cost per click – you are having to bid £1.50 in order for your adverts to be seen by the right audience, so even if you achieved a 100% conversion rate, more often than not, the campaign will be performing badly.

But does this tell the full story?

Not necessary. In many ways, Display Image ads need to be treated as they would in the offline advertising world. If you bought up a number of advertising slots in a range of high profile newspapers and magazines and ran your image adverts over a period of days, it can be difficult to assess what direct impact this has on your bottom line. Still, millions upon millions are spent advertising in this way, and has been the case for decades.

When it comes to paid search, we’re all heavily focussed on accountability and ROI, and why not? PPC is one of the best advertising mediums when it comes to being able measure performance. You want to spend £10,000 a month in PPC? Fine. For that, we’ve generated you 1000 sales, and £15,000’s worth of profit – we can be that accountable.

Display is different. If we start using the same exact metrics to define success, more often than not, they will fall short, and we’ll stop using it prematurely, without giving it a fair opportunity to demonstrate its worth.

Whilst Display campaigns cannot be judged directly on performance in the same way Search campaigns can; there are still metrics out there to judge success.

A view-through conversion is one of these. As Google put it; “View-through conversions count a conversion when there is no Display Network ad click but a conversion did occur within 30 days of the last display ad impression. If there is an ad click preceding the conversion, the conversion is treated as a click-conversion.”

In simple terms, somebody on the Display network has been exposed to your image advert,  but didn’t click on it. However, within a 30 day period, has navigated through to your website (by whatever means – PPC, SEO, Direct and so on), and converted.

Now, let’s take that same data set from earlier, and show the view-through conversion figures, instead of the 1-per-click conversion figures:

The data set in line two is a very good example to look at. This particular Ad Group spent £1,113.04 over this period, and generated 170 1-per-click conversions at £6.55 – way over the £1 CPA target. However, it also generated an incredible 47,239 View-through conversions in addition.

Now, I know you may argue the validity of using View-through conversions as metric. In theory, if you’re targeting the right types of websites and people on the display network, then you could argue that these people were already likely to know of you, and were going to convert anyway via another traffic source anyway.

However, I refuse to believe in the example above, that all 47,239 converters were users that were already going to take that path anyway, and that the range of image ads they were exposed to, had no bearing on this. In theory, in order to make this particular ad group profitable, it would have needed to generate 1,113 conversions at £1 each for the £1,113 spend. Well, it already generated 170 1-per-click conversions, so that’s another 943 outstanding.

So, 943 conversions as a proportion of the 47,239 View-through conversions that were achieved is 2%. Put simply, it only required 2% of the View-Through conversions achieved in this period to have been as a result of users seeing the image adverts and going on to convert directly as a result to make the ad group profitable. Does this sound so out of the question?

If you still require convincing, this may also help. Recently, I asked Google if they had any evidence to support the notion that display campaigns do result in the increase in conversions via other traffic sources. The reason being, that naturally, a client of ours was concerned about the high CPA being attained when using 1-per-click as a metric. As a result, Google were able to use some internal tools on one of our display campaigns to offer some insight.

The methodology was fairly simple – they bucket users into two groups. The first are users who have been exposed to our display ads. The second is users on the same sites, same time of day, who exhibit the same type of browsing behaviour, but have not been exposed to your ads. We then track whether or not the first set of users is more likely to navigate to your website than the second set, and what exactly that ratio is.

The result? A 12% uplift on average for those users that had seen the image adverts, compared to those that hadn’t.

So if you’re thinking of terminating your display campaigns prematurely, make sure you’re seeing the bigger picture first.

Please feel free to leave your comments either below or on Twitter - @PeterGould83

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/05/showing-display-url-domain-in-headline.html

This is an attempt to make the brand more prominent. It will not show if the domain is already in the headline, but it will show even when the first description line has been moved up to the headline (unless the whole headline is more than 68 characters).

Below is an example of how it looks in the search results:

The impact of this change will be different for all advertisers and the keywords it occurs for.  This addition from Google could be a response to the amount of users who type URLs into the search box in a search engine instead of going directly to the website. If an advertiser is bidding on the domain name for that account, there is a good chance the click-through rate will increase for such terms.

When looking for property in Leeds, two of the top three ads now have the display URL domain in the headline. Neither domain is keyword rich although it is good for branding in this case, but the impact is probably less significant in this situation.

The screen shot below is for the search term “garden centre leeds.” The top advert has the display URL domain in the advert and the domain includes the words “garden centre.” This could make the advert more prominent compared to competitors and help the click-through rate for the keywords within the domain.

It is an interesting addition to the sponsored results and I will be keeping an eye on how it affects the domain style keywords within accounts. I think this could aid the click-through rate for brand terms and for those keywords included in your URL, but it will be interesting to see if it actually makes a significant difference in practise.

I’m guilty of it myself but it’s amazing how much trust people display when using a search engine – almost giving no consideration to how this data is being used (and stored). It’s almost like people are talking to a friend… although sometimes it’s like they’re talking to themselves. People share information on their interests and lifestyle like never before and give little regard to what’s actually happening behind the white background and multi-coloured logo.

Intention analysis is a great thing for search marketers. Imagine what you could do (and the money you could make) if you had access to the Search Query data Google has? I do believe that in a few years Adwords will move forward to places we can’t currently imagine. Google is already talking about Keywordless Adverts and have said that:

• 20% of queries that users search on each day have not been seen in the last six months (if at all)
• 70% of queries in the US have no exact-matched keywords

Keywordless Ads seem to make sense then, right? Um, no I’d never ever use keywordless ads but that’s for another blog.

When you read through Search Query Reports, you can see why they might propose this. Here are a couple of examples that made me laugh recently:

• Just give me a f*****g debt consolidation loan
• Holiday to get away from the missus

These two searches make me laugh for several reasons. First, because they’re funny, and second, knowing how search engines work, how would adding “just give me a f*****g …” serve a better result than just “debt consolidation loan”? Also, if you want a holiday without the wife, just book one ticket!

Anyway, back to the future. Google TV is already available in the US. How long before television ads are based on the search query data of all the PCs/laptops/smart phones in the home? How attractive would that be to advertisers and even more so, to the channels that broadcast the ads. Investment into that channel would rise massively – helping rein in the recent decline in television ad spend.

Be careful what you search for in Google, as a month or so back, I searched Google for WordPress and saw this SERP!”

Have you seen any funny searches from Search Query Reports? If so please post them below so we can all have a giggle…

I would like to take a quick tour through the new features and outline how these could benefit and potentially make us, and our campaigns, more efficient.

The first observation with the new version of Adwords is the obvious effort made by Google to offer more of the functionality, formally found in the GUI available within the new Adwords Editor.

First, Google has made it much easier to navigate between accounts with a simple drop down menu; it is a much easier process than the previous version.

Also, Google has added the facility to fully manage “Site Links” via the Adwords Editor, allowing a user to upload, export, edit and manage “Site Links” without having to use the Adwords GUI.

Google has also provided the functionality to target specific high-end mobile devices by type, whether it be an Android, iPhone or iPad etc. This will allow you to trail specific advertising strategies to specific mobile devices and ascertain if certain accounts or campaigns perform better on the various mobile platforms. This is very useful and all is available from the new version of Adwords Editor.

You can now also upload bulk changes. Nothing new I hear you say; however, the columns uploaded may now be arranged in any order, and not just in the specific format Google has required previously. When a file is uploaded using the “Add/Update Multiple tool” you can assign specific header names to each column by using the drop down menus highlighted. I have yet to really see the benefit of this change, but I suppose if you have arranged your upload sheet incorrectly, you can change it within the Editor instead of Excel. This could save a lot of time and save a significant amount of frustration.

Google has also changed the way it handles and displays negative keywords by removing the “Negatives” tab, and replacing it with a function to quickly toggle between positive and negative keywords within the “Keyword” tab, as seen below.

I hope everybody finds this summary useful and allows your accounts to run more efficiently.

Implementation

First step is to create a new campaign targeting the display network.

Now to begin a re-marketing campaign you first need to create a set of re-marketing ”lists,” which require the implementation of tracking tags on your website. The tracking tags are simply used to create a list of people who have seen them (either on your website or possibly alternative websites as mentioned later). It is also a good idea to create a list of people who have converted (again for reasons mentioned shortly), although you can use an existing adwords conversion tag to create this list.

Initially you could try adding re-marketing tags to your homepage and individual category pages, which will build up lists of people who have seen these pages. Next you should create audiences by combining these lists. So, for an initial setup you may want to try combining the list of people who have seen the home page and exclude the list of people who have seen the conversion page, similarly for the category pages.

This will leave you with a set of audiences such as

• Seen homepage not converted
• Seen category page 1 not converted
• Seen category page 2 not converted etc.

The above lists will then be targeted toward visitors who have not made a purchase, and thus can be shown related adverts. Say they looked at the TV category pages and did not purchase, then you could show them a related TV based advert.

Create an ad group for each of the newly created audiences, then within each ad group navigate to the add-audience tab, select add audience and add the relevant audience. This should leave you with a list of ad groups along the lines of:

• Seen homepage not converted
• Seen category page 1 not converted
• Seen category page 2 not converted etc.

Each ad group can then have relevant adverts tailored to what they were previously looking at on your site,

Expansion

Cross sell alternative items to customers

A more complicated method would be to show re-marketing tags to people who have bought specific types of products. For example, you could show a re-marketing tag to all the people who bought a TV, thus creating a re-marketing list for these visitors. Instead of hitting these visitors with a “Purchase a  TV” advert, you could try adverts that cross sell relevant items such as TV brackets, wall stands, TV cabinets TV cleaning equipment, DVD players etc., as you know they have recently purchased a TV.

Use re-marketing code on alternative websites

One of the issues with re-marketing is it rears its head on smaller sites. The more granular you choose your audiences the more specific you can be with the re-marketing adverts; however, the volume of visitors quickly reduces! In some cases this leaves sites with only the homepage list producing any volume.

It is possible to create lists based on the actions of users on alternative websites. It is done in the same way as on your own site, creating lists, audiences and tags; however, these tags are then placed on alternative relevant sites. Whilst this may seem like a lot of work, getting other relevant sites to allow the placement of tags, but it does allow for an increase in volume without losing the targeting ability that makes re-marketing useful.

Saturation

Spamming the same visitor with adverts over and over again typically has an adverse effect. I know that I personally get followed around the net by Halfords car stereo adverts, despite having looked at them weeks ago. The first couple of times it did prompt me to have another look but after that, I just began ignoring them.

You should consider the typical buying cycle of your customers when deciding on the cookie length (how long you keep hitting the same visitor without the re-visit your site). If visitors never buy after seven days, is it worth hitting them repeatedly with re-marketing ads for much longer than that?

Frequency capping should also be considered to limit the number of times an advert is shown to the same user, and can be set in the campaign settings by day, week or month.

Conclusion

Re-marketing provides an opportunity to improve the return of visitors who have shown interest in specific items, thus allowing for improved targeting and conversion rates. Initial experience has provided good results with relatively low volumes. However, there are many areas for carful expansion available, although we will need to keep in mind the recently change rules for EU cookie usage, requiring express permission from the user for this type of advertising and cookie setting.

Anyway, by chance, a couple of months before the functionality was removed I was doing some research into seasonal data sources, and which of Google’s was most accurate (Adwords Keyword Tool vs Insights).

I picked a client of ours who is a very well known brand – and so has a large amount of brand searches (and clicks) every month. They therefore ranked #1 for that keyword in Google consistently for a 12 month period. Further to that, the brand has consistently had a PPC ad in #1. So, looking back at organic analytics data for that keyword over a 12 month period therefore provided a pretty robust picture of seasonality – i.e. seasonality was almost certainly the only big contributing factor to fluctuations in search traffic.

With that data to hand, I then plugged the keyword into Google Insights for the same time period and exported that data. I then did the same with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (looking at the keyword’s exact match, local search volume) and exported the monthly data.

By turning the analytics and Adwords Keyword Tool data into an index, it was then comparable to what Google Insights had provided me with.

The results were as follows:

As the above shows, Google Insights (red) correlates much more closely with actual traffic (green) than the data from the Adwords Keyword Tool (blue). It’s still by no means perfect, but not a bad starting point. While this analysis was based on 1 (albeit high volume) keyword, it does appear that monthly search data from Google’s Keyword Tool wasn’t actually that accurate anyway – certainly not as accurate as Google Insights, and maybe that’s why it was scrapped.

In conclusion, be sure to do your own seasonality research, analysis and comparisons where possible but I’m certainly no longer fretting about the lack of monthly data from the Keyword Tool. While extrapolating monthly search volume estimates from seasonality data in Insights is more work, and still not 100%, at least I can carry out the research with a little more faith in the numbers than previously!

These are questions that everyone that manages an Adwords account has asked at some point. So I decided to find out. As a large agency, we are in the position of having far more data to analyse than most people, and by manipulating this data, we’ve found some very clear and consistent trends, that have given us unique insights into what click through rate Google are looking for in order to consider you ‘relevant’, and how they take your position into account.

So here’s what I did. I pulled out the data for the last 30 days for every keyword, in every Ad Group, in every campaign, in every account that we manage. I stripped out any Phrase and Broad Match keywords (since QS is calculated on Exact Match), Google’s Search Partners data (since this is ignored in the calculation) and brand terms (which would skew the click through rate analysis significantly – more about this later).

I then looked at the average click through rate in each position from 1 – 8 (in increments of 0.1), for each keyword Quality Score. By graphing the results, it wasn’t hard to detect a pattern. Here’s the CTR’s by position for keywords with a QS of 10:

Note that I took the total impressions and clicks for each position, effectively weighting the CTR for each keyword by the number of impressions, so that low volume keywords didn’t have an exaggerated impact on the performance. You can also see why I removed brand names from the above analysis – the position 1 CTR would have been influenced excessively…

From the above graph, it’s possible to get some sense of what click through rate Google expects from a keyword in order to give it a QS of 10. And by fitting a curve through the data, it’s possible to get a reasonable indication of where you should be in order to pick up a Quality Score of 10:

Based on this line, it appears that Google expect the click through rate in any position to be about 65% of the next position up. So where position 1.0 has an average click through rate of 34%, position 2 has an average click through rate of 22.1%.

Whilst this line fits nicely through this data, what happens if you look at other Quality Scores? Will Google expect a similar drop-off in click through rate? If not, then this number is just a convenient fit for this data. Here’s the graph for Quality Scores of 9:

And 7:

And 6:

The same decay of 0.65 has been drawn on each, and in all cases, it appears to fit well. So this appears to be Google’s estimate of what ‘should’ happen to your click through rate every time you drop a position – you lose just over 1/3 of your clicks. Of course, this doesn’t really work once you drop below about 8^th, but it’s certainly a useful thing to know. Indeed, the line fits just as well with a Quality Score of 5, 4 or 3 as well.

Based on these fitted lines, you can estimate the following average click through rates by position, and how they are converted into Quality Scores:

Using this, you can potentially ‘health check’ your account. If you have a click through rate of 4.5% in position 4, you should have a Quality Score of around 7 or so. If you are getting less than the predicted Quality Score across the bulk of your keywords (excluding brand, on Google only, on Exact Match), then it’s a sign that your account has other issues, possibly with the landing page, keyword relevance or the overall account quality.

I tried to take this analysis to the next level, by calculating the predicted Quality Score for each keyword, based on its click through rate and average position. Unfortunately, whilst the fits are very good looking at large amounts of data, on a keyword-by-keyword basis, the results can be quite inaccurate, underlining the fact that advert relevance, landing page relevance and account quality also have a significant bearing.

One final point worth noting is that the overall figures for the Quality Score of 7 are a little misleading. Most keywords seem to be given a Quality Score of 7 initially, until Google calculates a value based on their performance. Because far more of our keywords get Quality Scores higher than 7 than get less than 7, the effect of new keywords on the ‘7’ performance is pushing up the click through rate significantly.

Realistically, none of this has any bearing on the way that you manage your account. Regardless of your click through rate, you should always be looking to improve it (though obviously not to the detriment of your conversion rate), and the Quality Scores that Google quotes in the data are only indicative – the true Quality Score figure is probably much more precise, and keywords that appear to have the same Quality Score could actually have quite different values (6.6 and 7.4 could both round to 7).

But in terms of offering insight into what may happen to your traffic volumes if your position were to change, it’s very interesting. If one of the advertisers above you were to drop out, you could potentially be looking at a 50% uplift in clicks. If you’ve got a restrictive budget, this could cause problems. Similarly, a new competitor appearing above you could cost you 1/3 of your clicks…

This appears to be an opportunity for many businesses for which images are important to an online sale. For example, a person looking for a sofa might look for ideas online through the image searches. They might know that they want a 3 seated leather sofa but are not sure of the exact colour or shape that they would like. To have ads showing for reasonably specific keywords for the image searches could give an advertiser the opportunity to get business where other businesses are not advertising.

The screen shot above shows that no adverts are showing for the term “3 seater leather sofa.” A potential customer may see a sofa they like from the images and get a better idea of what they want. They could then make a search on the web for sofa companies. However, if an advert for a sofa company offering “3 seater leather sofas” was at the top of the image search, they could go straight to that advertiser.

It is an opportunity to be utilised and it is surprising how few companies are doing this! It is not just sofas that this could be tested on. Image Search Advertising can be used for any number of products, such as cars, trainers & toys. It could also be used for people researching a certain country or city. Hotel companies could put their ads against the images of a city they have rooms available in. See the screen shot below for an example of this.

Obviously this would have to be tested to see if the quality of the clicks generated through this method of advertising is good enough, but it is a worthy test and is an opportunity to penetrate a competitive market through an alternative approach.

Setting it up is surprisingly simple. You need to get the images ready that you would like to use for your products and services. Then you can either use an existing campaign and ad group in your account or create new ones. I would recommend setting up a separate campaign to test this and manage separately from your other campaigns.

In the ads tab then go to the “New Ad” drop down menu and select the “Display ad builder” option. Then choose the “Image Search” option and fill in the form and upload the relevant image for that ad group. It gives you a preview of what the advert will look like on the right hand side whilst you are filling it in.

Even experienced users of Adwords, such as agencies, make mistakes, and can cost their clients money and ultimately cost themselves accounts. It’s very rare that I’ve accessed an account, whether managed by an agency or by an individual, where mistakes aren’t being made.

But fear not! Help is at hand. Perhaps the most easy-to-understand, but powerful guide ever written on how to advertise on Adwords is now being serialised on the Epiphany Solutions Blog for the first time.

This is the first part of that serialisation. It gives an overview of what Adwords is, where it is and isn’t useful, and the advantages and disadvantages of PPC against SEO. Future parts will look at each aspect of an Adwords account, and show what you should do in order to deliver amazing results, and perhaps more importantly, why the account should be set up and managed in this way.

Why Advertise Using Paid Search?

It’s a fair question. The days of PPC being a goldmine, with undiscovered pots of gold (also known as searches with few or no adverts) have gone. It’s one of the competitive – if not the most competitive – forms of advertising that there are, and you are going head to head with your rivals.

It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted. Your advert is likely to be in the middle of a bunch of competing adverts, all vying for the searcher’s attention. Even if you get the searcher to your website, they probably won’t do what you want – many sites see only one in every hundred actually making a purchase. Is it worth paying for the 99 that don’t?

It’s interesting, then, that a properly managed account is virtually guaranteed to make money.

No seriously, I mean it. Do the sums. Assuming that the visitors to your site have a value (i.e. you make money from at least some of them), then as long as you bid less than the visitor is worth, you can’t lose money.

For example, suppose 2.5% of your visitors buy something, the average order value is £100, and 25% of the order value contributes to profit. Each sale is worth £25 to you, and so each click is worth £0.625 to you (since every 40 clicks generate one sale, which is worth £25 to you).

So if you only pay £0.50, you will make money. Of course, if 30 other advertisers are all making £5 from each click, they are all going to outbid you, pushing your advert down into the nether regions, and you’ll get very few clicks – so you won’t make much money.

Optimising Your PPC Account

This simple example highlights two of the themes that will keep repeating throughout this whole guide.

Firstly, you should be basing the amount that you bid for a keyword on the amount that the click is worth to you. This is pretty obvious if you look at the example above. But there are still many advertisers out there that view success as achieving the highest positions that they can for their budget!

Secondly, since the amount that you bid is limited by the value of the click, you should be doing everything you can to maximise this. The simplest way to do this is to maximise your conversion rate. Every click that doesn’t convert is wasted money, every click that does convert is very profitable.

There is one more critical aspect to successful account management. Adwords is an auction – if you bid more, you appear higher. However, it is not a fair auction. Google multiply your bid by your Quality Score in order to determine your advert’s position, and the amount that you actually pay per click for your keyword.

Quality Score is Google’s measure of how relevant your advert is. Google want to make sure that their adverts are as relevant to users as possible for two reasons. Firstly, if their search results aren’t high quality, users will use another search engine. Secondly, if their search results aren’t high quality, nobody clicks on them, and Google don’t make any money. And Google likes making money.

Quality Score is covered in a lot of detail later on, as it is really quite important. But for now, suffice to say that every change that you make to your account should serve one or more of the following purposes:

• Increase the volume of clicks that you are generating
• Increase the profitability of a click, either by
  • Increasing the value of the click, or
  • Reducing the cost of the click

Often these two objectives directly conflict. For example, bidding more increases your clicks, but results in each click being less profitable. A new advert may improve your click through rate, but by driving less qualified traffic. New keywords may cause a similar trade-off.

Each individual section will look at this trade-off, and how to make the right decisions, and every recommendation made will be based on improving one or both of these objectives.

Isn’t It Cheaper And Easier To Stick To SEO?

Well – it can be, and you should probably do this regardless of whether or not you do PPC, but optimising your website to appear high in the natural, ‘free’ results takes a lot of time, work and money. In the long run, SEO generally pays off, but you’ll be spending a lot of money for a long time before you get results on popular search terms. And if your competitors are also doing SEO, then you may never catch up.

Pay Per Click gives you immediate results, and unlike other forms of online (and offline) advertising, you know for certain that you’ll get results. Instead of paying for an advert that people see, who then may not even visit your site/store, with PPC you pay only when somebody walks through the door. As long as there’s a good chance of that person buying something, then there’s a clear link between what you’re paying and how much you sell.

Also, you have total control over how much you pay for your visitors, and who visits your site. If something isn’t working, you can stop it immediately, and if something’s very successful, you can do more of it.

PPC can also support your SEO strategy, showing you which keywords convert, which landing pages you should be trying to drive visitors to, and which messages appeal to the searchers. And many studies have shown that websites with both natural and paid search listings get more traffic than they would expect to achieve from the two individually – the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Hope you enjoyed Part One of Google AdWords Expert — keep your eyes peeled each Friday when I’ll post the next part.

In the meantime, please feel free to comment or leave questions.

So, I think this might be a bit of a feature moving forward. Last month I talked about a few tests Google was performing with their paid search ads, and this month I thought it would be good to catch up on the latest tools and features that they have been releasing. This may seem like a bit of a cop out if you are someone who keeps up to date with all the latest goings-on, but from talking to a few friends throughout the industry, it is surprising how many of these new products of features that some advertisers miss out on!

So first, and this is a natty new report feature that may save a lot of you some time, is the addition of hourly conversion reporting. This has been the root of many frustrations in the past. Although it is possible with the use of analytics to produce an hourly report, it was always a bit convoluted, especially if you just wanted a quick snapshot. Now all you need to do is navigate to the dimensions tab and the hour of day report should now contain conversion data. This won’t replace deep analysis from combined analytics and AdWords reports, but it’s something that PPCers have been asking for over the last couple of years and Google has finally delivered the goods!

Second on the agenda is a new ad rotation option, which will ‘show ads that are most likely to receive conversions more often.’ This is based on calculations of a combination of both clickthrough and conversion rate, so of course you will need conversion tracking set up. Now call me a cynic, but I always approach these kinds of ‘innovations’ with a degree of caution. As an analyst, it is my job to make these decisions based on multiple metrics and use my best judgment to decide the results of a test. Forgive me if this sounds arrogant, but I think I may be more qualified, and make more informed decisions than an automated rule such as this. Despite my reservations, this might be a useful tool for people that don’t have the experience or time to make these decisions, but give me a human analyst any day!

So on to the next. In the words of Google, they are ‘simplifying bidding on the Google Display Network,’ which basically means they are stripping out managed placement bids. As of the 15 March, AdWords should have (but apparently hasn’t) automatically updated your managed placement bids to fall in line with this new policy (i.e set them all to £0.00).

Finally, Ad Preview and Diagnosis tools are being merged together and will soon be found together in a single ‘Ad Preview & Diagnosis’ tool. There is now a much more integrated feel about the diagnosis tools within the Campaigns tab, allowing you to run diagnosis on all of your keywords from your keywords tab. It also allows you to filter down and diagnose particular problems. Nothing earth shattering there but every little helps…

Are there any features or tools you have a real liking or dislike for? Have I missed anything? If so, just let me know below!

However, in Search Query Reports, if you have broad match keywords in your account, there are often keywords that turn up with Session Based Broad Match next to them in the match type column. What does this mean?

Session based broad match is where a person does a search on Google for a keyword that is in your account, then follows this with another search but for a term that is not in your account. However, your ad still appears for this term due to it being in the same session.

For example, I was searching for flights to Las Vegas, then searched for flights to Los Angeles and then to Colorado. The results that appeared when I searched for “flights to Colorado” are shown in the screen shot below. Four of the nine sponsored ads in this screen shot are for Los Angeles or Las Vegas.

In a Search Query Report, this would come up as a Session Based Broad match. So next to the Los Angeles ad group within the search query report, the search term “flights to Colorado” would show up with Session-Based Broad Match next to it.

Google has been doing this for a long time now, but it is important to consider this regularly to ensure your ads are not repeatedly showing for unrelated terms and generating wasted clicks. I have read other blogs and peoples’ comments and from my own experience these keywords tend to have a much lower conversion rate.

Although you can choose not to use broad match keywords, you are unable to switch off this session based broad match when using broad match keywords. I understand that this may work for some advertisers; however, I can’t help thinking that if I want my ads to show for a keyword, I will include it in the account. Is it fair that there is no opportunity to opt out of this?

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that there could be some positive cross-over in certain instances; however, I would like to be able to turn this feature off if it is performing poorly.

What Does It Do?

In short, this tool generates a list of Ad-groups, each of which contains a keyword list themed around a specific topic. The tool has been designed to make suggestions for use on the Display network, also providing a suggested, apparently based on relative, competitive site cost data.

How Does It Work?

An initial keyword list is required in a similar way to how the keyword tool currently functions, each keyword separated by commas. The keyword list is then expanded and grouped into themes, which you are then able to export into adwords editor and make changes as you see fit.

Once the Ad groups have been generated, you are then able to see a list of predicted placements upon where your ads are likely to appear. A placement is a handy addition that can be looked over to ensure the right type of site has been targeted by the ad group.

Another feature I missed on my first use was the ability to expand suggested ad groups further (an expand button appears once you hover over the ad group).

First Thoughts

In no way would I suggest that this tool is going to setup a perfect display network campaign off the bat; however, it does look handy as an initial starting point. After a few initial uses, even with tightly themed keywords, it sometimes suggested the odd ridiculous ad group (by this I mean rather unrelated subjects to what was intended, monsterfishkeepers for medical students, really?). Although the majority of ad groups have been a good starting point.

Summary

Initial impressions are good, a useful tool which may help speed up the creation of themed, relevant Display network ad groups. Ad groups can then be exported, manipulated, expanded and managed accordingly. I look forward to trying this out on new campaigns to see how useful it is once put into use.

The contextual targeting tool is found under reporting and tools in Adwords if you want to give it a try. Let me know what you think!

The biggie must surely be the change combining your headline and description line 1 in to some kind of beefed up super headline like this:

Google has put out details of the test here, and there are a couple of provisos to your ads being shown. Firstly, and most obviously, you have to have a high enough quality score and bid to appear in the top positions. Secondly, your descriptions must be separated into two distinct parts. For example, description line 1 must end with proper punctuation such as a full stop, question mark or exclamation point.

There must have been a flurry of ad changes in the more proactively managed PPC accounts. I certainly know all of us here at Epiphany were keen to get ad tests running as soon as we spotted these new ad formats. Initial results are nothing earth shattering, but if used intelligently, then there is no doubt this change could result in increased click through rates. An interesting point to note is that now in theory you can use exclamation point in your headline, something not previously possible. Worth a test maybe?

This is yet another step toward making paid results more closely resemble/outshine the organic listings. If we look at the first page above the fold ‘real estate’ on the keyword ‘tops,’ we can see that very little of the page is occupied by paid search ads, with nine natural results visible :

Now, compare this to the same space for the rather competitive term ‘holidays to florida.’ The effect is twofold: the results are pushed down to the point that only five full natural results are visible, and the sponsored  results are beginning to appear more ‘organic’ in format all the time:

The paid search ad headlines now rival the organic blurb in length (possibly an attempt to bamboozle the bleary eyed searcher into believing they are just looking at a non-paid ad in a pretty yellowish rectangle!).  Then when you take into account other extensions such as seller ratings and product extensions, the poor old natural results begin to resemble a weedy child being backed into the schoolyard corner by a group of well-dressed bullies!

Oh, and talking about yellowish rectangles, this was another recent change from the bods at Google. The paid search background colour was changed from yellow to purple a mere seven months ago in July, and now we’re going back to yellow. This is a very specific yellow, ‘cosmic latte’ to be exact, which supposedly resembles the colour of all the light in the universe added up (thanks Wikipedia!). Maybe Google is looking to the stars to increase their revenue in 2011?

Local Ad Extensions

Local ad extensions can help people notice you over your competitors. If location is important to a company, for instance, if they provide a product that is rather sourced locally, then the company should make their location prominent to their potential customers. It may not just be clicks and conversions that you want to improve through this. Showing the address clearly on the SERP might help increase footfall to the shop/restaurant/business, as the address is so much easier to find than a competitors may be.

The example below shows somebody searching for a hair salon in Manchester. The third ad has a location extension and, when opened, does dominate the results. It’s a great way for businesses that rely on local custom to stand out from their competitors. It is also a great way to avoid wasted clicks from those people who do not want to go to where the advertiser is based.

Site Links

Site links are the additional links that go under the text in your PPC ad. These additional links can just go straight through to the home page or they can be links to specific landing pages. The example below shows an ad shown for the search term “car insurance.” The links are highlighted by the red box. This ad has two links and both go through to the same landing page as the ad itself. In this case the ads are used as if they are an extension of the text. This gives the ability of showing all the USPs an advertiser has to offer that would not normally fit into the 70 characters usually available.

The example below for the search term “business insurance” is using the Site Links to enable users to select the type of business insurance they want a quote for before they are even on the website. The options are “public liability insurance,” “shop & retail insurance,” and “self-employed insurance.” All of these links go through to individual landing pages for users to get quotes on that particular type of insurance.

Phone Extensions

Click-to-call or phone extensions enable people to contact an advertiser by phone by just clicking on the phone number in the ad. Mobile marketing is becoming more prominent in the online advertising sector and therefore, click-to-call ads will be even more effective as more people buy sophisticated smart phones. Making the process of a potential customer getting in contact with the advertiser as easy as possible is imperative to the advertising strategy.

Businesses such as restaurants should have click-to-call ads for their websites to ensure people do not hesitate to get in contact and make a booking. It is very common for people with smart phones to search for local amenities using their mobile device. Setting up a mobile specific PPC campaign, and having click-to-call available on the ads, should ensure people have no excuse not to contact the advertiser.

If a company generates a lot of business through smart phone users, but it is yet to have a mobile optimised website, having the click-to-call ad extension available would give a clear opportunity for people to get in contact with your business.

Below is an example of what the ad would look like on a mobile phone. The number appears just under the URL and once a user clicks on this, the mobile device will call that number.

Product Extensions

Product extensions work by showing products from the website in the ad based on the search term used. To have product extensions, an advertiser must have a Google Merchant Account and set up a product feed for the website. The product extension then shows the most relevant products based on the keyword.

An example of this is shown below. The search term “hoodies” has brought up five different hoodies from the advertiser Republic.

The type of advertisers that should test this ad extension are those with retail e-commerce websites. Displaying your products in your ad gives an opportunity for potential customers to see if the range you provide is what they are after. Not only does this extension standout on the SERP, and therefore make the ad more prominent, but it also shows those people who are looking for something completely different, that they should not click on your ad. Therefore, this could also save money from wasted clicks.

For example, in the screenshot above, if those hoodies are priced a lot higher than someone can afford, they won’t click on the ad. However, this does mean you need to set up the product feed properly and name products accordingly. In theory, this should improve the quality of traffic that goes through to the website and help increase the conversion rate of the PPC account.

So that’s a quick summary of each of the ad extensions Google are currently offering to PPC advertisers.

If you assume that the quality of traffic driven by the two different is the same, then you can simply look at the click through rate – the conversion rate won’t vary. This is a reasonable assumption if the key messages and tone are similar, and if the website doesn’t receive many conversions (or can’t track them), it’s necessary.

However, if there is a chance that the different adverts are likely to drive a different type of visitor to the website, and sufficient conversions pass through the adverts, then it’s important to look at conversion rates.

But does this really go far enough?

Consider a casino website. They can promote their site using a small, easy-to-claim bonus, which small-time players can probably claim, or they can promote a much larger bonus, that only high-stakes players are likely to qualify for. Which will work better?

It’s likely that promoting a higher bonus is likely to deliver a higher click through rate. Or is it? Are searchers savvy enough to realise that they can’t claim this bonus? If so, they may be put off by this, and would respond better to a lower, more realistic bonus.

What about the conversion rate? If users weren’t put off by the higher bonus, will they be put off once they read the terms and conditions? If the landing page also has more realistic bonuses as well, this may not be a serious problem. On the other hand, has the bigger bonus attracted newbies – potential players that aren’t aware of how these bonuses work? If so, they may click on multiple websites before converting.

Is this sufficient? Can you tell from the click through rate and the conversion rate which is the more effective advert? Well – no.

Consider the likely behaviour of the visitors that do convert. If they’ve been attracted by different bonuses, their behaviour could vary significantly. If the bigger bonus appeals to the high stakes gamblers, then their lifetime value could be substantially more. On the other hand, if the people attracted by large bonuses are just bonus-hunters, playing just enough to claim their bonuses before moving on, then their lifetime values may be lower.

It may be that this can’t be answered – it depends on the back end systems that the advertiser has. But if you add a variable to the end of the destination url, and the back end can tag up new accounts with this variable, then after a few months, you’ll be able to ascertain which advert generates the more valuable players. Combining this with the conversion rate and the size of the bonus that was paid out, you can establish the value of a click from each advert. And from this, you can make an informed decision.

If this seems like an unusual situation, it really isn’t. Consider another example – a retailer selling discounted designer labels.

The advertiser decides to lead with the size of the discounts in one advert, and promotes the designer labels in another. Whilst the former may generate a higher click through rate and conversion rate, it’s likely that average order values (and possibly margins) will be lower for these customers.

Of course, it takes a lot of customers/players to generate reliable results. One big order or degenerate gambler shouldn’t be sufficient to make a major impact on the outcome. But for advertisers that can perform this kind of analysis, the benefits could be substantial. After all, there are probably thousands of advertisers who have squeezed their average order values, chasing improvements in the click through rate.

The Opportunities tab gives you keyword ideas based on the keywords already in your account. It’s so simple and easy to use. This is not a tool to use when building an account, but it is very helpful when refining your account once it has been live.

An update was announced on 9 December that Google now includes potential cost, impressions and clicks for all the keywords that are suggested for an ad group. This is also helpful as it gives you an idea of what to expect from these suggested keywords. This helps in making a more informed decision about adding the keywords or not. However, these figures are given by ad group and not by keyword, so the data given is based on if you add in all of the suggested keywords.

So once my account had gone live I looked in the Opportunities tab for suggestions. There were up to 100 keyword suggestions per ad group. It was surprising that a large amount of these keywords were highly relevant also. Of course there were some that would not have worked in the account, but many useful suggestions came up. For those keywords that are not relevant, it is worth seeing if any of them would help the performance by adding  them as negatives.

When you go through to the Opportunities tab, the ad groups in the account are listed with however many keyword ideas it is suggesting. If you click on the ad group with the keyword list you would like to expand, a box, like the one below, will appear.

You can then just go through all the keywords and tick the ones you wish to add to the account. Once you’ve selected all the keywords you want, you can click on the “apply now” button and then they will automatically be added to the ad group. You are able to alter the proposed CPC and destination URL at this time.

One big warning would be that you have to make sure the keywords have the match type that you want!!! It shows you in the box whether the keyword suggested is exact [], phrase “” or broad match. If you click on a particular keyword, you are able to change the match type before adding it to your account.

It really is an easy way to expand your account and have an even more comprehensive keyword list! I have definitely seen an improvement in performance since adding these keywords to the account.

Basically for those who haven’t heard about this before then in a nutshell Campaign Experiments let you run split tests on different aspects of you PPC campaign.  This way you can run tests without other factors such as seasonality, competitor activity, or any other online or offline marketing that may occur.  Here is a brief guide on how to set up an experiment:

Go to Campaign Settings on the campaign you want to run your experiment on and under Advanced settings there should be an ‘Experiment’ option.

Click the ‘Specify Experiment Settings’ button then enter the values for experiment parameters.

Here you can name your experiment and select the frequency that the experimental change is applied (by choosing the % split between ‘control’ and ‘experiment’ which can help minimise the risk if you are making significant changes.). You can also define how long the experiment should run from and until. Now just click save and it’s time for the fun stuff.

After you’ve set your experiment parameters, you need to decide what kinds of experimental changes you’d like to test. You can make experimental changes to keywords, ad groups, or ads. Go to one of those tabs, and make the changes you’d like to test with your experiment.

To add new keywords to the experiment split go to the Keywords tab and click the Add Keywords button. Add the keywords you’d like to add as you normally would then select the checkbox that reads, “Save these keywords as experiment-only.” For Ad Groups it’s the same, just go to the ‘Ad Group’ tab and select ‘Add Ad Group’.

You can also use experimental bid changes. Simply go to the Keywords tab and segment by experiment and on the experiment row of a keyword, click on the bid. Here you can add or subtract a percentage from the control bid which will create a new experimental bid. The same goes if you’re making ad group bid changes.

So once you get to grips with the tool and how to set up your experiment the next step is to choose what kind of experiment to run. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Bidding

You can use ACE to test the impact of incremental bid changes, and you can make wholesale bid increases or decreases across your experimental campaign. Ever wondered what would happen if you pushed those keywords above the fold? Now you can, but without risking blowing all of your budget!

Keywords

Why not launch those new terms you’ve been mulling over adding as an experiment? You’ll be able to see how your ad groups perform with and without these new keywords so you can make a truly informed decision. You could even try removing some keywords, will this drive more traffic through your other terms? There’s only one way to find out…

Ad Groups

Why not try more granular Ad Groups and test to see how this impacts your performance? Or maybe you want to see what would happen if you try a slightly different theme? Just follow the steps in the guide and set up your new ad groups as experiment only whilst keeping your originals as control and away you go!

Match Types

You could try out phrase or broad match on some of your keywords, just create an experimental ad group with these new match types in, and run your original ad group as control only. Now you can see a side by side comparison of how these new match types affect the performance of your ad group, without the risk of undoing any or your hard work.

Google Instant

There have been a few blogs about this so I can’t take this as one of my own ideas but I think it’s a pretty nifty use of ACE. I have taken the below from a blog that Brad Geddes wrote (here). This is his process for testing keyword suggestions from Google Instant and it’s rather interesting to use this relatively new tool to test some of the impact of Instant:

• Choose a few of your root keywords (generally the 2 word variety)

• Type these words into Google instant or web seer
• Make a list of these words
• Break them into appropriate ad groups
• Enable ACE (AdWords Campaign Experiments)
• Create new ad groups with these words
• Make these brand new ad groups part of your experimental campaign
• Let the experiment collect data
• Measure the results

Might be worth a try if you have some budget to test with…

OK so we’ve gone through the set up and also some ideas for experiments, so I thought I would briefly cover some minor gripes users may have with ACE.

Firstly and in my opinion the main gripe with this tool is the reporting.  It’s not possible to look at the overall performance of control against experiment unless you download the data and perform some jiggery pokery yourself. Also, when exporting reports the download is not split by experiment or control, just the usual overall report, which makes manual review outside of the adwords interface a little troublesome.

Secondly you can only run one experiment at a time on each campaign, it’s not a huge deal and shouldn’t really hinder you as this enables you to see the effects of a certain experiment fully, rather than muddy the results with multiple variables.

Finally, and this more of a wish than a gripe, there currently isn’t support for ACE in AdWords Editor so all changes must be made in the web interface.

So there you have it, Google Adwords Campaign Experiments in a (rather large) nutshell. I think this tool really has legs and with intelligent use can really help to fine tune PPC campaigns. Have you tried ACE? If so I would love to hear your thoughts, whether they are shining endorsements or damning dismissals!

One of the most important parts of this ad extension is that it gives people further insight into the type of company you are and quality of products you sell. Photos are a fundamental part of shopping online. This is the part of buying online that helps us make our decision as to whether we want to buy a particular product or not.

Having the photos in the ads will grab people’s attention and, should they like what they see in the photos, then click onto the website. Should a user not like what they see in the photos, they will not click on the ad. Thus, a company would save a lot of money avoiding wasted clicks from people that are looking for a different type of product. They no longer need to go through to your website to make that decision. The screen shot below shows an example of the Product Extension. Once the plus box has been clicked on you can see that the ad is the main focus on the page as it takes up a large amount of the available space. This addition to the ad pushes other results down the page and therefore below the fold ensuring your ad is the most prominent.

The price is included underneath the picture. This is very important when buying online. If a company has competitive prices, people will see these on the SERP and click through to the website. This also avoids wasted clicks further from people that are not willing to pay the price on the website. They can now make that decision before clicking on your website.

The Product Extension is set up by linking to the Google Merchant Centre account. So a company needs to set up a GMC account and a product feed, which they update regularly, before they can get the Product Extension on their PPC ads.

Another point to remember with the Product Extension is that the ad does not have to appear in position 1 to 3 for it to be included in the ad. They also appear in the ads along the right hand side. Interestingly, however, the link you click on to open up the ad has a different message when at the top of the page as to when it is on the side of the page. When on the side of the page it says “Show products from this advertiser” but when the ad is at the top of the page is reads “Show products from (Insert advertiser) for (Insert search term)”. I think this is more significant than it seems as it offers the advertiser an extra line which includes the brand and the search term.

The screen shot below shows how the Product Extension looks when in position 4 or lower. Once the link on the ad has been opened, the ad is the main focus on the page and really grabs the attention of potential customers.

In terms of the effect this has had on the results, we have seen a slightly higher click-through rate. For one account that has been using the Product Extension, the overall click-through rate is 2.96% so far this month, but the click-through rate for those ads with the Product Extension included is 8.23%. The graph below shows that the click-through rate has increased since the Extension was added on the 13^th October so, although the effect on the account is not huge, it is definitely worth adding to your campaigns to get those extra clicks for your account.

It’s called Call Metrics, and if you generate a lot of phone calls from your Adwords adverts, it may of use to you.

Google uses its Google Voice technology (also only available in the USA, so maybe it won’t be appearing quite so soon!) to assign a unique phone number to each campaign. With this number, you’ll be able to track which campaigns have been generating your phone calls, and adjust your bids accordingly.

It’ll be free for the moment, though Google are talking about billing for it in the future. Of course, this kind of thing is nothing new – companies like AdInsight have been offering unique phone numbers that can be assigned to different Adwords campaigns (as well as organic search, referrals or direct visits) that can be displayed on your website.

Still, this is an interesting development – allowing you to include phone numbers on your Adwords adverts without losing the transparency of using multiple numbers.

There are a number of interesting applications of this tool:

• You can target visitors who added an item to their basket but didn’t purchase. An advert offering 10% off if they come back and purchase would work well.
• You can cross sell to visitors who already purchased.  A visitor who buys a camera could be offered a memory card – and the advert could say “buy a memory card for your new camera”!
• You could target offers on product ranges to visitors who browsed those products.

There have been many studies so far, showing that conversion rates are much higher on these adverts than other content network adverts.

Google allows you to specify how many times you ‘bother’ the visitor with remarketing before stopping, so you don’t annoy your valuable customers!

There are some questionable morals to following users around the internet like this, but Google won’t allow you to show adverts until at least 100 people have met the conditions which trigger your adverts.  This way the advertising sample is kept large enough to keep individuals anonymous.

Instead, I’d like to offer some opinions and raise some interesting debate on just what kind of impact Google Instant could have on Adwords PPC campaigns.

Google suggest may suddenly become an extremely valuable keyword research tool. With instant results on screen, users may scroll between these options a lot more than they used to, knowing that a simple press of the down arrow will switch the results on screen without even having to click. With that mind, for PPCers, it becomes even more important to be bidding on the longer-tail variations that Google suggests automatically or you would risk missing out on potential traffic. I see there being a bigger shift over to these types of keywords.

Take the example above, an advertiser may previously just have been bidding on the term [holidays to spain] which generated huge amounts of impressions. For this particular advertiser, the trend may begin to shift where there becomes a surge in impressions for the longer tail terms Google is also suggesting such as ‘holidays to spain 2010’ or ‘holidays to spain in september’ and so it is paramount that these are bid on too. Bidding on the term ‘holidays to spain’ on phrase match would see adverts shown for the above terms too, but effective PPC optimisation would say that these terms need to be bid on specifically too so that their individual performances can be tracked and adjusted.

Google Instant is obviously going to have an impact on the way our Adwords campaigns perform and how we optimise these going forward, but I don’t think it is something to be feared or daunted by. Throughout Google’s lifetime, changes to their platform or algorithm like we have seen with Google Instant haven’t been uncommon. As advertisers, all that we now need to do is adapt and optimise to a slightly new set of variables. Let’s not forget, all advertisers are in the same boat right now, but it is those that respond and adapt quickly that will be the real winners, and that’s something that we have every intention of doing here at Epiphany.

For a breakdown of the impact of Google Instant Search on SEO and Natural Search check out this post by my colleague Malcolm Slade of the Epiphany SEO team.

If you have any opinions on any of the above discussion topics or any of your own regarding Google Instant, please feel free to comment and we’ll be sure to respond!

Google has recently changed the AdWords rules to allow advertisers to bid on various brand or trademarked terms. The rule change has come about after the European courts ruled that Google had not violated trademark laws by allowing rival companies to bid on competitor brand and trademarked terms.

Google’s new rules will come into force across Europe on the 14th of September 2010, along with a new complaint procedure. If a company feels its terms are being used to mislead a visitor or cause confusion to a user, Google may still remove the ad after conducting a limited investigation, however they will no longer prevent a company from bidding on trademarked terms. This appears to be good news for re-sellers of products across various sectors, although without being able to use the trademarked terms in the ad text, it will make it difficult to demonstrate to the user that they sell the product they are looking for. Because it will be difficult to describe specific branded products without using the terms, the trademark owners retain their current (albeit slightly reduced) advantage.

UK, Ireland and Canada AdWords Policy Change

A separate change to AdWords policies in the UK, Ireland and Canada has taken this change even further. Advertisers in the UK, Ireland and Canada may now be able to use trademarked terms within the advert text, again providing the user is not being misled.
The recent change has good and bad consequences for the client and the agency.

Agencies have had problems in the past with Google rejecting trademarked terms in adverts when it is perfectly reasonable.  Google will sometimes reject adverts with your own brand name in them because it is trademarked.  This simply requires a manual review from Google, but can be a pain if you test new adverts/landing pages regularly.  The manual review can take days too.

If you are a reseller it becomes even worse, with half your products being banned from the advert text, in which case you end up advertising “Golf Clubs” when you actually want to advertise “Ping Golf Clubs” – this causes lower click through rates and conversion rates throughout your campaign.  Often, the only way to combat this is to supply Google with evidence that you have permission to use the trademark – another huge pain!

With this change, we will be able to write more relevant adverts for resellers, as well as remove the problems of having to get manual reviews.

However, the down side is that there is room for underhanded tactics, such as competitors using your brand name and muddying the water by bidding on products they don’t sell.  This may not improve their business, but it won’t do our clients any good either, causing a negative user experience.  Google have issued a policy change stating that this is not allowed, but since the review process will be manual, competitors will be able to “get away with it” for significant periods of time.

As an agency, we will have to be much more vigilant in monitoring the marketplace for this activity, and install new processes for reporting this behaviour quickly so that our clients are not affected.

Where their standard bid optimization is completely automated, this option allows you to set your bid, and they’ll adjust it based on the conversion rate. The tool will increase your bids up to a maximum of 30% above your bids, though there does not appear to be a minimum.

The bids are adjusted in order to maximise the number of conversions that you achieve for your current CPA. If this is done correctly, then assuming that nothing changes in terms of the performance of your account due to external factors, then theoretically the number of conversions achieved at the same CPA should improve.

Which is all very nice, but I do have a few concerns…

1. If the tool works, you’ll spend a lot more money. Is this made obvious to the advertiser? It’s inevitable that if you get more conversions at the same CPA, then you’ll spend more.
2. Since this tool will spend more of your money, what happens if you’re already spending your full budget? Since your cost can’t increase, and your CPA won’t change, you should see no difference in your conversions.
3. What happens if your market changes? Seasonality can change your conversion rate significantly, as can a number of other market-specific factors, and circumstances within your individual business (such as stock levels). If your conversion rate drops, you’ll get fewer conversions (obviously), but Google will then kick you while you’re down, lowering your bids to hit your target CPA, and reducing your conversions further. Ouch!
4. Perhaps the most critical question of all, and the one that I ask whenever Google rolls out a new automated tool, ‘WHY?’ Why would you use this tool? Think about it. How long does it take to adjust your bids based on their performance, and how often does it need doing? If you spend a huge amount of cash, you may need to adjust your bids every day or two – but in that case, you should be either doing it manually, or using an expensive, cutting edge tool (depending on the complexity of the account). If you aren’t spending that much cash, you should only really be adjusting your bids occasionally – maybe every week or two. Otherwise, you’ll just be responding to random variation. How long does this really take? An hour? Two? Doesn’t the amount that you’re spending on Adwords justify that much of your time?

The truth is that assuming that you can crunch the numbers yourself, you will perform better than an Adwords automated tool. You can choose how far back to look when assessing the performance (balancing the volume of data with its recency), and if certain Ad Groups are performing better or worse, you can decide whether to increase the bids on the good groups, reduce the bids on the bad groups, or both. You can choose whether to spend more, or to use the improved performance to reduce your spend whilst retaining the same level of conversions, or to spend the same and pick up more conversions for your money.

Seriously, I don’t see who this tool is aimed at. Clearly, agencies shouldn’t touch it – after all, they are being paid to manage the campaign as well as possible, not with as little effort as possible. Perhaps it’s aimed at small companies who want to advertise on Adwords, but how are they even going to find out about it? It’s an option hidden away in the account settings, so unless they are subscribers to the Adwords blog, they will probably never know about it.

I don’t believe that this is just another ‘Google Money Grabber’. Assuming that it works in the way that it says that it does, it will certainly increase spend, but the user will be getting extra conversions for their money. I won’t be trying it on any of the campaigns that I manage – our clients pay for better service than that – but it’ll be interesting to see what sort of results the people that do try it get…