Google Adwords Blog Posts

New Version Of Adwords Editor, v9.0!

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Google Adwords, PPC

The new version of Adwords Editor was unveiled on the 6 May for the benefit of all us PPC’ers, but if we all don’t know the benefits of the new technology, how are we supposed to use it to its full potential?

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. (more…)

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Re-Marketing: Setup, Advice and Early Results

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Google Adwords, PPC

Re-marketing: a very simple and effective method for targeting adverts to users that have already shown interest with some of your products.

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. (more…)

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Google Insights – Better than the Keyword Tool?

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Google Adwords, Google Insights

It slipped relatively under the radar last month that Google has removed monthly data from its keyword tool. The Adwords Keyword Tool and its questionable numbers was already the bane of many SEO’s and PPC’s lives, and is now even less use. When little other data is available however, it’s often the last resort for search forecasting.

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. (more…)

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Decoding the Quality Score

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Google, PPC, Quality Score

Improving your click through rate improves your Quality Score. This you probably already know. But how high is a high click through rate? What is a decent click through rate for a given position? How do you know if your Quality Score is being dragged down by the Account Quality Score or your adverts?

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). (more…)

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Image Search Advertising

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Google Adwords, PPC

Advertisers have the ability to show ads when users do an image search. The ads appear above the images shown and consist of text and a thumbnail image. The screen shot below shows an image search for “ladies nike trainers.” Nike has made sure it has an image search ad at the top of the page and Adidas is also using image search ads to generate business from their competitors.

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. (more…)

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