Tag Archive for: AdWords

Google Officially Retires The Keyword Tool

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Keyword Planner Screenshot

The time has come. As of yesterday, the Google Keyword Tool is officially dead. The sentiments are mixed as the tool has been frequently used by webmasters and SEO professionals across the world, but Google has offered a replacement called the Keyword Planner which has some advantages over the old tool. It also has some drawbacks associated with the switch.

In Google’s opinion, the Keyword Planner can accomplish all the important tasks the Keyword Tool could, as well as that of the Traffic Estimator. There are even some new features included which neither of the older tools offered. Matt Southern from Search Engine Journal broke down the pros and cons of being forced to make the change, which are shared below. Chances are in a few months you won’t even remember using the old Keyword Tool, but the transition could take some getting used to.

Positives

The Keyword Planner allows local SEO professionals and marketers to acquire keyword search volume data down to a city level with better geographic segmentation than the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator. It also has the ability to bundle geographic regions together.

SEO professionals and marketers are also able to upload up to 10,000 keywords from their own list to get performance data. The planner displays search volume by ad group, landing page, and any other categorization established by the user.

Negatives

The most common gripe I have heard about the Keyword Planner is that, unlike the Keyword Tool, the planner required users to be logged into AdWords before being able to use the tool. However, there are some functions removed from the Keyword Tool which will have a larger impact on how you view and understand the data.

The Keyword Planner does not feature match type data for search volume, device targeting, and doesn’t include global vs. local monthly searches. The ability to filter by closely related search terms is also missing, though Google has stated it will be back within the coming weeks. They explained the missing match types and device differentiation in a statement, which read:

In general, you’ll notice that the average search volume data is higher in Keyword Planner as compared to the exact match search volume data you got with the Keyword Tool. That’s because we’ll show you the average number of searches for a keyword idea on all devices (desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and mobile phones). With Keyword Tool, we showed the average search volume for desktop and laptop computers by default.

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Google Adds Time Aggregation to AdWords

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Google Adwords Time Chart

Jon Diorio and the Google+ account for Google Ads announced today that a new feature is available in Adwords that will allow you to get a better look at your data. It is a small addition, but many advertisers will find it very useful.

Beginning today, you can control the time aggregation on Adwords charts to show data down to a day-by-day view. You can also view it by week, month, or quarter. This way, you can see the big and small pictures with just a couple clicks, and keep track of the smaller level trends.

The announcement read:

Today, we’re making it easier and faster to get a customized view of how your performance is trending with a new button right above your chart in AdWords that lets you toggle between Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly data (shown below). We hope this will save you time and make you more efficient while optimizing your search campaigns.

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A Bruce Springsteen Ad Shows The Importance of Nailing Your Negative Keywords

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Bruce Springsteen in Concert

Source: Craig O’Neal

Marketing is a tricky game. You aren’t just trying to broadcast your ads to everyone who can possibly see it. Instead, you want to get your message to interested parties. We want real leads and in PPC we want clicks that are going to lead to conversions. We are paying for those clicks after all.

To weed out the garden and keep your add showing up for irrelevant content or uninterested searchers, Google AdWords offers negative keywords. Not only can you designate the terms you want to bid on, but also the search terms that are likely to result in wasted clicks.

Some write off the importance of properly setting up your negative keywords. They underestimate how often people click the top results without actually checking to see what the result is, even when it’s an ad. Google doesn’t exactly try to obviously differentiate ads from regular results, and anyone can just click the top result. If your ad is irrelevant to them, you just wasted money on that ad.

Those who ignore or underestimate the importance of negative keywords tend to assume it is rare for searchers to blindly or accidentally click the top link, even when it’s not relevant to them. The group from Search Laboratory recently ran an experiment in the form of a Bruce Springsteen themed ad to show the exact opposite.

When Springsteen was set to perform at the Leeds Arena, they set up ads for the keywords ‘Bruce Springsteen’, ‘Leeds Arena’, ‘tickets’, and ‘reviews’ with a little play on the song title Born to Run. The ad was simple and clearly humorous, and it was very up front that the company is an SEO & PPC business.

They break down their results in a little more detail on their page, but simply put, the CTR was over 2% on an average position of three. It isn’t a perfectly scientific study of the effect, but it is pretty clear that they received quite a few clicks from people that were almost certainly not looking for PPC or SEO services. It highlights the need to get your negative keywords right and make sure your ads are shown to the interested markets, not just random people.

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What New PPC Reports Did You Miss Out On Recently?

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For the past couple of months, it has almost seemed like PPC didn’t exist outside of the new Adwords Enhanced Campaigns. But, the world did keep turning the entire time we were focused on the big transition, and plenty of new tools and features came out that deserve way more attention than they got.

Now that everyone is settling into the new form of campaigns, it is time to go over everything we missed while we were distracted. Frederick Vallaeys from Search Engine Land (and former Google AdWords employee) did just that by exploring the new reports in AdWords that can help guide your optimization and maybe save you some stress and money.

Impression Share Reports at the Keyword Level

Impression share (IS) is a useful metric which tells you how often your ads are being shown when a query matches your targeting. If the targeting is matching and a local user searches for one your keywords, you obviously hope they are being shown your ad in that relevant moment, especially for keywords that are performing well according to your KPI.

Previously, IS was only available at the campaign and ad group levels, and was difficult to figure out if there was a specific keyword dragging you down or performing extremely well. Now, Google notifies you exactly what keyword has a low IS and allows you to make the changes necessary without hurting your other keywords in the ad group.

Top Movers Dimension Report

The top movers report shows the most likely causes for any huge declines based on the change report and makes it quickly clear what budget changes had occurred. Rather than having to research and experiment to figure out the cause of any anomalies in campaign performance, the report quickly tells you what you need to know so you can skip forward to repairing any mistakes.

New Keywords Below First Page Bid Filter

The AdWords interface has shown the keywords whose max CPC is below the first page for a long time, but there was no easy way to filter or sort the view to focus solely on keywords. Now, Google has added a filter which helps you get started optimizing and boosting impressions. Few users go past the first page, so staying falling off will lose you a lot of impressions.

Date Comparisons

Google has always made it reasonably easy to make changes and attempt to constantly improve your performance. They have even openly advocated for ongoing optimization and testing. But, actually measuring the results has never been particularly easy and nets you a lot of useless data. Now, with new Date Comparisons combined with the Top Movers report, you can quickly spot issues with an account and perform before-and-after comparisons

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How To Protect Your PPC Campaigns From Damaging Factors

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Running PPC campaigns is a tricky task. If you do it right, everything can go great, but if you make a mistake you can waste money and hurt your brand. At any given time, there are tons of factors working to make your campaigns fail, and a PPC manager needs to be on the watch to prevent any damage. Fighting these issues may not be actively moving your campaign forward, but it can keep you from backsliding.

Joseph Kerschbaum explained the seven most damaging factors that PPC managers often let sabotage their campaigns and how to fight them. If you keep an eye out for any of these lurking dangers, you can protect yourself from almost all serious damage to your campaign.

  1. PPC Changes – While there are the occasional big changes to PPC like the implementation of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns, there are also constant small changes that make PPC managers continuously tweak their strategies. If you don’t keep up to date on the latest PPC news, you can end up behind on the best practices and seeing your campaigns go from good to bad very quickly.
  2. Fluctuating Performance in Other Channels – PPC is influenced by tons of other aspects of your brand’s online presence, just as PPC influences those other channels. You can’t treat PPC as an isolated area, because changes in other arenas can drag down campaign performance. Just as with the constant changes in PPC however, keeping up to date with all your web analytics and industry news can help keep your campaign on track.
  3. Negative seasonal trends – Every industry has good seasons and bad seasons. Many even see tidal changes from hour to hour. While small dips in performance throughout a day or week are regular, you need to be prepared for the longer periods of decelerated performance. To protect yourself, you should develop seasonal projections to help identify when these low periods will occur, and be prepared to ease off your campaigns when they won’t be performing well. Take the budget you would be spending on non-rewarding periods and use it to take advantage of the times that work well for your brand.
  4. Increasingly Intense Competition – One of the biggest struggles with PPC is trying to keep up with your competitors and predict when they are going to decrease or aggressively double-up on their PPC campaigns. Set performance thresholds so you can notice when your performance begins to take some heat, and check up on your competitors when you fall below the threshold. You can also use a third party competitive tool to monitor your competitors.
  5. Broken Tracking and Site Errors – Not all PPC performance hazards come from outside. There are many ways you can sabotage your own work, and one of the most common issues is errors that can slowly creep up on your site. Use AdWords and Google Analytics alerts so that you will be notified immediately when one of these errors occur.
  6. Failed PPC Initiatives – Of course, sometimes the self-inflicted damage isn’t preventable. In fact, with nearly every account there are going to be mispriced bids and failed ad copy that you won’t be able to identify until the signs start popping up that something isn’t working. Set reminders so that you can monitor your new initiatives. That way, you’ll be able to see the warning signs as soon as they start appearing.
  7. Implementation Errors – While there are tons of issues that can’t be prevented, you are likely running quite a few campaigns and making tons of changes on a daily basis. Preventable mistakes are going to happen, and you need to be prepared to respond. Yet again, alerts will likely be the best way to be notified when you mess up, but the better defense is to implement a process to ensure every change within your account is double-checked.
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Google Makes Changes To AdWords Help Center and Quality Score Reports

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Google has begun the process of pushing over the last few stragglers to Adwords Enhanced, and to reflect the big changes taking place, they’ve also been updating just about everything related to AdWords. Over the past week, they’ve redesigned the AdWords Help Center, as well as making some changes to how AdWords quality scores are reported.

AdWords Help Center Redesign

AdWords Help Center Graphic

The AdWords Help Center has always been an important resource for both new and old PPC campaign managers. Just as Google offers best practices for SEO, the help center for AdWords helps break down exactly how managing ads works and the best suggestions for those just getting started. The new redesign came with three major updates aimed to improve how the help center works and update the information contained within.

  1. Improved Navigation – To start out, Google has made the site much easier to get around, making the information more readily available. From the main navigation, you can now find portals to information on setting up and basic AdWords info, managing ads, community resources, and guides to success.
  2. More Visual Help – Google has openly said they will be making the Help Center more visual by filling it with infographics and screenshots. But, the Search Engine Journal report on the update found very little visual additions from the update. It is possible these additions are taking longer to implement, or that they have stepped away from this addition, but there are some new graphics to help explain AdWords, such as the one above.
  3. Guides to Success – Google has added a collection of instructional guides and tips to help get greener PPC managers started with their AdWords campaigns, but the information can also provide a helpful refresher for AdWords veterans who might not have checked up on Google’s latest suggestions.

Quality Score Reporting Revisions

The more functional change Google has made is an update to how the AdWords quality scores are reported within accounts. The company says these changes are aimed at making it easier for advertisers to adjust and revise any ads based on quality score, and to make it easier for users to gain more information on what is and isn’t working.

In their announcement, Google said:

As part of our ongoing efforts to help improve the quality of our ads, we’re announcing an update that changes how each keyword’s 1-10 numeric Quality Score is reported in AdWords. Under the hood, this reporting update will tie your 1-10 numeric Quality Score more closely to its three key sub factors — expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. We expect this update to reach all advertisers globally within the next several days.
We’re making this change so that the Quality Score in your reports more closely reflects the factors that influence the visibility and expected performance of your ads. We hope that providing you more transparency into your 1-10 Quality Score will help you improve the quality of your ads.

The way Google is calculating quality scores hasn’t changed at all, so there isn’t a great need to suddenly change how you’re running your campaigns, but they are simply changing the way these scores are reported to us and expanding on the information available.

However, advertisers using quality scores as part of automated rules will need to change or correct how the rules are interfacing with the new display methods.

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Is There Such Thing As a 10 Minute PPC Workday?

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Egg-Timer

We all have busy days where we seem to be running from the minute we get up, but as PPC managers, we can’t just ignore our campaigns for a day. There are many aspects of a campaign that have to be tweaked and worked with on a daily basis. Wouldn’t it be great if you could manage to take care of all the most important PPC tasks in 10 minutes? According to Melissa Mackey from Search Engine Watch, you can.

Of course, no good PPC manager is doing just 10 minutes of work a day, but on those days when work is piled up and you’re forced to squeeze it in, her “10-minute PPC workday” might just be able to help you keep all your basis covered.

It all starts with checking the stats on your top KPI. If conversions are your KPI, look at both your total conversions and cost per conversion. If you’re already doing this daily, you’ll be able to notice any anomalies immediately. Once you’ve spotted the outliers, you’ll spend the next nine minutes focusing on them.

The best step on fixing outliers is to pause the worse performers. Any ad group or keyword that has cost quite a bit but isn’t performing can be paused. You can re-enable it later when you have more time to focus in on the problem.

Next, you’ll want to check out your underperforming keywords. Whether they simply aren’t earning back the cost or maybe they just aren’t leading to conversions, you’ll want to see what keywords are dragging you down. The fastest method is to use in-line search query reports in Google to check the details of the keyword in question and create negative keywords directly in seconds.

Once that is over, we can move on to the positive things: top performing ad groups and keywords. Start with your best-performing ad groups (generating the most conversions at the lowest cost) and up the bids. Then, use AdWords editor to make any bulk bid increases on the best keywords. Keep it short, but tackle the most important and best few performers.

You will want to move on to quickly checking out your ad copy tests to see if you have any obvious winners, and try to replicate it by pasting it into your ad group a few times. The last couple minutes of actual work will be devoted to positive keyword research by running a quick search query report for your best performing keywords. Sort by conversions, and then add the best queries as positive keywords.

Once all is said and done, you’ll want to make notes for the next day. If you’ve kept yourself limited to 10 minutes, you’ll have noticed many issues you weren’t able to deal with at the moment, and you will probably have some questions to address. Jot down some quick notes while everything is fresh so that you’ll be able to tackle it all properly tomorrow.

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Google Begins The Forced Upgrade to Adwords Enhanced

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Yesterday was the big day. July 22 marked the deadline for the roughly 2 million Adwords campaigns that have held out on converting to Adwords Enhanced and will be automatically upgraded. Google had blatantly stated the that yesterday was a hard deadline for the last 25 percent of Adwords users to migrate, but as per usual, the process will actually occur over a long period.

In an Inside Adwords blog post about the change, Google explained, “…starting today, we will begin upgrading all remaining campaigns automatically, bringing everyone onto the new AdWords platform. As with many product launches, the rollout will be gradually completed over several weeks.”

The forced upgrade brings about quite a few changes in how you should manage your campaigns, and to help everyone get started, Search Engine Watch brought together a group of professionals in the field to offer their advice.

Google also offered their own suggestions.

  1. Review your mobile bid adjustments – For most campaigns, the auto-upgrade default is based on bids from similar advertisers. You will need to visit the ‘Settings’ tab to optimize for your business.
  2. Identify unwanted keyword duplication in overlapping campaigns – If you previously were using similar legacy campaigns for every device type, it is suggested you identify matching campaigns and remove any unwanted duplicate keywords in the enhanced campaign.
  3. Review Display Network campaigns – You will want to verify that your display ads are reaching users on all desired devices and that you are using the correct bidding strategies.
  4. Explore the Enhanced Campaign features – It is recommended you try out upgraded sitelinks and upgraded call extensions to start. Then you can further boost results by creating mobile preferred ads and setting bid adjustments for location and time.
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You Can Never Have Too Much AdWords Advice

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In my opinion, you can never read too many opinions and advice columns on how to manage your PPC campaigns. Sure, some may turn out to be full of bad advice, but I believe every bit of information can either guide you to improving your own campaigns, or steer you away from looming mistakes. At the very least, it’s good to see what other people are doing in order to inspire you to come up with your own methods.

With that in mind, how could you avoid Chris Kent’s article at Search Engine Journal called ’10 Golden Rules of AdWords.’ It’s loaded with good information. Some of it is bordering on cliche, such as logging in to your account at least once a day and testing every conceivable movable piece. But, even these have been repeated for a reason. They are important and are a key to building a successful campaign.

My favorite pieces of advice are a suggestion of how to determine how much to bid for certain keywords. For many, this seems to be a guessing game, which is not good. Also, remember to link your PPC ads to the specific page your ad refers to. Don’t just leave traffic at your doorstep, invite them in and put them right where you want them. In other words, bypass your homepage and get users as close to a conversion as you can.

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Bing Plans To Improve On AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

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A PPC war has started between Bing and Google and Microsoft Search Network’s GM fired the most recent shots. David Pann has bashed the effectiveness of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns for larger advertisers because of its bundling of desktop and tablet targeting options.

“For smaller advertisers that don’t distinguish between mobile, tablets and PCs Enhanced Campaigns may make sense. But for larger advertisers which understand that their messages must be different according to the device it will be harder and they will have to create workarounds,” Pann said.

Pann has a point and there have many independent reviewers who have essentially had the same critique since Google unveiled Enhanced Campaigns.

Take his opinions with a grain of salt, however, considering he is working for a direct competitor, who just happens to be rolling out their own version of Enhanced Campaigns in the coming months. Pann says Bing’s version will allow user’s to choose whether to combine mobile and desktop campaigns, or to keep them separate. Bing plans to launch their new product in beta sometime before fall and have a full release by the end of summer 2014.

For more, check out Jessica Davies article at The Drum.

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