Adwords Search Engine- second try

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:26:14 -0500

New Adwords Search Engine

I am fooling around with a new search engine that I am going to try to hack to search for all things adwords which you can find here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011060711406498666089%3Auj0c__tldk8

It pulls most of its results from Google currently and it will be going through a lot of more tweaks and hacks in the future.

Free Adwords Videos Giveaway for taking a survey

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:40:53 -0500

Free Adwords Videos Giveaway for taking a survey

This is only open to about the next 50 people, so do it soon, but I am going to give away a set of all of the Videos to a random winner that you see here: http://www.adwordstraining.org/mastering_google_adwords.htm

All you have to do is give me your feedback by taking a survey, which should take you about 7-15 minutes to do. Click here to take the survey now

I look forward to getting your feedback so that I can make even better videos, and really give you what you want, so thanks in advance!

Free Adwords CTR improvement tool

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 11:48:41 -0500

Adwords CTR Validity Checker tool

When you compare two ads in your adwords account, and one of them is at 2.9% and one is at 1.3% you should kill the second one and keep the first, right? Not necessesarily......

It really depends how many impressions and clicks each one has. Google sometimes decides too early which ads are best and you can easily be misled. I have seen ads I was sure were winners go DOWN a lot after even just 1000 impressions or so, and I have also seen "sleepers" gradually go from around 2% to a whopping 13% after a few thousand impressions. If you kill the ads too early, you miss this. Here is how it works....

Iif you let crappy ads go too long it kills your CTR, so when should you kill these ads and declare a winner? A workable answer is to only kill ads when the difference in CTR between the two ads is statistically relevant. You have to look at how many impressions and clicks each ad has recieved and compare that to the click through rate, and do some math. Well I hate math, sooooo............

Here is the tool that will tell you a pretty good guess:

http://www.vertster.com/adwords-tool/default.asp

What it does is look at the difference between the ads and tell you when it is safe to kill the loser, or if you should wait a while. Very good stuff.

A big adwords guru (who shall remain nameless) has a tool like this but you only get it after you have paid him 197 dollars.

This one is yours free.

There wasn't a lot of stuff for Die Hard Adwords fans at the SES conference, but there was one good seminar with some good advice.

The strategy is based on this interesting concept: A good portion of Search Queries are actually unique,meaning they have never been typed in before. The stats given were upwards of 50% of the search queries at Google on any givenday have NEVER BEEN TYPED IN before.

I have seen this type of research in a couple other places before, but not sure where I saw it. If anyone knows, send me the link and I will be forever grateful. For veteran SEOs this research might be unbelieveable, but if you track how you yourself are doing power searches you will see that you end up trying a lot of different versions and combinations when you are trying to hunt something down.

There was some other research done by another company though that had totally different findings. There findings were that most people use combinations of only 2 words for the most part, and rarely use even 3 terms. And never any complex phrase searching, always just2 or 3 broad terms.

How can two different companies get different results like this? I guess it depends where you look. One source of data comes from stuff like the ask jeeves peek behind the keyhole. Here's a bunch of places to check out just in case you aren't familar with this sort of thing:

Be aware that some of these things will show adult content:

Ask Jeeves Peek Through The Keyhole
http://www.askjeeves.com/docs/peek/

Shows you some of the search queries at ask jeeves

MetaCrawler MetaSpy
http://www.metaspy.com/

same deal here

Kanoodle Search Spy
http://www.kanoodle.com/spy/

Yahoo Buzz Index
http://buzz.yahoo.com/

This may get more interesting when they get their new search algorithm fully implemented.

Ok now this is one source of data, the other one was done by a company that monitored server logs of a lot of websites and additionally had a piece of spyware (that people volunteered to use for the experiment) installed on their computers and it logged everything people typed in and searched for.

It was also an interesting experiment because a "searching session" could be monitored so that you could track everything people would do in one sitdown with their favorite search engine. They found in some cases that people would type in two words, then when they didn't find what they wanted type in the SAME two words again, kind of like hoping the Engine would guess what they were looking for and somehow show different results!!

Sound like someone you know?

Anyway I thought this was pretty funny. So what does all this have to do with the strategy to improve your results in Google Adwords?

In a nutshell, the strategy is to go ahead and use BROAD MATCH on some terms and go ahead and get some slightly less targeted traffic for awhile. Could be a week, or a month depending on your budget, but the longer the better. Then analyze your server logs to see how people found you. People type in the darndest things sometimes, and looking through the logs or your analyzer software can give you some new ideas and new directions for your keyword lists. Then, when you are ready, add these keywords where appropriate and use them to expand your keyword lists and target better. Ideally, you should see your clickthrough rates improve because you are using some better keywords.

I usually do this in the opposite direction- I look through the server logs to find keywords that I don't want people to find me on, and I add them to my negative keyword list in my Adwords account so that I am notpaying for useless clicks. But I do a lot of "nichy" products and campaigns where ROI is paramount, and less but more highly focused traffic is perfectly fine.

I am going to look through my campaigns and clients to see if I can find a match for trying out this strategy.

We will see how it goes.

Send your comments and see ya next time

Adwords Marketing News - free stuff

Adwords Search Engine- second try

Free Adwords Videos Giveaway for taking a survey

Free Adwords CTR improvement tool