Free Adwords Tracking Url Generator Script

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:16:10 -0500

New Free Adwords Tracking/Powerposting tool

Track what makes money in Adwords

I finally got the help of a programmer on this one, and have the first
version of the script up:

http://www.advertinfo.com/quick/qt.php

I am going to try to keep it free, as long as there is a reasonable
server load with people accessing it. Basically what it does is automatically
generate the tracking urls I described in an earlier post called the
poor man's tracking urls. Here's a little background for those not
familiar with how this works:

In Adwords, when you enter your keywords, you can just enter the
keyword only, or you can use powerposting. It looks more
complicated than it actually is. Basically it gives you a lot more
flexability because you can specify an exact price, landing page,
and tracking for that keyword at the same time.

The formula for it is keyword ** price ** url instead of just the
keyword. So for example if I wanted to send people the site
http://google.com/new or something, and I wanted to pay $1.25
a click for that, the powerposting would look like this:

adwords ** 1.25 ** http://google.com/new

Simple enough? Ok now lets take this one step further. I don't
want to just send people to a regular link, that just won't do!

What I want to do is send people to a link that has tracking info
in it, so that I can see which keywords and pages are MAKING
ME MONEY and which are losers. If we want to use the corporate
doublespeak of the big SEM firms I would say "Its very important
to monitor your ROI by keyword with advanced web analytics"

If I did that, well, I could charge a heck of a lot more for this service.

As a matter of fact..... Ok I won't. What we want to do is be able
to track of all the words we are advertising on, which ones actually
result in somebody buying something or contacting us, and which ones
just bring freebie seekers or the curious to the site, suck up all our
adversing budget, and never produce any results. There are
a lot of ways to use this with a tracker like hitslink to really hone
in on making better profits, but until you can make the tracking
links, you can't achieve all these great benefits, so lets do that
first.

Different trackers work differently, but almost all of them
will work with the paramater SOURCE, so instead of sending someone
to http://mysite.com, if you can at least send them to a url like
http://mysite.com?source=mycampaign you can start
tracking which marketing campaigns or traffic sources are working
for you and which are not.

Now that is a very good start, but if you want to be a real pro we
have to take this to the next level. We want to know, if somebody
bought something from our site, exactly what keyword they typed
in, what keyword we advertised on (not always the same thing), and,
for easy access, what place they came from, such as yahoo or google,
and for google we want to know which ad group they came from so
we can quickly go look at that campaign and tweak it a bit.

To generate these adwords tracking urls manually you can go here
to learn how to do it, but if you want to have them generated for
you so that you can powerpost them back into your google adwords
campaign here you can try out this new script:

http://www.advertinfo.com/quick/qt.php

Note that for our purposes we didn't need to be quite so fancy, the
script generates the code to track the keyword, the ad group, and
the source.

This gives a real good start, to generate these tracking urls
automatically so that you can power post them into your Adwords
account, and later on you can start tweaking individual bid prices
and be happy as a clam.

Rock on,

Google Adwords Ad Group Rotation System

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:13:50 -0500

Beating Google's Adwords Rotation System

-Advanced Technique

I admit this is a little geeky and more of a pro level thing for people
that have NO LIFE and are WAY too into adwords, but the potential
is pretty huge, so here it goes:

I have been noticing the same pattern over and over again in the last
several months with almost every new ad group started, in many
different industries.

Google's Adwords rotation system, while I do not know the
exact algorithm, works something like this:

When you load all your keywords and ads and launch your ad group for the first time,
Google assumes a 1% CTR until proven otherwise in the beginning, then tries out your
first few keywords. How many it tries out depends on a few factors, like your overall
account performance, your daily ad spend, your industry, and a few other factors,
but in a typical small account maybe your first 4 or 5 keywords just go right in, with
normal delivery, just enough so Google can determine if you know what you are doing.

Those first few keywords either do well, or they don't.

If they do well, Google moves on and rotates new keywords in, one at a time.
If those keywords also do well, everything is great. If they don't do well,
or there aren't a lot of impressions, the ad group starts having the delivery slowed.

As each new word that has 0 impressions or does poorly, the position of your ads
goes lower, the clicks get more expensive, and the whole ad group is slowed in its
number of impressions overall.

If you delete the poorly performing keywords, it takes a while, but then
that ad group "builds up steam" again.

Lets look at a typical scenario. Here you start your ad group and it starts out fine:

Next, you add in another keyword, but it doesn't go as well. Notice that the
delivery is still ok though:

It is at this point that google starts rotating in the next keyword that you are getting
into trouble, because according to Google, the CTR is ZERO. So, google still rotates in
the next keyword giving you the benefit of the doubt, but then look what happens:

Even though you tried to pay 5 cents MORE, your position goes down quite a bit.

There could be a lot of theories as to why this is, but a good guess is that the
algorithm has calculated the CTR from all the keywords so far, and the ZERO you
just got, hurt you a bit.

Regardless, I have seen this pattern over and over again. If you have a loser
keyword in there, or several, Google starts slowing you down and making it
even harder to get clicks. Notice what happens now:

As you add more loser keywords, or keywords that don't get a lot of impressions,
your whole ad group starts losing steam, and your delivery and impressions just
keep slowing down.

Now in this case I am assuming that you are using relevant keywords and these
keywords are related in concept, and you are targeting correctly, and you have some
decent ads.

So what do you do about this?

There are a few options:

Rotate your keywords putting your best foot forward, and once you have some
data about the performance, arrange them so that the first 5 or 6 in the ad group
are good performing keywords. You can always chose "edit keywords" and change
the order in which your keywords appear
Nuke keywords that don't get any impressions or clicks for 30 days.
Nuke keywords fast that aren't performing, and target your ads better.

Hope this helps, remember you're only as good as your last ad group!

The Million Keyword Myth- Improving the performance of your Adwords account

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:12:30 -0500

The myth about needing millions of keywords

There are many myths about Adwords floating
around on the internet.

One of them is that you can have huge keyword
lists of thousands of keywords and get thousands
of visitors for very little cost.

Like meta tags, this was actually true and good advice at
one time, but it is no longer true, even though it is repeated
often by people who actually haven't done Adwords
for real.

Adwords- Ripping Beginners to Shreds

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:24:22 -0500

ANALYSIS OF A FAILING ADWORDS ACCOUNT

Ok this is going to be a little fun, and a little brutal at the same time.

This will illustrate the process of analyzing an account that is in pretty bad shape. I would consider over a million impressions with a clickthrough rate of almost ZERO to be in pretty bad shape.

Let's take a look:

When we log into the account, this is what we find:

Ok, with a 0% click through rate we have nowhere to go but up, lets see why this campaign is performing so poorly. As a side note, it is not smart to be using the Google tool to monitor those conversions, even though it is free. Get a real 3rd party tracker. Google representatives have admitted that this data is used in certain decisions Google has to make about the adwords program, and it is not smart to "open your books" to Google in this way. Ok lets look a little closer and see what we can find:

Notice two things- There are NO negative keywords at all, so there is no way to filter out bad or poorly performing traffic, or just plain searchers that are really not looking for a debt consolidation service that this company offers. That is the first thing, The second thing is that there are no sites listed to NOT be shown in the content network. In taking an account that is in trouble, its best to just shut of the content network completely while you work with your ROI on Google only for a little while, because almost every other option including the search network gives you worse quality traffic. So to stop the leakage, that is the first thing to do.

Lets move on a little bit more:

Just as expected, the content network is performing poorly as you can see here. The other thing to notice, which isn't obvious in this picture above, is that there is only ONE campaign and ONE ad group in the whole account. It is very hard to target your ads this way and get a good a good click through rate, which is the chief thing you need in order to reduce your cost.

The other thing that should be noticed is that they are paying a premium price on the content network traffic. The content network hack as described elsewhere in this blog should be employed, so that they can reduce their content network costs, but right now they should nuke it until the account can get under control. So far, here are the immediate steps to do:

Pause the whole account and lets do some operating
Nuke the content network from the one poorly performing campaign. Consider nuking the search network too, while you work on your targeting and Click throught Rate

Lets do a little further analysis and see if there is anything that is actually going right in this account:

Adwords CTR Algorithm Change

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:32:48 -0500

Change in Adwords ranking algorithm

As you remember, last month we talked about the slight change in the algorithm in how Google will be displaying adwords ads, which in a way is back to how it was in 1998 or so. Back then, ads themselves were looked on as either relevant or not by looking at the content of the ad itself, and after Google got money hungry, this dropped in importance a bit.

Now however, this might be becoming important again. So, if you are advertising on a keyword phrase it will give you a slight boost in ranking in addition to making those words bold in your ads, if you have those words or related words in the copy of your ad.

This will help your CTR quite a bit in theory.

I wish I could say I have been dutifully testing this for you but I have actually been having fun with testing some other aspects of copy and landing pages, so I can't report any conclusive results yet. But this is something to keep in mind when you are making new ads. You can find more details here:

Adwords CTR discussion

CTR and the Adwords Improvement Cycle

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:46:53 -0500

CTR and the adwords campaign improvement cycle

I can't say that I am 100% on this because after you are managing about 20 Accounts for different clients it gets harder to do. But if you are doing adwords for yourself you should definately do this:

Poor Man's Adwords Tracking Codes

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:49:32 -0500

The poor man's adwords tracking code:

Let's say you want to track something and you don't want to give all your adwords conversion data to Google. I don't blame you.

Here is what you do:

http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=put+your+keyphrase+here

Just copy the above and fill it in with the appropriate variables.

If you also want to be a real nerd and track the match type as well, like in the example of the keyword phrases mycool product, "mycool product", and [mycool product] it would look like this if you wanted to paste it into your adwords account.

mycool product ** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=mycool+product
"mycool product" ** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=%22mycool+product%22
[mycool product] ** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=%5Bmycool+product%5D

You can also if you want a little more control, also specify the price for just that one keyword. If you wanted to pay 1.25 per click for each of these keywords, here is what you would do:

mycool product ** 1.25**http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=mycool+product
"mycool product" **1.25** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=%22mycool+product%22
[mycool product] **1.25** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=%5Bmycool+product%5D

Then you just paste that into the appropriate ad group in your Adwords account. Doing it that way lets you tweak your positions more precisely.

Now, the only thing you are missing is a service like hitslink that lets you put a special
tracking code on every page of your site and then another one on the confirmation page after someone orders. But the above lets you have a lot more control over your adwords accounts if you have even a basic webstats program.

By the way, doing this can be accomplished with a very simple php script. Contact me if you want to make this script and become rich and famous.