My Greatest friend- Adwords Advanced Tools

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:35:15 -0500

Ok This is my greatest friend in Adwords, and I don't hear many Adwords gurus talk about it.

In my videos I mention to keep checking back often in the "tools" section under the Campaign Management tab in Adwords.

I take my own advice, and always check out when the Google Engineers are making some new kind of tool. Sometimes I try them and I am not that impressed, but there are two that you should really check out the power of.

The best one is the advanced search and edit tool. By using the filters, I am able to spend a fraction of the time I was before doing account tweaks. Lets say you want to find all the keywords that are lower than position 8, regardless of where they are in your account, and raise them all by 10 cents. it takes just a couple seconds to do this with this tool. How about deleting keywords that have consistently gotten poor CTR over the last month? You can either perform mass edits on them, or just see what they are to get a better idea of what is actually going on.

There is another great use of this tool that I use a lot. Lets say that you made a mistake in the url of several ads and now want to change the landing page, or like me, start making campaigns and ads before you have even settled on the final domain name you want to send people to. You can go throughout the entire account in all your ads and change the destination url en masse, or you can change just certain ones in certain ad groups. Its nice to be able to hit a button and change the destination url for 50 ads at once and is a real timesaver.

The other tool is the mass move/copy ad text. I actually hired a company to make a similar tool for me using the Google Api, but I end up just using the one that is built in to the Adwords interface more and more now. What it does is let you "clone" an ad group, with all the keywords and ads, onto another ad group. So lets say you want to separate out some keywords into different adgroups, but you don't want to lose the CTR history of your top performing ads. Just clone the ad group, and leave your top performing keywords in the origional one, and experiment all you want with the new one. The only thing I am waiting for is the ability to mass clone entire campaigns with all their ad groups at once, so that you can quickly add an additional website or for split testing a proven winning campaign.

There's always news of stuff, Like now google is trying day parting, position preferences, and now even testing cost per action and people have asked me why I don't comment on all these things. The reason is because for this blog I am concentrating only on proven stuff that has actually worked for me, and I ignore the bells and whistles until they actually prove out. These two new tools definately prove out for sure.

Ok kids, that's my two cents for the day.

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 - adwords tools

My Greatest friend- Adwords Advanced Tools

Free Adwords CTR improvement tool