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.

The ultimate adwords bid manager- the search

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:46:22 -0500

After you get to a certain point in Adwords, you start to get a LOT of keywords, campaigns, websites, and ad groups, and you start wondering what you are actually doing with your life. I mean, hey, I want to just advertise, and make some money, not spend hours pouring over the Google interface, managing campaigns!

Google makes advertisers work extra hard. Is it worth it? Well yes, for people that go the extra mile and outsmart their competition. Our company does this for a lot of corporate clients. There comes a time though when you have so many tens of thousands of keywords going that it is time to look at leveraging some technology to try to improve efficiency and lower the workload...

To manually review the bids and adjust them for 10,000 keywords takes a while even when using the Google interface to its utmost power. When you have been doing this for a while, you come up with your own ninja adwords techniques that you end up repeating quite a bit, which succeed in many different industries. Well why not turn this over to some intelligent software? Sure, why not?

I went on an all out search to see what could do this to help me and my company and this is what I learned:

1) Most of the big SEM companies that service the fortune 500 companies have their own proprietary systems

2) They are so expensive that they don't even list any prices on their websites.

3) Of the real bid managers out there that have decent reviews and capabilities, there are three that stand out, which include bidrank, atlas one point (formerly Go Toast), and Make me Top.

With bidrank and make me top, you can do a decent amount for about 200 bucks a month, but still I fell far short in being able to do a real good job with the 10,000 keywords I wanted to test. Atlas one point is so expensive to actually USE, that 150 keywords maxed out my little 90 dollar account within the first few days. How much would it cost to manage tens of thousands of keywords, just in adwords? I estimate at least 1600 bucks a month for 10,000 keywords, and it could easily be more.

I did find one other bid nanager from england, but I lost the link, so if someone knows of some good bid managers please comment and I'll include it below this post for everyone else to take advantage of.

My conclusion- I have to hire some programming teams to program my own industrial strength bid manager, capable of handling at least yahoo and google worldwide, with unlimited bid adjustments according to my exact ninja rules and the ability to create new ones, plus an integration with a webstats module so that you can do stuff like keep your cost per sale or cost per lead at a certain range and make your bidding adjustments based on your actual results.

Which language? Come on, stay away from Bill Gates baby. Php/mysql all the way. I have my own list of features in my head, but I am opening up a survey to find out what individual users and SEM companies are really looking for in a bid manager, so I can build a really good piece of ppc bid management software.

In the comments below, tell me about your ideal adwords bid management software and what it should do.

Comments, Comments, anyone?

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!

Adwords Marketing News - adwords account management

My Greatest friend- Adwords Advanced Tools

The ultimate adwords bid manager- the search

Google Adwords Ad Group Rotation System