Google announced a new Tab for the AdWords interface entering beta for some U.S. English customers soon. They’re calling it the “Opportunities” tab, but in Google-speak, that means, “Ways you can give Google more money.” Let’s take a look at the available details and ideas that would truly benefit advertisers:
Here’s a quick start to using Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool to find new, high-value, low-competition keywords on your existing site with zero work. To do this, we’ll use Google’s new “search based keyword tool”, SKTool.
Click over to:
Click ‘Sign in’ and sign in to your AdWords account. (Screen shots below show a random site I’m not associated with.)
I have a client who manages their own AdWords campaigns, but I check in on them once a month and see if anything is obviously going wrong. This works well, because the client is in control and handles day-to-day changes without me charging them, but they also have a “safety net” in case problems come up.
This morning, I noticed they have a broad match keyword getting LOTS of impressions and NO clicks. This is dragging down their Ad Group’s quality and costing them more on the keywords they are getting clicks on.
So, why might this happen? There are a few possibilities:
One of the big problems we see with clients’ campaigns is that they have keywords (or groups, or whole campaigns) that have excessively high bounce rates. Those should be taken out behind the barn and shot, but how do you separate the bad ones from the good ones? Analytics makes it easy!
Finding High Bounce Rate Keywords
Here’s how:
I’ve been using Google Docs more and more lately, and wanted to use their Spreadsheet for some AdWords bulk writing, but needed a letter counter to be sure my titles and ad lines were short enough to work.
PPCProz.com has the code for Excel here: http://blog.ppcproz.com/2009/02/3-secrets-creating-adwords-ads.html
So it was just a question of converting it to Google’s spreadsheet. Google spreadsheet doesn’t support formulas in conditional coloring, so I had to embed the formulas in the cells, then apply conditional coloring. Not too much harder, and I tweaked it to show the number of remaining characters until you go over the limit, then turn red. Here’s how:
One of the things I love about AdWords is that it tends to give me information I need to make good choices. I just looked at an ad campaign a client originally set up a year ago, and it’s done pretty badly for them over time. They seem to have good keywords, and the landing page was chosen reasonably well, but they’re still not getting many conversions.
The culprit? Bad ad text. Continue Reading ->
Today, we’re going to talk about AdWords keywords, and how to set them up so you get more value than the vanilla Google setup would give you. From Part 1, let me reiterate that you need each Ad Group to focus on one phrase, and that phrase needs to have its own custom ads and a specific page on your site.
So, once you’ve got the above, what can you do with keywords? Google lets you target phrases 4 ways: Continue Reading ->
Very often these days, I see AdWords campaigns that have either been set up by clients or set up by web folks who weren’t quite sure what they were doing. So here are some ideas for things to do with AdWords so you can minimize cost, maximize clicks, and try to get more conversions. Continue Reading ->
