Beta Features

The beta as launched shows just two things, both intended to get you more traffic (and Google more money):

• Budget ideas like “Change budget to $20.44 to capture missed links”
• Keyword ideas: New keywords for Ad Groups

Naturally, Google never tells us to “Lower budget to $15″ or “Remove these unrelated keywords from your Ad Group”.

Planned Features

Later on, the Opportunities tab will show more of the features from the Campaign Optimizer.  It will be more useful than Campaign Optimizer, since the ideas will span your account’s campaigns and ad groups. Hopefully, there will be some degree of sorting, so we can find low hanging fruit easily.

Eventually, the Tools tab’s features will migrate into the Opportunities tab.  This should include:

• Keyword tool (and the Search-based Keyword Tool)
• Conversion tracking
• Ads diagnostic tool
• Ad preview tool
• Campaign optimizer
• and a bunch more

Some of these could be more useful with the Opportunities tab’s broader view of suggestions across all campaigns and ad groups.

Features we ACTUALLY Need

Creating an AdWords account usually works best like this:

• Create ads for as many pages on our site as reasonable
• Use as many keywords as make sense for those pages
• Write multiple ads, so we’re testing ad performance

I think the Search-based Keyword Tool makes this task a lot easier than it once was, though I continue to be amazed that AdWords doesn’t give us the features I put into my “Missing Link” tool. The ability to manage bids and match types in bulk as you create a new campaign seems basic to me. Maybe someday!

Managing an AdWords account usually means:

• Finding new keywords over time
• Promoting broad matches to phrase match, phrase match to exact match (which Google’s keyword tab makes much easier now, by showing us actual search phrases that matched our keywords)
• Pausing bad ads and writing new ones
• Lowering bids as much as possible

So to perform these tasks, what I’d love the Opportunities tab to show me would be things like:

• Pause Bad Ad Text:  Identify ad texts that have “lost” the copmetition against the other Active ads in a given Ad Group, and point out which ones need to be paused and replaced with a fresh ad.
• Update Match Type:  Find phrase and broad match keywords that have a significant number of matching searches.  So if I have “red dog collars” as a phrase match, but no exact match, and 80% of searches that show the ad are exactly [red dog collars], it’s time to “promote” the phrase.  Same for broad match promoting to phrase match
• Missing Page:  Using Webmaster Tools’ perspective on the site (or the Search Based Keyword Tool), point out pages on the site that don’t have ads and perhaps should.
• Missing Keyword: AdWords and Analytics are growing together more, so I’m hopeful we might get this one. Find organic keywords not in my ad groups and suggest them for AdWords. (This is like the Search-based keyword tool, but based on actual inbound traffic instead of page analysis.)
• Broken Page:  Point out 404s and other broken pages on ads.  This can be a real problem when the folks managing the ads aren’t the same folks who manage the rest of the web site.
• Low Quality Score: Point out outlier keywords with low quality scores that should perhaps be pruned to bring ad groups into better focus.
• Update Keyword Bid: Point out extreme average positions, either always #1 or extremely low.
• Low CTR: Point out keywords (or ad texts) with extremely low CTR but reasonable numbers of impressions.  Maybe that broad match keyword that seemed like such a good idea is dragging down the rest of your campaign.
• Bouncy Keyword: Find keywords with high bounce rates (using Analytics data) and suggest we pause or update them.

Of course, many of these are things that an AdWords manager checks for frequently when managing a campaign. But the point is that Google could be doing a better job of helping ad managers, all in automated ways using data Google already has.

This approach would especially help small business advertisers, who don’t have big enough budgets to hire an AdWords pro to manage their campaigns. But Google has always been shy about the complexities of managing ads. They’d like us to think “It’s easy to get ads for your business running!” and that’s true. But getting your ads to help your own bottom line instead of Google’s requires information and tools Google isn’t providing.

This was a big reason I wrote AdWords Evolved, and continue to build tools like “Missing Link” to lower the bar for small advertisers. Managing AdWords well for your own business requires keeping an eye on the above elements, not just what Google considers “Opportunities”.

Click over to:

http://www.google.com/sktool/

Click ‘Sign in’ and sign in to your AdWords account.  (Screen shots below show a random site I’m not associated with.)

You’ll see your existing sites listed in the pulldown next to Website. Pick the one you want to start with and click ‘Find keywords’. If you’re just starting out with AdWords, your site may not be in the pulldown, so just type it into the Website box. Next, SKTool searches Google’s databases, looking at these things:

• Your existing AdWords campaigns
• Google’s knowledge of what phrases are on your pages
• How often those phrases are searched for
• What typical bids are for each keyword

Immediately, you will see a list of perhaps hundreds of phrases that are NOT in your AdWords campaign already, sorted by ‘Monthly searches’. I’ll have a tool available for bulk loading next week, but for now you’re stuck with manual entry.

If you don’t see a lot of phrases on your site, you probably have a Search Engine Optimization problem.

You’ll also see:

• How many others advertise on the phrase (the Competition column).
• A suggested bid to get in the top three ads for this phrase.
• The title of your web page where Google finds this phrase.

Next, look through the phrases for ones that really match what you’re selling. Look for phrases with low Competition and high Monthly Searches. Those are the most likely to be pay dirt for you. If you know the typical bids for your marketplace, you can also sort by Suggested bid and see which are cheaper than your usual rate.

At this point, you can manually add these phrases if you have appropriate ad groups, or set up new groups and campaigns as appropriate.

Have you started using SKTool yet?  Noticed any neat tricks or have any topics I should cover?  I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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:

1. Bad ad text. Maybe the ads in the group just don’t work for this keyword.  In this case, they’re a good match, so I don’t think that’s it.
2. Strange unrelated topics that happen to match the keyword.  This comes up sometimes when broad match keywords happen to align with a new movie or some other crazy unrelated search term. I don’t see any of that for this one.
3. Word order issues. I tried searching for the phrase in alternate orders, and don’t see anything crazy coming up there, either, so that’s not it.
4. Synonyms. I think that’s the issue here. Broad match will automatically identify synonyms for your words and show your ads when words unrelated to yours show up.

One way to check this is with the AdWords External Keyword Tool. I fired it up and entered the funny keyword. The main results were as expected, with around 5,000 monthly searches. But under Additional keywords to consider there were suggested keywords with 60,000 monthly searches. I’m betting the client’s ad is showing up for these phrases, which are completely unrelated to his business.

Here’s the action plan for this keyword:

1. Switch from broad match to phrase match. Phrase match won’t show the ad for synonyms the way broad match is.
2. Find the synonyms, and either add negative keywords to eliminate the ones causing problems, or find ways to make those searches valuable.
3. If this doesn’t work out, eliminate the broad match keyword. Phrase match in this case would catch our target searchers anyhow.

Thankfully, the folks searching on this unrelated keyword weren’t clicking the ad, or this could have been an expensive lesson!

Finding High Bounce Rate Keywords

Here’s how:

1. Connect your AdWords account with your Analytics account.
2. Wait until you have a bit of history in Analytics, at least 10-20 clicks on the keywords/groups you’re checking.
3. Log in to Analytics.
4. Click into the ‘Traffic Sources’ section in the menu at the left.
5. Click into the AdWords section. If nothing is shown here, you haven’t connected AdWords and Analytics correctly.
6. Choose the campaign you’re interested in.

Now you’re looking at how that campaign’s ad groups have performed on your site. One of the questions we get often is “what’s a high bounce rate?” Unfortunately, this depends on your site, your visitors, your market, etc. But Analytics gives you a great way to see how AdWords traffic compares with average traffic.

On your Analytics page, find the ‘Views:’ selector on the right side. It defaults to ‘Table’, but the option we want is ‘Comparison’. Click it and you’ll see how your ad groups’ visits compare with average. This isn’t terribly useful, but click the pulldown next to ‘compared to site average’ and select ‘Bounce Rate’.

Now you can see your bounce rate for each ad group relative to your average bounce rate for the site. Ad Groups that are bouncing higher than average need to be examined for problem keywords or ad text.

Another way to slice the data is to ignore campaigns and groups, and instead focus on Keywords. Click ‘Keywords’ on the left side under ‘Traffic Sources’, then click the ‘paid’ link below the graph. Now you’re looking at just the keywords you paid for via AdWords.

Again, use the ‘Comparison’ link over on the right side, then pick ‘Bounce Rate’ in the pulldown next to ‘compared to site average’, and you’ll see which keywords are bouncing a lot. Pause those in AdWords and stop spending money for clicks on keywords that aren’t performing!

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:

Here’s the code to use for the cells:

• Headline: =(if(LEN(A2)>25,”Too Long”,25-LEN(A2)))
• Line1 & Line2:  =(if(LEN(B2)>35,”Too Long”,35-LEN(B2)))
• Display URL: =(if(LEN(D7)>30,”Too Long”,30-LEN(D7)))

And for all of the cells in columns E-H:

1. Click the format menu
2. Choose ‘Change colors with rules’
3. Pick ‘Text Contains’
4. Enter Too Long for the text
5. Choose red for the background and foreground

Now when you finish typing each field in your ads, you’ll see how many characters you have left to work with, and if you go over the limit columns E-H will turn red to warn you. You can see the spreadsheet on Google here:  http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pRRcohDxf89nwmZ0uurDhKw

The culprit?  Bad ad text.

These guys have just one ad variation set up, so it’s tough to say the ad text is definitely at fault, but it’s my first guess.  Luckily, AdWords makes it easy for us to test ad text performance, using “split testing”.  The idea with split testing is that we write two very different ads, we show them each 50% of the time, and whichever gets more clicks is better.  (In reality, tracking conversions is better than clicks, but we’ll keep it simple for now.)

AdWords also has a system where it will rotate the ads for you, figure out which gets more clicks, and run that one more frequently.  This is good for “fire and forget” advertisers who want to set it up and walk away.  If you’re spending $50/month, this is fine.  If you’re spending $500/month or more, it’s worth doing your own testing.

In either case, it makes sense to create perhaps 8 ad variations before launching a new ad group.  Here are some ways I vary ads, to see what resonates well with searchers:

• Ask a question
• Make a promise
• Challenge an assumption
• Vary the headline
• Mix the headline and body rows up
• Change the URL (with/without “www.”, change capitalization, etc.)
• Get specific:  Give your price, timeline, etc.
• Be personal.  Start your introduction process.

Once you’ve set up some variations, you’re ready to test.  If you’re a $50/month “fire and forget” kind of advertiser, head over to ‘Edit Campaign Settings’ and pick “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often”.  Now put a reminder in your calendar software to come back every month to review AdWords.  Kill the ads that Google has stopped showing, and create variations around the ads that are working well.

If you’re a $500/month advertiser, you have a harder, but more interesting, road ahead.  Set up your ad variations, and pause all but two of them.  Now head to ‘Edit Campaign Settings’ and pick ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’.  Google will now show just those two ads, each 50% of the time, while the rest of your variations wait their turn.

Our goal is to get perhaps 30 clicks so we can figure out what’s performing well.  Guess how long it’ll take you to get that many clicks, and set a reminder in your calendar software to come back in a day or a week or whatever.  (I can’t tell you how many ad campaigns I’ve seen where people meant to come back and forgot, only remembering when they got the credit card statement and realized they’d spent WAY more with AdWords than they meant to, on poorly-converting clicks!)

Once you’ve got your 30 clicks, you probably have a clear winner from the first A/B.  Whoever lost, go ahead and delete.  Whoever won is your new “control” ad, the one against others will be measured.

This is important: The “control” ad now has a history with Google, and will be shown higher than a new ad, so you have to make a copy of this ad for the next round of testing.  Pause the “control” ad, make an exact copy, and un-pause one of your other variations.

Now just come back at intervals when you have about 30 clicks, deleting losing ads (and their old copies, if they were a control ad), pausing control ads, making new copies of control ads, and bringing new variations online.  If you’re making money with your ads, great!  You may hate the 50/50 split approach, but you can get more advanced with this and create multiple copies of the control ad so your test is only getting 25% of impressions or whatever.

As you iterate through this process, you’ll probably come up with new ad variations to add to the pool, and you may want to continue iterating likc this forever for highly-converting ads you’re spending a lot on.  If you do really well, you may notice other advertisers stealing your copy.  Sorry, but remember that’s just flattery!

So, once you’ve got the above, what can you do with keywords?  Google lets you target phrases 4 ways:

1. Exact match.  So if a user searches on exactly happy widgets, with no other words, it’s an exact match.  You indicate this in Google with brackets:  [happy widgets]
2. Phrase match. This kind of match occurs if the words are adjacent, but extra words before or after are allowed. “happy widgets” is how you specify this kind of match, and it would match a search on shiny happy widgets or one on happy widgets farming, but not happy farming widgets.
3. Broad match.  This just requires the words in the phrase to be in the search somewhere.  So if in AdWords, you specify happy widgets as your phrase, happy widgets farming would match, as would widgets farming happy.
4. Negative match.  This lets you specify that the words must NOT appear in the search.  If you can identify related searches that should not see your ads, you can avoid showing ads to folks unlikely to click (and very unlikely to convert).  Classics are -free, -jobs, and -class which are common searches, but aren’t buyers.

So once you’ve created a new Ad Group for your important keyword, set up a couple of ad variations for it, and linked it to a page about that phrase, I suggest the following keywords for that group as a starting point:

[happy widgets]
“happy widgets”
happy widgets
-free
-jobs
-class

Naturally, augmenting this with additional close matches from Google’s keyword tool is usually useful, but consider using exact and phrase matches for those as well, if they get many impressions.

The great thing about this is that then you can see how many searchers are using your exact phrase, your phrase with other words, or your words in a different order.  This can be very informative, especially in combination with Google Analytics.

For this first installment, we’ll cover Quality Score (QS).   This is basically Google’s idea of how well your keywords, ad text, and target page “match”.  If they’re all 3 about “happy widgets”, then you should have a Great QS.  If the keywords are “happy widgets”, the ad text is “our company is great”, and the page is just the site’s home page, covering all kinds of widgets, your QS will be lower.  Lower QS = higher bids required, and it’s also a warning that you have a problem that will likely result in fewer clicks and fewer conversions.

First off, make sure you can see QS:

1.  Click into an ad group, click to the Keywords tab, then click ‘Customize Columns’.  Be sure that the Quality Score column is visible.

2.  You want all keywords to have ‘Great’, ‘Good’, or at the very least ‘OK’ for Quality Score.

3.  For each “Poor” keyword, make a new ad group for just that keyword.

4.  Customize the ad text to emphasize the phrase, and try to link to a page on your site that emphasizes the phrase.  To find pages on your site that Google thinks are about the phrase, do a search like site:www.mysite.com happy widgets.

5.  If you don’t have a great page for an important phrase, consider making one.  It’ll help your organic Search Engine Optimization, as well!