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What the colors mean in Google Local Traffic View

February 28, 2007

Google recently caught up with other local search engines by showing traffic on local.google.com .

Here’s the key to what the colors mean:

• Green: more than 50 miles per hour
• Yellow: 25 – 50 miles per hour
• Red: less than 25 miles per hour
• Gray: no data available

Google launches webinars and seminars for Google Apps

February 28, 2007

Google has launched online seminars and Google @ work seminars for people to learn more about the new Google Apps programs.

There are three types of online seminars:

The seminar types are:

• Google Apps overview
• Administration and deployment
• Google Apps education edition

The signup page is here.

In addition, if you’re lucky enough to live in one of hte cities they are visiting, you can see the demos in person (I’m surprised Chicago isn’t on this list).

Google @ work signup page here.

adLabs “Keyword Group Detector”

February 25, 2007

The first step to good keyword organization is to identify your ad groups. Microsoft’s adLabs has a nice tool in helping to first determine your ad groups.

The Keyword Group Detector tool lets one input a keyword and then see the related items to that keyword.

It’s similar to the often forgotten Google Sets project.

This can be very useful for finding related keywords, or starting to group similar words together.

A search for a word like ‘marketing’ will bring back related words such as advertising, ads, etc. Words that are more likely to be adjectives than ad groups.

A search for a more commercial term such as ‘ipod’, brings back ‘ipod mini’, “i-pod shuffle”, “apple i pod”. These different terms are better served in their own ad group.

The tool works off of sorting data, so it doesn’t care about spellings. Some will like this as it’s the reality of searches. Other’s won’t like this as they don’t want to make ad groups from misspellings. Either way, be aware that some of the keywords will be either misspelled or jargon.

In the above example, “ipod” can be seen to be spelled as: i pod, ipod, and i-pod. It is important to understand those are the words being searched even if they don’t translate into being an ad group.

If you are just starting down the road of organizing keywords, this can be a useful tool to do some research.

AdWords Editor V3 Released

February 25, 2007

The newest version of the AdWords editor has been released. It several new features which should make managing campaign through the editor instead of the web based interface much easier.

Site Targeting

New Features:

• New tab in the top data pane which lets you view your site targeting sites
• Pause/resume sites
• Change destination URL
• Change bids
• Change budget
• Pause/resume campaigns
• Delete campaigns
• Adding sites

Comments:

• When adding sites, you have to know exactly what site you’re adding. There is not a search feature.
• When adding sites, I would suggest you do it through the web based interface and not the editor.

Negative Sites:

• Ability to add/remove single or multiple campaign or ad group negative sites

Comments:

• Can’t add a negative keyword or negative site to multiple campaigns at once. Must choose each ad group or campaign individually.

Edit while you wait:

• While you are uploading an account, you can now open another account to begin work.
• This is a great feature as sometimes it can take well over an hour (and sometimes multiple hours for a lot of changes) for changes to be posted which locked up the editor from being able to do anything else.

Count Your Selection

• At the very bottom of the editor is a tally of how many data items you’ve selected.
• Since you can only work with one data item at a time (except in bulk import mode which doesn’t have the count screen), its an easy way of telling how many items your change will affect.

Pause / Resume Keywords, Ads, or Sites

• Google recently released their pausing and resuming of keywords and ads
• You can pause sites in site-targeting campaigns
• Or pause keywords or ads in an ad group

New Export Features

• I have no idea who really wants to have their account in HTML, however, you can now export an account, campaign, or ad group to an HTML format.
  • Google says this is for people who don’t use the editor, but even for them, I think spreadsheets are easier.
• Export current view to CSV. This is useful for exporting a custom view, or changes to another person for review or comment before finalizing an upload.

Paste Special

• You can now ‘paste special’ into multiple ad groups. If you have keywords or ads copied and wish them pasted into multiple ad group – you can now do so.
• The shortcut key for paste special is Cntl + Shift + V
  • More AdWords Editor Shortcuts

Final Comments & Links

Overall, a solid upgrade to the editor. The background posting will save a lot of time. It’s also nice to see upgrades to the functionality of the editor with regards to what can be done through the interface

I’m still quite surprised that Google has not introduced the ability to manage geographic targeting options at the campaign level yet. This is one of the most requested features I hear from editor users. It’s also one of those settings that forces a user to not just use the editor, but one that a user must login to finalize campaigns going live (and with a lot of campaigns it can take a while through the interface).

Hopefully, the editor will continue to gain ‘campaign level’ AdWords features and not just ’software enhancements’.

AdWords editor download page.

AdWords Editor V3 to be released this week

February 21, 2007

I just heard that the newest version of the editor will be out this week with several new features.

It will finally have the ability to add and edit site-targeting campaigns. The implementation of this one will be interesting as most of the choices for site-targeting campaigns are search or browser driven. Will you have to be online to use this feature, or will it be an offline database?

Pausing and resuming keywords will be added.

And finally, background posting. If this works like I’m hoping, it will be a much anticipated improvement.

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