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Best New AdWords Features Launched Over the Past Month

November 13, 2009

Google has launched several small updates over the past month. Together, there has been quite a bit of innovation. Here are my favorite changes that everyone should know about.

AdWords Editor Updated:

The newest version of the AdWords editor launched with some very nice updates. It now supports:

• Ad scheduling
• Advanced location targeting
• Inline editing
• Editing multiple campaign settings at once
• YouTube promotional ads
• New keyword expansion options
• Set default targeting
• Supports Spanish as an interface option

You can see the full release notes for the newest version here.

Product Listing Ads:

Google announced new product listing ads:

Google Ad Planner Updated

Google made some nice additions to Google ad planner. You can now see placement listings, subdomain info, and additional graphing options.

New Alerts Features

You can set up customized AdWords Alerts to help spot issues within your AdWords Account.

Sitelinks now available for AdWords Ads

If ads meet certain quality guidelines, they can now show additional links within the ad. Good stuff for branded queries, or when you are currently sending traffic to segmentation pages.

Google Analytics for Mobile Users

Many phones do not support scripts, such as Google Analytics. If you want to track additional items, you can use event tracking to track mobile usage and apps.

New Conversion Tracking Interface

The conversion tracking interface received a facelift. Among the changes is the ability to see which page conversions are occurring on.

Latest SEL Column: How To Bid Profitably On Non-converting Keywords

November 9, 2009

There are many studies that show that using both organic and paid together creates increases in CTR and conversions, even if the ad is not clicked.

However, many of these types of words are early in the buying cycle.  It is very hard to monetize keywords early in the buying cycle as often someone is still conducting research before buying. However, that does not mean these keywords are useless. Often consumers will ‘lock-in’ to a site, or find enough information on your site to finishing going through the buying cycle and create a conversion.

However, how do you set bids for keywords that often do not lead to direct conversions; but for ones that you still wish to find some visibility?

You can use a combination of the new goals in Google Analytics (page views per visit and time on site) and the budget optimizer, which tries to maximize the clicks that any one campaign receives.

The two of these in combination with each other allow you to set ‘branding awareness’ or ‘informational campaigns’ to take advantage of these words.

My latest Search Engine Land column walks through the procedure for setting up these campaigns and how to measure them for effectiveness:

How To Bid Profitably On Non-converting Keywords

Should you use Google’s new translation tool for AdWords?

November 4, 2009

Google announced that your can use their translator service to automatically translate an .aes (AdWords Editor File) into various languages.

Sounds nice?

I’m not so sure. The same words have different meanings in different languages and this scares me a little bit.

Andy Atkins-Krüger wrote a good piece at Search Engine Watch about translation a while ago that is worth reading again before you use the tool without a language specialist to edit the file before your keywords and ads go live. 

I spoke on the same panel as Andy at SES San Jose and he definitely knows his linguists.  Here’s a good comment from the piece for just English (and it gets crazier past English):

Why doesn’t translating keywords work? Because keywords are the fruit of a language, hanging on the branches of trees that grew and were nurtured in the local climate and are rooted in the local culture. As markers of someone’s intent when they search — they spring from local habits and behaviors that will vary from country to country — or even region to region.

Compare the U.S. and U.K. use of English — the same language. In the U.K., we’re in the habit of saying "holiday" when folks in the U.S. would say "vacation." For "football boots" Americans would say "soccer cleats" (Can someone please tell me what a "cleat" is? Because, as a sailor, I think that’s somewhere you fix a rope to stop it slipping). And as for baseball, well that’s just not cricket.

Here’s the full article on translation.

Everything you need to know about Google’s SK Tool via Video Tutorials

October 5, 2009

Google launched the SK Tool (search based keyword tool) in November 2008. This tool uses Google’s crawler information and combines it with AdWords data to suggest keywords for your website. You can examine the results about any domain via the SK Tool. If you access the SK Tool while logged into a Google account that is associated with an AdWords account that buys traffic to a domain, then you can see some associated data points with the suggested keywords.

Google is excellent at making helpful videos about their products. What they aren’t great at is putting the videos in useful formats and marketing their own videos.  Some of these videos have under 300 total views, and most are under 1000. Considering how beneficial these videos are (and how many people conduct keyword research); those numbers should have a couple more 0s after it.

I’ve taken the videos that Google has produced and created some custom playlists so that you can view Google’s information is an easy-to-follow manner.

SK Tool Introduction & First Steps

This first playlists consists of 9 videos:

• Video 1: Product intro (3:49)
• Video 2: Getting started (4:06)
• Video 3: Navigating the interface (6:23)
• Video 4: Refining results (6:27)
• Video 5 & 6: Exporting the information (7:49)
• Video 7 – 9: Tracking the results (3:52)

It will take just over 30 minutes to watch all of the videos. However, as these videos do play in the correct order, you can leave and come back and jump to the next video you wish to view.

 

SK Tool Opportunities

The next playlist is a set of six short videos totaling around 15 minutes of ways to use the SK Tool to identify missed opportunities.

SK Tool – Other Videos

The last two videos are:

• Using the tool to promote new part of your website (2:22)
• Identifying how well your active keywords are doing (2:39)

More Google Videos

Google has quite a few channels and videos that they maintain. If you would like to see all of the official Google channels, you can view our subscription list or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Quality Score is Based on Precise Match Not Exact Match

October 1, 2009

I made a comment on Twitter that stirred up some confusion; however, as tweets are limited to 140 characters; it seemed easiest to write out the explanation as a blog post and then let people read the rationale in its entirety.

The common assumption is that the CTR used in the search quality score algo is based upon the search query matching your exact matched keywords. Sometimes this is stated as ‘the search query exactly matches your keywords’. That statement is actually true, but sometimes confusing as Google has an exact match type; and the match type itself does not play a factor into determining quality score.

What if you do not have exact match keywords? How are those keywords assigned a quality score? You do not have to have exact match versions of broad matched words. Please note, this is not a debate about what is best practice, but about what is possible – there’s a difference.

The truth is that the CTR that determines your keyword’s quality score is based upon the user’s search query precisely matching the keyword in your ad group, regardless of the match type you use.

For instance, if you have the keyword ‘Google AdWords’ broad matched, then your ad could show for:

1. Google ad words
2. Google adwords help
3. Google adwords alternative
4. my adwords ad is not running on Google
5. Google AdWords
6. etc…

In this case, only the CTR of number 5, Google AdWords, would be used to calculate your quality score.

This same exercise can be applied to phrase and exact match.

This is also why if you have the same keyword as an exact, phrase, and broad match in the same ad group, they will have the same quality score. As quality score uses precise match regardless of match type, all of those keywords are assigned CTR information under the same conditions.

<Please note this next section is for advanced PPC marketers and could require paragraphs of explanation. It might not make sense to many of you – and if it doesn’t – that’s OK>

There is a difference between all three match types showing the same quality score and being displayed in the same positions.

For instance, one of the quality score factors is, “Relevance of keyword and ad to search query”. This factor is calculated after dynamic insertion is applied to an ad copy. Therefore, if for some reason a broad matched variation was doing fantastic with DKI, yet the exact match was doing average with that ad, it might appear that the broad matched word had a higher CTR than the exact match, which might result in a higher average position. Yet since that broad matched variation is not a keyword in your account, your broad matched word would still maintain the same quality score as the exact matched word that has a lower average position. This example is a rare case; however, it could happen.

<End advanced section – next section for everyone>

The same principles that apply to “Your Broad Match Keywords Are Not Converting Higher than Your Exact Match Keywords” apply to quality score. However, instead of examining conversion rates, just substitute quality score relevancy factors.

I hope that helps explain the confusion. If not, please add a comment and I’ll do a long blog post using the search query report and actual numbers to showcase how match types and quality score interact with the actual search query.

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