More Insights Into How Hard Your Keywords and Ads Are Working

With the new search funnels reports, you’ll now be able to see things like which keywords and ads assisted in driving conversions and how long it took for visitors to convert to customers. So keywords and ads that drive traffic to your site but are converting below average might be worth more than you think since potential customers usually search several times before making a purchase – especially when comparison shopping.

Reaching People at Earlier Stages in the Buying Cycle Might be Worth More Than You Think

Often potential customers will start with a more generic search query like “flat screen tvs” and then continue to refine their search by narrowing the focus to something like “sony bravia lcd tv” before making a purchase. Now you’ll be able to see how the more generic keyword “flat screen tvs” had a hand in driving that customer to you even though they did not convert from that first search.

With this added intelligence you’ll be able to adjust your bid strategy accordingly and might discover areas of your campaign you thought were under-performing are actually funneling people towards conversions. Said another way, your short-tail keywords that reach people at an earlier stage in the buying cycle could be swaying people towards buying from you – now you’ll have proof of it!

To see the Search Funnel Reports in action check out this video:

You can also get more details on the the official AdWords blog.

We’ve recently come across an excellent Video by Hal Varian – the chief economist at Google where he visually explains how an advertiser’s quality scores and bids affect their ad positions. After watching this video most people will understand what the AdWords quality score is and how it affects their ad positions and campaign performance. I highly recommend you check it out for yourself:

10/10 Quality Scores and Double Digit CTRs

We’ve experimented with this strategy on a number of new campaign launches in the last few months with astonishingly positive results. The quality score across most, if not all keywords tends to be anywhere from 7/10 to 10/10. And in several cases CTRs have held steady in the double digits for a relatively good amount of traffic.

Maintaining a solid CTR is critical to keeping your quality score high and CPC low and this is especially true when a campaign is new and has no history. Once you have some momentum built up, you can slowly begin introducing some broad match keywords to gain incremental traffic, but keep a close eye on the search query report to make sure that you filter out any irrelevant search queries through the use of negative keywords. I recommend checking this at least once a week for campaigns with larger amounts of traffic and at least once a month for smaller campaigns.

Expanded Broad Match – Or Almost Anything Goes

Google has been known to open up the floodgates in campaigns containing broad match keywords through their expanded broad match feature to the misfortune of unsuspecting advertisers. That said you’d be surprised (not pleasantly) to see what kind of queries some of your ads are showing up for because of this. All the more reason to watch the search query report like a hawk once you’ve got some broad match keywords in your campaign.

If you’re using Google analytics you can take things one step further and set up a custom filter to see the actual search queries that your campaign is triggering ads to appear on. Jason Billingsley has put together a really simple tutorial on how to do this on the Get Elastic blog.

Let me know how this tactic works out for you.

This simple tool can quickly tell you when your ads stopped running and in which adgroups they stopped running in.

Large portions of your campaigns can become dormant because for one reason or another, your ads may have been disapproved. So if you notice a sharp drop in traffic, this is one place in your campaigns that you’ll want to take a closer look at.
Here’s how to do it:

For those of you using the old AdWords interface, simply click on the Tools link in the Campaign Management tab as shown here:

If you’re using the new interface which is currently in public beta, you’ll find the disapproved ads tool by clicking on the Tools Tab and then on the “More Tools” link from the drop down menu as seen here:

Also be sure to keep an eye out for emails from Google letting you know that some of your ads have been deactivated. They typically send email alerts when your ads become disapproved (unless you’ve opted out of email notifications), but as we all know, it’s sometimes easy to miss emails so it would be good to automate the Ad Performance report and check it regularly.

You can do this from the Reports section in your account:

Just remember to add in a filter to show you disapproved ads only so you can quickly see which ads are no longer active:

Depending on the reason given for why your ads were disapproved, you can call the AdWords team and ask for a review or simply make the necessary changes and wait for the editorial team to review your ads which usually takes a day or two. You can find more information on what to do once your ads have been disapproved here.

Have a question or need something clarified? We’d be more than happy to help – simply submit a comment!

Thanks to SERoundtable for catching this earlier today. Some of details found in the release notes include:

• First page bid estimates: the Editor now uses first page bid estimates for your keywords and Minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids are no longer used.
• Keyword Quality Score: The Keywords tab now displays the Quality Score for your keywords. [Finally!]
• Keyword Opportunities locale: Tailor your keyword suggestions to a particular language and location by changing your Keyword Opportunities locale.
• Campaign targeting in the data view: You can view your targeting settings in the new ‘Language’ and ‘Location’ columns on the Campaigns tab. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser.
• Send feedback to Google: Help us improve AdWords Editor by enabling usage tracking in your AdWords Editor settings.
• Absolute Numbers for Volume in Keyword Opportunities Tool: The ‘Volume’ column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool now shows absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.
• Keyword Opportunities tool isn’t available for draft accounts.

Overall, the two major updates that should help speed up day-to-day optimizations of your AdWords campaigns are the addition of First Page Bid Estimates and Quality Score data in the Editor. You can quickly spot problem keywords across your multiple campaigns without having to go through the web interface or extracting reports. Here’s how the new data looks like:

So, how can we make use of this? Here are a few ideas…

2 Filters To Catch Problems Quickly

You can make use of the Advanced Search feature in the “Create or Set Custom View” tool to apply filters on your campaigns, identify potential problem areas and take action.

1. Spot Low Quality Score Keywords

If you want to make sure that you didn’t miss any low QS keywords that may be lurking in your campaign, using a filter in the editor will save you lots of time. Simply select the new option for Quality Score and apply a filter to match Quality Score criteria (when you spot problem keywords, go back in the web interface to get more insights as to potential problems):

2. Spot Keywords With Max CPC lower than First Page Bid Estimates

In some cases, you may be bidding too low for your ads to appear on the first page. Through the web interface, Google alerts you of these potential problems but again, you have to navigate through each Ad Group to spot them. By using the new data in AdWords Editor 7.0, you can apply 2 filters to find where your Max CPC is lower than your First Page Bid Estimates. Unfortunately, you’ll need to repeat a few times and use a variety of values as you can conditionally sort something like: Max CPC is less than First Page Bid Estimates.

Look out for Google’s official announcement shortly and as pointed out here and here, let’s hope there are less bugs than in version 6.5.

Google puts it like this “These settings do not apply to mobile format ads. Ads in the mobile ad format always show on traditional mobile devices only, regardless of your choices here.”

You’ll find this new feature in your campaign settings page for which you are “opted in by default”.

Here’s a screenshot:

We did find mention of this new feature on Search Engine Roundtable and the Search Engine Watch Forum.

Our reps at Google explained that this feature was launched on the 3rd of this month and the idea is to expand the reach of AdWords ads to mobile devices that can display websites that were designed for desktop and laptop displays such as the iPhone.

They also mentioned that this new setting is turned on by default so advertisers will have to manually opt out of it if they want to.

Quality Score is Impacted So Be Vigilant

You might definitely want to opt out or test this new feature further as your CTR and consequently quality score will be impacted by this update. Given that user intent on such devices as the iPhone might be different from users searching on their laptops and desktops (think less involved searchers that are not as research intense), you will definitely want to pay close attention to this update.

Some industries and niches might find that mobile devices perform well for their AdWords campaigns while others might discover that CTR is way too low on these devices and therefore not the right venue for their ads.

How To Test Performance

The recommended best practice at this point is to split up your campaigns – one opted into device platform targeting and one opted out of it. Currently this is the only way to measure performance of your campaigns on mobile devices that offer full browser capabilities. As it stands, you can’t see performance split up by device platform on either the AdWords interface, AdWords editor nor any of the reports.

Splitting your campaigns this way will allow you to tailor your keywords, ads and landing pages to target these mobile users differently for greater results.

Learn more about this new feature here.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this new feature. Is it working out for you or not really?

Update (Dec 8): Google just posted an entry on the Inside AdWords blog announcing this feature which allows you to extend your AdWords Campaigns to the G1 (Android) and iPhone.

How can to see the data?

At the Campaign Summary and Ad Group Summary pages, you’ll now see a drop down with the following options:

• Summary – See statistics aggregated in one line
• Split: all search/content network – See separate statistics for search (which includes Google search and search partners) and the content network, as well as a line combining the two
• Split: Google search/search partners/content network – See separate statistics for Google search, search partners, and the content network, as well as a line combining the three
• Only show: Google search/search partners – See statistics for search only (includes Google search and search partners)
• Only show: Google search – See statistics for Google search only
• Only show: search partners – See statistics for search partners only (doesn’t include Google search)
• Only show: content network – See statistics for the content network only

Previously, these pages showed performance information rolled up in one line item for each campaign or ad group.

First the Content Network…

Google’s Content Network was long an area of dissatisfaction to some advertisers mainly due to the lack of control and transparency Google provided as to which sites showed your ads. Google responded by providing placement reports, demographic bidding options, ability to exclude sites in categories such as parked domains, error pages or sites with potentially offensive content, and recently, the ability to target both keywords and placements in the same campaign.

Where “opting-out” of the Content Network was once a default tactic to improve ROI on a campaign, the flexibility and control brought by these improvements now provide real opportunities to get results by strategically targeting the Content Network.

…Now the Search Partners

As for the Search Partners, Google has relationships with sites that agree to show ads in response to searches performed on those sites (sometimes search driven, sometimes navigational driven). The actual “search partners” has always been a grey zone as to knowing how it performs and where your ads show. Google does provide some examples on their AdWords Help section which mentions sites like AOL, Ask.com, Shopping.com -  but also includes sites that installed the Google Site Search.

What do you do now?

Google can report separate metrics back to January 1, 2007, any data prior to this data will be categorized under ‘Google’ in your account. If you opted out of the Search Partners recently, take a look at your data since Jan 1 and see how the Search Partners performed relative to Google – perhaps you’ll see positive results that may justify reactivating this network. If you’re currently including the Search Partners in your campaign, analyze the data to see if this part of your campaign is delivering on your campaign goals or wasting your budget. In the current economic climate, this may be an interesting way to see if there are any cost savings to be had for some of your campaigns.

More control?

Not yet. More insights, yes – well, at least a bit. The only control you currently have is to exclude the entire Search Partners Network from your Google campaign. Hopefully, the Report Center will allow for more granular statistics by Search Partners.

What’s next?

Although breaking down campaign statistics between the Google and Search Partners is a great step into seeing how your campaign is performing on each, I would like to see a few more features added:

• Similar to the Placements report, the ability to see which Search Partner your ads showed on and campaign statistics for each domain/url
• Ability to exclude individual Search Partners or domains/urls
• Option to target only the Search Partners in a campaign
• Ability to report between “search results” vs “navigational results”
• Separate bidding options for Search Partners

Is this only the first of many improvement with the Search Partners? Any other features you’d like to see Google roll out for the Search Partners? Please share in the comments below.

You can learn more about the new Search Partners features in the AdWords Help section but there’s also a conversation going on at the webmasterworld Google Adwords forum about this update, so be sure to check it out and see what others are saying.

A more “accurate” quality score since it will be calculated more on a real-time basis for each search query.

Google clarifies that account history, CTR (Click Through Rate) of keywords and ad texts along with landing page quality will continue to be factored in. What they don’t say is which elements will carry more importance so testing will remain key to keep your campaigns running optimally.

Keywords will no longer be marked as “inactive for search”.

Google claims that all keywords will “remain” active since they’re now going to be evaluated on each and every search query. However most keywords currently marked as “inactive” will continue not to accrue impressions or clicks except in certain circumstances where Google deems that they perform better.

Unfortunately Google did not provide more details on what some of those circumstances might be, but we suspect geographical targeting may play a role.

“Minimum bids” will be replaced by “First page bid estimates”.

Google states that this move will “provide a more actionable and useful metric to advertisers”. Personally I’ll wait to see how it’s rolled out to see if that statement is accurate.

Our contacts at Google did clarify that there will be a numerical value by which you’ll be able to gauge at what position your ads will appear depending on your bids and what grade of quality score individual keywords are marked at (Currently advertisers use minimum bids to gage at what level of “Great”, “Ok” or “Poor” their keyword quality scores are at – I would not like to lose this insight!).

Opportunity for Adwords Advertisers? Possibly…

As search marketers that spend hours each day monitoring and optimizing campaigns in Adwords, we wait with anticipation for this change to finally take effect. As with many recent changes to Adwords’ quality score, we suspect that savvy advertisers and search marketers will be able to capitalize on the opportunities these changes will likely bring about so keep your eyes open in the coming days.

Just the same, we’re hoping that Google implements this update smoothly!

Saying it’s really nice that the folks at Google have changed their minds and decided to give advertisers search volume estimates in the keyword tool is an understatement! This is definitely a feature that savvy search marketers will jump all over. Not only can you get the search volume estimates for a keyword, but you can even get them for each match type and here’s the kicker: search volume data on negative keywords.

Yes, you heard right! You can now get a more accurate picture of how much of a difference in search volume there is between an exact match keyword and a broad match keyword. But even more impressive is that you can now see how much irrelevant traffic individual negative keywords in combination with the keywords you’re looking up will eliminate. Now that’s powerful!

In keeping with Google’s mantra of making advertising as relevant to their users as possible, this is a feature that advertisers can directly benefit from. Not to mention that SEOs will most likely have a greater interest in the tool as well. That said, it seems like the celebration of this long awaited feature has already begun!

For further insights into how to make the most of this tool, check out the official Adwords blog. We’d love to hear what you think about this new feature, so be sure to leave us your thoughts and comments!

What People Are Saying

A lot of the commentary floating around the forums and blogs are quite critical of this move by Google. I guess it’s normal to see such reactions given the frustration that many advertisers have faced with expanded broad match and Google’s lack of transparency with these type of “updates” in the past. In this case if you’re “randomly” selected for the beta, your campaigns will be automatically affected since you have to manually opt out.

If You Still Want to Test it Out

As with any beta that Google rolls out we recommend being cautious and if you want to test it, do it on a limited scale that you have full control over. In this case, limit the daily budget of the campaign that you have automatic matching on, set your performance benchmarks, test time frame, pull out search query reports and measure the performance closely to make sure that this feature makes sense for you.

Tell Google What You Think!

Google has however given advertisers who are selected to participate in this beta the ability to provide them with feedback on this feature. You can do this (just click on the “Take our survey” link) from within the Campaign Settings page which is also where you can opt out of the automatic matching feature. So make sure to tell them what you think about it!

How to Opt Out and tell Google What You Think:

If you haven’t yet been “invited” to the automatic matching beta test, keep and eye out for the following alert in your Adwords account: