Archive for the 'PPC Tools' Category

The integration of the Search Query Report directly into the Keywords tab of your Search campaigns makes it super-easy to see if your keywords or match types are picking up non-converting or irrelevant searches that should really be added as negatives at an adgroup level at least, or at a campaign level if they’re “way out there”.

It should be noted that the search queries (even in the new UI option) can take a couple of days to fully populate with results, so it’s best to look a decently-sized block of time to make sure the data is valid.

To access your search queries, go into an adgroup and select the Keywords tab and the “See Search Terms” button:

Next, if you see an irrelevant or poorly converting keyword you’d like to add as a negative on-the-fly, check the checkbox next to the keyword and hit the “Add as Negative Keyword” button:

This box then pops up allowing you to choose the match type of that negative keyword (it defaults to adding the keyword as an adgroup-level negative keyword) and you can vary your negative match type depending on how surgical you want to get in avoiding a particular keyword or phrase:

Compared to the old method of cutting and pasting from the Search Query Reports to your various adgroups, this is a MUCH easier and faster way to improve your campaign’s targeting.

Cutting Display Network Placements On-the-Fly

The same approach also works for adding negative site placements to your campaign with some small differences.

To exclude placements quickly (and with all the conversion data right at your fingertips), in your content network campaign, select an adgroup, then hit the “Networks” tab.

On the Networks tab, regardless of whether you’re using Automatic or Managed placements, you’ll see a full list of domains (or URLs) where your ads are showing and how they’re converting.

If you see a dud, hit the checkbox next to the junk placement and click the “Exclude Placements” button:

On the popup box, select whether you want to exclude the domain or URL placement for your entire campaign or only this adgroup.  Because you can often kill the golden goose in another adgroup by doing a campaign-level exclusion, it’s usually best to stick to the adgroup level and evaluate each of your adgroup’s exclusion placements on a group-by-group basis.

All in all, the consolidation in the new UI is speeding things up considerably, it just takes some getting used to:)

As Google methodically picks off the reports in the Adwords Report Center, moving reporting to an ad-hoc model in the main campaign UI, some interesting little tricks are popping up.

In the past, if you tried to keep track of how much traffic Google is actually sending you compared to how much is truly available, you ran a campaign report and checked the box for “Impression Share”.

Now, that feature is gone from the Report Center, but with the new changes, you can tack it right to your campaign list columns:

Now you’ll be able to view your Impression Share in real time right from the campaigns overview screen:

Pretty Handy!!

Ever thought it would be nice if Google sent you a ping if your top keywords suddenly saw their Quality Scores tank?  How about when you lose your top favorite top ad position?

Google’s new filters give you the ability to configure custom alarms that can alert you via email or SMS when one of your top keywords (or any keyword for that matter) goes inactive or stops firing ads for budget reasons, sudden Quality Score drops, or moves by your competitors.

In addition to watching for traffic stopages, you can also monitor:

• Avg CPCs
• Spend Levels (Cost)
• CTRs
• Avg Ad Positions
• Clicks
• Impressions
• Conversion Counts
• Conversion Rates
• Costs-per-Conversion

You can set up these custom alerts at the Campaign, Adgroup, or Keyword level for specific, selected keywords or adgroups, or ALL of the keywords or adgroups in your campaign if you like.

To enable custom alerts, click on the “More Actions” drop down likeso:

Here’s a screenshot of the settings for doing this at a keyword level, where if the impressions on a top keyword disappear (for whatever reason, but usually QS drop) you’ll get a ping from Google via email (SMS if you give them your mobile number, but who are we kidding they probably already have your number anyway:p ):

I use an alert for “if this top keyword gets less than 1000 impressions in a given day, let me know” to keep on top of critical quality score changes:

Jen at PPC Hero also had some great suggestions on how to use the new Segments capability as well.

Do you have a favorite new alert to keep you on top of your campaigns? Share it in the comments!

Matt from KeywordEye™ sent me a ping last week to have a look at a new, free keyword ‘visualization’ tool that he’s been working on for some time now and asked me to give it a look.

It’s a pretty neat concept: pulling from the Adwords API, KeywordEye™ pulls up associated keywords to your search and displays the results in a 2D or 3D ‘cloud’ format, with higher traffic keywords displayed as larger words in the cloud, and color-codes the keywords in the cloud green, yellow, or red depending on the amount of competition.

An even cooler part of this tool is the ability to view the visualized data by country, match type, and a few other variables.  As you hover over each of the keywords in the cloud you see the individual search volume (per month) for the local region selected.  Simply click on a keyword in the cloud to add it to the scratch pad on the right for export.

Click to Enlarge

The data in the tool is no different than what Google provides via their internal Adwords Keyword Tool, but I found that the way the data is presented helps you to visualize the scope of keyword possibilities for new niches you’re looking into (particularly the 3D cloud view).

This unique way of viewing new keyword possibilities reminds me a bit of Google’s Wonderwheel, a great way of viewing things as Google does from a relational standpoint.

Give KeywordEye a spin here!

Facebook has lagged behind MySpace when it comes to conversion tracking, but they’re catching up, releasing their conversion tracking beta program to select advertisers.

Until now, to track which campaign or particular ad was converting you had to tag your ad destination URLs with a tracking ID or parameter, then go back and reference that manually to figure out if a given ad was converting or not…Ugh.

Conversions Without Clicks

Facebook has put their own spin on conventional conversion tracking however by allowing advertisers to track conversion events that happen on their site even if the user didn’t click any of their ads, tracking on an ad impression alone.

Similar to Google’s reasoning behind implementing “View-Through” conversion tracking, under the “Post-Impression Data” heading in Facebook’s PDF ‘Conversion Tracking Guide’ they point out the motivation for this level of tracking:

“The ability to track Post-Impression…enables you to measure conversions from users who saw your ads without clicking them and so gives you insight into the true value of your ads.“

i.e. “Keep buying display ads from us even if your CTR sucks…”

It’s hard to imagine the amount of data crunching and storage they’ll have to do to be able to reference what ad you’ve simply seen and successfully tie it back to conversion pixels firing on vendor sites’ everywhere. But hey, if Google can do it, they can too.

They appear to hold onto that impression-recording data for at least a month as their new Conversion Time reports can tell you how far out the conversion was from the time a user saw an ad.

Nice Metrics You Have There

In addition to allowing advertisers to count conversions as they come in (FB says to expect roughly a 24 hour delay on conversion data), advertisers can dynamically add additional parameters to the FB tracking scripts included conversion values in dollars (“VALUE”) as well as “SKU” to let you figure out what exact product the user ultimately bought or signed up for.  Definitely a nice touch.

Configuring Facebook Conversion Tracking

If the tracking beta has been enabled in your account, you’ll see it in the sidebar of your Facebook Ads interface:

Next, select the type of action you’d like to track and give the a “tag name”, or an easily-referenced nickname.  You can also add the conversion value amount to help evaluate ROI later on:

That’s it, you end up with a small piece of javascript to insert before the ending </body> tag on your landing page:  (sorry for the tiny image)

Conversion Reporting – Apps, Fan Pages, & Events Now Included

When you run the conversion reporting, or “Conversions by Conversion Time” report, you can drill down to the account, campaign, or individual ad level, viewing how many conversions took place during given time frames and/or how long after impressions or ad clicks conversions happened.

If you’ve been using the ‘VALUE’ and ‘SKU’ parameters, you’ll be able to see revenue figures as well as particular sale or lead type data.

Conversion metrics (conversion counts, rates etc…) have also been added to the regular campaign and ad reporting, adding the big piece that’s been missing from these regular campaign reports.

Another nice touch to the new system is that if you are running ads with ‘Inline Actions’ such as “Become a Fan” or “RSVP to this Event”, you’ll automatically see “Conversion by Impression Time” and “Conversion by Conversion Time” reports including how many users responded inline by becoming a Fan of a Page or RSVPing to an Event from the ad itself.

These conversions show up in your reports associated with SKU values like “fan_page” or “rsvp_event”.

App developers can add their FB conversion tracking codes on any Facebook apps hosted on your Page the same way that you would place tracking tags in the application independently where you have control over the page code.

A Great Addition, Lots of Data to Crunch

Facebook has taken conversion tracking up a notch here, particularly with the impression-only tracking capability.  It’ll be interesting to see what kind of custom reporting can be crafted from the huge amount of data points Facebook’s allowing advertisers to empty out of their reporting.

It has been pretty difficult getting Facebook ads to convert without advanced demographic and keyword segmentation, not to mention the reams of ads you need to continually load to beat user ad-fatigue and keep them clicking.  This new Facebook Ads feature will make that job much, much easier.

Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system…optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google’s yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don’t yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.

To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator – a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.

Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.

Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google’s products, our calculator is starting out in beta

Guest post by Tom Demers

At WordStream, we just launched a couple of free tools I think paid search marketers can get a lot of utility out of. I’ll walk through how both of them work and what you might be able to use them for.

The first tool is something we’re calling The Free Keyword Niche Finder. Basically the premise is that rather than offering you single keyword suggestions we’re showing you the pockets of keywords (or “keyword niches”) that are the most popular.

This is valuable for a few reasons:

1. Keyword Niches Versus Single Keywords – It helps you prioritize your content, keyword targeting, and campaign/AdGroup creation based on an entire “keyword universe” surrounding your topic. Many times you’ll find the most popular keyword you could target will have the “longest tail,” but not always.
2. Suggested Keyword Variations – It shows you popular variations within a given keyword cluster, or niche – this helps you to vary page content and anchor text: something real SEOs advocate – and it helps you to structure comprehensive PPC campaigns or Ad Groups
3. Campaign Structure Suggestions – It helps you to create a nice semantically-themed campaign and/or Ad Group structure for paid search account creation

I’ll walk through each of these advantages, and then introduce another tool we’re introducing called The Free Keyword Grouper.

1. “Keyword Niches“ Versus Single Keywords

It’s interesting to compare the results of a traditional keyword tool to The Free Keyword Niche Finder.

Here is the list of results from our Free Keyword Tool:

Now let’s look at the results for the same topic using The Free Keyword Niche Finder:

The interesting thing here is in the difference between the two results, and the way that the two tools function. The Free Keyword Tool looks at the volume of results across a variety of sources (ISPs, search engines, and toolbars). The Free Keyword Niche Finder, meanwhile, takes the same data that The Free Keyword Tool is using (our own database) and then clusters that information semantically.

So what we’re seeing here is that some keywords have a longer or more substantial “tail”. Look:

The aggregated keyword “niches” are more centered around brands. If we dig deeper into the refurbished laptops – ibm cluster we get a pretty good idea of why the tail for brands is longer:

So while “used refurbished laptops” is a more popular single query than “refurbished laptops ibm”, the sum of the refurbished laptops keyword niche is actually greater, and it contains more specific, buy-focused terms.

By looking at the data side-by-side, it definitely appears that IBM refurbished laptops is a more profitable keyword niche to attack.

2. Suggested Keyword Variations Within a Group

The tool also shows you closely related variations, as you can see above, so that you can structure a single landing page and Ad Group/ad text to target a variety of phrases, allowing your campaigns to generate more ROI and to become more scalable.

3. PPC Campaign Structure Suggestions

One of the neatest things about this tool from a PPC standpoint is that if you’re starting a new paid search account or campaign, you can get some great suggestions for either high-level campaign ideas, or even for actionable Ad Groups (depending on the term you put in). Following our example from above, we might turn each of the top ten suggestions into high-level campaigns. From there, we could drill down to find specific Ad Groups for each of our campaigns. Let’s take one of the more popular niches, refurbished laptops – dell, and enter that keyword into the Niche Finder:

Assuming were using Refurbished Dell Laptops as a campaign, these would make for a series of pretty tight Ad Groups, ranging from around 10 keywords to around 35, and allowing us to write a very targeted ad and create a very specific, compelling landing page for each group.

The Free Keyword Grouper – Finding Keyword Niches in Your Own Lists and Data

Our other free tool, The Free Keyword Grouper, offers pretty similar functionality, but instead of asking for a keyword as input, it groups your existing data (whether you generated a list from a keyword suggestion tool like the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool or WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool), or allows you to export data from your analytics or a search query report, drop it into the tool, and then The Free Keyword Grouper segments that data for you:

If you drop in a list of keywords, it’ll spit back a list of results similar to what you would find with The Free Keyword Niche Finder. This is a nice way to look at either a list you already have, or to examine historical data on a client site or an existing site you may be taking over. You can then leverage the same advantages The Free Keyword Niche Finder offers.

So What’s the Catch?

As with anything, our new free tools are imperfect. While they’re free, you do have to spend a few seconds creating a free WordStream account to use them, and once you do we’ll occasionally send you relevant Email communications about the tools themselves, or about some of our products you might be interested in.

The Free Keyword Niche Finder works off our own database, and as with any keyword tool, you have to be careful not to be over-reliant upon keyword suggestion data. That’s one of the neat things about The Free Keyword Grouper, though: you can take blended data from multiple tools, or even your own log file or analytic data (which you know to be accurate) and run the tool against that.

Finally: this is just a start. If you’re going to develop really effective paid search campaigns, you need to do a lot more work building out specific Ad Groups and then monitoring their performance to have a really effective paid search account structure. That said these tools are free and easy to use, and we think you’ll find a good deal of utility in them. If you have questions, feedback, or future feature requests, please leave them in the comments!

Google have announced a new Adwords feature called Bid Simulator.

From the Google Adwords blog:

Bid Simulator takes some of the guess work out of cost per click (CPC) bidding by estimating the number of clicks or impressions you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid.

Google have also provided a tutorial video showing you how to work out your value per click, and how to use this value to maximize your profits.

This video provides a great overview of the economics of PPC bidding, then goes onto show you how to use the Bid Simulator tool to arrive at the most profitable bid.

In summary:

• Determine your max profitable CPA
• Determine your conversion rate
• Calculate your value per click
• Adjust your bids so value per click = ICC (Inceremental Cost Per Click)

This tool, whilst useful in terms of taking a lot of trial and error out of bid setting, will provide marginal benefit in areas where the keyword auction is fierce. If the auction is busy above you, then you’re still going to need to raise you bid a lot for minor increases in volume.

Indeed, some of the recommended bid prices seem very high. The danger is that some people may see this as a helpful autopilot, when really it’s just another “suggestion” tool. Be wary.

The tool is possibly most useful when there is moderate activity in the bid range. Andrew Goodman suggests that Bid Simulator might help a lot in terms of saving cash on the low side:

Case by case, it gets interesting. Take, for example, an account where you figure you’ve done a great job whittling average CPC’s down to 23 cents. Now on a lot of the keywords that you’re getting for 15 cents, you’re not doing great ROI-wise, but you’re reasonably content since the price is low by historic and industry standards, you don’t feel like risking the effort to go down to 11 cents. I think the bid simulator may be helpful in helping advertisers decide when to take risks like that. Shaving those few pennies on lukewarm keywords, across several hundred keywords and a thousand clicks a day, can add up to a lot of saved cash you can then turn around and devote to better performing keywords or channels (or simply, profitability).

Also, as it is a simulator, your actual mileage out on the real Google may vary.

Here’s a presentation on how to use the bid simulator within your Adwords account.

A couple weeks back we created a few new tools that I think I forgot to mention here.

• PPC Ad Group Generator
• CPC ROI Calculator
• CPC ROAS Calculator
• A/B Split Test Calculator

People also send us lots of links to new tools. A couple of them that were sent in recently are a French company’s ad copy brainstorming tool, a cool City Concatenator tool, and a cool neighborhood Concatenator tool.

Aaron recently showed me his cool flowchart software and I made a flow chart for PPC.

Let me know what you think.