What are AdWords 'Dimensions' and why are they useful?

Some of you may have noticed that AdWords recently released a new tab within the campaign management section of the account called Dimensions. In this post I'll discuss how to enable that feature and what some possible uses are for the data it displays.

Viewing Dimensions

Dimensions will not be visible by default, you have to select to view the tab within your account. To do so, go to your campaign settings, and click on the drop down menu to the right of the Networks tab, as shown in the screenshot above. After clicking on Dimensions, you will see an additional array of options to choose from, as shown in the image on left.

What should I care about dimensions?

Dimensions provide you an easy view to segment and view your AdWords data by the dimension of your choice for an ad group, campaign, or your entire account. One of my favorite options is to analyze how your account performs on different days of the week. If you're concerned about ROI and have a tight budget, and the dimensions tab shows you that on Sundays your cost/conversion is higher than on other days of the week, you can choose to lower your budget on Sundays or pause your campaigns entirely.

Another view I found useful is to look at account performance over a period of several months. You will be able to see all of your statistics month-by-month and this can allow you to evaluate how the account has changed since you started implementing specific optimization strategies or special offers, for example.

I also found Destination URL data very useful, since you can quickly view how your different landing pages convert and which ones are most profitable. Really, Dimensions are another quick way to integrate and present reports and data you care about!

Advantages Of Paid Search Ads Over Organic/Natural Search

Business owners that are looking to grow their online presence often ask why they should invest in pay-per-click (PPC) ads when they could be getting free organic traffic. When considering how to market your business online, it's important to keep in mind that paid and organic ads both have their advantages and disadvantages.

One of the main advantage of organic is that clicks are free. Also, more people click on organic than paid ads, and those clicking on organic results tend to be more educated. However, paid ads do have some important benefits over organic, and these factors should be considered before you neglect your PPC efforts.

Top 10 benefits of PPC ads:

• Instant: A strong online presence in organic search can be difficult to achieve and may take months. With online PPC ads, you can create an ad and appear on your most important keywords within minutes.


• Targeted Keywords: With PPC marketing you can control the precise keywords and messaging for your business with virtually unlimited scope of keywords to target.


• Flexible Spend: There are no minimum spend requirements for PPC, and you can set your own budgets and the maximum amount you're willing to pay per click.


• Cost-Effective: Advertisers are awarded for being relevant, which in turn helps bring down costs and allows even smaller advertisers to compete with large businesses.


• ROI: PPC is highly accountable and allows you to measure and optimize return on investment. You can easily analyze how your keywords and ads are performing and make adjustments, based on data.


• Reach: With PPC ads, you can reach millions of people searching for your services. Additionally, you get access to a huge network of other partner sites beyond search.


• Easy implementation: PPC advertising is a proven model and is simple to implement. PPC ads don’t require any major modifications on the website. Ads can be easily updated for changing promotions and business needs.


• Location Control: PPC campaigns allow you to target users in select locations or regions.


• Time Control: advertisers can choose the days and times their ads will show. Campaigns can be easily activated or paused when you need to adjust demand, or to match your bandwidth/resources.


• Mobile Audience: With PPC ads, you can now reach the rapidly growing audience of mobile users browsing the web and pay for clicks or calls only.

For all of these reasons, businesses should consider paid search, in addition to organic optimization efforts. White both strategies have pros and cons, you'll likely find that each suits a different business need and deserves a place in your marketing plan.

Microsoft's adCenter Expands Negative Keyword Limits

adCenter recently increased their negative keyword limits to 'thousands.' This is great news for those who have been optimizing their campaigns in preparation for the Yahoo search marketing and adCenter merger. Previously, advertisers were able to only add less than a 150 negative keywords. To start taking advantage of the new system capability, go to your campaign or ad group settings and add new exclusions.

Unfortunately, unlike with AdWords, in adCenter negative keywords still cannot be assigned a match type. If you're curious about when you might want to assign different match types to your negatives, and want to read more about negative keywords, see my post on negative keyword best practices.

Google's keyword tool out of beta

Google's updated keyword tool is now officially out of beta, and advertisers no longer have the option to go back to the previous version of the tool. This is unfortunate, as the previous version provided more results and keyword variations. However, a couple of advantages on the updated tool include updated statistics and the ability to use the tool without signing in.

In you're looking for additional or alternative keyword tools, I recommend you check out keywordspy and wordtracker. Both require subscriptions but do offer free trials.

Should you let AdWords do the bidding for you with Enhanced CPC?

AdWords recently released a new bidding option under campaign settings called Enhanced CPC that uses your conversion data to optimize bids for ROI.  Advertisers will reportedly benefit from spending less time on managing bids while receiving more conversions at an equal or lower ROI.

The way Enhanced CPC* works is that your keyword bids are automatically adjusted up or down depending on how an individual keyword converts for you. As a result you may pay up to 30% of your set bid. It's a feature you can enable at the campaign settings page, and it applies to all the ad groups within the chosen campaign. If you're uncomfortable paying more than your set Max CPC, you should probably not use Enhanced CPC.

Unlike with Conversion Optimizer, the other AdWords advanced ROI bidding option, you do not need 15 conversions in the past 30 days to use this. However, Conversion Optimizers allows you to set specific CPA goals, which Enhanced CPC does not offer. If you are looking to lower CPA significantly, then you might be better off using Conversion Optimizer, which has greater potential to help you improve CPA.

*Do note that if you enable Enhanced CPC you will not be able to make changes to your campaigns through AdWords Editor.

How To Effectively Structure Your AdWords Account

Account structure is the fundamental basis of being able to write relevant ads, track, optimize your campaigns, and keep your budget manageable. Poor account structure is one of the most common reasons advertisers fail and can make or break the success of your account.  Before you start adding in keywords you’d like to advertise on, think about the following:

• What products or services would you like to advertise?


• Where are your potential customers? What locations and regions would you like to target?


• Do you have different budgets for your various products and services? Are some of your product lines of greater priority?

Next, consider the AdWords account hierarchy and how you can best organize your offerings within that structure. An AdWords account has the following components:

Here are some general guidelines to keep in mind:

Campaigns: You will want to create separate campaigns for different products or services and to take advantage of other settings that you choose at the campaign level. For example, as a carpet cleaning business, you might want to create separate campaign for the different locations you service.  I also recommend creating separate campaigns for the different networks and advertising on Search and Display separately.



Ad Groups: Within each campaign, you should have multiple tightly themed ad groups. If an Ad Group has several keywords, all with different themes, your ads are less likely to be effectively targeted. As a carpet cleaning business, you might want to have the following ad groups:

Tip: A good test to double check if your themes are tight enough is to ask yourself is each keyword within your ad group is reflected in your ad text. Make sure you find a balance between relevant groupings and being too specific. Creating a separate ad group for each individual keyword is not the best use of your time!

Optimize Pay-Per-Click Display Campaigns for ROI

Many advertisers are reluctant to use display due to lack of control and poor ROI, but with the right set-up and optimization, display can be a great source of leads, and not just a branding tool. Display includes websites, such as blogs, articles, and other sites that will show ads relevant to their content. The Display Network has the advantage of reaching potential customers at different points of the buying cycle, and capturing the attention of those that were not yet considering searching for your services. For example, someone reading an article on how to clean a carpet might decide that they'd like to hire your carpet cleaning company after seeing your ad next to the article they were reading.

As you get ready to advertise on Display, keep in mind that users browsing online content behave very differently than those searching for specific information. Also, you will see different results from the two networks. Lower CTRs on display are normal and will not affect the quality of your search keywords. Most advertisers see higher conversion rates for search, but that’s not always necessarily the case. Some of my clients get most of their conversions from display. Then, there are advertisers who see lower conversion rates on Display but still get valuable traffic at lower costs than Search. The only way to know how Search and Display will perform for you is to test them both.

Here are my top 5 recommendations for optimizing display campaigns:

1. Display only campaigns: When advertisers create their AdWords campaigns, they’re automatically opted into both networks. However, I do not recommend simply enabling Display within your existing campaign, keep the two networks separate. To get you started, create a mirror version on your search campaign, opt it out of search and leave it opted into content only.


2. What placements to target: You can either run display ads by choosing Automatic Placements, where AdWords chooses for you what websites are relevant based on your current keywords and ads. or, you can target specific websites you’d like to show on by selecting Managed Placements. At this initial stage, I recommend going with Automatic instead of Managed Placements.


3. Budget: While you test effectiveness of Display for your website, I recommend setting an initially lower budget for Display than for Search (10-20% of your total AdWords budget), and lowering your bids by about 20% for Display.


4. Display ads: Create different ads for display to capture attention of users that are at different staged of the buying cycle. Also, create image and rich media ads. AdWords offers a free Display ad builder that will help you get started. Image and rich media ads tend to get better CTR on display than regular text ads.


5. Exclude poor performers: Monitor what websites your ads have appeared on and exclude poor performers, which are sites that generate a lot of impressions but few clicks, and sites that you get a lot of clicks from but that don't convert.

Keep monitoring your campaigns and adjusting based on incoming data. Display could prove a valuable source of cost-effective traffic you've been missing out on! What strategies have you tried that  worked?

Increase exposure to your site with flash and image ads

According to the latest data, flash and rich media ads account for 40% of online display ad impressions. AdWords, and most other PPC programs allow you to create these ad formats through their display network. Many advertisers have been reluctant to use display but with the right set-up and targeting you can optimize ROI as well. AdWords even offers a free display ad builder to help you get started. Are you taking advantage of this growing market?

Enable Ad Sitelinks in AdWords and boost your CTR

AdWords recently announced that they are enabling Ad Sitelinks for all campaigns, which advertisers previously had to pre-qualify for. Only advertisers with very high quality scores actually saw this as an option in their accounts. Now, it's available to all campaigns, and you should be taking advantage of it. Sitelinks allows you to link to other pages on your website with the links visible immediately below your Display URL.

Sitelinks not only acts as an extra line of ad text and provides your visitors additional navigation options, it can reportedly boost CTRs by up to 30%. To set it up, go to your campaign settings, and under Extensions, enable Sitelinks by clicking on Show additional links to my site within my ad.

Find out when your AdWords ads convert to maximize budget and ROI

Many advertisers have observed that their ads convert differently during the day. In fact, hourly conversion rates can vary as much as 50% from the overall average. To maximize your budget you should first find out when visitors are more likely to covert. To do so, log-in to your analytics account, go to Traffic Sources, click on the AdWords tab, and select Day Parts. There, you can see goal completions by hour of day.

If you notice that most of your conversions happen during certain times of the day, say during standard business hours, you may want to run your campaigns during business hours only. This can be set-up automatically within your AdWords campaigns by enabling Ad Scheduling. Be aware that restricting your ads to certain hours only will results in decreased impressions and clicks. However, this may still be a viable option for you, especially if you have a limited budget.  Understanding when your ads convert and acting on that information can help you maximize advertising dollars and improve ROI. You'll avoid spending money on clicks that are less likely to convert and focus your efforts on what's working for your website.

Yahoo & Microsoft announce new editorial guidelines for paid search.

Yahoo and Microsoft announced their new paid search editorial guidelines that will begin in early August. The new guidelines are part of the alliance between Yahoo and MS (see previous blog post). Make sure you review the new content restrictions and policies and see if you're impacted. If content policies do not apply to you, still read through the ad content and style policies to ensure you're ready for the transition.

Use the broad match modifier in AdWords and get more clicks, while maintaining control

AdWords just released a new keyword match type called broad match modifier that gives more control over how your ads will show. The broad match modifier is more specific than broad match but provides greater reach than phrase or exact match. Unlike phrase match, it will trigger singular and plural variations, as well as misspelling and closely related words. And, unlike broad match, it will not expand to wildly irrelevant variations that hike up costs.

The broad match modifier is meant for advertisers that have been using phrase and exact mainly. This type of advertiser has been avoiding broad match because it's shown their ads on variations that are too far outside the target audience. Even if you're running on mainly broad match today I recommend testing the braod match modifier, as the more precise matching might improve your conversions. It's recommended to add the new keyword in addition to your existing match keywords, rather than replacing them. Then, analyze your data and adjust bids and strategies accordingly.

To implement broad match modifier, simply out a + before each word in the search term. Make sure there are no spaces before or after the + sign, but there should be a space between the search terms in the query.

Correct: +sell +widgets
Incorrect: +sell+widgets
Incorrect: + sell + widgets

Implementation is still a little slow and manual. Within the interface, you have to click to edit a keyword and add the + sign manually. Hopefully, AdWords adds a feature that will allow us to change the keyword match type to the modifier within the interface and AdWords Editor soon.

I can't blame advertisers for avoiding broad match, however phrase and exact can severely limit traffic. The issue of keyword being expanded too broadly with broad match has caused me hours of work reviewing search queries and adding negative keywords to maintain click and conversion volumes. The broad match modifier will be a valuable tool in my campaigns.

Microsoft & Yahoo unite to provide a unified search advertising platform

Microsoft and Yahoo announced earlier this year that they're forming an alliance by uniting their search advertising platforms. The alliance will make both companies more competitive with the current leader in online advertising, Google AdWords. Advertisers will reportedly benefit from greater reach, better technology, more resources freed up for innovation, and improved customer support.

What does this mean for current advertisers? Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for search campaigns for both companies and those using Yahoo will need to transition their ad campaigns over to adCenter. The transition is planned to take place before the 2010 holiday season, but it may be delayed until 2011. Advertisers should prepare by learning more about the upcoming changes. You may need to shorten your ads, expand keywords, and check your bids. Start making changes now, so you experience a smooth transition!

I, for one, am very excited about using only one platform and am looking forward to a more unified experience. More importantly, I am hopefully that this alliance will make Yahoo and Microsoft better source of qualified traffic, as both have been struggling to keep up with Google. The reality is that most of my clients get the bulk of their traffic and leads from Google, plus the AdWords platform provides far more advanced options and features. Getting some real competition in the PPC world can only mean good things for advertisers and agencies.

See how you stack up against your AdWords competitors

There's a new tool in AdWords that allows you to compare your account performance against your competition. You can access it by going to your Opportunities tab and clicking on link Analyze Competition. It's limited in terms of what data you can analyze and currently provides comparisons for the following metrics: impressions, clicks, CTR, and Avg. position. This is a good start, but what I'd really like to see are CPC and conversion metric comparisons, as impressions and clicks are heavily driven by budget and you can quickly increase those numbers by increasing your budget.

Data is available for the last two weeks or so, and there is no option to change this date range, which would be necessary if you wanted to review trends. Filtering is also available allowing you to select specific countries and states. A major con of the Analyze Competition tool is that it's pretty vague about who your competition is, for obvious privacy reasons. It separates out competitors bidding on the same terms under several industries and provides data for those verticals. However, some of the competitors bidding on your keywords may not be your actual competition for your sub-vertical or areas of specialty.

Overall, an interesting tool to check out and even more data from Google to arm you with information to potentially act upon. However, in order to be truly useful, the data would have to be more specific to your true competition and include CPC and conversion metrics. Meanwhile, I recommend checking out some of the other software sites, such as KeywordSpy or SpyFy that do offer more detailed information about your competition.

AdWords finally makes it easy to find out why your ads aren't showing

Why are my ads not showing? That was the most common question I heard from advertisers while working at Google, year after year. There are many reasons this might be happening, such as a low budget, Max CPCs lower then the first page bid estimate, regional targeting, and many other potential issues. There isn't always a simple answer to this question and it is highly specific to each account. This is why help articles are not always, well, helpful. Clients have to browse through technical jargon and are still often unable to find out what the issue is. Worse yet, they are not even aware of the available tools that can help them troubleshoot.

AdWords just released a feature that aims to ameliorate this common problem by allowing advertisers to easily diagnose keywords and find out why they might not be triggering ads. Previously, advertisers had to navigate to the tools section in their account, which many never made it to or even knew about.

Now, the tool has been integrated into your campaigns and can be found while looking at data within the Keywords tab in your AdWords account. While on the Keywords tab, click on More Actions and then Diagnose Keywords. The tool will walk you through the rest.

Dedicated customer support isn't a strength for AdWords, especially when it comes to small, lower spend clients. So, I hope advertisers empower themselves and use the various tools AdWords has developed to help them manage and troubleshoot their accounts.

Best practices for using dynamic keyword insertion in AdWords ads

Keyword insertion is a tool that allows AdWords advertisers to automate their ads with a single piece of code in the ad copy. Keywords users are searching on are automatically populated into the ad, usually the ad title, possibly making the ad more relevant. To use it, you'd simply enter the following piece of code {KeyWord:Default Headline} into your ad. Keyword insertion is used most commonly in headlines. However, the code could also be placed in the rest of your ad text, as well as in your display and destination URLs.

There are many benefits to using keyword insertion, but you should also be careful to avoid weird looking ads that don't make sense or aren't converting for you. The table below explores some pros and cons of keyword insertion as well as my tips on how to best take advantage of it.

Stop wasting advertising dollars on bad keywords

Before you can analyze and make decisions on individual keywords, make sure you have conversion tracking set-up first in your Google AdWords account. Conversions are specific actions you care about on your website, such as lead submissions, white paper downloads, or most commonly, sales. If you're not tracking conversions already, enable conversion tracking within your Google Adwords account first. You'll get a code snippet to be placed on a page that's usually a confirmation page for a desired action.

Once you're tracking conversions, review your data regularly and make decisions based on patterns you're seeing. If a keyword is getting a lot of clicks but few of those clicks are resulting in a conversion, you may want to lower your CPCs or pause that keyword entirely. This will save you $ and allow your PPC budget to be spent on other, more profitable terms. In the example below, I paused a keyword that generated clicks and had a good CTR but resulted in only 1 conversion and a relatively high cost/conversion.

Best practices for using negative keywords

Negative keywords are an excellent way to eliminate irrelevant impressions and improve the quality of your PPC traffic. They help boost your CTR, improve quality score, lower your CPCs and increase ROI. Here are my 5 best practices for using negative keywords with Google AdWords:

1. Use negative keywords at the campaign level. Negative keywords in Google AdWords can be applied at the ad group or campaign levels. In most cases, you'll want to use them at the more scalable campaign level to eliminate specific words or phrases from appearing with any on your keyword combinations pertaining to your entire campaign.


2. Use the AdWords keyword tool. Look up additional keyword variations for your highest impression generating keywords through the keyword tool. Any searches that are not relevant to your business should be added as negative terms.


3. Expand your negatives. Make sure that you expand the negative terms you come up with, adding singulars, plurals, synonyms and any other variations you can think of. The Google AdWords system does not expand the negatives for you. For example, if you're running on a keyword 'cosmetic surgery' and you add a negative keyword 'pic' the query 'cosmetic surgery pics' still might trigger your ad unless you add 'pics' as a negative as well. Add synonyms (photo, photos, picture, pictures, pix) while you're at it!


4. Run search query reports. Search query reports will show you actual queries that led to clicks on your PPC ads. Any queries that do not apply to your website are excellent negative keywords. I recommend running this report once a week.


5. Use advanced negative matching options. In addition to negative broad match, you can also use negative phrase and negative exact match. Negative phrase and exact match should be used to restrict specific phrases from triggering your PPC ads, but still preserve and allow your PPC ads to be triggered for some of the words within that phrase. Let's say you are advertising a cosmetic surgery website, and you're running on keyword 'breast enhancement surgery'. Here are some use cases for advanced negative match types with that example in mind:

Optimize your Google AdWords campaigns for mobile

According to recent data, 30% of US  of mobile owners are accessing their internet browsers on their phones and mobile is one of fastest growing media channels. Advertisers need to take advantage of the various mobile options that Google AdWords provides. Are your PPC campaigns optimized for it? Here are three tips for success:

1. Create a separate campaign opted into mobile devices only and opted out of desktop and and laptop devices. This will allow you greater control and an easier overview of how mobile is performing for you. On your Google AdWords campaign settings page, under Networks and devices, choose to opt your campaign into iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers


2. Enable Phone extensions to display your number on iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers. Calls are often more valuable than online leads and this feature allows you to side-step the website visit option and get that call right away, increasing the chance of converting a visitor to a lead.


3. Create WAP mobile ads. In my experience they get better CTRs and lower CPCs. WAP mobile ads are shorter versions of your full text ads, optimized for the online browsing experience and with a click-to-call option. Mobile text ads contain two lines of text with 18 characters per line. The display URL is limited to 20 characters only. Consider leaving out the www. if you are running out of space. To create a mobile ad, go to your mobile campaign, click tab Ads -> New Ad and choose the WAP mobile option from the drop down.
   

Google AdWords tab now available in analytics reports

Analytics recently added a Google AdWords tab to their Traffic Sources section. This tremendously decreases the navigation and time required to analyze Google AdWords performance, which you'd do in analytics by creating and managing custom reports, prior to this new tab.



One of my favorite new features of the AdWords tab is being able to see goals completed directly through Google AdWords and tie it back to individual keywords. Goals in analytics are specific actions you'd like to track. For example, a goal could be a contact form submission. Prior to the Google AdWords beta tab in analytics you'd need to run custom reports to find out how individual keyword relate to your goals. Now, all I need to do is navigate to the Google AdWords beta tab, click Keywords, and voila! I can see each keyword's statistics, such as time on site, page/visit, bounce rates, AND goal completions, all within a few clicks.