A quick review- after 15 or so years, google decided to add additional characters to their adwords that you see. You will usually see these in the first and second position. Sometimes all of the positions have them. It depends on the device.

Let’s take a look at the search term “buy rings online” on a desktop:

Here you can see the top position is maintained by Gemvara, followed by jensen’s then rarecarat.com. Let’s take a look at Gemvara’s ad. The Expanded line of text is the line “Create Unique Rings on Gemvara.” A year ago, that space would not have been there.

Interestingly, people have gotten so used to the format from years’ past that often it turns out that the best strategy is to drastically shorten your ad so that it appears to be the same length as before. Note the length of the text of Gemvara vs jensenestatebuyers.com. Gemvara’s ad is short and sweet. I would imagine it converts better and has a higher CTR than jensens.

We can’t confirm this but it seems to be the trend across the board the experienced retailers. (Ignore the part of the ad that says ‘free 101 day returns’ and everything after it. Those are features that are tested separately and only shown for position one.)

Here are a couple other examples of retailers using short ads in spite of the expanded ads: Asus is a killer company

Here is an ad for TVs with Walmart and Newegg:

All of these ads are much shorter than jensen’s and I suspect they are the results of more rigorous testing.

One other interesting thing I have noticed in the past year is that you must get rid of old ads that are not in the current format or Google will punish your Quality Score. I don’t know if they have outright said this is the case, but in my experience it is true. Regardless of how well that old ad converts, you have to convert it to the new format or get punished by Google!

Overall I thought the transition was rough at first but things have stabilized after implementing these lessons. Since the short ads seem to convert better it remains to be seen why Google thought we needed these extra characters now, but maybe they didn’t test enough. Or maybe some industries convert differently. Enjoy.

One other comment. In Adwords editor the destination url and final url should switch places to make life easier. This is more of a request for Google. Good luck:

Upgrade Ads From Destination to Final URL

1. Log into google.com/adwords
2. Go to Campaigns

Official News–

I would like to see an official news feature in the adwords admin that keeps me up to date with all the feature releases and betas. I don’t want to scour the internet for adwords updates. Just tell me when there is something I need to know…or may want to know. Put it in the notifications.

I Hate The Notifications.

(Note the scroll bar).

Our bosses read these. They don’t know what they mean. When you send us a red highlighted error message that states that one of my 10k ads had an error my boss might think that is an actual problem that needs immediate attention. It doesn’t. You know it.  Especially since I am testing 5 other ads for the same keywords. AND most of the campaigns are paused. Why do you do this to me? I have dealt with this issue with every boss and every client so I know this is not an issue of my bosses simply being crazy. Well…regardless…it still needs to be addressed.

Other red error messages that are worthless: “Your campaign has ended”…no kidding, I wanted it to end. I don’t mind a reminder but come on.

“Your campaign can use campaign optimizer”…yeah, I know that too. I don’t want to use it. Is that an urgent message?

“Keyword conflicts”…thank you…this is an important one.

The lightbulb sign on every campaign that tells me how to improve my campaign is annoying. I realize that if I “add broad keywords” “raise the bid to the first page” and “add more keywords” my campaign may “improve”. Ill also be spending more money…that’s not mentioned. Almost every campaign has a lightbulb…it makes it look like I am not doing my job. Trust me- you want to please me just as much as the executives or I will stop singing your praises and start spending my money elsewhere.

Think of all the time I have to spend re-educating my bosses every month. I could be spending that time optimizing my campaigns. And when my campaigns do better, we’ll probably spend more money. Help me help you.

The Adwords Editor Needs To Report ROI

The editor shows all sorts of information, but why not revenue and ROI? I won’t spend much time on this because there must be some bizarre technical reason this isn’t being done. It would be very valuable to have this info. Please make it happen.

Adult Content and Ads

Currently the Adwords team reviews ads to see if they are family material. If they are not, they restrict the content to show only to adult audiences. For example, if I use the word “sexy” in an ad it is likely to get marked as adult. But not always. When something gets marked adult it limits the audience. Impressions go down and my reach is significantly lower. Sometimes I actually DO WANT my ad to be marked as adult. If I am selling something for an audience of 18+ year olds, sometimes I do not want kids to see my ads. Otherwise my CPA goes crazy and I can’t afford to bid on these keywords.

Currently there is no way to mark an ad as adult by myself. I have to try to get you (Google) to flag it. It is very inefficient trying to guess what will get pass your automatic filters so that your human screeners can mark this as adult. Here is an example of me trying to get something flagged as adult, but I got flagged before it got to the human screeners:

Oops.

See my problem? I am selling bikinis for women and I don’t want people who are looking for bikinis for kids using a keyword like “bikinis” to see my ad. A great solution would be to allow me to check a box to only show a particular ad to an adult audience. Does that make sense? I have tried to explain it to three people on your team but they didn’t seem to get it.

And yes, I would consider employment as a product manager for adwords.

Here are a few of my thoughts:

The transition phase was smoother than I thought. So far my cost/conversion decreased about 15%. That is not bad for deleting 2/3 of my campaigns. I anticipate it will improve a bit. Still, it is money wasted for no reason.

The Facts About Google Enhanced

Switching to Google Enhanced campaigns will never improve your Adwords performance—unless you have a poorly designed campaign to begin with. Very poor. (Though perhaps there are other fringe cases I haven’t considered.)

For years Google has advocated splitting your campaigns by device type. (I have sat in meetings with Google employees…I have the “confidential” slides stating exactly these recommendations). To be clear, imagine you wanted to bid one adgroup: fishing lure, fishing lures, etc. The best way to optimize your campaigns was to create one fishing lure campaign for regular computers, one fishing lure campaign for mobile and one fishing lure campaign for tab.

The reasoning is simple, different device types require different looking ads. Thus, the best way to optimize is to treat mobile ads for fishing lure completely different from desktop ads.  Different ads will convert at different rates on different devices. My fishing lure desktop campaign might convert at $30/conversion, $35 for mobile, $50 for tab.  If my target CPA is $36 I can turn off tab and run just mobile and desktop.

Now, with Google Enhanced, all three devices must be combined into one adgroup.  Combined, the CPA for all three devices is $38. What should I do? Should I lower bids? Turn off the campaign? The one consolation is that I am able to provide a multiplier for mobile bids. So, after transitioning to Google enhanced I should probably set my mobile multiplier to (30/35) or 85%. (30 and 35 comes from the CPA numbers). There is one problem: there is no tab multiplier. The reason: Google has found that tab tends to perform like desktops.

That is an interesting observation…I wouldn’t have guessed that. But in the aggregate what good is that info to me? How do people searching for fishing lures on tab devices usually convert in relation to desktops? This is why I have a SEM team. I need a tab multiplier too.  I need to be able to set my tab multiplier to (30/50) or 60%.  (*There are more advanced ways to figure out what multiplier to set it to but this will do for now.)

The Future Of Google Enhanced

I anticipate Google providing a tab multiplier in the future. However, this will still not fix the issue completely. You still have the same ads running for mobile and tab that you wrote to convert on desktop. (A solution may be to allow you to write ads for specifically one devices in one adgroup.)

Of most interest to me is why Google is making this change. For the most part I feel they do a good job of listening to their customers. While the owners pay the bills, if the ppc managers are upset, they will advocate moving money to yahoo/bing. I don’t think this move is being well-received. The only reason I can imagine that they would make this move is because it makes managing the accounts “easier” and perhaps thus we may be more likely to build out our campaigns and spend more with Google. I might argue that providing a better ROI makes me want to spend more.

Conclusion

Google Enhanced campaigns will never (by their design) improve your over-all adwords performance UNLESS you are a low level user or you get lucky due to some opportunity you overlooked in the past. It will never help you lower ROI.

What is Adwords Experiments?
Due to Adwords’ concepts of “account history”, you are rewarded for past performance. Thus, you must think twice about every change you make to the account as your changes have a permanent effect!
Have you ever had a “brilliant idea” that you couldn’t get your boss to sign off on? Adwords Experiments is great for cases like these. Make a change to a campaign, check it in a month, and then celebrate your great results. If your idea was horrible, “undo” the results without harming your account history!

Adwords Experiments allows you to make changes to your account that you can undo if you don’t like the results. Usually, we make changes to our accounts and then look in the account history (or our memory) to keep track of progress. This is adequate 95% of the time. For the other times, we can use Adwords Experiments.

How Does Adwords Experiments Work?
Adwords will test the control group vs your new experimental group and tell you the winner. If you want to keep the changes at the end of the experiment you just click a button and your changes are implemented. If not, your changes go back to the way they were before the experiment.

If you make a dumb decision, it will still have a negative effect on the company. It might negatively effect sales or CTR or whatever during the experiment. Using Adwords Experiments you won’t be permanently punished for trying to improve your account.
This is all that a marketer wants.

When Should I Use Adwords Experiments?
If you are making a risky change to the account, make an experiment. Testing new copy is not risky. Raising the price of a high performing keyword is not risky. Adding a bunch of new negative keywords to a campaign makes me nervous, so I would set up an experiment. Splitting up a high-performing adgroup into two makes me nervous, so I would set up an experiment.

The Positives of Adwords Experiments:
1) You can make risky changes to the account without fear of permanently damaging your account history.
2) One great feature of Adwords Experiments is that it automatically calculates statistical significance. I wonder why this has to be limited to experiments? It is such a useful feature! It would be great in many of Google’s products.
3) Certain variables can only be properly tested by using the Adwords Experiment feature. (One feature that comes to mind is determining ROI-based-on-keyword-position. Previously our testing has had to simulate this effect, or make inductions based upon time-shifting results. That is fine, and we are able to produce actionable-data, but this new way is a little better).

The Negatives- Unfortunately there are a lot of negatives. Perhaps some of them will be ironed out.
1) You can only run one experiment at a time at the campaign level. E-commerce sites tend to have tons of campaigns, so this will not be an issue for you if you are E-commerce. Lead-generation sites tend to have fewer campaigns. You may have set up your account so that you have a ton of adgroups and few campaigns. If this is the case you will be limited to one experiment at a time. (I would not recommend changing your account structure simply to get around this).
2) The interface is complex: make sure your first experiment is simple. Until you get the hang of the interface, don’t make complex experiments. Try messing around with numbers rather than keywords the first time out.
3) Remember that any changes make will have ramifications campaign-wide. A small change to one adgroup may effect another adgroup. Make sure you look for those. Some of the effects to other adgroups are non-intuitive, but that may just be an indication that I designed a poor experiment.
4) You can’t save your experiment history. If you want to save your results you will have to export them and keep a log.

To Summarize:
-Make BOLD changes to your account so that your results will be statistically significant. Bid much higher or much lower.
-Make your first experiment simple.
-Most of your testing can still be done without using this feature. You can still experiment in Adwords without using “Adwords Experiments”.

1) What should I be spending per month
2) What will my setup costs be if I don’t already have an account.

What Should I Spend Per Month?
There are several ways to answer this question. You may want to consider these answers before you hire a pay per click management team. Some popular answers to this question are “what you can afford to lose”, “it depends on the industry”, and “about whatever you think you can afford to spend”. Those are all reasonable answers for some clients.

For advanced businessmen and women I think the following answer is better: “If you could buy one dollar bills for $.99, how many would you buy?” Obviously you would want to buy as many as possible, or spend infinite amounts. Even though margins are low (in this example), the more you spend, the more you make.

Would you still be interested in this deal if you had to pay someone else to arrange this service for you? Again, the answer would be yes. While this eats into your margins (again), you are still in a position to make a ton of money if you put up the money.

Lets bring this back to pay per click. Due to advances in tracking technology, we are able to calculate the amount of money you are spending and the amount of money you are making directly from pay per click ads. If this is a positive number, it is no different than the above example, where you are buying dollar bills for $.99.

This advice has is limitations, but not in the ways you might expect. The obvious limitation is that there is not an infinite supply of customers. This manifests itself in the following way: the more you spend, the higher the cost of acquisition, which will eat into your margins. However, if you do not yet have a solid account, you probably do not need to be concerned about this.

Setup Costs
The other limitation to this advice is that it will cost you money to get your account to a profitable state. Accounts are rarely profitable on day one. You will have to invest some money upfront in your advertising, just like all other forms of advertising. This cost varies from company to company. A pharmaceutical company that advertises to every country will pay a lot more than a mom-and-pop button-making shop that serves only San Diego.

Thus, there are two variables to keep in mind that will affect your startup costs (not to be confused with “setup costs”, which is the cost your ppc company charges you to setup the account): How competitive your industry is and how large the geographic region you want to advertise to is.

An advertiser spends $100 every day of the week except for Wednesdays. On Wednesdays, the company spends $250. Currently Adwords does not allow you to easily account for this scenario. The closest they come is Google offers you the ability to bid a certain percentage higher or lower on certain days.
That is not what we want.

We could wake up at 12am on Wednesday and change the spend from $100 to $250 and then change it back at midnight. However that seems like a lot of work, with not enough return.
However, there is another way. An Adwords hack, if you will. It ads a lot of complexity to the account, so I only recommend this solution for advertisers that anticipate a great discrepancy in daily spending (based on the day of the week).

Here is how it works: (We will pretend you have an account with one campaign for simplicity sake.)

1) Turn off all spending on Wednesdays by bidding on keywords at 0% on Wednesdays.
2) In Google Adwords Editor copy the campaign and repaste it. Rename the new Campaign “Wednesdays”.
3) In the “Wednesdays” campaign, turn off spending on all days except Wednesday. Set the daily spend to $250.

The result is that campaign one will bid $100/day mon, tue, thur, fri, sat, sun. Your new “Wednesday” campaign will bid on the exact same keywords on Wednesdays but the daily spend will be $250 on Wednesdays.

You can repeat this process for multiple campaigns if you have more than one.

Ideally, this seems like a feature that would be should be addressed by Google’s people. Perhaps it could be added to the interface to save time and avoid confusion.
If you need help with this procedure contact me.

The List

1) Common sense-This one is often overlooked. If a discount glasses company solicited my help I know a ton of their keywords because I have shopped for glasses online in the past.

2) Keyword tools- Google Adwords Keywords tool and Yahoo both have free keyword tools with real data from searches people have performed. There are also good paid alternatives.

3) Website analysis. Look at the content of the webpage. There are also tools that can extract that data. The navigation and breadcrumbs can be helpful.

4) Competitors- Look at the content of the webpage of the competition.

5) Yahoo’s search home page- do a couple “bad” searches and Yahoo will show a list of related searches. Those are keywords.

6) Analytics-In your analytics. You are running analytics right? It will send you the keyword people are searching for when then used a search engine to get to your site.

7) Internal search-what are people searching for on your site? Those are keywords.

8 Competitive intelligence reports-Companies like Compete.com sell information on you and your company that may be useful.

9) The company-I listen to the language the stakeholders and employees use in our correspondence. Also, it never hurts to ask them if they thought I missed anything, but that is always at the end of the keyword expansion phase and campaign building phase.

Perhaps a new product might come in or a new corporate trend might develop that is outside the scope of analytics.

10) My experience-I have built umpteen campaigns and I have a certain feel for it.

(You may only recreate portions of this list if you keep the text and links unchanged and attribute the list to RoseOspreyMarketing.com.)

No! We don’t want exposure in itself (since we are paying for this exposure); we want exposure to potential customers.
There are really two challenges here:
1) limiting the exposure of your ads so as to save money
2) Only showing your ads to potential customers.
While you may not have experience in the pay per click field with this strategy, you have experienced it in your everyday TV-viewing life.

Filtering by Language and Location
The first large filter in advertising is language. When I am watching TV, I never receive ads from pepsi in Farsi. It is in English. Or your Lingua-Franca. The second large filter is location. I don’t see commercials for British restaurants. Though they speak the same language as I do, the physical distance is too great for me to be considered a potential customer.
This level of filtering in advertising is as simple as it gets. The same rules that apply to TV advertising apply to ppc advertising.

In many cases, you can go right now to your campaigns and click the “off” button for non-English languages, and countries outside the U.S. (or wherever you live). Your conversion rates will improve instantly. Check your settings now.

Filtering by Using Negative Keywords in PPC
Have you ever been watching a football game and there is a commercial for tampons? It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is pretty entertaining. This is an example of advertisers wasting money by targeting the wrong audience. This happens ALL THE TIME in ppc advertising.
One of the more difficult aspects of ppc advertising is deciding who I should block from seeing my ads.
I am currently running a campaign for a hotel in Minneapolis*. How would I describe it if I were to be honest with you: It is a small hotel, not luxurious or expensive, not what I would call a 5 star hotel or suite. It is not the type of hotel you would find valet parking or limos.
Notice that I listed several qualities that the hotel lacks. That is not because I am (necessarily) a negative person, it is because this is a tool I use in ppc.  I can now take that list of qualities that my product does not have and add them to the negative (also called excluded) keyword list.
-limo
-expensive
-luxury
-suite
-five star

Now if anyone does a search with any of those words, my ad automatically cannot appear. So if someone searches for “inexpensive Minneapolis hotel with limo” I don’t want to show my ad.
But I have so many of the desirable qualities this person is searching for. Maybe we should show them the ad just in case.

No.
They will find an inexpensive hotel with limo services or they will perform a different search. Perhaps our ad will show up then. We do not want people clicking our ads for services we do not sell.

Conclusion
So, do your campaigns have negative keywords? Think of all the words that DON’T describe your product or business and write them down in a spreadsheet. Add them as negative words. Your conversion rates will improve, your quality scores will improve and you will be spending less.

*Details changed slightly

While it is easier to stick all keywords into one ad it is not cost effective. Your ROI will be lower because you will pay more per click than a person who segments their ads. High quality ads are rewarded with lower costs per click.

Each of the Big three pay per click companies (MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Google Adwords) use quality score as a way to reduce your cost per click. Most second-tier search engines use quality score as well.

Creating PPC Campaigns
Sometimes it can be hard to think of a logical way to create adgroups, especially for those new to PPC or for agencies that are working with a company for the first time. Here is one technique that I use that is very helpful:

Imagine that you have a client or you are a company with thousands of SKUs, across several verticals, like Bestbuy.com. If I was asked to start their campaign from scratch, it seems like a very daunting task. So where would I begin? I would look at their websites’ navigation.

Selecting and Ordering PPC Campaigns
Just like PPC advertising, one of the aspects of good website design is grouping products into a logical order. Taking a look at the top-level navigation shows us the categories that the company uses to separate their products.

I would start by creating a separate campaign for each of the top level categories. TV & Video would be 1 campaign, “Audio” would be another campaign, etc. (The TV AND Video is a hint that these might be two individual categories as well. So I would create one campaign for TV and one for Video.)

Think of campaigns like the departments in the store. If the campaigns are the departments then adgroups are the rows. Keywords are the products.

Selecting and Ordering Adgroups
I want to select adgroups that are quite narrow so as to keep a high quality score. How narrow? For a large store like Bestbuy this can be a little tricky. The adgroups will consist of groupings that are smaller than campaigns but larger than keywords. Where can I find information on a big site like this?

Once again we are helped out by the fact that Bestbuy is a well-designed site.

Take a close look at the “breadcrumbs”:

The furthest down on the navigation level will always (usually?) be the product (or service to buy or product to download, etc). The trail of breadcrumbs shows the path we used to get from the category which is the most general group to the product. The levels in between the product and the category are good candidates for adgroups.

If a site doesn’t have breadcrumbs you might be able to use a similar “trick” by looking at the product URL. A site that does this well is Calloway Golf. Here is the URL for product called an “X tour Wedge”; a type of gold club:

http://www.callawaygolf.com/Global/en-US/Products/Clubs/Wedges/X-TourWedges.html

Keyword: X tour wedge
Adgroup: Wedges
Campaign: clubs

Keywords
If you have used the method I have described, this is the easy part. By that I mean, you will now know where to put those keywords you have been wanting to bid on!

In summary, these are not necessarily the recommendations I would recommend to Calloway or BestBuy, but this provides a useful starting point for tackling a large project. Using a websites’ navigation, breadcrumbs and URL are great tools to help create your PPC campaigns achieve high quality scores.