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.

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.