A reader wonders:

“I am tracking conversions, just wondering how someone whose seen a gazillion AdWords campaigns approaches optimization.  Is there a system or do things just pop out based on your experience.”

My response:

Things do pop out at me at this point (I flatter myself by imaging my brain working like Russell Crowe as John Nash in A Beautiful Mind – before he went crazy), but it’s a result, I think, of just adoping a process and practicing it until it became second nature.

Here’s my system:

1. Set up conversion tracking, as closely related to actual dollars in as possible. If you can track online sales, do that. Use the actual ecommerce sales totals if you can. If you can’t track sales online, then track leads. If you can’t track leads, then use analytics to track time on site, or use AdWords conversion tracking to track views of a key page.

2. Sit down and make a list of my questions. Before diving into the reporting, decide what you want to know. If you just go in wondering, “What is all this data?” you can get lost for days. Enter the spreadsheets with a “search image” in mind – a specific question or set of questions.

For example:

• Which keywords cost more than they’re worth?
• Which ads make me the most money?
• Which sites on the content network are delivering bad traffic?
• Do prospects in different parts of the country or the world respond differently to my marketing?
• Are there certain days of the week or times of the day when I shouldn’t advertise?

There are dozens of potential questions you can ask – and since every business – and every business owner – is unique in some respects, no one can hand you your list of important questions without knowing something about your circumstances.

3. Set up reports that answer those questions.

4. Filter the data so you end up with,not just information, but as Jim Collins puts it in Good to Great, but “information that cannot be ignored.” You can do this manually, or with the Magic AdWords Button.

5. Take action on the data – pause non-performing keywords, annoint ad split test winners, find new negative and positive keywords, use the Google Ad Planner to identify new content sites based on existing good sources of traffic, etc.

6. Ask new questions and repeat.

This is the process you’ll master in AdWords Ball – the first official class is Thursday 12/11/08 – learn more here.

Until recently, quality score was given in moral terms – Great, OK, or Poor.

That’s still the way it appears in your campaign management dashboard:

But now, you can get actual quality score numbers in your reports:

All part of Google’s effort to get us to pay attention to the overall quality of the experience that searchers will have once they click our ad.

It’s like when I was in high school, the teachers used to complain about how grade-grubby I was. I would write a 12-page essay on predestination in Malamud’s The Magic Barrel, the teacher would spend 2 hours reading and commenting on it, and I would flip to the page page, check out the grade, and totally ignore the commentary. (That’s probably why I’m writing Dummies books instead of novels :)

Google’s now giving quality score the same serious treatment – a black and white cardinal number – as they give to position, average bid price, and CTR. 

So why do they still hide it by default? ;)

Google announced yesterday that it’s now easier for a well-crafted ad to get to the coveted (sometimes) TOP LEFT area of sponsored links (above the organic listings). See the position of the Yoplait ad below to grok what I’m talking about:

Before, your ad would show up there only if you bid high enough, regardless of quality score. Now, quality score, and especially the clickthrough rate (CTR) factor in quality score, is more important.

In Google’s own words:

To appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results. With this update, we’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so. For instance, suppose the ad in position 1 on the right side of the page doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score to appear above the search results, but the ad in position 2 does. It’s now possible for the number 2 ad to jump over the number 1 ad and appear above the search results. This change ensures that quality plays an even more important role in determining the ads that show in those prominent positions.

AdWords Mad Scientist Dr. Glenn Livingston put it this way in an email to me this morning:

My take is – it increases the stupidity tax, making it harder than ever for big dumb advertisers to win by just outbidding smart, hyper-relevant advertisers who work hard to understand what people want.
 
Now you REALLY gotta get’m clicking ’cause you can’t maintain your quality by paying for the top slot anymore.
 
Score one for our team.

My take is – Glenn’s absolutely right. AdWords, while still favoring deep pockets and well-known brands, is the least unfair advertising medium ever invented. And the playing field just got leveled even more with this welcome improvement.

Today at 11am EDT, I officially launched AdWords Ball: The Easy Way to Breakthrough Profits. In my mind, though, its subtitle is stolen from the book Moneyball (why not, since I stole/adapted the title from that book?): "The Art of Winning an Unfair Game."

Yes, you’re competing against advertisers with deeper pockets than you. With more brand recognition than you. But I’d bet money on a smart, prepared bootstrap entrepreneur going up against a big company every time.

AdWords Ball – the playbook for winning an unfair game. The good news for us, it just got a little fairer today.

I’m trying to take my mind off the realization that in 3 months I’ll be the parent of a teenager by thinking about something more cheerful: the economy.

The Current Economic Maelstrom

If businesses are sailboats, then the economy right now is like a strong wind – blowing in the wrong direction.

Yet some sailors are so knowledgeable about the winds and how to handle their craft in the face of them, they can sail against the wind by tacking and a lot of other technical sailing terms that I would just embarrass myself by trying to use correctly.

Other sailors, who do not know how to read the winds, find that they are simply at their mercy, a bobbing plaything driven by forces outside their comprehension and therefore outside their control.

Which Kind of AdWords Sailor Are You?

Take this quick quiz to see whether you know how to read the winds of your AdWords-driven sales funnel:

1. What is the average value of a visitor to your website?
2. What are your 10 most profitable keywords?
3. Which ads are most profitable?
4. If you are using the content network, which sites deliver the most valuable traffic? (Do you even know which sites are displaying your ads?)
5. How much time, on average, do visitors spend on each of your landing pages?
6. Which is more profitable: going for the sale on the first visit, or trying to capture contact information for followup marketing?
7. What price point delivers the highest profit for each of your products?
8. What browser size are the majority of your visitors viewing? (And are you making sure that the most important content of your web pages fit inside that area?)
9. What ad position is most profitable for each of your biggest keywords?
10. At what place on your landing page do most visitors stop paying attention?

If you can answer questions 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 off the top of your head, and can find the answers to the other questions in a matter of minutes, then congratulations! You’re an expert AdWords sailor.

If you can’t, then you’re wasting at least 50% of your AdWords budget every single day. At least.

Sarah Palin may need expensive makeup artists and designer clothes to look persuasive in public, but not me! Check out my solution to image management on a day when I’m not looking my very best…

Learn more about AdWords Ball, and see about snagging one of the 15 slots for your business: The AdWords Ball Sales Letter.

A reader wonders:

Hi Howie, I have tweaked my campaigns to improve conversions but it’s resulted in a fall in sales, is there a way to revert to the campaign settings at a certain date?

My response:

The quick answer is no. There’s no magic “system restore” in AdWords.

You can go to the My Change History tool and see all the changes you’ve made, and then change them back one by one.

It might be a little late to say it now (for this reader, anyway), but a best practice is to make one change at a time and observe the results. If you made 10 tweaks and sales dropped, how do you know which change (or interaction of changes) caused the drop? Or what if the drop had nothing to do with your changes? (If you sell firecrackers, for example, I would expect a slow period following July 4.)

Without seeing your campaign and the specific changes you made, it’s impossible for me to offer specific advice. But I’d look for clues in the “nodes” – impressions, clicks, opt-ins, sales. Did your impressions fall off, while everything else remained steady? Did impressions hold while your CTR plummeted? Or did the same number of visitors arrive at your site, but fewer of them are converting?

Which campaigns have changed? All of them, or only some?

And here’s a case where you might find the account snapshot page handy. You can compare date ranges by lots of important metrics, both in table form and visually.

By doing some detective work, you may be able to spare yourself the task of redoing everything in the hopes of getting back to where you were.

Best of luck!

Here’s a tool that shows you what the Google Search Results Page looks like  anywhere in the world:

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Here’s the tool in action, with me entering the longitude and latitude for Sheboygan, Wisconsin (does anyone not love saying that name?):

Click here if you’re over 40 and need to magnify the picture.

You can also search by country, state, and metro area. So now you can’t deduct that house in the south of France as a business expense because you’re checking on an ad.

Otherwise – Cool, huh? :)

A reader wonders: Can you tell me what the harm is in putting in more key words than less key words since a person only gets charged for the clicks on Google when someone actually clicks on your ad?

Howie answers the wondering:

Read the rest of this entry »

A reader asks:

How do I test the conversion rate with a new product using Google AdWords?

My answer:

It depends on what the definition of "the" is. As in, what conversion rate are you talking about? In which market?

Read the rest of this entry »

A reader wonders:

In my "broad" keywords list of about 150 words, Google is giving me the message:
 
Overlapping Terms
If your keyword list has two or more similar keywords, the Traffic Estimator will divide the potential traffic between the overlapping terms. Estimates for such keywords may be less accurate due to this overlap. 
 
My question is:  Are broad "Overlapping Terms" ok to use or will I waste $ in the long run?

Here’s what I think:

The "Overlapping Terms" message is not a terrible thing, but in the long run your goal is to figure out what the phrase and exact match keywords are, and get more traffic from them and less traffic from broad match keywords. Google is just telling you that sometimes two different keywords may be triggered by the same search, so it can’t predict in advance where to send the traffic.

You definitely will waste money if you can’t, ultimately, pinpoint your profitable keywords and eliminate the rest, or at least adjust their bids to bring them into the positive ROI range.

And here’s your horoscope, if you’re a Leo:

A stranger you meet on top of a mountain will compliment your dog. Despite this, you will still burn dinner.