When you copy a keyword to another location, all values are reset to zero, is there some sort of delay in transferring or does this mean they are starting from scratch? – I have keywords that are great performers and I’m concerned that I will lose their status if I move them.

My response:

Since Quality Score (QS) is dynamically recalculated with each search (graded on a curve against competing advertisers), the only thing that is retained is the historical CTR of the keyword.

According to Google, the historical CTR of a keyword is remembered if you move that keyword to a different ad group or campaign.

Of course, pairing the keyword with a different ad will change the CTR, which will change the QS.

To be on the safe side, don’t delete the great performing keywords. Just pause them and try them in new places.

Or, to be even safer, keep the great performers exactly where the are, and move the other keywords to a new location.

Thai Veggie? Gulasch Gourmet?

What’s going on?

What happened to Two All Beef Patties etc? Large fries and a shake? Apple Pie?

McDonalds, the world’s best-known restaurant chain, is peeling and sticking.

Huh?

The Importance of Tight Targeting

When I first started using AdWords, I had no idea what I was doing. (Sound familiar? ;)

My first teacher, Perry Marshall, hired me to work on some AdWords campaigns for a client of his. (Apparently, in the early years, there weren’t a lot of us to choose from.) I diligently researched the market, using the Overture Inventory Tool (R.I.P., but in its day it was amazing!) and came up with about 2000 promising keywords.

I dumped them all into a single ad group, wrote two ads (I knew enough to split test, at least), and sent a proud email to Perry informing him that I had done my job.

Perry wrote back, “Yeah, let’s get on the phone and talk about this.”

Oh.

Perry gently explained to me that maybe 2000 keywords in a single ad group was not such a good idea. Because the people searching for all those keywords weren’t all going to be attracted to the same ad.

I needed to separate the keywords into buckets, Perry said. All the keywords related to Topic A should go into one ad group. Then I could write an ad specifically about Topic A. And so on for all the themes contained in the giant keyword list.

That took a heck of a lot of time. Lots of iterations. Many printer cartridges, and several highlighters. And probably a few gray hairs.

But that was what it took to generate hundreds of inexpensive, valuable leads for the client.

And that’s what it took to get me on the road to AdWords mastery.

Even Big Global Brands Benefit From Tight Targeting

McDonalds would be much more efficient, I’m sure, if their menu was the same everywhere in the world.

Yet they offer regional specialties based on market research and testing in different countries and regions around the world. And they don’t automatically apply the results of a test conducted in Duluth, Minnesota to Berlin, Germany. They understand that while humans have certain things in common (among them, apparently, a deep love for fat and sugar), significant differences exist among groups. And ignoring those differences, in advertising, architecture, and product selection, would sub-optimize their profitability.

So if you are sending all your keywords to the same ad group, showing the same ad or ad rotation, and (heaven forbid) sending all your traffic to the same landing page (gasp – possibly even your home page?), you need to stop what you’re doing, hop on a plane, and walk down Schwertnergasse, near the Dom Cathedral. And check out what Ronald McDonald is doing.

Or, you can stay at home and attend my upcoming Traffic Surge telecourse. From online beginner to being able to choose a market and enter it effectively in 8 weeks. Discover how to set up your AdWords campaigns the right way. Avoid paying the Google Lazy Tax.

This is the last time I’m teaching this course live. Don’t miss out – get your online marketing on the right track, and start making the breakthrough online profits you deserve.

Read the reviews from the last class here:

Traffic Surge – course description and reviews.

And in case you’re wondering, no. You can’t get fries with that.

And the more you know and love your soil, the more you’ll be able to grow, and the better it will taste and look.

In this short video, I show you how to prune a basil plant that’s going to seed, and relate it to your AdWords account. To learn specific AdWords pruning techniques for free, go here to view a 60-minute web clinic on the AdWords Ball method.

Happy late summer eating!

“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.

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? ;)

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.

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.

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

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!