Archive for the ‘Adwords’ Category

Analyzing Adwords Geographic Performance Reports

Monday, May 24th, 2010

I was checking our Visitor stats in Analytics when I noticed that over the last 30 days, Mexico was nr. 2 in my top countries list, accounting for 8% of my visitors.

Mexico? We hardly ever sell to Mexico.

A quick peek at the Ecommerce tab confirmed that: In the same period only 0.37% of my sales came from Mexico. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if all that traffic was organic and thus free. But what if I am paying for those visitors with Adwords?

Sadly, information like that is not readily available from your Adwords interface. You will have to run a Geographic Performance report to get to the data. And even then, it takes some work to turn the data into actionable information.

But, it’s definitely worth doing. For instance, I found that for the past five months, a considerable part of my Adwords spend had been going to Mexico and a couple of other countries (Greece, Spain) that were not resulting in enough sales.

So I highly recommend that you spend some time to analyze your own Geographics Performance report. To help you do it, I have created a step-by-step tutorial on creating and analyzing this important report type. Here we go… More »

The importance of Display URLs in Adwords ads

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

adwordsA few weeks ago, I posted about my new microsites project. In short: I am creating microsites targeted at specific keyword phrases, for both SEO and PPC reasons.

Here’s some of the first effects I am seeing when using a microsite as the target URL and, more importantly, the Display URL of Google ads. More »

Adwords Remarketing – first impressions

Monday, April 12th, 2010

adwordsTwo weeks ago I started experimenting with Adwords Remarketing. As with most new advertising methods, this sure isn’t something that you can just switch on and then expect it to work. It takes time to understand it and then more time to test, tweak, test some more. Here’s an update on my findings so far.
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Remarketing with Google Adwords

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

adwordsLast Thursday, Adwords started offering remarketing options. I heard about remarketing first in Maui, during Jonathan Mizel’s presentation. A couple of big advertising companies were already offering it. It sounded interesting enough to put it high on my “must check out” list. But now it is available through Adwords, so I started using it right away.
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Pending Review or Under Review?

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Today, I created two new ads in one of my ad groups, to start a new test of two different messages.

For some reason, both got flagged for manual approval, but now look at the Status of both ads:

pending-review-vs-under-review

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New Adwords interface beta – first impressions

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Google has a new interface for the Adwords system. It is still in beta and you can try it by choosing the “New Interface (beta)” link at the top in your Adwords account.

I have been using the new UI for a week now. Here’s my first impressions:
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Content Network – Keyword Targeting vs Placement Targeting

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Here’s a quick update on my Content Network adventures.

Up till now I have been using keyword targeting only. And I have been running Placement Reports to find “bad” sites, so that I could exclude them using site exclusions.

But now my campaigns have run for a few months, my ads are being shown on thousands of sites. There is no way I can go through and exclude the all bad ones.
I have removed the high volume bad sites which helps a bit, but there’s load’s of bad ones in the long tail too. Some of em even generating lots of clicks and thus costing me money.

(BTW: when I say “bad sites”, I mean “somewhat relevant” sites that are not performing plus sites that are simply not relevant.)

So now I am trying placement targeting. I am using the Placement Report for my keyword targeted ads to find good sites (based on relevance, number of conversions, clicks and impressions). Then I create new placement targeted ad groups to target just those sites.

Here’s my findings on both methods:
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The word “download” in ads triggers manual approval?

Monday, March 30th, 2009

I had noticed some weird “no impressions” effect a couple of weeks ago, but at the time I couldn’t pin it down to a specific word yet.

However, now I am pretty sure that using the word “download” in your Google ad can trigger their “manual approval” process. Here’s what happened:

This Saturday I added new ads to a series of ad groups, for testing new ad copy. When I checked the ads a couple of hours later, I noticed that some of the new ones hadn’t received any impressions yet (these are high volume ad groups, so that was weird).
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Negative Keywords for software ads

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Are you using negative keywords in your Google ads? You probably are. But are you taking full advantage of this powerful way to cut costs and increase click through rates? I know I sure wasn’t. Of course I was using some obvious negative keywords like: free, freeware, crack and serial. But that was all.

Lately I have been investigating the use of negative keywords (again after listening to Perry’s interview with two dudes from Epiar.com). Currently, I have hundreds of negative keywords in each campaign. How I found them is another story, maybe I will write about that later.

Today I just want to give you a list of negative keywords specific to selling software. Simply add them to all your Adwords campaigns (and Yahoo Ads for that matter) and immediately save money and increase click through rates.
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Still Struggling with the Content Network

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Let me tell you about my experience so far with Google’s Content Network.

Of course, when I started out with Adwords in 2002 I made the same mistake everyone makes: leaving the Content Network switched ON for all campaigns. Which got me lots of impressions of course, many clicks even, some (expensive) sales too.
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