Making Adwords Make Sense

We went to the AiMA event last night. The topic was finding the value beyond click to conversion. There were some very professional speakers and they did a wonderful job presenting the material. The first two (Yahoo Guy and Google Girl) were really good speakers talking about things that we already know and that we’re already talking to clients about.

The Yahoo Guy (Ron Belanger) got really deep into why search is so important for Brand Development, going a little more deeply into the fact that customers use search to develop their concept of what your brand means to them. He had some stats to support the fact that most internet users will go to search and taste 2-3 brands before making a purchase decision. In this context if you’re the brand leader you can continue to dominate using search and ensure that your brand is there on top of search results in the most pleasing light possible. If your brand is less recognized you can use search to develop the brand and to disrupt the brand message of the top competitor. He makes the point that people go to search to find that positive message reinforcement even for products they may have already purchased or companies they already are engaged with. The post purchase value of search marketing is very easy to underestimate.

The Google Girl (Raku Coryne) talked more about actual metrics and using Google Analytics, but didn’t go into specifics as much we may have liked. It was very good, but a little like she was repeating the high level stuff from Avinash’s blog. She spoke of the importance of using Analytics data to develop actionable insights. She mentioned bounce rate as a key performance indicator, and described some of the ways you can use it. She also discussed the factors that make up a good metric. I think she would have done well to go more into the advantages of segmenting the data and comparing those metrics from segment to segment.

There was some talk of the importance of mapping offline purchases to online initiatives and vice versa, and promise that there were ways to do this although it still seems pretty grey. Coupons and online only 1-800 #s can be used to quantify online to offline to some extent. Google Analytics can be used to demonstrate the degree of effect an offline initiative might have to online. This can be done by comparing the geographic area where the offline campaign (TV, Radio, Mailers etc.) took place to a geographic area where it didn’t, or by comparing the online traffic for the time span of the offline initiative to a time span where it was not present.

I thought that the majority of this material has been covered and discussed thoroughly for quite some time now and I kind of had the feeling that the guy from Yahoo was giving the same story he gave 5 years ago. That being said, if you were not familiar with the concepts then it would have blown your hair back so I’m sure someone got something out of it.

In this industry every now and then you run into strange situations and strange client requests so often that it becomes the norm. Some of my favorites are the people who absolutely must get ranked for certain phrases but have a very limited budget. Other times there are people who have budget aplenty but have no ability to wait for Google to register the changes.

At times people feel like it is their right to be in the Google index almost as though Google were part of the global government - It’s my right to be indexed in Google! I’m a citizen of Earth!

Presently I have a company contacting me that does not rank for their own domain name in Google. If you search for their domain it shows that Google has indexed it as the hosting company place holder page. This is fun because we get to see if we can take some steps to get Google to reindex it in a hurry. (How do you rush Google?)

1) Examine Source for Errors
2) Customize Robots.txt
3) Add to Google Webmaster Tools
4) Add to Yahoo Site Explorer
5) Point a couple of hyperlinks to the site from a site that Google spiders regularly

These are the first steps I will take to lead the spiders to Arborview Capital Partners.

Perhaps there are good reasons why you would need that functionality…

I thought that for this post it would be handy to describe my impressions of the usefulness of the program before and after this Adwords Editor Webinar which promises to provide advanced tactics for using the Google Adwords Account Management Tool. If you are interested in registering I am pretty sure that it is free to all.

Advanced AdWords Editor webinar: June 10th
The Google AdWords Editor Team will be holding an advanced training geared towards users who have some experience with AdWords Editor. Please register here to join us on Tuesday, June 10th from 10:30 to 11:30am PDT to find out more about the features and new developments of the account management tool.

Probably the first thing that you should make sure you’re clear on is that whenever you get in to the editor you have to hit the Get Recent Changes button in the upper left hand corner to update the editor. For a while I thought that this button was just for if you made changes in Adwords web based interface while you had the editor open. This isn’t the case. Always click it when you open an account in the editor.

You can keep multiple accounts in editor as well as draft accounts.

If you click export for archiving when you first log into an account before you make any changes then you won’t have to worry about losing data or making an irreparable error.

One thing that is really useful is to use the Adwords Editor to find Duplicate Keywords. (As pictured below)

You can also use the editor to Export your entire account (or sections of the account) in a variety of formats.

You can then make bulk changes and then Import the account back into the editor. For those of you who are getting sick of the slow interfaces this will be an indispensable tool for when you have a lot of changes to make. Some of you may remember the same type of functionality in Yahoo’s older version of their web based interface. This can save you a lot of time.

Some of you may remember an advanced keyword filter that used to be in the web based interface for Adwords. Anyone? Well it was really useful until one day it just vanished. Well it turns out that it was mostly integrated into the Adwords Editor in the Advanced Search option (Pictured Below). You can search the keywords based on a variety of filters such as click thru, conversion rate, cost per click etc.

One area that I wouldn’t mind seeing in Advanced Search would be a filter by placements.

These are just some of the features that I find useful. I will post again after the webinar to keep you abreast of any of the other ways that this tool is fantastically useful.

Please share if there is a way that this tool is particularly useful for you.