AdWord Excelizer .com

Bookmarking this page on how negative broad-matched, phrase-matched and exact-matched work.

From Adwords Help Center.

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This is an interesting presentation on how Google Analytics’ reports can help in fine tuning our adwords campaigns.

Stephanie Hsu went through
a. Linking Analytics with Adwords account (at account level instead of MCC)
b. Search Engine Report
c. Bounce Rate Report
d. Adwords Campaign Report
e. Keyword Positions Report
f. Goals
g. Ad Scheduling & Budgeting
h. Optimizing Ad Texts & Ad Delivery
i. Other tips (i.e. top ten referral sites, etc.)

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Chris McNeeney, the author of Affiliate Project X and Day Job Killer, wrote on three techniques that will improve your Adwords success rate. I think it is interesting.

First, it is about bidding on very specific keywords which is the product brand name. I admit that some of my successful adwords campaigns are those that bid on specific brand and model.

Second, it is about tracking the keywords. Yes, it is hardwork and, yes again, my experience is that I have to track. No other choice.
Third, on how to select clickbank products using adwords’ impression. Once you have a campaign running on a new clickbank product and bidding on the default keyword(s) of the product, Adwords’ impressions shows demand growth of the new clickbank products.

Read the original article at associateprogram.com.

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How to get your cost per click cheap? Make sure Quality Score (”QS”) of your keywords are high. Read the overview from Google Adwords Help Center.
For high Quality Score we need to have:

a. Keywords with high historical CTR (good ad copy and appropriate use of negative keywords)

b. Relevant Ad Text with the keyword (I have done an experiment: Keywords that are included in Ad Copy give me a lower minimum CPC. Google wants advertisers to create more targeted Ads for smaller group of keywords.)

c. The quality of landing page?! This is a newly added factor. Google specifically gives guidelines on landing page for quality score. One of the criteria for a good QS is “Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text”
By now we probably realize one thing: For a high QS and cheap CPC keyword, make sure the keyword that trigger our ad appears in our ad text and appear in the landing page! (off course not forgetting to use negative keywords to drive up your CTR.)
It leads to one conclusion…more works in creating a finer and more focused Ad Group, relevant ad copies and landing pages for various Ad Groups.

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We all know negative keywords are important, however, most people under estimate its importance.

Basic

You can find the basic on negative keywords at Adwords Blog, matching options in Google Help Center, specific discussion on negative keywords in Google Help Center. Negative keywords filter unrelated keywords that we don’t want them to trigger our ads. For instance, if I am promoting The Apprentice DVD or download with broad match The Apprentice, a user search on The Sorcerers Apprentice would triggered my ads. In order to filter users who search for The Sorcerers Apprentice, I would added Sorcerer and Sorcerers as negative keywords.

Negative keywords affect keywords with Exact Match

From my experience and emails with Adwords Support team, it seems negative keywords affect CTR of Exact match. The Ad Rank of the Ads that are triggered by these Exact matched keywords is affected by lack of negative keywords. In one of the email reply from Adwords Support, it was stated that “For historical CTR, keywords in the three different matching options would share the same historical CTR.”

In such a case, a low CTR of Broad match and Phrase match will pull down the Ad Rank of Ads triggered by the exact match of the same keywords. When we use all match options in our campaign, we cannot afford to have without negative keywords.

For example, if we have
1000 impressions with 20 clicks for the apprentice,
1000 impressions with 30 click for “the apprentice”, and
1000 impressions with 100 click for [the apprentice]
What is the CTR for Ad Rank when the exact keyword [the apprentice] triggers an ad? 10%? Not really. From what I understand, it is 5% (140clicks / 3000 impressions)

So, when you use more than mere exact match in a campaign…you must have negative match.

How to use negative keywords correctly?

Negative keywords prevail over all other match options. For instance, in the case below:
-tennis
red tennis shoes
“red tennis shoes”
[red tennis shoes]

All the above keywords (including that of exact match) will not trigger ads. I do aware of other opinions in certain forums that the exact match will trigger ads despite the negative keywords. However, this was what I experienced and confirmed with Adwords Support.

Where do you get negative keywords?

Under your nose.

There are two places to get negative keywords, and both places are under your nose. First place, when you get a list of keywords from a source, DO NOT throw away the unrelated or unwanted keywords. Turn them into negative keywords. Second place, when you realise that a keyword does not convert, do not just delete it from your AdGroup. Turn it into negative keyword!
Here is another good write up on finding negative keywords from various places.

Quickly convert keywords into negative keywords with AE

Use Adword Excelizer.

First, carefully group the unrelated/ unwanted keywords into one column. Then, in one click, the entire column of keywords are turned into negative keywords, copied and ready to be pasted into text box in Adwords.

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When we activate Search Network at Campaign Setting, how do we know which search engines that our ads or creatives will display?

Search-this.com has a very interesting interactive chart, called Search Engine Decoder (Relationship Chart), to identify which search engines receive the Ads feed from Google and Yahoo (overture).

Go to the web site to check it out. First click on Google in the image and follow the yellow arrow to see how the paid ads are flowing.

You should able to find out the search engines included in Google’s search network are:
1. Lycos
2. AOL
3. Alexa
4. Netscape
5. AskJeeves
6. Teoma
7. Hotbot

You can also find out from the chart which search engines that your Overture’s ads appeared.

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This is one of the most interesting threads I read recently. It is from WebmasterWorld.com…Google Adwords rules of thumb. It was started by a new member and joined in by many Adwords experts.

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Do you really think you know how to do a proper ads split test? You may be surprise to find out that you have been using a wrong method…

If you don’t know what split test is…
Split test is a process to test the effectiveness of two or more Ad copies or, in another term, creatives. It is usually measured in term of click through rate (CTR). When we do a split test, we want to find out which Ads are more effective in generating click.

Setting:

First step of split test is to tick off (in another words, stop running) Seach network and Content network. Leave only Google search in Campaign settings.

Generally, the CTRs of an Ad in Google search and Search network are quite different. Comparing CTRs of two Ads with one in Google search and another in Google+Network search are like comparing apple with orange. When we add a new ad, this ad will display instantly for Google Search but not Search Network. Google team will take a while to review the new ad before approving it to be displayed in Search Network. So if we compare the CTRs of an old ad (displayed in both Google Search & Search Network) with a new ad (displayed only in Google search), we will get a distorted picture of comparison.

We can wait until the new ad is displayed in Search Network to do the comparison, but we don’t know the exact date when the new ad started to be displayed in Search Network. So the logical method is to deactivate the old ad from displaying in Search Network for a fair comparison.

Second, you tick of Ad rotation and, therefore, NOT to show better ads more often.

More about split testing technique at Google Groups Adwords Help forum.

Unit of comparison:

CTR, instead of number of clicks, should be the comparison factor. But how many clicks should be sufficient for a fair comparinson of CTR? This is from the thread by jtara from the Google Groups Adwords Help forum.

30 clicks is a good rule of thumb. A more accurate way is to use statistical confidence. There’s a handy statistical confidence calculator for AdWords here;

http://splittester.com/

You enter the # of clicks and CTR for each of the two ads, and it will calculate a confidence level.

This is the explanation on splittester’s methodology.

Comparing CTR:

After a few days (it really depends on the click popularity of your ads and keywords.) we may start comparing your newly create ads and old ads. From the image below, we should choose a date after the new ads were created. We will have a fair comparison of the effectiveness of the ads.

Creation and variations of ads:

You may find more about creating variations of ads for split testing at the blog by Brad Geddes.

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