Default Campaign Settings In AdWords — The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Fellow SEM experts, how many times has this happened to you? A newbie joins your company (or a company with which your SEM agency is working) and is convinced that he is an SEM master. He’s read a few SEM books, attended a conference or two, and gone through the AdWords tutorials, after all. It’s just keywords and text ads!

In a worst-case scenario, this genius has enough confidence to convince folks higher up in the organization that he can truly make positive improvements to the path of the company’s SEM fortunes and suddenly has some control over the campaigns. My favorite example of this scenario happened last year when a self-proclaimed “searchologist” did a re-org of a B2B AdWords campaign that resulted in an 85% conversion rate — a nice increase over the 3% conversion rate the campaigns had seen for the prior three years.

When I pointed out that this was likely due to a misplaced conversion pixel on the landing page and that this 85% “conversion rate” was more likely indicative of a 15% bounce rate, the searchologist shot back saying that it was the new account structure that was driving these incredible results. As with many things in life, SEM is easy to do, but hard to do well. This axiom is proven to me every day by neophytes who have anointed themselves searchologists, as in the case above.

To demonstrate how dangerous it is to start an AdWords campaign without a lot of deep knowledge, I recently set up a new AdWords campaign and looked at the default settings that AdWords recommends. As you’ll see in the following deep-dive, starting a campaign on AdWords recommended settings can easily lead you to a world of hurt.

Search & Display Or Search & Destroy?

The default campaign type when starting a new AdWords campaign is “Search Network with Display Select,” and the default setting is “standard” versus “all features.” Sticking with the default setting of “standard” here can cause advertisers to miss out on all sorts of opportunities to fine-tune their PPC campaigns, as you’ll see throughout this column.

Display Select is a recent addition to the AdWords world; it pushes your text ads onto parts of the Google Display Network (GDN). GDN can be a very powerful network if managed properly — we have many clients that see 30-40% of their acquisitions coming from GDN — but it can also be a cesspool of irrelevant and occasionally fraudulent sites. (Example: I recently evaluated a B2B telephony site that was spending thousands of dollars a month on a website that had articles about getting cat urine out of carpets!)
Moreover, we’ve found that the conversion rate on banner ads on GDN is astronomically higher than the conversion rate of text ads, so this “display select” offering (which involves text ads only) is a double-whammy for newbie AdWords users.

Devices: All For One, One For All

Regardless of whether you choose “standard” or “all features,” you are defaulted into all devices when you set up your campaign:

Of course, since the advent of Enhanced Campaigns, we are all defaulted into all devices. What’s missing here is the ability to exclude mobile devices by bidding at -100%. Assuming that new AdWords advertisers are the least likely to have mobile-optimized sites, running full-throttle on mobile is likely going to be pretty painful.

Location: Pakistanis Searching For “Los Angeles Burger King”

The next option is location targeting. The default setting (for US customers) goes to US and Canada, which makes sense to me. The advanced options (which I have highlighted in yellow in the screenshot) are missing for “standard” users:

I’ve found a surprisingly large variance in performance between “people in my targeted location” and “people searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location.” In general, folks outside the US perform much more poorly than people in the US (due to shipping costs or the local nature of a product or service). I generally recommend that you exclude these “geo intent” keywords unless you have data that suggest otherwise.

Extensions: PLAs MIA

Ad extension options are unchecked by default in the “standard” edition; they also exclude several more advanced options (yellow represents the excluded options):

Again, in the spirit of simplicity, I totally understand why Google has unchecked these and excluded some choices. That said, an advertiser that at a minimum doesn’t have sitelinks is going to be at a huge disadvantage for competitive terms, especially now that Google has tweaked its algorithm to factor ad extensions into ranking.
Additionally, for e-commerce businesses, not even showing product listing ads (PLAs) as an option is a pretty big deal. For many merchants, PLAs perform better than text ads, and Google appears to be giving PLAs more and more prominence.

Day Parting: All AdWords, All The Time

“Standard” setting users are not shown day-parting options, whereas the “all features” users at least get the ability to click and open a section on day-parting:

Depending on the business, day-parting can be very important. For example, brick-and-mortar businesses that do not have online storefronts are usually better off shutting off ads when their store is closed. B2B companies see conversion rates drop over the weekends.
Moreover, the options shown above aren’t even the most advanced choices — power users can also make bid adjustments by time of day, as opposed to just on/off functionality.

Ad Rotation: CTR FTW!

“Standard” users don’t get to choose ad rotation preferences. “All features” users can open up a hidden field to make their choice, although the “recommended” and default choice is to optimize for CTR:

My preference is to optimize for a combination of CTR and conversion rate, but given that this isn’t a choice, I’d rather chose to optimization for conversion rate.

Keyword Matching: Close Only Counts In Horseshoes & Hand Grenades

The last “all features”-only option allows advertisers to opt-out of exact and phrase near-match:

I haven’t seen a huge impact one way or the other from this feature, but when in doubt, I prefer to have more control over my keywords, so I opt out.

The Average Man Thinks He Isn’t

As I’ve said numerous times in this article, I don’t fault Google for making choices in the name of simplicity. Amongst self-serve online advertising platforms, Google has the best training and FAQs and the easiest-to-use interface. All that being said, the things that are missing from the default campaign settings in AdWords are the nuances that often make or break an account.
And, this ultimately goes back to my original point: people who think they know AdWords but actually don’t will get burned badly by simply following AdWords’ recommended settings. If you think an expert is expensive, wait until you see what a novice will cost you!