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!
