Start The New Year With A PPC Health Check: Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of my PPC Health Check series! I covered account structure, settings, conversion tracking and budgets. Today’s piece will help you understand the areas you need to be checking with regard to keywords, ads and performance.

Reviewing a campaign properly isn’t something that is done in 20 minutes — you’ll need to spend hours checking these things over in detail, depending on how large your account is. Please keep this in mind when checking over your own accounts.

As a further point on ad extensions, below is a great example of an ad that almost has it all (for the adventure holiday company Alpine Elements). Social extensions and seller reviews are missing, but it’s making use of some great image extensions that show the core areas of their business: call extensions, communication extensions, site links and site link descriptions.

If only all ads could take up this much space! You’ll mostly only be able to achieve this on your brand terms as they’ll always be in high positions, but it’s worth trying to add all these extensions to all your campaigns.


Here’s an example of an ad with seller reviews and social extensions. Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? These kind of extensions really make a brand stand out as trustworthy and reliable, and will almost certainly be leading more people to click on one advert over another.



This PPC Health Check series has just covered the main areas you should be looking into — but there are also many other charts you could run for your account to determine whether it’s still in a healthy state or not with regard to performance. This post is primarily focused on paid search campaigns; you will need to look at some additional factors when analyzing campaigns on the Google Display Network.

While this series has focused on settings and the fundamentals of any campaign, it’s important to note that to improve performance in your campaign’s year-on-year, you need to be taking advantage of the many new campaign types that are available such as dynamic search ads, product listing ads, remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) and dynamic remarketing. These will all help you gain additional market share in the year ahead.

Features within AdWords change frequently so it’s important to sign up to regular AdWords newsletters (and watch this column) to be kept updated on anything new that might be useful for your account. If you stay stagnant for too long you’ll be left behind in this industry and end up miles behind your competitors; regular knowledge updating and health checks are a necessity!

A Former Googler’s Routine For AdWords Management

It’s been seven months since we launched Optmyzr’s first tool  at SMX Advanced in Seattle – the Quality Score Tracker – and we’ve been busy adding tools, reports and optimizations since then. Now, one of the most common questions we get is when to use various optimizations — and, of course, these apply no matter what tools you’re using.

There are plenty of daily tweaks to make in any AdWords account, but what are some of the optimizations we do on a regular schedule? While there’s no one right answer for every account, I’ll share some of my thoughts about what to do and when to do it to keep an account in great shape.

Do These At Least Quarterly

AdWords changes all the time — in the past year, we saw one of the bigger changes in recent memory with the forced migration to Enhanced Campaigns. AdWords also frequently launches new features that are less dramatic than Enhanced Campaigns but that can still have a huge impact on how your ads perform. Make sure you’re not missing out on any of these. Here are a few recent examples:

Mobile Bid Modifiers

Now that mobile and desktop ads are all served from a single campaign, are you using mobile bid modifiers for maximum performance?

Be sure you’re looking at how your ads are performing on different devices so you’re not losing money on mobile devices or tablets. With bid modifiers, you can bid lower for mobile clicks and make sure your ROI is similar to that on desktop. Try to avoid bidding your mobile clicks down 100% because that’s not a viable long-term strategy in most cases.

It reminds me of when we launched the Google Display Network and some advertisers were convinced this was a complete waste of money and turned it off entirely. Smart advertisers figured out how to set the right bids, set the right targeting and make this a very profitable part of their business.

I think there’s no such thing as a bad click, just a click that’s too expensive. So make sure your bids are set correctly to take advantage of the growing number of mobile searches. If you don’t do something with them, your competitors will.

AdWords Scripts
I talk about these ad nauseum, but I believe this is the biggest untapped opportunity for most advertisers. The ability to create custom reports, automate your secret sauce and become a more efficient marketer offers a huge advantage to advertisers that are not afraid of a little code (or copy-and-pasting code written by others).

Use AdWords Scripts to automate reports and optimizations you do frequently.

Conversion Tracking
It continues to amaze me how many accounts I come across that spend a lot of money but are not tracking conversions properly. If you’re not yet tracking conversions, figure out a way to start doing this immediately. Either that or go flush some money down the toilet… I’m serious, if you’re advertising online and not tracking conversions, you’ve got a big problem that you need to fix quickly.

If your conversions happen offline, you can now import this with Conversion Import, a tool Google launched in September.

And, thanks to Call Extensions being counted as conversions since November, it’s easier than ever to track calls as conversions without using any third-party tools.

Get A Better Ad Rank With Ad Extensions
The ad ranking formula changed in October: in addition to Quality Score and the bid, the performance of ad extensions is now also a factor. This makes a lot of sense since Quality Score is mostly a measure of CTR, and according to Google, ad extensions like sitelinks improve CTR of ads by 30% on average. So, by factoring the CTR of an extension into the ad ranking formula, advertisers that have added CTR boosting extensions get rewarded with a higher rank for their ads.

Use ad extensions to improve your CTR and get a better rank for your ad.

New ad extensions get launched periodically, so make sure you’ve taken a look at all the ones that are available to you. For example, are you using review extensions yet? They let you enhance your ad with a short snippet from a third-party review of your company. Have you updated your sitelinks with the two additional lines of text you’re now allowed to include? Have you considered setting different sitelinks for different ad groups now that sitelinks are no longer set at just the campaign level?

As you can see, there are always new features in AdWords — so be sure to do at least a quarterly review to ensure you’re not falling behind your competitors.

Do These At Least Monthly

Ad Text Cleanup
Ad text testing may be the most neglected account management task… not surprisingly so, since it’s the hardest to do correctly when using just the AdWords interface. While it’s easy to create new ads (have you tried Ready Ads yet for display ads?), it’s hard to keep track of what you’re testing and how the experiments are going. Even if you set ad rotation to let Google show the best performing ads more often, you end up with a slew of ads that don’t get served much but are still active in your account.

If you’re looking to clean up ads that are not performing well, doing the math to find those ads that are underperforming with at least a 95% confidence is not trivial. We have just launched a preview of a new report in Optmyzr that helps identify underperforming ads. Brad Geddes also has a new tool called adAlysis that helps with ad text optimization. And of course, there’s boostCTR, a company I advise, that’s been in the ad optimization space for several years.

The ad on the left has a 99% probability of beating the ad on the right. Go through your account periodically to look for the losers and delete them.

The next challenge with ad text optimization is finding winning ad text elements. You’re probably using similar lines across many ad groups; but, AdWords doesn’t provide any reporting that aggregates the performance of all headlines, description lines and display URLs.

For that, I wrote an AdWords Script that spits out a Google Sheet with aggregated performance data for every line I use in my ads. I can easily see if the line “Free Shipping” or “Next Day Delivery” has a better CTR. Armed with that data, I can quickly generate a bunch of new ad variations using the better performing text; then, next month, I can use one of the tools to clean up ads that are underperforming and do another round of tests.

Keyword Cleanup

While we are all buying keywords from Google, we should really be thinking about managing queries rather than managing keywords. The reason is that most keywords are not exact matches, so they are getting clicks and impressions from a variety of related queries.

I wrote in my last article that broad match keywords are liars. What you ideally want to do is take tight control over queries that you know convert or are critical to your business. By adding these as exact match keywords, you’ll have more certainty over their rank, cost and messaging.

One of the issues with broad match keywords is that they tend to rank worse for a query than another keyword that is an exact match to the query. That’s because in the case where the query and keyword exactly match, the advertiser has told Google they definitely want to have their ad show — when the keyword is a broad match, there is some uncertainty, and Google typically will rank that lower due to the uncertainty factor.

Add New Keywords From The Search Terms Report
At least once a month, check the search terms report and add converting queries as keywords to the account. You can add them to the ad group that generated the impression or you can add them to a new ad group, or even a special campaign for converting keywords.

When you put the new keyword by itself as an exact match into a new ad group, you’re tightly controlling the messaging in your ad for that one query. When you place the new ad group into a campaign with other converting keywords, you’re able to allocate a separate budget to converting keywords and ideally set that budget to be unconstrained.

Find Negative Keywords In The Long Tail Of Queries
At the same time, find negative themes from your search terms report. Do this by taking the keyword list and running it through a word cloud tool. That way, terms that appear more frequently will be more noticeable and you’ll have a better way to see what words from the long-tail represent a potentially significant volume of irrelevant clicks.

Deduplicate Keywords
When you’re actively adding new keywords to the account, you may find yourself accidentally creating duplicates. This is not a terrible thing, but it does complicate account management. So be sure to clean up duplicate keywords at least monthly. The AdWords Editor will help you find these, and we have a tool that takes it a step further and suggests the best one to keep based on QS, Conversions, CTR and other metrics.

Sculpt Your Account To Drive Queries To The Right Ad Group
One optimization we really like is to look through the search terms report for situations where Google shows a different ad than the one we had written for a particular query. This happens quite frequently in most accounts and reduces our control over the landing page, ad messaging and bids; so, we add negative exact match keywords to limit this behavior at least once a month.

Bid Cleanup
Make sure bids are sensible and your bid management strategy hasn’t just killed off your best keyword without telling you.

If you’re managing bids manually, look for converting keywords where you may be bidding slightly below the first page bid estimate or where your impression share is too low.
Clean up keywords that have spent too much and aren’t converting, especially if they aren’t exact matches.

Do These At Least Daily

There are plenty of tweaks to make in accounts every day. How do you know what tweaks to make? It’s best to have a clear set of reports and metrics by which you’re judging things and give yourself a big enough time window for the analysis. That way, you can steer your account in a consistent direction without making too many changes too fast. It’s like steering a car, you want to look far enough ahead and steer to the middle of the lane you want to be in rather than bouncing from one line to the other by looking just in front of the car’s hood.

For example, if you take too short a view on conversions, you may be missing the fact that some conversions take several days to happen (you can check this in Search Funnels in your AdWords account) and your bid adjustments could set bids lower than ideal.

Look For Anomalies
What I do look for are daily anomalies, or items in the account that are completely off track. For example, are there keywords that are suddenly spending way more than usual and converting poorly? Are there ad groups that show consistently declining CTR? The AdWords engineers wrote some AdWords Scripts that will notify you when some of these things happen.

Analyze Y-O-Y Data
I also like to compare last year’s top-performers to the top-performers now. If there are differences, try to understand why so that you can react appropriately.

Conclusion

So, those are some thoughts on how to manage an AdWords account for success. Stay on top of the performance every day and get into the routine of doing some of the standard optimizations on a weekly or monthly schedule, and do at least a quarterly audit to make sure you’re taking advantage of all the latest capabilities of the system.

AdWords Bid Management And Account Structure Mistakes To Avoid

On my one-year anniversary of working as an AdWords practitioner instead of a Googler, Brad Geddes interviewed me about Quality Score for his WebmasterRadio.fm show, Marketing Nirvana. He asked for my thoughts on AdWords now that I’m a user rather than someone building it, and I thought that was a great question and one worth covering in this month’s column.

I’ve always had plenty to say about the most common mistakes advertisers make, but now that I’m auditing accounts more in-depth and managing a few myself, there are some new mistakes I’ve seen that I think are worth sharing so that you can avoid them in your own accounts.

Bid Management Pitfalls

Handing the reins of bid management to Google or another third party has risks — but perhaps not for the reason I so often hear, which is that Google could use the information to their own advantage. I believe Google wants to use the information to give advertisers the results they want, and I am a big advocate of automated bid management because doing lots of repetitive math and keeping track of lots of variables is something computers are simply better at than your average account manager.

Automating bids is especially useful when you’re working with large accounts; any time you have more than a couple hundred keywords, managing all these manually is just too slow and tedious. But relinquishing all control to the algorithms can have unintended consequences, and it’s useful to understand the risks so you can decide what’s right for your account.

Monitor Your Top Keywords’ Bids Closely

An advertiser I was working with noticed that they lost pretty much all conversions on the one keyword that perfectly describes their business. This happened several months ago, and because they were spending so much time managing long-tail keywords, the drop-off on their money keyword initially went unnoticed.

Be careful about what automated bid management does to the bids of your top keywords. Here a keyword was bid down from the first page.

Only much later (during my audit) did they learn that this keyword had seen a week of poor conversion performance following a landing page redesign. The algorithm noticed it, too, and dropped the bid 60% — effectively taking them off the first page of results. They noticed the conversion rate decrease and quickly fixed the landing pages, but they never looked at resetting the bids for their keywords, so it continued to linger on page 2 of the results. Had the bid algorithm given the keyword another chance, it would have been restored to the first page of results and they wouldn’t have lost a ton of sales.

The takeaway here is that it makes sense to manage head keywords differently than long tail keywords. Even if you put them on automated bidding, you must monitor these keywords closely so that any change in performance will trigger a warning and you can investigate.

AdWords could make this much easier if they allowed advertisers to add charts of keyword-level detail to the interface. Until that time, we have an AdWords Script that builds a nifty little AdWords dashboard in Google Sheets.

Build a dashboard for any campaigns, ad groups or keywords in your AdWords account in minutes using an AdWords Script.

Changing Bids Can Change Which Keyword Is Served

The second issue with bid management is that your carefully calculated bids may not be the ones Google actually uses. Because of the vagaries of how Google selects the keyword from your account that matches the query, it’s possible that lowering the bid on a poorly performing keyword simply shifts its clicks to another keyword that still has a higher bid. This is exactly why we built the Traffic Sculptor – it helps find when Google gives an impression to a different keyword than what you intended. This way, you can be sure Google is serving the ad for your selected keyword, using its bid, ad text and carefully selected landing page.

Budget Constrained Campaigns May Not Work With Automated Bids

A third pitfall I’ve noticed with managed bids is that they may not always play well with budget constrained campaigns. On several occasions, I’ve seen that a campaign that uses bid automation depletes its budget too early in the day, even when ad serving is set to standard (meaning that ads are supposed to be shown throughout the day). Obviously, when the budget runs out by 10:00 a.m. and no conversions happen, it creates a potential vicious cycle — the bid management tool will eventually reduce bids too much and the campaign may entirely miss serving ads at the times of day when they would have performed best.

Account Structure Issues

Another common problem I’ve noticed is with account structure and keyword match types. I still come across accounts that combine display and search in a single campaign and accounts that have hundreds of keywords in an ad group — both not best practices in AdWords.

But one account structure issue that’s a bit more subtle (and that I hadn’t given much thought until this year) is that if you’re deploying a lot of broad match keywords in an account, it’s challenging to see trends or answer questions about why results change. That can make it hard to know if your strategy is panning out. As much as I like broad match keywords for their ability to help discover what users are really typing into the search box, they can make life for advertisers pretty hard….

Broad Match Keywords Are Liars

We’ve all heard that CPCs change based on seasonality or because Google introduces things like Enhanced Campaigns. But knowing how this impacts your account is trickier than just taking a look at the average CPC. The reason is that most advertisers use some degree of broad match keywords in their accounts, and stats for broad match keywords are averages that include data from each of the hundreds of queries that matched the broad keyword. We’ve all heard the adage that averages lie, and broad match stats are averages that obscure what’s really happening.

For example, when you change the bid for a broad match keyword, you’re changing the query mix because it becomes eligible for a different set of queries. The different queries have different CTRs, conversion rates, etc., so it quickly becomes a nightmare to figure out why a keyword’s performance has changed. Was it a competitor, a change Google made, an optimization you did, or simply the fact that your query mix changed? If your results are dropping and you can’t pinpoint the reason, it’s hard to correct the course. So unless you’re analyzing exact match keywords, you’ll have to dig very deep into the search terms report to try and come up with an answer.

To further complicate things, even exact match keywords may see sudden changes in performance because of the aforementioned issue where Google may shift the clicks to another, similar keyword with a better rank. In this case, the best way to understand what’s happening is to run a query report rather than a keyword report.