It’s well worth downloading & has a couple of funky new features (new videos coming soon to current clients)

Sorting Columns in AdWords Editor

If you’ve always been annoyed that you had to export your campaigns to Excel in order to be able to properly sort the various columns, be annoyed no more. Now you can choose up to 3 columns to sort by (eg by AdGroup, then by Clicks – to help find ads that need editing)

CSV Import to AdWords Editor

It’s always been easy to paste your changes into AdWords Editor, but you could never import a CSV file – now you can.

This video from the AdWords team will show you how… you don’t even have to make sure the column names are in the right order, Google will help figure this out for you – nice.

Selective Downloading

This has probably been the biggest timesaver around our office with the new version. Just update the campaigns you want to work on, not the entire account. It’s also simple to just download ‘active’ campaigns.

Conversion Metrics

You’ve seen them in the new interface, now you have em in the Editor too.

“many per click” and “one per click” columns are now available – more on these another time.

Convinced? Go here to download the latest version of AdWords Editor & as always, drop us a note if you want more video tutorials on how to use this fantastic, time-saving tool.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be expanding on this list & telling you how to solve every one – it’s part of a new free product we’re putting together.

Have we left any out? Did you make any other mistakes when you first started using AdWords?

• Bidding too High
• Only using 1 Campaign
• Only using 1 AdGroup
• Bidding too Low
• Too Few Keywords
• Too many Keywords in each AdGroup
• Not checking Quality Scores for Keywords
• Not Testing Different Ads
• Not testing different URLs
• Allowing Google to control which Ads are shown
• Not using the target Keywords in the Ad
• A broken link!
• Not testing the Landing Page
• Ignoring Geographical targeting
• No Negative Keywords
• Ads Running on Content & Search in the same Campaign
• Ignoring Content Network completely
• Not tracking results on the Content Network sites
• Copying Campaigns to Content & not changing bids
• Not Using Conversion Tracking
• Not using any kind of Tracking
• Sending all Visitors to the Homepage
• Not using Keyword Matching Options
• Using DKI without Conversion Tracking
• Not offering anything Unique in the Ad Copy
• Not checking to see what the competition is advertising
• Not using Image Ads
• Not growing the keyword list
• Failing to find out exactly what visitors were searching for

The Search Network (google.com.au, google.com) & the partner network (ask.com, aol etc) get most of the airtime in the SEM game. But there’s a third network that you ned to master to get the most out of your pay per click advertising: The Google Content Network

Rather than showing text ads next to the search results, for example on google.com.au, the content ads show up next to relevant content on ‘other sites’ around the internet. Which other sites? Well there are millions of them. Blogs, social media sites, portals, directories, newspaper sites even next to emails in gmail that contain (what Google thinks) are relevant words.

Can this be useful to you? You bet! Let’s count the ways:

1. Many Google advertisers don’t use the content network at all, most of those that do often do so by mistake (the default setting is to show your search ads across the content network). This means that only a fraction of advertisers are using this powerful medium to it’s full potential & yet Google makes about 50% of it’s revenue from these ads!
2. You can display more than just text ads. Image ads are available in a wide range of sizes (just be sure to get the size right) & again hardly any advertisers use these! Many of those square, rectangle, skyscraper & even plain old banner ads you see on sites like myspace, facebook & others are put there by google advertisers (& it’s very easy to setup). You can also test animated ads, video ads & gadget ads (look out for a huge increase in these in 2009)
3. You don’t have to rely on Google to figure out which sites are relevant for your ads – you can specify a list of sites that you choose. Better yet, you can specify the content that needs to be on those sites before your ads show (by choosing a short list of keywords). So you might place ads on facebook that only appear when the phrases “weight loss” or “lose weight” are used on a page… nobody else gets to see your ad, so it’s still fairly targeted. You might even write those ads to make a special offer just to facebook users & send them to a facebook specific landing page… just an idea
4. It’s generally cheaper than the Search Network (but not always). Text ads are generally 50-80% cheaper on the content network. Image ads might be a little cheaper, but usually not by a lot.
5. You can split test ads just as you do on the search network. Yep, even the image ads. For example, you’re about to launch a new billboard campaign for the first time (or an insert in a local paper, or a poster in your physical store) & your graphic designer gives you 4 styles to choose from. Which one’s the best? Not which is your favourite, but which will get the highest ROI for your marketing dollar? Run 4 image ads for a couple of weeks, letting Google do the hard work of showing them evenly across the web. Sit back & choose the winner!
6. Choose the pricing model that you prefer. You can choose either cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
7. You can use the very useful (ok essential) placement performance report to find out which sites are working & which ones get lots of impressions but no clicks – better yet manage based on conversions not just clicks (hint: you can easily stop showing ads on these sites in just a few clicks). Read my post on how to run the placement performance report.
8. You can drill down to specific areas within large sites. myspace & about.com are both huge sites. Instead of running your ads across the whole site, you can choose which niche you want to target,
9. Negative Keywords are just as important in Content but use them wisely. You’ll probably want to edit the list of negative keywords you’re using on Search & cut this down a bit – otherwise you can severely limit the number of impressions you’ll get.
10. You can be a lot more creative in the cross selling opportunities your product or service gives you. It would be nearly impossible to advertise say a site selling whiteboards by bidding on terms like ‘small business office’ on search. There’s just too much competition & the lack of relevance between the keyword & the ad would really hurt your Quality Score for that term. On content – if your ad is good enough – those ads will be shown to a much wider audience.
11. The Content Network is great for affiliate marketing! Very few affiliates are using this avenue effectively – especially image ads – giving you amazing opportunities to dominate your chosen niche.
12. Often the more creative (even salesy) ads will work very well, more than might be the case on Search. Experiment with your copy, ham it up, tone it down – see what works in your market

Convinced? Ok, so how do you set this up?

First – always (always!) use a different campaign to your search targeted ads (in fact you’ll want separate campaigns for your content text ads & image ads, but more on that another day).

Feel free to use AdWords Editor to create a copy of your existing search campaign – but check:

• Delete all keyword bids. It’s only the AdGroup bid that counts on content. Start with bids about 70-80% of the search bids & test from there.
• Edit your list of negative keywords – you’ll want some, but not too many.
• Consider rearranging your groups of keywords – you want enough keywords in a group so that Google can work out what you’re selling, but not so many that they become irrelevant to the ad itself (hint: Shelley Ellis tells us that google will only look at the first 50 keywords in a group – so don’t bother having more than that). I find that 5-15 phrase are usually best
• There are mixed opinions about this… but I believe it’s best to delete your broad & exact match keywords from your group & just leave the phrase match keywords. Why? Well on content, phrase & exact are going to be basically the same thing – it’s the phrase that will be used on a page of content. And whilst the broad match type will get you more impressions it should be tested & used with caution. It will greatly increase the scope of your campaign, but probably not the relevance. Watch that cost per conversion number carefully!
• check your geo-targeting settings. As with search I’m a firm believer in (starting off at least) just targeting one country per campaign. Maybe for you it’s the States, or Australia or just Ireland. But test your ‘most likely to succeed’ country first, then expand to others.
• consider adding a 2nd campaign with image ads sooner rather than later – lots of low-hanging fruit out there!

Any of this not make sense to you? Would a video of me setting up campaigns for the content network make this easier to understand? Drop me a line & I’ll see what WebSavvy can do to help.

Good luck out there!

What does this mean for you?

High Quality & Relevance will be even more important than before. You need to check your Quality Score ratings & maybe deleted any Keywords that don’t get at least 7/10. (maybe even higher). High Quality means you can leapfrog over Ads paying more money than you! Quality is key to a really great ROI.
How do you get those Quality Scores higher for the keywords that remain (or for those that you need to bid on, but that aren’t yet performing)?

Basic SEO can help a lot… do you have:

• plain english URLs that relate to the keyword (you’re not sending people to the homepage are you?)
• unique title & description tags that match the keywords
• H1 & H2 tags that match the keywords in the AdGroup AND ideally match the promise made in the Ad itself
• the right keyword density (around 3%)
• professional design
• inbound & outbound links – with relevant anchor text
• links to more content from the Landing Page… not a one-page ‘are you in or out?’ page. provide great content!

& of course in the account itself:

• just a few, closely related keywords in each AdGroup
• at least 2 Ads that include those keywords for each group
• only use keywords directly related to your business – at least until you have great CTR numbers & a history with Google

PS – Using AdWords Editor can give you a quick way to get a feel for the Quality Score numbers for all keywords at a glance. Just import your account & look at the min bid column. It hasn’t changed to the new ‘fist page minimum’ bid yet & can still be used as a guide to just how ‘poor’, ‘ok’ or ‘great’ your keywords are.

Or, if you prefer, just start AdWords Editor on your computer & choose the ‘backup then update’ option when prompted.

Remember you can use this great (free) tool to:

• quickly copy entire campaigns (maybe you want separate campaigns for search & content networks, or for different countries)
• easily search & replace keywords across multiple AdGroups & Campaigns
• instantly adjust bid prices for thousands of keywords in just a few seconds

Some of the new changes are:

Keyword Opportunities – another way to let Google help you generate more keywords & (you’ll love this) a mix ‘n’ match feature called Keyword Multiplier that allows you to combine lists of words for more phrase ideas.

Some much needed View improvements – making it easier to resize/choose columns & date ranges (try autosize!)
Copy the ‘shell’ of a campaign or group – make copies without the contents … sounds weird, try it!

Better import (& export) options – the HTML version is much better & you can now choose specific AdGroups to export to csv (hey – it’s useful for some of us…)
It’s a great tool – grab your free copy today.

Also when you upgrade from an older version of AdWords Editor, all of your current unposted changes (including comments) will transer to the new version as well.

If you’re not already using AdWords Editor to manage your account, give it a try

It allows you more control over the content network, by adjusting your content bids based on the sites where your ads will show.

Sounds like a great feature & it should help improve cost per lead/sale.

The only slightly worrying thing is the addition of a new tab in the AdGroup view that appears to overly encourage advertisers to change their campaign settings & add content. Please don’t do this. If you’re going to use the content network, you MUST setup a new campaign that ONLY shows ads on content & not combine them with your search traffic.

Yes you can use content bids to make sure you don’t pay too much – but if you combine both sets of traffic into one campaign it’s just too easy to get confused by the stats & make the wrong decisions (although you can now separate these two very different sets of numbers).

By far the best thing to do is use AdWords Editor to make an instant copy of your campaign. Just change the name, the network settings & (if you like) the bids.. and you’re done. An exact copy of the search campaign you already know is working. All your adgroups, keywords, ads & negatives in exactly the right place. Easy!

Now start using the placement performance report & adjust as necessary.Get rid of underperforming placements (gmail is often one of them) & bid higher on the ones that work.

If you’re running Google Ads on the Content Network then here’s a really useful report for you to run. Once you log in, go to the ‘Reports’ tab in your AdWords account

1. Under ‘report type’ choose ‘Placement Performance’

2. Settings as follows:

Level of Detail = Campaign
Domain or URL = Domain
View = The largest date range you can (at least one month, preferably a quarter)
Date Range = this will be set automatically for you based on View above
Campaigns = manually select each campaign that you have. It’ll be easier to read if you produce a new report for each campaign (ie if you have a different content campaign for different countries)

3. Advanced Settings: no need to change anything here

4. Take advantage of Google’s automation. Email this report to you (with a .csv (for excel) attachment) each month

Now open up the csv file in excel (or whatever you use), delete the first 3 lines, and if you really want this to be easy, setup a quick filter.

Now you can slice & dice your data any way you like. You can see for instance:

• domains where your cost/conversion is too high – see below for next steps
• domains where your CTR is very low (possibly YouTube) that might hurt your overall campaign stats
• domains on which you have very high impressions – which doesn’t matter, but might give you a clue as to other types of sites that you should be on

Now that you have a list of domains on which the performance of your Ads is hurting you (costing too much, not converting, terrible CTR) you can go back to your AdWords account & list these domains in the ‘Site Exclusion’ list for that campaign.

This will stop your Ads showing on those domains. Increases your overall CTR, which (slightly) reduces the CPC & of course, best of all, your cost per conversion drops (sometimes quite dramatically)

Any questions or comments? Would a video help to explain this? Just let me know below.

So it’s time to create some more videos for you to show the power & simplicity of this essential tool. Really – if you have an AdWords account, please download this tool today, it will save you hours & hours of your precious time.

So far the videos are:

Finding & Replacing Keywords Using AdWords Editor

How to (Quickly) Move Keywords between AdGroups

I’d love your feedback & suggestions for future topics. More basic? More advanced? I’ll record one this week on the advanced search feature & how a client is using that … it’s the 80/20 rule on steroids!

Have fun with it & please contact me with your suggestion – nothing is too silly – if you have a question, then you can guarantee others do too.

Maybe it’s to correct an error, or maybe you’d like to be able to cut & paste a group of words, then change them – let’s look at an example.

Image you had a group of ‘dog’ keywords. Your AdGroup was well organised, the keywords working well. Now you want to create a new group with similar keywords, but for cats, not dogs. To do this in AdWords is a real pain. Using AdWords Editor takes a few seconds.

So in today’s video I’ll walk you through an example: how I easily corrected a keyword that I’d misspelt during the account setup. It’s just like using Microsoft Word, you can find & replace text in seconds. You can even use it to change your URLs – not just the keywords. Very handy.

Full screen video (make take a few seconds to load): Finding & Replacing Keywords Using AdWords Editor