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marketing

Adwords are finally giving more insights into their landing page polices… let’s hope this trend continues and they give more insights to all their other polices.

More clarity in AdWords for advertisers affected by landing page policy

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Ad Center’s Quality Score where do we stand?

As we all know Microsoft’s Ad Center introduced their own version of Quality Score very recently. Most advertisers frustratingly saw a massive drop in impression share, clicks and spend. Although Ad Center support can be very helpful and easier to deal with than adwords support, some very common repsonses were coming back that led me to believe they had no idea about their own quality score system. Answers to questions were very vague, and their solutions were not the ones we wanted to hear.

Time will tell while we all get to grips with the new system. One thing is for certain is that Ad center is no easy traffic source that it once was. That said it is still ever increasing in its market share.

It now seems clear that the good old days of buying broad keyword terms in Ad Center are gone. They have adopted a Google style Quality Score algorithm. Annoying? Yes.

But we had better just get used to it the way we did with Google.

How do I get a good quality score and get my campaigns spending like the old days?

It’s fairly simple really, once you you let go of the old ways of running your ad center account.

It’s time for a spring clean!

  • clean up you keyword list, get rid of all none performing keywords. This means keywords with a low ctr and zero clicks. Too many non performing keywords will a have impact on your relevancy. Get rid of broad keywords or at least some of them, turn on exact and phrase match. Focus on high CTR keywords and try and expand upon them.
  • Stuff your landing page with relevant keywords.
  • Have lots and lots and lots of relevant content on you landing page.
  • Ad text. Ad text can always be improved, create lots of ad text variation. Re submitting your ads for approval after completing the above points can improve you campaigns performance and might just get them spending again.

 

 

 

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CHANGE?

Ikea: Embrace Change

Ikea: Embrace Change

CR Blog » Blog Archive » Yes We Can…Sell You Stuff.

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One of the most common tasks when working with Google AdWords PPC is preparing campaigns in Excel ready to be loaded into Google’s AdWords Editor.

We think the following process is the quickest and most effective method for producing these lists in Excel. A lot of the speed comes from learning the keyboard shortcuts for various Excel commands, as typing keyboard shortcuts is faster than clicking around with the mouse.

The overall goal here is to create 1 Excel sheet for a specific campaign or upload.

There are 3 main pieces of data that we have to create:

  1. Keywords
  2. Ad Groups
  3. Ad Text

The following sheet will contain all of these ready to be uploaded.

Start with a list of keywords

Typically, we start with a list of keywords tailored to the product we’re advertising. For this example I’ve used the keyword ‘widgets’ and results from the AdWords Keyword Tool.

Keyword list

Next, organise the keywords into Ad Groups

This is the most labour intensive part, but also the most important! At this stage we categorise and group the keywords into relevant ad groups; combine miss-spellings into correctly name groups and also edit out and delete keywords that are not at all relevant.

If you add in the Excel AutoFilters you can make life a little easier by sorting a re-sorting the keywords into related themes.

Structure Ad Groups

Now, add the search and content bids

If this is a new campaign, you’ll probably want to start by bidding well within in your budget.

In this example, we’re using Ad Group level search and content bids. To create different bids for different ad groups you need to ensure that the bids are present on every line of the Ad Group.

At this stage it may look a little redundant to enter bids for every line in an Ad Group, but as you’ll see later it make sense to fill out the sheet as completely as possible…

Search and content bids

Time to write the ad text

OK, we’re almost half-way through creating a our campaign. Now we’re moving on to the most labour saving part of the process.

Creating individual pieces of ad text for an entire campaign from whithin the AdWords website interface can be extremely labour intensive. Doing this in Excel is a massive time-saver.

Excel copy downThe time saving comes from Excel copy-down feature, this can be used either by copy and pasting cell contents or by using the fill handle in the bottom right hand corner of the selection marquee.

As you can see in the animated illustration on the right you can very quickly create sequential lists of data or you can quickly copy and repeat the same data. When you combine this with formulas and text it is becomes a very powerful way of quickly creating ad text.

Headline

For the headline we may as well keep things simple and use the Ad Group name, we can do this with the formula =A2.

Ad text headline

Description line 1 & 2

In description lines 1 and 2 we are going to use ad copy that is relevant but that can also work accross the whole campaign.

Headlines 1 and 2

Display URL

The display URL will simply be the url of the site.

Display URL

Destination URL

The destination URL is simillar but we like to track everything we do in NetInsight, which means we need to add some tracking parameters to the query string. Using Excel this is nice and easy as we can use a formula to dynamically grab the right data.

Destination URL formula

Now, we’re ready to upload this data to AdWords Editor…

To do this you simply copy and paste the right columns in the right order for the 3 main multi-input panels in AdWords Editor:

Add/ Update Multiple Ad Groups

Add/Update Multiple Ad Groups

Add/ Update Multiple keywords

Add/Update Multiple Keywords

Add/ Update Multiple Ad Text

Add/Update Multiple Ad Text

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