I’m not going to be all that sad when Yahoo Search Marketing goes away, mainly because the interface is such a pain to use. But they have a great feature which is fantastic for big brands that get poached on thier trademarks all the time.
A small logo on the search ads that says “official site.” Hello! I wish Google Adwords would have this.
When Google came out for a visit last month we got hints that they might be ready to kill the "previous interface" option for finding new keywords in Google AdWords. And today (tonight we think) it seems that they did finally. There is a hint of a new backend that might be better called "nostradamo" that is linked from the new keyword interface, but it’s broken right now.
Why I liked the old version better.
There are some things I do like: The ability to drop different keywords into different ad groups. That’s nice.
And of course this comes at a bad time. There are three of us tonight working on deadlines, and we’re all sending sad and frustrated IM’s back and forth about it. You can still access the open version that isn’t tied to your account. But that means that you can’t save them into the ad group. Also the keyword tool in Editor is still working, but that works only 1 keyword at a time.
Please leave comments (legitimate – we’ll ruthlessly delete spam.)
We had one of those problems that most SEM agencies dream of having. We have clients who are running display ads on the Google Content Network whose view through conversions are in the hundreds a month. We love to report on this number, but have to add the caveat that a certain % of those conversions are actually counted elsewhere in their other search campaigns. Faces turn from happy to puzzled in a manner of seconds.
So when our Google reps were in town visiting us last week, we mentioned this problem. They looked over their shoulders to see if anybody was watching before saying, in a whisper: "This doesn’t leave this room, but we are looking into a feature that de-duplicates view-through conversions."
And sure enough, the next week we ran across this blog post on Google that talks about this exact feature.
Many of you know that view-through conversions result when users see but don’t click on a display ad. They may come back later and convert through a search ad, which would count the conversion twice. Which makes reporting nearly impossible and leads to puzzled faces.
By enabling the de-duplication feature, you exclude view-through conversions that are found in both the Search and Content networks!
Do note that the feature isn’t retroactive, and that going forward, the number of view-through conversions will drop. In the first few days of testing, we saw a 35% decrease in the number of reported view-through conversions. But what we are left with is basically 65% more conversions that we can accurately report back to our clients.
We can’t wait to see their faces.
Interesting thing I saw today. I knew about a video beta in Google PPC, but I only just saw it today in the form of watching a trailer. I saw this ad for the Babies Movie (I’ve sat through the preview twice now and it looks insufferable). When I expanded the box it started playing right away. I also think it’s interesting that they’re sending people to the fan page on Facebook. But it makes a lot of sense to me. If you get people to be fans, you can continue that conversation with them (and then as an agency, I can target people who like it – for my own clients).
Wow, how fabulous is this screen shot of a bunch of our clients Google Analytics accounts? Almost everyone is way up, and a lot of those are from Search – both organic and paid. Everyone’s been working hard for our clients and it shows!
]
I have have to drop in a comment about how much I love the Google AdWords Editor for PPC management. The reason is because they are always adding small improvements that display a constant awareness of how SEM campaigns are built, managed and optimized. Case in point: to optimize well, it’s a good idea to run search query reports that show you the keywords that people actually used that resulted in a click to the site (and hence a charge). These often reveal irrelevant keywords so you need to add them to a "negative" list to filter them out of the keywords you pay for your ads to show on. Any-who, when adding these new keywords, you have to add them to each campaign. Sometimes you want to add them indiviudally to campaigns or adgroups, but sometimes they apply to the whole account. In the past I would copy and paste to each campaign. But a small enhancement makes it easier to add across campaigns.
AdWords Editor is filled with all these small considerations, some of which make it much easier, and others you just save a few minutes. But it shows a remarkable attention to all those little things that make optimization easier. Now after my little love note, do you think they’ll wear my letter jacket?
Google has a new bid estimator feature that is pretty cool. Reminds me of the old Yahoo days when you knew exactly how much each competitor was bidding on keywords.To find it: when you are adjusting individual bids, there is a tiny squiggly line next to some of the keywords. When you click on it, it will give you an estimate of how many impressions you’ll get depending on your bid. Yes, there are elements of "the best answer is to bid higher!" However, there is some nice directional advice, and often you’ll realize that you really don’t have to spend a huge amount to be #2 and get almost the same impressions.
