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Posts Tagged ‘AdWords’

What Happened to the Google AdWords “Previous Interface” option?

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

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.

 

  • I was used to it. (lame I know, but still)
  • Less broad. Now I enter a keyword and I get a huge amount of synonyms and I have to go in and uncheck the categories. 
  • Automatic. Hear me out here. So in the old version if you didn’t add anything into the box if would automatically give suggestions on anything that was in your ad group already. SO you could enter some placeholders in Google AdWords Editor, post them, then look for suggestions. Seems like not a big deal, but it saved time, and it felt like a lot of time. If the new interface had this one option, I think I would like it more. 
  • This is a big one: "Don’t show me suggestions for other keywords." This allowed you to quickly get estimated monthly searches for your previously chosen keywords. So we would settle on a set of keywords to recommend to clients, and would then want to go get number of search estimates. 

 

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. 

So my plea to Google: PLEASE bring back the previous interface. 

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Posted in Google, PPC, SEM, SEO | 3 Comments »

AdWords Click Attribution: New PPC Reports Shed Light on Conversion Attribution

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

It has always been tough to get the full picture of what drives potential customers to visit a website. Even with expensive and complex web analytics packages, conversion and click attribution has been difficult. Recently, Google has taken a step toward providing AdWords users more in depth information regarding the impression and click behavior leading up to a conversion.

Within the next several weeks, Google will be rolling out what they call the Search Funnel Reports (beta). In the past, this information was only available to SEM agencies, like Nina Hale Inc, by request from their Google reps. This will allow AdWords users to see which ads and keywords assisted in bringing in conversions. The premise behind these new reports, is that people generally start their search with broad, non-branded queries, and often end with product specific branded queries. So even though the final conversion is only attributed to the last click (the last ad that was clicked on), there were likely other keywords, higher up in the search funnel, which assisted in the conversion.
 
There are two types of reports that are included in this Search Funnel beta – click-assisted conversions and impression-assisted conversions. Here is a brief explanation, of the information that each provides:
  • Click-assisted conversions: someone types in search query A “red shoes”, clicks on the corresponding AdWords ad from Shoe Warehouse, but does not convert. Later, this same person types in search query B “Shoe Warehouse”, clicks through the corresponding AdWords ad and converts. In this situation, the conversion will be attributed to the branded keyword associated with search query B, however, the new report will show a click-assisted conversion for search query A too.
  • Impression-assisted conversions: someone types in search query A “red shoes”, the corresponding AdWords ad is served, the person presumably sees it but does not click through. Later, this same person types in search query B “Shoe Warehouse”, clicks through the corresponding AdWords ad and converts. Like in the previous situation, the conversion will be attributed to search query B, but the new report will also show an impression-assisted conversion for search query A.
 
At Nina Hale, Inc. we have used this information to shed more light on the performance of non-branded campaigns for several of our ecommerce clients. Generally marketers assume branded keywords convert much better than non-branded keywords, but this new information demonstrates we can’t take conversion data at face value. There is much more going on in the search process – the broader non-branded terms are assisting the specific branded terms to convert.
 

 

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Posted in Analytics, Google, PPC | No Comments »