AdWords Tips Posts from the Internet Marketing Blog
AdWords Display Network Banners: 5 Tips for Using Crowdsourced Ad Banner Design
In a few recent posts on how to get more volume on the content network and on getting more leads from PPC, we talked about leveraging the content network to expand AdWords campaigns and attract more prospects via PPC. Most advertisers know how to get started with Google’s search network, and even with creating specific content network campaigns, but an area that often trips up advertisers – particularly new advertisers or those who are looking to expand beyond their initial structures – is building out “display” campaigns using Google AdWords, or creating banner ads for display on the content network.
Many times the stumbling block here is more around designing the creative (banner ads) than around the mechanics of creating a structure for your content network... > Read more
AdWords Quality Score FAQ Continued: 5 More Questions About Quality Score
We received the following questions during our recent webinar, "Improving Quality Score." For more help with understanding and improving AdWords Quality Score, check out these resources:Quality Score Toolkit (this free kit includes a Quality Score worksheet, cheat sheet, white paper, and video)Quality Score FAQImproving Quality Score (webinar recording)Ultimate Guide to Quality Score (15 experts on Quality Score)Do site links improve CTR and Quality Score? According to data from Bigmouth Media, "ads that run with Ad Sitelinks typically result in an average click through rate increase of 30%.
" RKG reported similar results: "To take seasonal shifts out of the picture, I looked at the brand performance since the links were launched, and compared this data to the same time period last year. We... > Read more
Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 5: Dynamic Controls
This is the final post in my series on Re-Creating the AdWords Dashboard in Excel. For the rest of the series, see below: Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 1: The Data Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 2: The Transformation Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 3: Making the Scorecard Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 4: Making the Charts In part four of this series, you learned how to build the charts for the AdWords dashboard.
In this article, I will show you how to make the dashboard dynamic by teaching you how to: Add a dynamic campaign filter. Add a dynamic date-range picker using a Data Validation list. Building the Campaign Filter As you may rec... > Read more
Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 4: Making the Charts
In part three of this series, you learned how to build our dashboard’s scorecard. In this article, I will show you: How to build the charts. How to copy and reuse your charts to save time when building multiple charts. Building the Charts The AdWords Campaign Performance report only has two charts and they allow you to choose from many different available metrics for comparison.
Our dashboard isn’t really limited by space, so we will be creating a chart for each of our KPI’s. Impressions Clicks Cost Conversions CTR CR CPA CPC The best way to do this is to create and format one chart for one KPI, and then we will copy the chart several times for each of the other KPI’s. This technique will save you lots of time, becau... > Read more
Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 3: Making the Scorecard
In part two of this series, you learned how to transform the data we will be using to create our dashboard. In this article, I will show you: How to build the scorecard. How to use conditional formatting. How to use the camera tool. Presentation (the “P” in “DTP”) Again, we are using the DTP framework created by the smart folks at Juice Analytics.
The presentation layer for our exercise consists of all the pieces of our dashboard: Dynamic charts and scorecards Dynamic controls for date ranges and campaign filtering Building dynamic dashboards in Excel can be a challenge, but if you’ve already completed the steps from the first two posts in this series you’ve done the hard part. Now we are ready for the fun stuf... > Read more
Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 2: The Transformation
In Part 1 of this series, you learned how to prepare the data we will be using to create our dashboard. In this article, I will show you: How to set up an Excel pivot table. How to use calculated metrics in a pivot table. How to use Named Ranges in Excel. How to use the OFFSET formula in Excel.
Transformation (The “T” in “DTP”) We are going to use an Excel pivot table for our "transformation" layer in our DTP framework (worksheet). You should already have your data prepared in the "current" worksheet, so you will need to: 1. If you haven’t already, format your data as a table in Excel by highlighting your entire data set in the "current" worksheet and click on "Format as Table" from the "Home"... > Read more
Re-Creating AdWords Campaign Performance Charts in Excel, Part 1: The Data
Interesting things you will learn in this how-to: How to prepare data for year-over-year analysis in Excel How to use the Excel INDEX-MATCH formula How to use the Excel ISNA formula A few weeks ago I showed you how to compare date ranges in AdWords, and then a few days later I came across an article on Search Engine Journal about using the new AdWords dashboard located on the "Home" tab.
In the article the author mentioned how, in the new version of the Home tab, you couldn’t do date range comparison like in the previous version. See the image below: So, I thought it might be interesting to try and recreate this chart and summary in Excel. The finished dashboard will look something like this: For this exercise I will be using a variation of the Ju... > Read more
AdWords Position Preference Bidding Is Retired: What You Need to Know About AdWords Average Position
Google recently announced that they are retiring position preference bidding. Some smart PPC managers had been talking about how position bidding wastes money for some time, and Google's own chief economist had taken great pains to lay out the argument against bidding to position in your attempts to improve your actual sales and costs per sale.
If you're hearing this news now for the first time you might be wondering why people ever used bidding to position as a means of managing bids, what you should know about AdWords average position metric, and of course: whether or not there may be some instances where this data is still useful in your campaign. Why Bid to Position? Obviously with Google sharing some of its own data and Google and top PPC minds decrying the value of the met... > Read more
AdWords Marries Opportunities Tab to Campaign Experiments: What Does it Mean for You?
We've written here about some of the things to be aware of with regard to the AdWords opportunities tab, and we've talked in depth about AdWords Campaign Experiments. AdWords recently announced a new feature that enables advertisers to run campaign experiments against AdWords opportunities. This is a really interesting feature combo -- both from a pure functionality standpoint and in thinking about where AdWords is heading, so let's unpack it.
What Exactly Does Opportunities & Experiments Combining Mean? So how does this play out, exactly? Basically all Google's done (from the end-user perspective anyway) is make the campaign experiments functionality visible and available as you're browsing the opportunities Google is presenting you with: (Funny aside: this is the screenshot from the... > Read more
Comparing Year-Over-Year Search Query Trends
In the past I’ve written extensively about search query mining for negative keywords and new keyword opportunities, and while search query mining is arguably the best use of the search query report, there are other insights worth exploring. Have you ever wondered what search queries were driving your business last year and if they are still contributing this year? Are there new search queries emerging in your market? To answer these questions, you will have to do a year-over-year search query analysis.
While the AdWords interface does allow for date range comparisons down to the keyword level, it loses this functionality at the search term level. We are left with analyzing date range comparisons for search queries in Excel.Getting the right dataThe goal of this analysis is to c... > Read more
