As you create AdWords ads, always seek to be very targeted rather than general.
I just hunted down a post from another thread that expands the idea a bit, and have pasted it below.
Don't worry, I am plagerizing myself, so it's ok!
...here is my attempt to cover the entire subject of "How to Get More Sales through Adwords" in 25 words or less:Keys:
* Targeted Ad Groups!
* Specific keywords describing your products!
* Ads about same thing as the keywords!
* Send user to highly related page on site!
Hope this helps a bit.
AWA
[webmasterworld.com...]
Keep detailed records because you can't rely on memory.
This is a very interesting point, anallawalla, and we've been chatting about it in the hallways ourselves. In the best of all possible worlds, how would you all like to see it be addressed?
* Provide a change-by-change log searchable by date range?
* Give you the ability to 'take notes' on a purpose-built page within your account?
* Both?
* Other?
Just thinking out loud. If anyone else wants to do the same, I'll compile and forward your comments.
Thanks!
AWA
This would be great for promotions that are run on a limited basis, and then can be paused, but because they are already approved, when you want to rerun the promotion, you don't have to wait for a new approval, but just unpause the ad.
* Provide a change-by-change log searchable by date range?
right on
Shak
Provide a change-by-change log searchable by date range?
Yes this would be a great feature which is very handy when optimizing campaigns, I agree with Shak here!
A change log would be good, including access details (which leads to a request to allow creation of additional access accounts with varying privileges - for multi-user "who changed that!" situations)
I have thousands of keywords to keep tabs on. Therefore it becomes hard to remember if a given keyword was tried before as a broad, phrase or exact match, or not at all. The recent change that displays deleted keywords is a help, but only where you are looking inside an active campaign.
What we do is for another staff member to download the reports from Google into our own db (which I can't access), from which I download a subset into Access on my own PC. I have the keywords trimmed at the left so as to sort correctly.
e.g.
[blue widgets]
"blue widgets"
blue widgets
[red widgets]
"red widgets"
red widgets
do not sort correctly, so I have them trimmed as
blue widgets ]
blue widgets "
blue widgets
red widgets ]
red widgets "
red widgets
Now they will sort correctly. The space at the end is also required. I can look at the trailing " or ] and I know what match type it is.
These data sets are in rows, showing how long they ran, when, the CTR, CPA etc. Looking at the past 12 months, I often see a different result compared to relying on the immediate results, e.g. "Phrase match isn't doing well for me - no sales - so let's try broad". The historic data might show that I had tried broad for 3 months last year and had made the progression to phrase, to exact, then back to phrase, yet phrase was the best performing.
During a bad spell, it is tempting to change a match type out of frustration, even though 12 months of data tells you that your current choice is best.
This is partly why I ended up with a 3-tier set of campaigns designated as "It Ain't Broke, Leave Alone", "Looking Good, Needs Tweaks" and "Everything Else" (I use other labels). This keeps me and my well-meaning CEO from "gefingerpoken" in the tried and tested campaigns. :)
If Google can let me set my own "satisfaction index", e.g. high CTR, high conversion etc, which colours keywords based on my criteria, it will save me from making such mistakes.
You can cut/paste the reports quite nicely into excel. You can also use excel commands to create links, set prices, etc.
use spreadsheets.
Actually I use Excel to extract the data from the internal company database (which has conversion data not available in Google, as we don't sell online but bill the user after a trial period has ended).
But this goes into Access, because I can drive SQL better than VBA to perform a cross-tab query, such as
TRANSFORM Avg(stat.CPS) AS AvgOfCPS
SELECT stat.Normal, stat.Keyword, Avg(stat.CPS) AS [Total Of CPS]
FROM stat
GROUP BY stat.Normal, stat.Keyword
ORDER BY Format([Week Ending],"Short Date")
PIVOT Format([Week Ending],"Short Date");
This example shows me (I export back to Excel for other reasons) at a glance, week-by-week (columns) which match types performed by way of conversions. When looking at a year's worth, I might see higher dollar values for a certain match type (all the phrases lumped together) than another match type.
This kind of analysis might not apply to people who sell off the web site and have nice $ figures to see from within the AdWords interface.
Is there a way in Excel to group rows that contain the same keyword and make a calculation?
