So I am currently bothering about what and how to log, as well as how to organize my website's usability for adwords customers.
Just like google, I prefer a scalable approach, i.e. I want to automate as much as possible and am planning to upload hundreds if not thousands of keyword-combinations. However, I am not sure whether I already discovered the necessary interfaces in the adwords program.
As far as I yet found out, I may upload a txt- or xml-sheet containing the relevant keywords (and maximum bids) for a given campaign. But I have to design the displayed ads for each campaign "by hand". Is that right?
In other words: I may start a campaign named "widgetgroup", and also a list of relevant search-queries like "green widgets", "red widgets" etc (I may either upload a file with this list or use the keyword-suggestion-tool as webinterface). The target-URL of my website, however, is defined within the set of text-ads, which I may also define for this particular campaign. But if I understood the adwords-structure correctly, I have no means to define a specific target-URL for each search-query (unless I start a separate campaign on it). Instead, the set of ads, which I defiine for that campaign, is displayed randomly. Is that right?
But for reasons of usability and efficiency, I want to present my visitor excactly what he had been looking for, i.e. "green widgets" (and only green widgets), if this was his search query.
Please point me to the correct threads in here or the relevant help-pages, if I overlooked these.
As a workaround I thought of the following:
If adwords visitors come from the natural SERPS-pages, the original search query is preserved in the referer-URL by the normal 'q='-needle. As for the googlesyndication-partners, it is also preserved in a bit more complicated manner within the 'ref='-needle of the referer string. So at least in principle, I might try to identify this original query and trigger a relevant search-query in my internal shop-system. But before I start such an intensive programming-task, I have a couple of questions:
1) Is there any easier way to perform this within the regular adwords program? Note that I already do have a bookmarkable URL-structure in my internal search-funtion with a syntax like e.g.
...myshop?q=green%20widgets
which might function as an idempotent target-URL of each defined adwords-keyword-combination.
2) Some people here reported that some adwords-customers come without any referrrer-string at all. If you already implementd a similar function as I have in mind: What do you present to these visitors? I might define a specific "emergency-exit" for each campaign using ...myshop?c=thiscampaign or so in case my system detects an empty or irregular referer.
3) Does it really make sense to implement such a complicated evaluation of the referer string? It is probably a great security risk if not 100% accurately programmed, and it may also be the case that google changes its referer-syntax unnoticed, which could result in a complete breakdown of the adwords revenues (e.g. the domain is called pagead2.googlesyndication.com in the referer string today, but what will it be named next year?)
4) if I design such a specific adwords-GET-cgi, may I set the robots tag to "noindex" in order to avoid duplicate-content-issues with my regular search-function, or will this lead to make the pages unparseable for the adwords-bots?
5) Do you log the referer-URLs of the googlesyndication-partners and if so, why?
Gosh, what a long post.
Any help is well appreciated.
If you want every keyword to deliver the visitor to a highly targeted landing page simply put the destination URL at the keyword level instead of the text ad level. This eliminates the whole url parameter aspect and a lot of confusion.
[edited by: skibum at 6:06 am (utc) on Mar. 19, 2008]
[edit reason] removed link drop [/edit]
The editor offers an export function for its data. Can I also import a modified csv-file? Or can I upload such a file diretly to the adwords account via web-interface? I'd like to add a number of keywords from my products-database together with a calculated target URL.
Yes, indeed, I found that import function. Today i wrote a little script in order to datamine my products database. For all products related to the broader term of my first campaign i extracted about 600 two-word-search-phrases and defined a decided target-URLs for each. The import and upload via adwords editor seemed to work fine so far, at least for the keywords, the max-ppc-values, keyword type and status as well as the destination url.
However:
1) I also defined some different headlines and description lines and this interface seems to have ignored them (it may be the case that there was a mistake in my syntax, but I don't think so).
2) Some short tests with a few niche-keyword-phrases (exactly matching what I had defined) revealed zero results. My adds simply did not show up, for some there was no adwords-ad displayed at all, so competing money was NOT the reason. Instead I found the normal listings of my longtail in the ordinary serps. I thought adwords would perform better than that.
How long will it take until the changes I made to my adwords account will have any effect on the ads displayed, relative to specific search-queries?
For me it makes no sense to get into competition with ebay and those larger players for the broader search terms if they pay maximum bids of 30 cents and more. If anything, I want to target the long-tail and use adwords in order to a) get my shop found quicker for newly listed products and b) get seen at all with all terms where I do not perform well in the organic serps.
Even for new campaigns I have noticed higher impressions & lower cpc's a month or so after it is launched. Google looks at account & campaign history in addition to many other factors like quality score, competition, etc before it decides where to show your ads & what cpc you pay.
This is again my experience, so it may not be representative.
Thx for the info. How long, what would you say? A few days? If this status persists, adwords is a dead end for me.
I think the more niche the key-phrases, the higher the quality?(provided the terms show up on the target-page, which definietly IS the case)
I also set the type to "exact match". What about case-sensitivity in this respect? I uploaded purely lower-case-phrases for ALL terms.
I'm beginning to understand why my wife so often complains I should't be so impatient.
Exact match - case senstivity - I'm 99% sure it shouldnt matter.
From my experience & seems to corroborated by most people is that Adwords likes the slow & steady approach.
