Just opted out of 3 AdWords settings

is that standard practice?

[Tonearm]

I was going over my AdWords campaign settings and noticed 3 settings I didn't like so I opted out of them:

1. Include search partners
(I don't think I've ever seen an AdWords conversion with a non-google.com referrer.)

2. People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location
(I want my ads to appear in the US only.)

3. Include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants

Is it standard practice to opt out of these 3?

[LucidSW]

The search partners usually have lower CTR and lower conversion rates. But not always. It depends. If you notice lower numbers for the search partners, by all means opt out.

For the second, which did you choose instead? I assume "people in my targeted location".

If your keywords are too broad, I'd opt out of the recommended setting. If your keyword is "metal widgets", it means someone in Europe would still be shown your ad if they searched for "metal widgets chicago", if you are targeting the Chicago area or, I believe, the whole US as well.

I already include plurals as keywords. Misspellings I don't. Not unless there's a very large percentage using that misspelling, otherwise I don't think it's worth it. Besides, Google handles that.

As for the setting, must be relatively new since I never noticed it before. I'd leave it to the default setting.

[Tonearm]

Thanks LucidSW. Which domains show up as Google's search partners?

[RhinoFish]

1. use data to to decide - use that Segment button; might surprise you.

2. use data to to decide - use that Dimensions tab; see it, then judge.

3. use data to to decide - it might shift some really good traffic up the match type ladder for you, where it's conversion outcomes below.
some good deets:
[certifiedknowledge.org...]

[webdevfv]

I keep showing up for searches on "product name" and "product names" and yet I've restricted my keyword list to "big product name", "white product name", "blue product name" etc.

I don't want to be shown for the general terms as it becomes more of a broad sweep and cost per conversion is not sustainable.

I've put my search terms in quotes for phrase searching and brackets for exact match searching and yet if I search for "product name" my listing comes up.

I was thinking what the hell is going on, have I lost it, I'm not an 'adwords pro' but I'd like to think I know what I'm doing and then I come across this thread and bingo! This has got to be the answer!

Am I right? Are my listings showing up because I didn't switch OFF the "plurals, misspellings, and other close variants" setting.

Moving the goalposts all the time that Google - surely this doesn't come under a misspelling or close variant. I've specifically asked it to show exact match. What part of exact does Google not understand!

[RhinoFish]

There can be several reasons why this is happening, let's assume it's just keyword matching in play here.

Run a Search terms report, find one of these words coming through, and give us the specific case.

Otherwise...
If you have keywords: "big product name", "white product name", "blue product name"
All phrase matches...
And some exacts like them...
The close variants ON or OFF, either way, is not going to let 'product name' come through.

I bet you either have a Broad, Mod Broad or are running PLAs / Auto Targets, or Display+Search together...

[webdevfv]

You know, I have searched, checked, double checked.

perhaps it isn't the misspellings / close variants - I will do more research (don't want to hijack this thread if my assumption is incorrect) run the report and may start a new thread if I can't get to the bottom.

Anyways, interesting article RhinoFish - although only a few days data it looks like a huge amount of traffic so the early dataset would show what I would assume

= google is out to make more money by showing less relevant (only slightly, but enough all the same) ads.

[RhinoFish]

For clarity, for others...

If a search was for red wigdets...

This search will now go to your higher bid / higher performing "Red Widgets" or [Red Widgets], instead of going to your lower bid / lower performing +Red +Widgets or Red Widgets

I think you'd want to do this, then again you might not use tiered bidding or other tactics that would give you this advantage.

Imo, no matter you think it is, always best to test it.

[Oliver Henniges]

I was going over my AdWords campaign settings and noticed 3 settings I didn't like so I opted out of them:

Me too, and for 3) it also took me three months to even notice about;)

The past days I was investigating my data quite intensively. Switching off that function has unexpectedly dropped sales to almost zero, but this may also be due to holidays.

My question:

Does it make sense at all to try to concisely define keywords (and their landing pages) in our adwords accounts?

This new spelling-mistake+plural-feature is practically completetly uncontrollable. The same holds true for this new product-search-thing, where we can only bid.

Not using analytics, I always found it very very difficult to develop a thorrough analysis of the roi of my adwords-spendings, and these new features make things even worse.

One gets the impression that google wants to take over ALL information-management (from customer-search to checkout), leaving us idiots nothing but doing the packaging and payment (with continuuously decreasing profits due to competition).

"Care for your visitors, all else will follow."

Well, this is what I did for several years, and big daddy brought me many, many new customers. But although I always paid my monthly tribute, for some unknown reason he doesn't seem to like me any more. Both SEO- and adwords-performance continusoulsy dropped over the past two years.

Do you really feel as comfortable as the google programmers think we should feel, because we may so relaxedly leave the logic of sales to them?

[RhinoFish]

"The same holds true for this new product-search-thing, where we can only bid."

You can use negative keywords, filter your feed, segments your bids using multiple data fields that you control, and much more.
:-)

[RhinoFish]

"Not using analytics, I always found it very very difficult to develop a thorrough analysis of the roi of my adwords-spendings"

should i ask the obvious? :-) nope, don't ask it Pat, don't do it. you already know the answer. arrrrr, should i... nope, it's lunch time, just go to lunch. ahhh. i am hungry!

good luck to you!

[Oliver Henniges]

Thx for your reply.

should i ask the obvious?

I suspect this obvious be the counter-question why not to use it, right?

Well, I can't really tell. The sky opened up and a voice told me not to do so....

European markets are definitely different from the US and legal discussions inside the European Commission take a long time, but there is a lot going on there.

But apart from this: Only we as sellers have the knowledge where (landing-page) to best lead our customers in detail for a given keyword. In favour of the best user-experience, which google also claims to have in mind. Designing optimal landingpages deserves as much information as possible about the preceding user-action. What I am missing in the transferred information is mainly:

Which of the keywords defined in my account was responsible for this specific user and how much did i pay for it?

All this information is coded in the gclid-parameter transmitted, but to my knowledge only google knows about the algorithms to re-decode this parameter for the analytics framework.

Maybe I am wrong about this. If you have a link about how to decrypt this parameter, please post it or send me a pm.

[RhinoFish]

sumpin smells stinky, but i digress.

if it's you're own ppc, turn off auto-tagging and manually append value track dynamic params to your ppc links so that you don't have to decode gclid, but can pluck off the utm's.