Google Adwords Updates – Better Than A Stick In The Eye

Recently Google has gone out of its way to make usability updates to the Adwords interface. If you are a frequent user of Adwords, you know that this is uncommon. More often than not, either no updates are made for months, or Google acts like a nanny dealing with a 3-year-old drawing pictures in sharpie on the living room wall. This means that mostly Google just likes taking away things I use every day. Like custom shapes in geo-targeting. I’m not saying it was a bad move, Google, but it certainly wasn’t to increase usability. And if I have to add cities in one at a time every time I need to target a custom area, I may make like an unemployed, middle-class white girl with dreadlocks, and occupy your corporate office.

On a positive note, the updates Google has released within the last month have actually made the interface easier to use, which is a fun and interesting surprise.

1. Location Targeting – Ok, so yes, they took away the most useful tool they had in specific geo-targeting, and yes this ticks me off beyond belief due to the cluster-F of errors my campaigns went through after that change rolled out. How can you make it up to me, Google? Well a new car would be nice, but I will be momentarily satisfied with the following update to location targeting.

In days of yore, you can to whip out a dictionary and your thesis paper from Philosophy 201 to figure out what Google meant when it asked if you wanted to target based on location or search intent. The wording was confusing, to say the least, and I was never really sure if I picked the right answer. If chosen incorrectly, my clients in Philadelphia could be getting phone calls from Columbus, OH, and this makes me look like a schmuck. I really hate looking like a schmuck. So Google thought, “hey, you know what would help people use our amazing advertising platform? Wording that makes SENSE!”. I applaud you, Google. But just this once, so don’t let it go to your head.

2. Display Advertising – Google snuck a mini-update in there without me noticing. I stumbled upon this little gem while checking on a client’s managed placements, and then immediately became enraged that only one client had this update. I have one client who has 20 display campaigns. TWENTY. That is a lot of campaigns spending money without any way of optimizing for keywords.

In this newest update, I can view what keywords are causing my ads to show, and within the same Display Network tab, I can look at the managed placements that are receiving those clicks. Brilliant! If you don’t think that this will change the way you manage display campaigns, well, you’re a moron. It’s the one thing your campaign needed, you know, KEYWORDS. I am so happy I might cry.

3. Quality Scores – the most recent update seems to be more in-depth thought on the topic of quality scores. Nevermind the fact that the factors that determine a quality score are vague and inexplicable. According to Google, much like a wafer-thin fashion model, you’ve either got it, or you don’t. This update allows Google more opportunities to tell you whether or not you’ve got “it”.

apparently I shock Google with my above average click-through-rates.

I cant be the only search marketer in the world completely frustrated with Google’s quality scores. Or maybe I am.

I will continue to hope that future updates in Adwords are as forward thinking as the previous three. Maybe they will come up with an acceptable and reasonable alternative to custom-shape geo-targeting (You see what I did there? It’s called bitterness). Until then Google, I’ve got my eye (just one) on you.

Google Split Testing – NOT!

Recently, while perusing the performance of a client, who shall for my own job security remain nameless, I noticed that all of a sudden quite a few of my text ads were disapproved in Google Search. What the sweet Jolly Green Giant is going on here, I thought. I hovered my cursor over the thought bubble next to my Disapproved status and it very helpfully told me that all the display URLs within the ad group must be the same.

Identical, like creepy little PPC minions.

Fair enough, I thought, and I went to look through my active ads. To my not-at-all-surprise, all my active ads had identical display URLs. I figured it probably was an older disapproval and maybe I just needed to make a small edit and resubmit it. I can always go back later and put the display URL back the way I want it, all properly capitalized and looking adorable and useful. Then I clicked on the ads tab at the campaign level, and lo and behold, ALL the ad groups had disapproved ads. Mother of Pearl! I went through and edited every single one of those suckers until after about ten minutes I realized that I have edited myself into a circle, and have started re-editing ads that within the last few minutes have been disapproved AGAIN.

This looks like a job for Annoying Girl! Annoying Girl calls Adwords Support hotline (which is 866-2-GOOGLE, for any of you that do not have the secret weapon) and complains about the hypocrisy inherent within the system at length to the (I’m sure very lovely) girl on the other end of the phone. Despite my gratitude that she spoke perfectly clear and easily understandable English, the fact remains that there are built-in flaws within the Adwords system, and if I cared half as much about politics as I do about getting Google to improve this program, I would have mastered the art of making protest signs and have an arrest record the length of my leg.

Give me split testing or give me DEATH!

Here is what I was told by said lovely girl, and here is why I still don’t want to make friends with her: The display URL of all the ads that are paused and DELETED within an ad group will affect the approval of the active ads. Therefore, if you decided that you didn’t like the display URL you used last year, and wanted to revamp your company image, you would have to create an entirely new ad group to change it. Even so much as a change from mygreatcompany.com/rock-on to something more like MyGreatCompany.com will get your ads disapproved.

The whole rule about identical display URLs, to me, goes against the entire point of having multiple ads. Why can I split test everything under the sun, but not my display URLs? I know some of you are thinking that this really shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. No, seriously it is! How can I explain the statistical reasoning behind a “best practices” of building adwords ads to a client when I cant even show them the difference in performance between their www.reallylongandobnoxiousurl.com/subdomain and my super sweet ShortURL.com/Yea. Maybe this is the lament of just one species of marketer. But I say if I deleted something, that means I no longer own it, and like wiping a misdemeanor off a minor’s record, you should not be able to hold past performance against me.

In order to remedy this situation, I had to go through all paused ads and edit them, thus losing my historical data. To find the data that once was, I have to go through deleted ads and guess which one it was. Google, if you could possibly, I would really love it if you could make my job a little harder. Kthnx. So, I’m sorry Very Lovely Adwords girl, whose name I cannot remember, I don’t think I will be adding you as a friend on Facebook, and please tell your employer I think they smell.

Google updates AdWords Quality Score Algorithm to target weak landing pages

For the past several months Google has been testing a new algorithm change that would place higher importance on the optimization of PPC landing pages. Latin America including Portugal, Spain and South America have been serving as Google’s testing grounds while the search company makes final tweaks. The algorithm change will be rolled out to the US market within the next couple of weeks.

Google AdWords’ quality score algorithm already takes into account landing pages quality among other factors like ad relevance, click through rates and general account performance. By implementing optimized landing pages AdWords customers will be able to obtain a higher quality score when entering the auction, allowing them to be served at a higher position at a lower click through rate than poorly optimized landing pages. On the same hand weak landing pages will most likely suffer a lower quality score that would raise the cost per click and any performance metrics beyond the initial bid (ie. Cost per conversion).

The director of product management on Google’s ad quality team, Jonathan Alferness, confirmed the change and stated that “We’ve seen that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads but the landing pages are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction”. The algorithm change would allow advertisers with highly relevant landing pages to perform more competitively with top performing advertisers. This is a huge incentive for AdWords advertisers to more closely align landing page keywords and content with the phrases of which they are bidding on in the auction. Google hopes that the change to the quality score algorithm will result in a more relevant and positive experience for users and help clean up poorly optimized landing pages at the same time.

For those who have spent any amount of time in AdWords, quality score can make or break a campaign. It can be the difference of paying $1 per click or $10 per click! Quality score optimization is a major part of account management and requires a strong SEM partner to help guide advertisers though account setup and landing page optimization. There is tons of great information on Google’s quality score and how it is calculated. “What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance – Choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re target and also a good experience for the end users”, says Alferness.

Just like any Google Algorithm update you should expect some volatility within the auction. PPC advertisers should be aware of the update and be extra alert to account changes. Google has said that things should settle down in couple of weeks as the new update goes live.