Suggested use:

• Launch AdWords Editor and open your Account
• Launch the Tool – keyboard: ALT-T-O (menu: Tools | Keyword Opportunities (Beta))
• Uncheck the box for “Include Additional Items”
• Set Match Type to “Exact”
• Input your seed keyword, and click the “Get Keywords” Button
• Select & drag/drop keywords into targeted AdGroups

A Brief History Of The Tool

Google released the Keyword Opportunities (Beta) with Editor 6.5 nearly 5 years ago, as previously reported by Barry Schwartz.

The current version of the tool is quite slick and integrated with Editor. Google’s help on the Keyword Opportunities Tool covers the main Keyword Expansion part of the tool, as well as the other tabs available from Keyword Opportunities. More detailed usage instructions, tips and tricks follow.

Uncheck The Box For “Include Additional Items”

The tool does a nice job generating keywords tightly related to the seed keyword. Check this box if you want to cast a wider net; but, I found that it generates a wide array of results that overlap with a more organized approach seeding more specific keywords.

If you do check the box, “additional items” appear below the more-targeted result set, so you can give it a try and see for yourself what works for you.

The tool automatically dedupes against your account; It will not suggest keywords that you already have in your account. One gotcha; it checks against your live account, not the local copy. I suggest you Post changes between runs of the tool, so you don’t end up with duplicate keywords to clean up.

Set Match Type To “Exact”

I do this beforehand so I don’t accidentally add all of these keywords on Broad Match. Best practices in our shop dictate that we push toward Exact Match, with limited use of Broad Match to find new search queries we can add on Exact Match. Even then, we usually emphasize Modified Broad Match.

You may, of course, add the keywords with whatever Match Type works for your account. You can also add negatives (instead of keywords), if you find something you don’t want to match for.

Input Your Seed Keyword

Try to be specific enough that you know you can write targeted ads for the results, but broad enough that you are not needlessly limiting your results. The results tend to be pretty tightly targeted around this keyword.

Select & Drag/Drop Keywords Into Targeted AdGroups

This is where the tool really excels. You can filter, select, multi-select, and drag/drop keywords over to your existing AdGroups. Keywords that have already been added are marked with a [+] so you can sort by that and more easily find the keywords that have not yet been added.

You can also filter results, which is really helpful for wading through long lists and getting the keywords into targeted AdGroups. The tool also lets you create a new Campaign or AdGroup shell.

You may find it useful to sort descending by Global Monthly Searches, at least initially. This should help prioritize the value of longer result sets. This deep workflow integration really helps this tool shine because you don’t have to task-switch between tools to complete the job at hand.

You may find it useful to sort-descending by Global Monthly Searches. This should help prioritize the value of longer result sets. One of the best practices we generally recommend to Clients is to push toward exact match keywords. The increased control and precision often do wonderful things for account performance.

However, our aggressive search-query harvesting and keyword expansions don’t always catch everything. This tool helps us add even more keywords on Exact Match, and it is built right in to Editor.

In this post, we will use some Excel VBA code that will help us work back and forth between this format and the regular, two column format recognized by AdWords Editor. As an example, we can add all of our existing broad match keywords as exact match so we can refine our bidding control on them. Let’s get started.

This posting format originated as a means of uploading keywords in bulk through the web interface without having to provide 2 columns for keyword and match type. So, rather than having to input something like:

red bike    broad
blue bike   phrase
fast bike   phrase
tiny bike   exact

We can instead simply encode the match type using special punctuation, like this:

red bike
"blue bike"
"fast bike"
[tiny bike]

In this style, Broad Match keywords are left as-is (no special punctuation). Note that this is the default when simply pasting a list of keywords. Be careful with Broad Match!). Broad Match Modified keywords get a “+” in front of each modified keyword (I usually tag all of them by default, but your usage may vary. Phrase Match keywords get surrounded by double-quotes. Exact Match Keywords get surrounded by brackets.

Basically, like this:

Broad Match
+Broad +Match +Modified
"Phrase Match"
[Exact Match]

Here is the current google help on the topic: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2497836&from=6100&rd=1

To see for yourself, login to your AdWords account, navigate to the Keywords tab (hopefully, with some keywords of various match types), and click the download button.

Once you download and open in Excel, you should see something like this:

From here, if you wanted to work with those keywords and make a bulk sheet to upload to AdWords Editor, you would have to translate from that Power Posting format to regular Bulk Sheet Format. Of course, if you want to copy/paste into the web interface, you can do so, but you might find that somewhat limiting. For example, you can’t paste into multiple Campaigns or AdGroups, delete things, etc.

Let’s see if we can translate those characters into something meaningful without having to do a bunch of manual find-and-replace operations.

Here is some Excel VBA code that will do the trick:

  Option Explicit

  'COPYRIGHT: 2011 Stone Temple Consulting 
(http://www.stonetemple.com)
  'AUTHOR: Crosby Grant - cgrant@stonetemple.com
  'LICENSE: Provided under Creative Commons BY-NC license.
  'Details here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
  'Essentially: You may share or remix, 
but you must attribute the original author
(e.g.: include this entire block of text) 
and you may not use this work for commercial purposes 
(e.g.: sell it or its output).
  'WARRANTY: This code is distributed as-is, with no warranty.
  'USAGE INFORMATION: 
http://searchengineland.com/ppc-shop-tools-the-permutator-99135
  'CONTRIBUTIONS:
Code and design contributions graciously accepted.
Please contact the author directly.

  Public Function GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword

(ByVal kwd As String) As String
    Dim mt As String
    mt = ""

    If (0 = Len(kwd)) Then
      GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword = ""
      Exit Function
    Else
      If ("-" = Left(kwd, 1)) Then
        If (1 < Len(kwd)) Then
          mt = "Negative "
          kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 1)
        End If
      End If
      If ("[" = Left(kwd, 1) And "]" = Right(kwd, 1)) Then
        kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 2)
        GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword = mt + "Exact"
        Exit Function
      ElseIf ("""" = Left(kwd, 1) And """" = Right(kwd, 1)) Then
        kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 2)
        GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword = mt + "Phrase"
        Exit Function
      Else
        GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword = mt + "Broad"
        Exit Function
      End If
    End If
  End Function

  Public Function GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword
(ByVal kwd As String) As String
    If (0 = Len(kwd)) Then
      GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword = ""
      Exit Function
    Else
      If ("-" = Left(kwd, 1)) Then
        If (1 < Len(kwd)) Then
          kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 1)
        End If
      End If
      If ("[" = Left(kwd, 1) And "]" = Right(kwd, 1)) Then
        kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 2)
        GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword = kwd
        Exit Function
      ElseIf ("""" = Left(kwd, 1) And """" = Right(kwd, 1)) Then
        kwd = Mid(kwd, 2, Len(kwd) - 2)
        GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword = kwd
        Exit Function
      Else
        GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword = kwd
        Exit Function
      End If
    End If
  End Function

  Public Function GetPowerPostKeyword
(ByVal kwd As String, ByVal mt As String)
    mt = Replace(LCase(mt), " match", "")
    Select Case mt
      Case "broad"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = kwd
      Case "negative broad"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = "-" & kwd
      Case "phrase"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = """" & kwd & """"
      Case "negative phrase"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = "-""" & kwd & """"
      Case "exact"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = "[" & kwd & "]"
      Case "negative exact"
        GetPowerPostKeyword = "-[" & kwd & "]"
    End Select
  End Function

If you are unfamiliar with working with VBA, here is the short version of how to make use of this:

• Open your worksheet in Excel.
• ALT-F11 (opens the VBA coding window)
• Copy/Paste the above code into the editor
• ALT-F11 (switches back to Excel)
• Save-As a Macro-Enabled Workbook
• Use the functions like any other Excel Function

Here is a nice resource to help get you started: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ee814737.aspx

Let’s get to that keyword download sheet then, shall we?

First, let’s rename the Keyword column to “Keyword.Old”. Then, insert a new column before column C, and call it “Keyword”. In this column, in cell C3, type the following formula, and then fill-down all the rows in your report.

=GetKeywordFromPowerPostKeyword($B3)

Your report should look similar to this:

Now, add insert a new column before column D, and call it “Match Type”. In this column, in cell D3, enter the following:

=GetMatchTypeFromPowerPostKeyword($B3)

Your report should now look something like this:

From here, let’s say we want to add all of our existing broad match keywords as exact match so we can refine our bidding control on them. In Excel, add a Filter to your report (ALT-A-T). Then filter the Match Type column to only show Broad.

Now, you have a few options from here, but one simple method would be to type “Exact” into the Match Type column, and copy that down for all the rows you are seeing, then copy to the clipboard.

Next, open up AdWords Editor and Add/Update Multiple Keywords (CTRL-SHIFT-K). Editor will automatically ignore the “Keyword.Old” column (and any other columns related to metrics, etc.).

Good luck out there.

This article demonstrates some useful ways to use regular expressions with PPC, by adding new dimensions to our typical Account/Campaign/AdGroup hierarchy of data. Another use for regular expressions would be manipulating URLs – perhaps in a future article…

First, a quick note: Getting up to speed with regular expressions in general can be a daunting adventure. There are a lot of resources online for getting started - http://www.regular-expressions.info is a good one.

While this article assumes a working knowledge of Regular expressions, the examples do work without your needing to know anything about them.

Enriching Data With Campaign & AdGroup Names

It is sometimes useful in PPC to group data together in more ways than the standard hierarchy of Account, Campaign, AdGroup, etc.

You might want to create a report that more naturally represents your business’ products, or that aggregates keyword data in unconventional ways, perhaps to help with bidding. If you are familiar with data warehousing concepts, and if you will permit me the rough comparison, we are enriching our data with dimensions.

As an example, consider a bike store that has 3 different Campaigns selling Mountain Bikes, a few selling Road Bikes, some Brand Campaigns, and some others. It could be useful to alter a standard Campaign Performance report that has one row per campaign, to instead have one row for each product, brand, and other.

Similarly, you could aggregate based on Account or AdGroup names, provided you plan ahead and use a naming convention that will prove useful.

Use A Strong Naming Convention

In order to use this technique, use a strong naming convention that is readily parsed by regular expressions. The examples above use my recommended naming convention, which basically looks like this:

{Dimension}({Value}), e.g.: Product(Road Bike)

That is: a {Dimension} name that we will use to name the new dimension in our data, followed by a {Value} for each of the different values in that dimension, wrapped in parenthesis. One implied rule is that {Value} should not contain any parenthesis.

In practice, avoiding any special characters is a good idea, regardless.

Considering our bicycle vendor, let’s look at those Campaign Names:

• Product(Road Bike)
• Product(Road Bike) Distribution(Content)
• Product(Mountain Bike)
• Product(Mountain Bike) Distribution(Content)
• Brand(ACME Bikes)
• Product(Other)
• …

We have defined 3 new dimensions:

• Product
• Brand
• Distribution

Create additional dimensions by adding them to your Campaign naming convention. Device(Mobile) might be a good one, or perhaps geography, as in State(CA), etc.

The “Product” dimension currently has 3 members:

• Road Bike
• Mountain Bike
• Other

Likewise, each of the other dimensions has its members. Add members by simply filling in the new value in a campaign. In this example, there might also be: Product(Tire), Product(Helmet), etc.

You could of course use something other than parenthesis to delimit your {Member} values, and you could use something other than a space to separate {Dimension}({Member}) pairs.

Some examples come to mind:

• product=road bike&distribution=content
• product:road bike|distribution:content
• etc.

Personally, I find the Product(Road Bike) convention to be easily human-readable, and suitably robust to meet our needs for machine-parsing with regular expressions.

Now that we have rigorously-named Campaigns and AdGroups, how do we make use of that in a robust and scalable way? The simple way is to use filter functionality.

Using Filter Functionality With Our New Naming Convention

With your new naming convention in place, you can immediately start using filters in your reporting. This works online in the web UI, as well as with Excel, and probably with whatever reporting tool you are already using.

By carefully using your delimiters, you can get exactly what you want. For example, to get all Campaigns that sell products, filter for “Product(” (without the quotes).

Notice I included the delimiter – the opening parenthesis. This will help avoid inadvertently including something unexpected, like Brand(ACME Products).

Using filters is nice, but what about robust reporting, or combining multiple dimensions in creative ways? We are going to use regular expressions, of course.

Extracting Dimensions With Regular Expressions

Here is a regular expression we can use to extract a specific dimension’s member-value from our recommended naming convention:

Product\(([^\)]+)\)

Or, more generally, replace {Dimension} with the name of the dimension in the following:

{Dimension}\(([^\)]+)\)

Note: These examples use the Microsoft regular expression implementation. Other conventions, as with PERL, POSIX, etc., will of course require adjustments to get the expected results.

Now let’s try to use that in Excel. Wait, Excel doesn’t do regular expressions…

Teach Excel How To Use Regular Expressions

The easiest way – use these macros can be downloaded in a working example spreadsheet here: PPC Tools – Regular Expressions Examples.

Excel does not ship with any regular expression functionality, but it is added easily enough through macros.

Here is one working version:

Function RegExReplace(ReplaceIn, _
        ReplaceWhat As String, ReplaceWith As String)
    #If Not LateBind Then
      Dim re As RegExp
      Set re = New RegExp
    #Else
      Dim re As Object
      Set re = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
    #End If
    re.Pattern = ReplaceWhat
    re.Global = True
    RegExReplace = re.Replace(ReplaceIn, ReplaceWith)
End Function

Function RegExFind(FindIn, FindWhat As String, Optional Match As
Integer = 0,
Optional SubMatch As Integer = 0, _ Optional IgnoreCase As
Boolean = False)
    Dim i As Long
    Dim rslt As String

    #If Not LateBind Then
    Dim re As RegExp, allMatches As MatchCollection, aMatch As Match
    Set re = New RegExp

    #Else
      Dim re As Object, allMatches As Object, aMatch As Object
      Set re = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
    #End If
    re.Pattern = FindWhat
    re.IgnoreCase = IgnoreCase
    re.Global = True
    Set allMatches = re.Execute(FindIn)
    Set aMatch = allMatches(Match)
    RegExFind = aMatch.SubMatches(SubMatch)
End Function

To add these to an Excel file, here are the quick steps:

• Be sure you have a macro-enabled file. (hint: Save As Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook)
• Alt-F11 (this opens the VBA coding window)
• Paste the macros into a module (the default window should work).
• Alt-F11 (this should bring you back to regular Excel

Save

You may also want to deal with setting Excel options to permit macros to run next time you open Excel. Here are good instructions from Microsoft for how to Enable or Disable macros in Office files.

Extract Dimensions & Members Using Regular Expressions

Now we can ask Excel to help us extract those member names.

Here is the magic formula (Assuming Campaign Name is in column A, and Dimension Name is the column B header, in row 10)

=IFERROR(regexfind($A11,B$10&"\(([^\)]+)\)"),"")

The formula looks in the column header to get the dimension name, then looks in the Campaign Name to get the member value. If it doesn’t find anything, it returns a blank. Simply add the dimension name to each successive column, and copy/paste the formula.

Pivot On Your New Dimensions

Here is the culmination of our efforts. We can now pull together a report that aggregates based on Product (rather than just Campaign Name, for example).

What tips do you have to utilize Excel to better manage your search marketing efforts?

As an Excel add-in, it offers powerful API-based access to data, right in the familiar Excel environment. Version 8 includes some usability improvements, better Excel integration, improved keyword suggestions and insights, and perhaps most importantly – a new template-based system with community support.

My Take: It seems like you can’t throw a cat without hitting a new adCenter feature these days. (No animals were harmed in testing this theory.) I just finished a getting started article on the old version of MAI last month! We ended that article hoping for community templates and mobile device data – we got it!

adCenter is alone in offering this type of marketplace data in a desktop software tool. Google AdWords doesn’t offer one. Their related offerings are Web-based, and adCenter offers additional features and data that simply is not available on the AdWords network.

With MAI, we can build business processes around automated spreadsheets, which could greatly improve the adoption of the adCenter marketing platform by making it easier to get great, actionable data.

I had a chance to catch up with Amit Goel, a Product Manager on the team responsible for MAI.

“One of the key values of Microsoft Ad Intelligence is its ability to operate seamlessly in Excel which of course enables you to benefit from the excel-based features commonly used by SEMs. Plus, we are really excited to introduce the templates to our advertisers. We hope they can benefit from this upgrade by using templates to save time manual tasks. Increasing our Advertisers’ Return on Time Spent is a big push for us.”

My Take: I’ve been working in Excel-based tools doing PPC for almost a decade now. I eagerly anticipate the day when these tools make my account-specific data available. But the current functionality gives us lots to explore. For example, I can imagine automating the expansion of core keywords from limited input, as with starting up a new account.

Amit Goel: Currently MAI is account agnostic. In the future we will be including advertiser context i.e. account specific data in MAI. Our goal is to have advertisers perform keyword research based on their account information and directly sync their data to adCenter platform from Excel.”

My Take: Sweet!

Templates & Community Support

The new version of MAI supports templates. You can save your reports to a template and develop your own custom, repeatable keyword research workflow.

Join the online discussion at Microsoft Advertising Intelligence 8.0 (MAI 8.0): Templates and Best Practices

My Take: The Community Templates have so much potential. I’m eagerly looking forward to what we come up with as a community. One of the templates that is available today from the AdCenter team is a Twitter template that helps Advertisers find keywords from tweets happening near a specific location. The mashup potential is really great!

Now, With Mobile!

The latest version of MAI includes device-based data. Advertisers can customize results to include any combination of “Desktops and laptops,” “Smart phones” and “Non-smart phones.”

My Take: If you haven’t already heard, mobile is coming. At this point in the game, PPC tools need to be Device-Aware, and it is good to see adCenter catching the details.

Quick Tour

• Download Microsoft Advertising Intelligence – a Free downloadable add-in for Excel
• Note: v8 does not update the previous version. Uninstall the old version using Windows&squot; Add/Remove Programs Control Panel.)
• The new version, v8, will auto-update going forward.
• Once installed, launch Excel. Notice the new “Ad Intelligence 8.0″ tab with a ribbon bar full of tools!

Keyword Suggestions

• Webpage Keywords: Generate keywords from a list of URLs.

• Aggregate Keywords: This is the core research tool. Feed it a list and get keyword suggestions.

• Searches With Your Keyword: Submit a list, and get back search queries that contain your keyword.

• Associated Keywords: This is the Keyword Ninja – find related keywords that other Advertisers are bidding on. (This is not SpyFu.com. They won’t share who, and you can’t filter the results to spy on your competitors.)

• Related Searches: Bing “Related Searches” results.

Keyword Analysis: Traffic & Performance

• Traffic: Search Volume

• Keyword Categories: Generates a list of keywords along with their Business Categories

• Search-User Location: Top locations where searches originated from (configure a country)

• Age Group & Gender: Break out Search Volume by Age & Gender over the last 30 days

• Keyword Performance: Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPC, etc. (tip: default is aggregate, try configuring a position.)

• Bid Estimation: Bid suggestions and expected performance (tip: configure position and match type).

Configure The Output

Each tool on the ribbon has configurable output. The Excel integration is tight here. Advertisers can point the settings to read from specific cells, such as the keywords to feed into the tool, the match types to use, the positions to use for performance data, etc.

API Access

All of the features exposed through MAI in Excel are also available directly through the Ad Intelligence API Service. There is a tremendous opportunity to build data-rich tool sets from these features, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this post.

Quota

In previous versions, it was possible to reach Quota and get blocked from access for the rest of the day. This has been explicitly addressed in this version should not be an issue.

Resources

• Download Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

In general, if you have a high SOV, you have an opportunity to expand into related terms and if you have a low SOV, you have an opportunity to improve performance on your existing terms. Let’s take a look at some recommended actions to take based on the new SOV reports.

My Take: I remember when we had to do PPC with absolutely zero data about search volume, trends, etc. We have come a long way now that we have detailed Impression Share data within our PPC accounts. This is a welcome addition to the onslaught of features adCenter has been adding to the platform over the past few months.

While adCenter is a bit behind AdWords on timing in general, they are also pushing the envelope when they do launch similar features. With this feature, they increase the fidelity of the reports compared to AdWords, by adding more detail about the reasons behind lost SOV. I get really excited when I think about what this pace of innovation looks like after they are done catching up to AdWords…

Overview: Share Of Voice

adCenter Share of Voice (SOV) metrics are live now. You can get overall SOV down to the ad group level, and they’ll tell you what percentage of your SOV is lost to either: budget, rank, bid, keyword relevance, or landing page relevance. Just customize a standard report at the account, campaign, or ad group level to get the metrics.

Metrics are only available with the Daily Report View (which is why they are greyed out if you try one of the other Report Views, like Summary, weekly, etc.).

Taking Action

Acting on SOV reports takes some consideration on the advertiser’s part. While at first glance they may not be as directly actionable as changing bids based on a keyword performance report, or adding keywords and negatives based on a search query report, SOV reports give you information about where and how to focus your optimization efforts.

One rule of thumb that I’ll share with anybody who will listen at adCenter or AdWords: Give us metrics for anything we can optimize, and let us optimize anything we can measure. Mercifully, SOV reports give us good metrics about things we can optimize.

What Is Share Of Voice (SOV)?

I had the opportunity to speak directly with Lucy Wang, a Product Manager on the adCenter team responsible for Share of Voice Metrics. She defines Share of Voice like this:

“Share of Voice represents the percentage of times your ads were actually shown in relation to the total number of chances your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings. It provides quantified insight into what your impression share is, and more importantly, the reasons why you lost certain impressions, allowing you to take precise action.”

To clarify a common misconception: SOV is not a measure of your impressions versus the total search volume for the keywords in your ad group (or campaign, or account). It is a measure of the impressions versus the search volume left over after considering your campaign settings (budget, targeting, etc.), and your rank, bids, and relevance.

By the way, Share of Voice and Impression Share are virtually interchangeable in this context. adCenter refers to this feature as Share of Voice, but uses Impression Share in the names of the metrics in their reports.

What Is A Good SOV?

There is no really good or single answer to this question. You will have to answer this for yourself. Every marketplace and advertiser will have different references for good and bad SOV.

My recommendation would be to simply take a baseline, check that it is either consistent across your account (or find out how it differs along meaningful divisions in your account) then improve it.

High SOV

When your SOV is comparatively high, you are already maximizing your ability to generate traffic for these terms, given your campaign settings. Assuming your performance and ROI justify it, this would be a good place to start to expand. Try additional keywords, or expand your geo-targeting and/or scheduling to try to attract more traffic, even if it is less relevant.

Remember, lowering your SOV is not necessarily a bad thing – it just means you are reaching into areas where you are not as relevant. That could be a good thing if the performance is still there. You can find the balance that is right for your business by experimenting with the limits.

Low SOV

All by itself, low SOV is not a very actionable metric; it is more like a summary to help you find where to dig in. Take a look at the details to find more actionable information.

Impression Share Lost To Budget

This is perhaps the most directly-actionable source of lost impression share. For direct advertisers, increasing budget is usually not an issue as long as ROI is within range. Assuming your performance metrics are within tolerable bounds, increase your budget and you will grow (hopefully, profitably).

Rule of Thumb: If you are spending less than a dollar to earn a dollar, why would you ever stop?

Even if you are truly limited by a budget, you may still have an opportunity to optimize. Remove, pause, bid-down, or reduce budget on your bottom-performers and spend more budget on your winners (by increasing budgets, bids, or both). Even brand advertisers can optimize, based on CTR, for example.

Rule of thumb: Use keyword bidding to manage budget. Use budget settings to manage risk.

Impression Share Lost To Rank

This is the first indication that you have some optimization to do. Rank is generally a combination of your Bid and Relevance, so at first glance we might expect this to be a composite score.

However, when you look at the numbers, this is an independent contributor to your overall lost Impression Share. They all add up to 100%. Skipping ahead a bit, the only place left to optimize would be your ads. Focus on your ad relevance and CTR if you are losing is due to Rank.

Impression Share Lost To Bid

This is pretty straightforward. Your ad is relevant compared to your competition, but suffered because your bid was not competitive. The direct action to take would be to increase your bid, assuming your performance and business can justify it.

However, assuming your bidding is already optimal for your business goals, then what do you do?

I think this is the one SOV metric that I’d be willing to live with long-term. If you can’t afford it, then you can’t afford it. Go focus on building the conversion value of your business, or expand elsewhere.

Of course, this also means that some other businesses out there are able to spend more money on these keywords than you are. Assuming they behave rationally; they are either better at monetizing, or more efficient in their business process, or both.

Impression Share Lost To Landing Page Relevance

This one seems pretty straightforward, but tends to be a challenge for many PPC Advertising efforts. Landing page Relevance might not currently be in your control – but it is in somebody’s control. If you don’t have a better landing page, then find a way to make one.

adCenter’s help is actually quite specific about what will improve your landing page relevance score:

• adCenter Help: About the landing page relevance score

The only thing I would add would be to make sure you are making new landing pages (or dynamically customizing them) for each meaningful group of keywords in your account. For most accounts, that means at least one distinct landing page per ad group.

Rule of Thumb: If you can write unique ad copy, or send to a unique landing page, then you should make a unique ad group.

Impression Share Lost To Keyword Relevance

This is a sure sign that you should be looking at your Search Query reports and looking for negatives. You may also need to delete underperforming keywords, or move them to other ad groups. You may also benefit from adding any search queries you are matching for, as keywords on Exact match.

If you weren’t already aware of this, adCenter has a distinct preference for Exact match. If you have a keyword running on phrase or broad match, the same keyword on exact match will be eligible for more search queries that are exact matches for your keyword. (Think about that carefully. Yes, it is accurately stated.)

Once again, the adCenter Support Center offers a good reference for addressing this issue specifically:

• adCenter Help: About the keyword relevance score

What’s Next

Like most aspects of PPC, Share of Voice is not a “set it and forget it” metric. You should be balancing the time you spend in your account based on SOV against the value you are deriving from it. That is Return on Time Spent, which is another article altogether:

• ROTS: Return on Time Spent
• Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?
• Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: Why DIY SEM Isn’t The Answer

It is in some ways better than AdWords’ equivalent tools, and the Excel integration and wizard workflow are unlike anything AdWords makes available.

The adCenter team invited me to help them announce their recent innovations at Search Engine Strategies New York last week. I was somewhat surprised to learn that most Advertisers don’t even know MAI exists. I suspect that is because we don’t go looking for it.

We mostly limit our time with adCenter to copying what we have already done in AdWords; who would think of looking to adCenter for more advanced features and tools? You should. They have been quietly pushing a few features a bit further downfield than AdWords, and MAI (Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence) is one such tool.

Quick Tour

• MAI is a downloadable Add-In for Excel (download)
• Once installed, it adds a tab to Excel, with a ribbon bar full of tools
• Keyword Wizard: Walks you through using the next few buttons, all in one wizard
• Keyword Extraction: Extract Keywords from a list of URLs
• Keyword Suggestion: 3 Types
  • Campaign Association: Mine other advertisers’ keywords!
  • Queries that contain your Keyword
  • Related Search Keywords
• Traffic
  • By Month
  • By Day
• Demographics
  • Age Group and Gender
  • Search-User Location: Geography
• Metrics
  • historical & forecast trends and KPIs
  • Volume

When you take a closer look at the tool, you may notice there are other features available as well. The Quick Tour above highlights the features most useful for Paid Search Advertisers.

Keyword Generation

Keyword Generation is an important part of Paid Search throughout the lifecycle of an account. These tools help with generating keywords by starting with your “seed” terms and expanding them.

Perhaps the most interesting and effective is the “Campaign Association” feature. MAI states that it will “Generate keywords based on the bidding behavior of other adCenter advertisers.” I find this feature frequently finds new ideas that are worth testing, and that it also often shows keywords that I would not normally include in a campaign – they can be quite broad and possibly lack relevance for your account.

The tool will also expand based on related keywords and on search queries adCenter has seen that include your seed terms.

Keyword Extraction

This is a tool familiar to many SEO experts – it basically scrapes a webpage looking for relevant keywords. This is a terrific way to get seed terms and get a good starting list for new clients, or to double check your work across a list of URLs and a long keyword list.

Campaign Structure

Be careful using keyword generation tools at scale. They often do not help put things in the correct AdGroup. That organization would have to be done according to your own Campaign Buildout design.

Metrics

MAI will also produce historical and forecast traffic and monetization data (cost per click, clicks, average positions, etc.), and will break it down by match type. This is another example of where they are pushing the tools a bit beyond what is made available by AdWords, and in really useful ways.

API Access

All of the features exposed through MAI in Excel are also available directly through the API. There is a tremendous opportunity to build data-rich toolsets from these features, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this post.

Quota

Be aware that the tool accesses adCenter via the API, and the volulme of requests is limited. Individual advertisers might have success raising this limit by contacting their representatives.

Future Versions

The adCenter team is actively developing this tool, and we can expect future versions to show improved usability, more features, and hopefully more community support for Advertisers to share best practices around keyword generation.

Resources

• Download Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence
• MAI Tutorials
• Giant List of Keyword Tools

Feeds define the data that may be changing regularly, like e-commerce inventory, store locations, etc. Readers may be able to generalize these terms to apply to existing rules-based tool if one is currently in use. First, a word about where this approach fits in to the broader picture.

The Broader Landscape of Managing Keywords & Negatives

There are many approaches for discovering keywords and adding them to a PPC Account, and many tools to support the various approaches. This article presents a rules-based approach and some tools that support it.

A good rules-based approach such as this often separates homegrown PPC Accounts from their more-mature competitors. This approach could be part of an overall strategy for managing Keywords and Negatives throughout the lifetime of a PPC account.

A Rules-Based Approach

A good rules-based approach is part of an overall Keywords and Negatives strategy. Most advertisers know how to manually add Keywords, many Advertisers know how to effectively use Negatives, and even How to Use Search Term View.

Quite often, efforts to add keywords in this way end up mostly manual, and occur something like: “Well, what about THIS keyword, or THAT one? Yeah, they would be good… But do don’t we have to go back and add that every where else, too?”

Good advertisers will often take that one step further and actually measure the value of their efforts by monitoring the value of those keywords over time. Some Advertisers know how to use other keyword research and generation tools such as SpyFu, Compete.com, or Wordstream.com and the like.

Some advertisers mine their SEO search queries for PPC keywords (and vice-versa), and some advertisers define rules for their automated tools that automatically add keywords based on performance (e.g.: for every broad match keyword with more than 100 clicks in a month, add a phrase match for the same keyword), or remove keywords based on lack of traffic (e.g.: remove keywords that have zero impressions after 3 months of eligibility). There are many components to managing Keywords and Negatives.

These are all healthy, productive components of a complete Keywords and Negatives strategy. A good rules-based approach helps advertisers leverage the good ideas by building them out across accounts.

• Dictionaries: Define the various groups of words that are relevant to your account
• Grammar: Define how to combine Dictionaries into actual Keywords, within your Account structure of Accounts, Campaigns, and AdGroups
• Feeds: Define keywords that change over time, as with available inventory, prices, etc.

Dictionaries

Consider a mythical PPC client, the ACME Bike Store. A previous Search Engine Land article demonstrating Stone Temple’s PPC Permutator uses a similar example. Today’s article builds on the ideas in the Permutator article. ACME’s Grammar might look like this:

That is to say, the Dictionary defines [terrain], [bike], and [product], each as a set of tokens that can be used in a Keyword Grammar to create Keywords.

Grammar

ACME’s Grammar might look like this:

That is to say, the Grammar defines meaningful ways to combine the tokens defined in the Dictionary, to create Keywords. For example, the combination of the Dictionary and Grammar so far would produce:

The list expands quickly from here. This is one of the values of this approach: Generate a lot of useful Keywords for a minimum of creative effort. However, this benefit can also be a drawback.

It is not productive to produce an excess of keywords that generate zero impressions. It can actually be counter-productive, and negatively impact Quality Score. Managing Zero Impression Keywords and Quality Score are both integral parts of any complete PPC effort, and beyond the scope of this entry.

Regardless, there is no need to over-tax those processes by wantonly adding keywords.

Grammar With Match Types

A Grammar can also define the Match Types for each Grammar entry. By defining the Match Types for each entry, the Advertiser can avoid repeating the entry for each Match Type wanted. The above Grammar definition might now look like this:

Advertisers should choose the right combination of Match Types to create a list that is full of keywords that are specific enough, but not so specific that the Grammar generates an excess of Keywords with zero traffic.

That brings up another good practice beyond the scope of this article, which would be to devise a system for automatically expanding Keywords on new Match Types when they get enough search volume. Another day…

Grammar With Modified Broad Match Support

Advertisers may choose to support “Modified”, as in the example below. One way to do that is to include the “+” sign wherever it might apply in the Grammar definition for the Keyword. Keywords being added as “Modified” retain the “+” in the output, and any output for other Match Types simply remove them.

This way, the Grammar is expressive enough to address the requirements of “Modified”, without requiring additional entries. That is one worthy goal when designing these tools; minimize the amount of effort required of the Advertiser, by maximizing the expressive power and flexibility of the Grammar Syntax.

For the sake of simplicity, the remainder of this article will use examples without the “+”.

Grammar With Negative Match Types

Similarly, a Grammar can define Negative Keywords and Negative Match Types. This helps to craft Airtight AdGroups, which is a highly recommended best practice.

For example, an Airtight AdGroup approach would prevent searches for “mountain bike” from matching for the AdGroup containing the Keyword “mountain bike tires.” To handle that case, add a Negative Exact Match “mountain bike” to the “mountain bike tires” AdGroup.

Grammar With Account Structure

It will be necessary to specify where to put all of these Keywords in the PPC Account. This is one of the final pieces needed for a complete Keyword Grammar: Account, Campaign, and AdGroup.

In addition to naming the structure elements, using a good naming convention will be valuable for many reasons; one convention to consider would be to name the group from the Dictionary, then embed the actual token used within parenthesis.

Example: Group(token), as in the table below.

The Grammar definition above defines a new AdGroup for each token defined in the Dictionary for [terrain] and [product], e.g.:

• Terrain(mountain) Product(tire)
• Terrain(mountain) Product(tube)
• Terrain(road) Product(tire)
• etc.

Defining a naming convention enables the Advertiser to report or take action in bulk based on the name of the Account Structure elements, such as Campaign and ADGroup. Example: generate a report showing the performance for all “Product” AdGroups, vs. other AdGroups to find out if customers convert differently when they have a specific product in mind.

Advanced & Optional Considerations For Grammars

There are some optional components to include in this approach. Named Sets allow advertisers to define specific groups within the Dictionary. For example, a Grammar Entry for [product:tire], which might output the set of keywords {tire, tires}.

Similarly, advertisers could implement Named Sets with Magic Words. The “Each” Magic Word directs the Grammar to expand the Grammar Entry once for “each” token in the Dictionary. Advertisers could consider more complex rules, such as [product:singles]. This could expand one line for each of the Dictionary entries in the “product” group that are single words (vs. plurals).

One worthy enrichment is the “Other” Magic Word. This is really useful for Negatives, allowing the addition of every “Other” token the in Dictionary as a Negative. For example, add a Manufacturer(Puffy) AdGroup, and add a {Manufacturer:Other} Keyword as a Negative Phrase Match to prevent this AdGroup from picking up searches from any other Manufacturer.

Advertisers can enrich the Dictionary with whatever meta-data works in a given application, and use Syntax in the Grammar, like Named Sets and Magic Words, to consume that meta-data. The simplest version of these special cases that extend the capabilities beyond the Dictionary is the use of “raw text.”

Grammar Special Case: “Raw Text”

Grammars should be capable of using “raw text” to create names, as with “ACME Bikes” to define the Account Names in the Grammar above. Similarly, Advertisers could use “raw text” in a Keyword definition to combine with Dictionary tokens, or in even in lieu of them.

A good time to use this is when starting with an existing keyword list. Just add the current Keywords do the Grammar, and then continue to add new definitions using the Dictionary. This way the Grammar describes an entire Account structure, which can be quite valuable.

Feeds

Use Feeds to define data that changes over time, such as available inventory. For example, ACME carries Puffy, Hwinn, and sometimes Sianchi bikes. A Feed might contain the following data:

Using Feeds In A Grammar

In order for a Grammar to consume the Feed above, the tool needs to understand a Syntax to express it. One could use curly-braces, e.g.: {Manufacturer}, {Category}, etc.

If Named Sets and Magic Words are implemented, consider enabling them to work with Feed elements as well. This provides the ability to expand Feed-sourced elements in a Grammar, like so:

Separate Grammar & Feed

Separating Dictionaries and Feeds provides the flexibility to adjust one while still leveraging the other. For example, an Advertiser can add a new Bike synonym to the Dictionary.

The next time the Account is generated, the Grammar will expand the new Bike-derived keywords for everything in the feed. Another example would be to add or remove a particular Manufacturer. The next time the Account is generated, the Manufacturer would be added or removed, respectively.

One note on scalability and the underlying implementation. Depending on the application, Advertisers may choose to expand the Dictionary first, or expand the Grammar first. Either way, the results should be deduped. Consider which approach will minimize the computing resources needed to address the exponential growth of the output.

Finally, it is worth noting that a similar approach, and much of the same data, can be used to produce Ads, as well as much of the rest of the information required to build a complete PPC Account.

A similar approach works for adding Geo-Targeting, with {lat} and {lon} for each {Location} provided in the Feed, and consumed in a Campaign Grammar supporting geo-targeting settings. The approach can be expanded to include whatever is needed in a given environment.

Build Your Own, Or Use An Existing Tool

This rules-based approach to Keyword generation, using Dictionaries, Grammars, and Feeds, provides a practical means of powerfully expressing new Keyword ideas into massively scaled PPC Account buildouts. The approach was presented generically in order to provide a basis for Advertisers to incorporate the ideas into tools and processes.

There are also commercial PPC tools available that already incorporate their own versions of some of the same concepts. Kenshoo offers “Real Time Campaigns”. Enterprise Travel advertisers have been using similar home-grown systems for almost a decade now. Of course Stone Temple offers The Permutator for free, and we have our own internal tools we use during Client engagements (Disclaimer: The Author is associated with Stone Temple Consulting.)

Stone Temple has built accounts with 10s of millions of Keywords, Negatives, and Ads for a client with over 800 locations throughout the United States, and uses the same approach to manage Keywords with the changing inventories of various e-commerce clients’.

These ideas can be implemented readily using home-brew or off-the-shelf tools, or by engaging with Consultants who have access to them. On a personal note, I eagerly anticipate the day when Search Engines adopt these ideas and make them available to Advertisers.

How would a rules-based Keyword Generation approach impact your PPC efforts?

During a recent trip to adCenter headquarters, Eric Enge was able to get some insight into these new features, and what we can expect from adCenter in the near future, which he shared in his recent post Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?.

Here is a quick synopsis of the new features:

• Browser Compatibility with Safari and Chrome, and mobile devices
• Mobile Device Targeting
• Ad Description Lengths Increased

Browser Compatibility With Safari & Chrome

Status: Live

AdCenter silently released browser compatibility with Safari and Chrome this week, including mobile device support for iPad and other devices. Compatibility with Mozilla Firefox was also improved.

From our sources and anecdotal testing, the support appears complete and fully functional. This release supports adCenter’s efforts to increase the ease of access of the online marketing platform by enabling Advertisers to access the site from a wider variety of browsers and devices.

My Take: Manage adCenter from your iPad!

Manage adCenter from whichever browser or device you prefer. While this feature doesn’t seem at first like core functionality (like a change to Negatives or Device Targeting would be), it is one of the top-requested features on adCenter’s Feature Suggestion Forum for good reason; as Advertisers we want to maximize our time efficiency.

Advertisers want to work where we are comfortable, and this helps us do that. Many of us have come to expect ubiquitous access from a premier online business as a matter of course, but those of us who use Chrome / Safari, or who have ever wanted to check on a client off-hours from the nearest mobile device that is handy, will probably appreciate this release the most.

I also see this release as more evidence that adCenter is really listening and taking steps to actively improve the adCenter experience.

Device Targeting

Status: Live

AdCenter silently released support for device targeting recently. Device targeting enables Advertisers to choose which Devices their Ads will, or will not, appear on.

By offering this functionality, adCenter empowers Advertisers to create separate Campaigns to bid on devices with different Bids, Keywords, and Ads optimized for each Device.

Device targeting support now includes:

• Smartphones
• Android
• BlackBerry
• iOS
• Windows
• Other
• Tablets
• Android
• BlackBerry
• iOS
• Other

Barry Schwartz previously reported on this release: Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget & More Mobile Targeting Options

My Take: Include this in your 2012 plans

Mobile search is growing rapidly, there is no denying that. I tend to take future predictions with a grain of salt though, as the atmospheric trend lines tend to imply there will be more mobile searches than grains of sand on the planet Earth sometime during the next President’s term of office.

What I do know is that amongst my clients, mobile devices account for roughly 10-15% of our searches happening today, and that number is growing.

Mobile device traffic can have a wildly different Cost Per Acquisition, and may represent a prime candidate for optimizing your bids accordingly. You could also try different Keywords, Ads, etc., and you might be in a unique situation where you actually only want to target one Device vs. another.

For the majority of Advertisers considering carving out separate Mobile Campaigns and weighing that against the cost of implementation and long-term manageability, I’d recommend something like the following equation:

Potential = ((% of total Account Value) * (% increase in Value for new Campaigns)) – Cost of Implementation and Management

Of course, you will have to define what value means for your business. You might start with PPC Profit, Conversions, etc.

Ad Description Length Increased To 71 Characters

Status: Live

AdCenter silently increased the Text Ad Description character limits to 71 recently. This feature makes importing Ads from AdWords easier by accounting for the extra punctuation often required to import Ads from AdWords to adCenter.

My Take: The Little Things Really Do Matter!

Many Advertisers develop on AdWords first then copy to adCenter. Working with AdWords first is a simple matter of prioritizing time and focusing on what will deliver the biggest bang for the buck. This feature fixes a problem you have most likely come across if you have ever imported Ads from AdWords to adCenter.

When you import a Description Line 1 and 2 from AdWords, adCenter adds a space between them to form the single Description used in adCenter. This space accounts for the fact that usually AdWords Ads are crafted to work with a line-break in between them.

However, if you have two Descriptions from AdWords totaling 35 characters each, the extra space brings the total to 71 characters, and ultimately causes the Ad to be rejected in adCenter.

For a process that was supposed to be easy (importing from AdWords to adCenter), this was quite interruptive. Many Advertisers found that it necessitated maintaining different sets of Ads for the two platforms, or adjusting the Ads on AdWords to make room, etc. Going forward, this problem goes away.

In my opinion, this is more strong evidence that the adCenter team is making progress towards making our lives easier and increasing Advertiser time efficiency.

Resources:

• Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?
• adCenter Blog
• Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget & More Mobile Targeting Options

What Is Search Terms View?

The AdWords Search Terms View shows us the performance metrics on the Search Terms that matched against our Keywords (more detail on the difference between Search Terms and Keywords is coming up later in this post). Advertisers can use this data to optimize the Keywords and Negatives in their account.

Optimization in this context usually includes adding Keywords (both new Keywords on an any Match Type and existing Keywords but on a new Match Type), and adding Negatives (again, both new Negatives and existing Negatives on a new Match Type).

The data can also be used to help remove Keywords and Negatives, optimize bids and ad copy, and to inform the organization of AdGroups and Campaigns. In this article, we will focus on the two primary optimization tasks: adding Keywords, and adding Negatives.

Why Optimize Keywords? How Often?

Most of our clients are doing this on a weekly basis at least. I consider this activity to be like gardening for PPC; we want to pull out the weeds and make sure we fertilize the pretty flowers, all the while considering the overall organization and appearance of the garden… and the process never ends.

This core and ongoing practice is essential because it helps us continually refine the traffic we are paying for and improve Quality Score, and also because it helps us find new ideas for AdGroups, Ads, and Landing Pages.

Generating The Search Term View

To navigate to the Search Term View, start by logging in to AdWords, then click the Keywords tab, then click on the “See Search Terms…” button and choose either “All.” This will generate a view of the Search Terms triggered by all of the Keywords in our account.

We can optionally narrow the list using the usual navigation with AdWords, and by selecting individual Keywords and choosing “Selected” instead of “All” from the drop-down.

Recommended Keyword Selection

I recommend choosing our AdGroup with the most clicks in the last 30 days (All Campaigns, then AdGroup tab, then sort descending by Clicks), then the Keyword with the most Impressions (Click on the AdGroup with the most clicks, this takes we to the Keywords tab, now sort descending by Impressions).

We will consider other approaches for narrowing down the list later in this post, but this will do for now. Check the box next to the Keyword with the most Impressions, then click the “See Search Terms…” button. When we click the button, it will drop a menu, choose “Selected.” This will take us to Search Terms View.

Getting Back

When in Search Terms view, there is now a link to get us “Back to Keywords.” This is how we return to the Keyword list we were just at. We can also navigate away from Search Term view by any of the other traditional means, such as the tabs or the quick menu on the left.

Columns In Search Terms View

In Search Terms view, the first column will show us the Search Term, and the next column will be the (Search Term) Match Type. The next two columns will be optionally included by AdWords. If your original Keyword tab was at the “All” level or represented more than one Campaign, then the Search Term view will show a Campaign column next. Likewise, if your Keyword tab represented more than one AdGroup, then it will show an AdGroup column.

One thing to note about the Search Term view is that a given Search Term and Match Type may have matched against multiple Keywords. In this report, that Keyword detail will not be shown; Each Search Term and Match Type combination is reported in one row, regardless of how many different Keywords it matched.

For example, if we have the Keyword “bike” in our account on Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match, and many different users searched on “bike”, the report will have one row for the “bike” Search Term, and it will be Exact Match. Behind the scenes, our Keywords may have each gotten credit for some of the traffic on their various Match Types, but this report will not show that.

Search Terms vs. Keywords

Search Terms are what the user typed into Google Search. Keywords are added to our account by us, and Google matches them to Search Terms based on their Match Type. For example, if we have a Keyword “bike” in our account on Broad Match, some Search Terms that might match include: “beach bikes,” “road bikes,” “bicycle,” etc.

Match Type in Search Term View

Match Type in Search Term View is the Match Type that Google used to match the Search Term to a Keyword in our account. This is not necessarily the same as the Match Type of the Keyword in our account. For example, if we have a Broad Match Keyword “bike” in our account, and the Search Term report is showing traffic for “bike”, the Match Type in this report would be Exact Match because the Search Term is an Exact Match with the Keyword.

Customizing Columns

The remaining columns can be customized in the usual way (Click the “Columns” drop-down-button, then choose “Customize Columns.”) See references at the end of this entry for a link to get help customizing columns.

Recommended Columns

My recommendation is to start with the following columns:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conv. (many-per-click)
• CTR
• Conv. rate (many-per-click)
• Cost
• Total Conv. Value
• Avg. CPC
• Avg. Pos.

In my experience, these columns provide the information I need, in an order that makes sense to me for the task at hand.

Added & Excluded Terms

The Search Term view will also show us which Search Terms already exist as Keywords “Added” or negatives “Excluded” in our account.

Using Added and Excluded Terms in practice

While this feature is helpful, there are some practical limitations to be aware of. It does not tell us if the Keyword is “Added” to the correct AdGroup according to your account’s design structure – we need to check that ourselves.

Another limitation to be aware of is that this feature looks for literal matches. It does not consider coverage provided by the Match Type functionality in AdWords. Meaning, if we have a Phrase Match “bikes” Keyword, while it would cover the Search Term “fast bikes,” it will not be marked as “Added.” We have to check that ourselves.

As a rule of thumb, we want to be pushing mature accounts towards Search Term Reports that show every Search Term is “Added” or “Excluded.” (Note to AdWords: this would be a nice feature improvement.)

Adding Keywords

We can add Keywords directly from the Search Term View. To do so, check the box next to the Search Term(s) we wish to add, and click the “Add as Keyword” button. We will be given an opportunity to set a specific bid and destination URL. The Campaign and Adgroup are indicated as well.

The Keyword field accepts power posting syntax for Broad Match (no punctuation), “Phrase Match”, and [Exact Match] Keywords. For example, to add “fast bikes” on Exact Match, edit the Keyword field to be [fast bikes]. Click “Save” and the Keywords are added to our account immediately.

Adding Keywords in Practice

My recommendation is that we should almost always be adding Keywords on Phrase or Exact Match. This is based on my best-practice recommendation of using Broad Match to help us find additional terms, and assumes this AdGroup already has a Broad Match Keyword (or maybe a select few), that is doing that research for us. If so, then we want to run as much of our traffic as we can through Phrase and Exact Match Keywords.

Adding Negatives

We can add negative Keywords in a similar way. Check the box next to the Search Term(s) we wish to add, then click “Add as negative Keyword.” When adding Negatives, we have the option to add them as Campaign or AdGroup Negatives. Click “Save” and the Keywords are added to our account immediately.

Adding Negatives in Practice

My rule of thumb for Negatives is to always add them on Exact Match, maybe add them on Phrase Match, and to only add them on Broad Match in exceptional cases. With the tools we have available today for Keyword targeting and Search Term reporting, we have the ability to be very targeted with our Negatives. We can add Keywords on Broad Match, then use Negatives on Exact Match or Phrase Match to filter unwanted traffic.

In my experience, using Broad Match Negatives runs too high of a risk of blocking words unintentionally. For example, if we have a Keyword for “beach bike” on Broad Match, and are matching the Search Term “bike beach” (which, in this example, we do not want), then we can block that by adding “bike beach” as a Negative on Phrase Match. We would not want to add “bike beach” as a Negative on Broad Match because we would most likely end up unintentionally blocking the good searches for “beach bike.”

Pro Tip: If you have a dedicated rep, he can produce a “Negative Blocked Report” – a report showing you the Search Terms that were blocked by your negatives, and the potential traffic you are missing. It is a good idea to review this occasionally to check if you are inadvertently blocking good traffic.

For example, I recently had a situation where we copied an AdGroup and did a find/replace on the keywords, but neglected to review the negatives. The new AdGroup was blocking itself based on the negatives from the original AdGroup.

Download The Search Term View

We can also download the Search Term view; Just click the “Download” button.

Working Online vs. Downloading and Working in Bulk

Once we start working with this report, we may be tempted to start working it in bulk, by downloading it. Once downloaded we could manipulate the report, generate Keywords and Negatives and upload them in bulk via AdWords Editor, for example.

While I am a big fan of doing things in bulk in Excel then uploading them via AdWords Editor, this is one workflow that I prefer to do directly on the website. I find that I am constantly changing my view from one AdGroup to the next, changing the dates, etc., and that the instant gratification of adding Keywords and Negatives in place, instantly, works for me. our mileage may vary, of course.

Choosing Which Keywords To Work With

When choosing which Keywords to work with, there are many different approaches. While getting started, my recommendation would be to start with 30 days, the AdGroup with the most Clicks, then the Keyword with the most Impressions, as recommended above. This is a great bellweather.

If the Search Terms are all over the place here, then we have a lot of opportunity for optimization. Whereas if our biggest term is generating almost all Exact Match and Phrase Match Search Terms, then we are doing a great job keeping our Keyword Targeting tight. I like to work Keyword by Keyword in this way for my most-trafficked Keywords.

We can also work AdGroup by AdGroup, which will pool more data into the report for us to work with, while still keeping the theme tight. I do not usually find it useful to work with this report at the All or Campaign level, because the Keywords tend to be all over the place. One notable exception; It can definitely be useful to work at the All or Campaign level when adding Negatives. You may want to discipline yourself to cycle through all of your AdGroups over time.

Choosing where to go next will really depend on how much data we have in our Account, and how much time we wish to invest. As a rule of thumb, optimize 5-10% of our traffic weekly, and be sure to work through those less-trafficked AdGroups and Keywords over time as well.

Benefits of Optimizing Keywords &Negatives

The benefits of optimizing in this way should include increased traffic (and/or more targeted traffic), improved Quality Score (through improved Keyword and Ad CTR), improved bidding efficiency (we will be able to refine our bids for a tighter subset of traffic), and often improved Conversion Rate (by filtering out unwanted traffic).

We will also find this is a great way to find Keywords we may not already have coverage for, and for getting insight into how our customers search for our products, which can lead us to create new Ads and Landing Pages. Good luck out there.

Resources

• Google AdWords Help on this topic
• Daydreaming About Paid Search: How About Airtight Ad Groups?
• How do I customize the data in my tables and reports?

The tool helps us generate the core concepts of a PPC Account in an easy-to-understand visual layout, without having to burden business users with all of the details. We call it the PPC Planning Matrix.

I’m going to gloss over the absolute basics of Campaign creation, and aim for a quick “How to Get Started Using the PPC Planning Matrix Today” entry.

If you are an expert with Paid Search, this tool may help you work with your customers to generate great PPC Campaigns. You might notice that while this tool covers all the required basics, it leaves room for your own additions and fine tuning. The real value in this tool is that it helps visually organize and collect what is needed to create PPC Campaigns.

Even if you are not a Paid Search expert, this article is still for you. This tool will help you organize your Account into meaningful Campaigns and AdGroups, and produce a bulk sheet that can be pasted into Google AdWords Editor or into adCenter Desktop.

AdGroups & Campaigns

Campaigns are like an organizational folder for holding AdGroups. In addition to the Campaign Name, the one obligatory setting is the Campaign Daily Budget. The tool provides a default of $500, which you are free to override.

Campaigns also provide the ability to change some advanced settings like geography targeting, or device targeting (i.e.: computers or mobile devices), which you are free to adjust after the tool generates a Bulk Sheet for you.

AdGroups contain Keywords and Text Ads. The one compulsory setting is the default Maximum CPC. This will apply to all of your keywords. If you apply a Max CPC for any keyword, then it trumps the AdGroup Default. The tool provides a default AdGroup CPC of $1.00, which you are free to override.

If you want to set keyword level CPC’s you can edit the bulk sheet when the tool is done.

Ads

Ads are what your customers see on their Search Results Page. You provide the Headline, the two lines of Description (combined into one for adCenter), a Display URL that your customers will see, and a Destination URL that your customers’ browser navigates to when they click on your ad. The tool provides some examples.

AdWords restricts the length of the various fields in an ad. The tool will highlight them red if they are too long. You can add up to 3 ads per AdGroup in this tool (AdWords allows more and you can add them later).

Keywords

Keywords are what AdWords and adCenter use to match your ads to actual user searches. Add keywords that are related to the AdGroup you are creating, and the Ads you already provided. The tool supports “Power Posting” keywords (I’m dating myself, for those of you who remember when Power Posting first came out).

You can add Broad, “Phrase”, [Exact], or –negative match keywords directly in the tool, and it will parse them into the bulk sheet as expected.

Errors?

The tool tries to help you fill it out by highlighting errors like a missing Campaign Name, missing Ads or Keywords, etc. The tool is also “protected” to prevent inadvertently breaking things. The adventurous at heart can use the password “StoneTemple” to unlock the worksheet.

Generate Bulk Sheet

Click the button. If nothing happens, be sure you have enabled macros. Change Macro Settings in Microsoft Excel

Import into AdWords Editor

Choose: File | Import CSV | Paste Text… Review and Accept the Proposed Changes. Don’t forget to Post your new Campaigns!

Import Into adCenter Desktop

Desktop doesn’t yet support importing from the Clipboard. You can save the bulk sheet to a new CSV file, or as of Desktop Editor Version 8.1.11291.0, you can import directly from AdWords (Beta).

Choose: Import | From Google Select Import From a File, and browse to the file on your Computer. Verify the columns line up and click “Import.” Don’t forget to Post your new Campaigns!

Take It For A Spin

If you would like to get started with the PPC Planning Matrix, please feel free to send me an email. You will get an automated response with a download link and you can get started right away. You could also adapt these ideas to your own tools. Have fun out there.