Image provided by the Multi-State Lottery Association.

Chances are you didn’t win this past Friday’s $190 million Mega Millions drawing or Saturday’s $600 million Powerball jackpot. However, the great news is that if you’re an SEM account manager, you can still try your luck at winning the AdWords Jackpot!

What’s An AdWords Jackpot?

An AdWords Jackpot happens when all of the paid search ads for a search query are the same or are pretty similar. In this case, of course, having an ad that’s like all the rest is not a winning hand. Here are a few examples of hitting the AdWords Jackpot:

You’ve probably come across many AdWords Jackpots in the past, particularly when searching on queries that trigger product listing ads, like this:

Of course, the reason I call this “hitting the AdWords Jackpot” is because it’s just like hitting a row of lucky 7’s when playing the slots in Vegas – and because there are valuable optimization opportunities to be had here!

Image used by permission from Shutterstock.com

Any SEM manager’s ongoing PPC campaign optimization activities should include periodically running a few searches on your most high-impression keywords using the AdWords Ad Preview Tool. Be on the lookout for any potential AdWords Jackpots!

What To Do If You Hit An AdWords Jackpot

In this article, I’ll focus on what to do when you win a standard text-ad AdWords Jackpot (excluding PLAs) – these jackpots generally arise due to a complete lack of marketing creativity on the part of the SEM manager, or excessive usage of Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

AdWords Jackpots represent a great opportunity for an SEM manager to do some good old-fashioned marketing and optimize ad text in such a way to differentiate one’s products or service offerings among a crowded pool of similar ad listings.

My respected friend and colleague, Perry Marshall has a pretty cool system for writing compelling and emotion-evoking ad text, which he calls his “The Swiss Army Knife,” as shown here:

Perry’s ad creation process is basically an effective, structured way of brainstorming entities and relationships wherein you list out things like:

• Your customer
• A thing that your customer loves
• A think that your customer hates
• You (the advertiser)
• Your customer’s worst enemy
• Your customer’s best friend

Next, draw lines between the different entities in your list, then try to brainstorm ad copy that connects two of them. For example:

Now, look how differentiated this new ad is compared to the boring and similar search listings on a search for [boston divorce lawyer], and you can start to see the power of this structured ad brainstorming technique.

Not An Ad Copy Writing Genius? Don’t Worry – The Bar Is Pretty Low

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most text ads stink. Hopefully I’ve demonstrated here that with just a bit of creativity and effort,  it’s possible to do way better than the rest of pack.

Best of all, the odds of realizing better ROI for yourself or your client are millions of times better than winning the Power Ball or Mega Millions. So what are you waiting for?

This new keyword tool combines elements of two existing keyword tools, the Google Keyword Tool and the AdWords Traffic Estimator, adding a more structured and integrated workflow as well as all sorts of new bells and whistles.

If you’ve ever used the Google Keyword Tool and/or AdWords Traffic Estimator in the past, take note here – the new Keyword Planner will most certainly replace both tools in the near future, and your workflow will undoubtedly change as a result.

What’s A Keyword Planner, Anyway?

The Keyword Planner is a more focused version of the Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator tool, and the focus is on doing one thing only: to make it easier for advertisers to get through the process of creating new ad groups and ad campaigns, which is the key to getting your PPC accounts off to a good start.

It differs from the existing Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator tools in that the old tools were more general purpose, unstructured tools. They could be used for just about anything, including Keyword Research for SEO. This new tool, on the other hand, is more like an ultimate AdWords campaign building workshop.

The Keyword Planner has a “wizard” type interface. The first step in the process is to determine how you’re going to go about creating your ad campaigns and ad groups. You’re asked to pick one of 3 possible paths:

• Search for Keyword and Ad Group Ideas
• Enter or Upload Keywords to get Estimates
• Multiply keyword lists to get Estimates

Here’s what this looks like in AdWords:

Searching For Keyword & Ad Group Ideas

Most of the time when creating a new campaign in AdWords, you’ll need to rely on Google to provide you with keyword suggestions to pick from. Therefore, the primary flow through the Keyword Planner is to “Search for keyword and ad group ideas.”

Clicking on that option whisks you off to the next stage of the Keyword Planner, which provides a robust keyword workbench for researching and picking keywords to add to your AdWords account, illustrated below:

Using this interface, the Keyword Planner lets you brainstorm keywords using any or all of the following three methods:

• By Keyword:  you can type in a word or phrase relevant to your business
• By Landing Page: by entering a landing page on your site (or any competitor’s webpages, for that matter), the Keyword Planner will scan and infer keywords that are relevant to those pages
• By Product Category: you can select from one of thousands of pre-defined keyword categories

Filtering Keywords From Your Keyword Plan

Additionally, the Keyword Planner provides robust filtering capabilities so you can be super picky with what keywords you choose to add to your PPC account. For example, you can filter keywords based on the following ways:

• Average CPC: include or exclude keywords that fall above or below a desired Cost Per Click
• Estimated Search Volume: include or exclude keywords that fall above or below a desired monthly search volume
• Keyword Competition: you can narrow your list based on estimated advertiser competition
• Exclude Keywords Already In Your Account:  the Keyword Planner can automatically exclude keywords that are already in your own AdWords account to avoid having duplicate keywords
• Filter by Keyword: you can specify to include or exclude keywords containing specific terms

Setting Targeting Parameters

Because keyword research requires analyzing keyword statistics in order to determine whether or not a given keyword makes sense for your business, Google lets you customize the keyword stats and performance estimates so that they’re relevant to your campaigns. This means they let you specify targeting parameters such as language, country and search network.

List View Vs. Grouped View

One nice feature is the ability to view keywords in the Keyword Planner that appear either in list view or in grouped view – this is analogous to the concept of keyword niches and keyword lists.

Your “Keyword Plan”

As you discover promising terms looking at individual keywords or keyword groupings, you have the ability to add them to “Your Plan,” which is a temporary storage area for saving interesting-looking keywords and keyword groupings for later.

The Keyword Planner maintains state for the duration of your session – keywords that you add to “Your Plan” are saved while you’re in the process of looking for keywords.

This is a nice change — previously, when using the Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator separately, there was a bit of a disjointed workflow where you had to save the results of the Google Keyword Tool, then open the file and copy/paste it as input to the AdWords Traffic Estimator. These two separate processes are now integrated into a single, seamless one.

When you’re done picking keywords and adding them into “Your Plan,” click on the Get Estimates and Review Plan button.

Getting Estimates & Reviewing Your Plan

The next stage of the Keyword Plan process involves setting a keyword bid and daily budget for your portfolio of keywords and keyword groupings.

Since keyword volume and CPC bid estimates are based on your budget, bid, location and other competitive factors, you’ll need to provide Google with some information in order to customize your estimates.

For example, you could enter a bid of $50 and a daily budget of $2,000.00 and click on the Get Detailed Estimates button — the Keyword Planner will then generate daily estimates for Clicks, Impressions, Average ad position and costs, as shown below:

Once finalized, you can download your detailed keyword plan in a variety of different formats, such as Excel or AdWords Editor CSV, as shown below:

Enter Or Upload Your Own Keyword List

Another way of running though the Keyword Plan process is to start using your own keyword list. Sometimes, when creating a new campaigns, you may be fortunate enough to already be sitting on a treasure trove of keyword data (for example, several years of Web analytics data, including valuable keyword referral data).

If you’re in this enviable position, it may make sense to start the campaign creation process using your own keyword list rather than the generic keyword suggestions you get from the Keyword Suggestion Tool.  Here’s what that looks like:

When you press the Get Estimates button, you’ll be taken through the rest of the Keyword Plan process as described above — the only difference is that you’ll be looking at your own keyword list rather than the generic keywords suggested via the Google Keyword Tool.

Multiplying Keyword Lists Using Keyword Planner

A third and final way to work thorough the Keyword Planner is to mash-up and multiply keyword lists. For example, you might want to multiply a bunch of names of products with colors and word modifiers to come up with every imaginable keyword permutations, as shown below:

Note that you can have up to three lists to mash up, and clicking on the Get Estimates button brings you to the next stage of the Keyword Planner. The only difference between this and the other two methods is that you’ll be looking at your own keyword list based on the mash-up of the lists you provided.

I personally don’t like this option very much because your mashed-up keyword lists may bear little or no resemblance to how people naturally search for those words, though perhaps you could use this method if you absolutely don’t want to miss any possible keyword permutation.

Summary

The new Keyword Planner tool supports various workflows for building ad groups and campaigns either starting from scratch, or based on your existing lists, and provides more cohesive user experience by integrating the keyword selection, grouping, analysis and filtering aspects of the keyword selection workflow.

If you’re lucky, you can find the Keyword Planner tool in your AdWords account today. According to my contacts at Google, as of two weeks ago, it was enabled in only 5% of accounts. At that time, it took me 67 tries to finally find an account with the Keyword Planner; but as of today, I’m finding it in roughly one out of every 5 accounts. It appears that Google is opening up Keyword Planner access to a greater number of accounts over time, so hopefully you’ll see it in your account soon!

One of the most common hypothetical use cases for device targeting in AdWords has to do with mobile apps. For example, a mobile app developer who doesn’t want to target desktops because their app only works on say, iOS tablets – it would make no sense for these ads to show up on Windows desktop computer searches.

One Search Engine Land commenter wrote:

The great news for app developers and marketers is that advertising your mobile app with Enhanced Campaigns just got way easier and more targeted than ever. Here’s how!

Google Quietly Releases New Mobile App Promotion Ad Format

Enhanced Campaigns are such a big shift in how AdWords campaign management works. While Google focused on the biggest changes when announcing the news, some smaller new features and enhancements didn’t get as much attention, if any.

One of those new features is a new ad type specifically created to address the above use case: the App Promotion Ad. This new ad type offers some key benefits to mobile app developers and marketers:

• Mobile users can find and install your app directly from the SERP on their devices with a single click.
• Google automatically figures out the details; for example, if your app only runs on iPhones, Google won’t display your ad to Android users or on tablets; it just works.
• App developers can use these ads to get a large number of installs and reviews very quickly, which are key for remaining competitive in this crowded space.

The new ad format is a big improvement over the previously existing click-to-download ad format for promoting mobile apps, in that it ads a new ad creation template which makes it easier to setting up these ads, as well as smarter built-in ad targeting intelligence.

For example, at my company, WordStream, we work with a few app publishers and struggled to get the old click-to-download ad format to work properly for iTunes apps.

Why is Google offering this new ad type? Because mobile apps are big business – a $30 billion business last year, by some estimates, with over 700K Android and iPhone apps on the market today.

How To Set Up An App Promotion Ad

It’s super easy to set up one of these ads. First, note that you need to upgrade to Enhanced Campaigns for these to work. If you’ve done that, just select the “App / digital content ad” option from the “+New ad” menu.

Then, you simply choose your app platform (currently, these are only available for Android or iOS) and search for your app in the Google Play or iTunes store.

Then, write your ad text as you normally would. Google will show you a preview of how it will look on a mobile device or tablet.

And, that’s it! You’re done. You don’t have to specify what devices or operating systems you’re interested in targeting. Google will show your ads to the platforms that are compatible with your app. So, for example, you don’t need to worry about your app promotion ad showing up on a windows desktop search.

One Small Step For [A] Mobile App Marketer, One Giant Leap For Ad Intelligence

This new ad format is much easier and more powerful than the previous options for mobile app developers. It’s an exciting progression, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google roll out more of these kinds of ad creation templates and smarter ad formats in the future for other advertising use cases where it makes sense!

Now, if you’ll forgive my attention-grabbing headline (based on ‘It’s the Economy, Stupid‘), I’m definitely not actually calling anyone stupid – and, you can certainly see by the volume of re-tweets and favorites, it’s clearly a widely-shared view.

However, I recently had the opportunity to chat with Surojit Chatterjee, the Group Product Manager of Global Mobile Search Ads at Google, and he explained to me some interesting facts and information about the direction that Google is going with their mobile products, and how this changes mobile advertising best practices for advertisers.

Device Doesn’t Matter As Much As User Context Does

Looking at the huge amount of search query data that they have access to, Google picked up on a pattern in the way people use their devices. What they noticed is that user context trumps everything else.

“User context” refers to the time, location and device from which a search is conducted, and as Surojit put it: “User context drives what people search for, and the actions they take. So for example, say I am at home in the evening, and I’m doing a search. The actions that I will take will be largely the same if I’m using a smartphone, tablet or notebook, because the context is the same. Particularly between notebook and tablet, the query patterns are very similar.”

Similarly, the types of searches that we typically think of as “mobile” searches are the ones that people make when they’re out and about, away from home or work – and that user context is actually far more important than the physical device they are using.

As an example of the predictive power of user context, consider that Google Now — Google’s latest app for getting you just the right information at just the right time — is made possible, in part, by your user context data, such as time and location, which gives Google a decent enough idea of what you’ll likely be searching for, and then seemingly, magically provides that information at your fingertips.

New AdWords “Bid Vectors” Target User Contexts, Not Just Devices

In the new system – the enhanced campaigns announcement we’ve been hearing so much about for a couple of weeks – advertisers can now easily target different user contexts – time, location and devices – in the same campaigns you have been using to target desktop search, instead of having to break out new campaigns for each possible permutation.

As a more concrete example of how to target specific user contexts, consider my own search marketing software company, WordStream, which spends tens of thousands of dollars each month on paid search advertising to drive valuable leads and sales through PPC.

We’re optimizing the various “bid vectors” (my terminology, not an official AdWords term) in our own AdWords account to more aggressively target English speaking markets, using different bid multipliers for USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, etc. We’re leveraging call extensions for searches executed from mobile, and scheduled them to run while our call center is open between 8-6PM EST.

Because so many of our customers are businesses, we’re bidding down our ads slightly during nights and weekends when the office is closed. Thus, you can say that our bidding and ad copy strategy has evolved to become much more about targeting the specific user contexts that tend to convert into the best leads, rather than a strategy based on specific devices.

Here’s an example of how easy it is to add location-based “bid vectors” in AdWords:

Overall, I think it’s a powerful shift in SEM strategy – bidding for different types of user context rather than bidding for specific devices, which was sort of just a limited proxy for user context to begin with.

Tablets vs. Desktop vs. Phones: What’s The Difference?

Less and less these days. Google has aligned tablets (like the iPad) and desktop searches in AdWords. But why, especially if when we log into AdWords, we can see that there are differences in performance between devices? Or why does it appear that there are differences?

Again, the differences have more to do with user context than device. In a recent Google AdWords webinar on enhanced campaigns, Jason Spero, the Head of Global Mobile Sales & Strategy at Google said (at roughly 45:30): “When we look at search data in a controlled time of day and location … the patterns of search are almost identical … there’s a lot of similarity in how people are searching for things whether they’re searching on a tablet vs. a desktop vs. a smartphone, in that context.”

Additionally, Jason points out that “tablets used to be aligned, because of the price point, with a certain demographic” – higher net-worth individuals who could afford them when they first came out. But now, as prices decline, the tablet demographic is looking more and more mainstream demographic-wise, and so, they expect to see fewer differences over time.

Currently, 80% of tablet traffic occurs in the home, in the evening, and Google is much more interested in user context vs. user hardware.

Google attributes these changes to the mobile revolution we’re experiencing – not only are mobile searches growing rapidly, expected to overtake desktop search sometime next year, but people move seamlessly from one device to another, without treating those experiences very differently.

So What? Why Should Search Marketers Care About User Context?

In summary, user context matters because it helps determine what kinds of things people search for and what actions they take immediately after conducting a search.

No longer an afterthought, search marketers must now think more critically about time, location and device from the get-go, and try to reflect those modalities into their ad copy and bid strategies to harness and capture user intent, thereby ensuring the best possible results. The great news is that with enhanced campaigns, it’s far easier to do this than ever before.

For more information on user context, check out my interview with Surojit Chatterjee, the Group Product Manager of Global Mobile Search Ads at Google, on this and related mobile ad strategy topics, as well as my deep dive on enhanced campaigns.

Here’s what an Offer Extension looks like:

Users who click on the View Offer link are taken to a Google-hosted landing page. From there, the discount can be printed out, or saved for later in a user’s Google Offers account, for use in-store.

How Does Offer Extensions Compare to Past Google Deal Endeavors?

You might recall that Google has had past attempts at entering into the coveted deal space that sites like Groupon and Living Social dominate.

Google’s first attempt was the simplest – buy out someone else! Back in 2010, Google was negotiating a buy for Groupon, but their 6 billion dollar offer was rejected, and later Groupon filed for IPO.

This didn’t discourage Google – instead, the search giant started its own deal offering called “Google Offers.” Google Offers was basically a complete copycat of Groupon, but it was never able to overthrow the existing King of Deals, and has been a bit of a flop as far as Google product endeavors are concerned.

Google’s next big move was the “Save to Wallet” feature that worked within Google Wallet. The “Save to Wallet” function let Google Wallet users clip and save coupons they saw online, which could then be used later for online or in-store purchases. When Google Wallet users entered a store or restaurant where the deal could be used, they would get a notification reminding them about the stored coupon. The “Save to Wallet” feature was a smart idea, but it didn’t get much traction since there isn’t a huge contingency of people using Google Wallet (at least, not yet).

The new Offer Extensions feature is different than Google’s past deal experiments because rather than introduce a new product, Google is simply adding a feature to the already widely used AdWords advertising platform.

Why Do Offer Extensions Matter?

While you may feel conditioned to ignore Offer Extensions as just another useless add-on, Offer Extensions has some serious power up its sleeve. Why?

1. It Could Kill Groupon

Offer Extensions could be the nail in the coffin for Groupon, who has been struggling to stay afloat as their stock has plummeted. Offer Extensions are cheap (a click on an offer costs the same as a normal ad click), easy to set up, and allow advertisers to maintain control over their offers. Meanwhile, deal sites like Groupon and Living Social take as much as half of the deal profits (off of already deeply discounted merchandise), require jumping through hoops with representatives, and don’t allow for much modification once a deal is posted, and overall are a terrible deal for advertisers. It seems like an obvious choice for advertisers.

2. Ads With Offer Extensions Get More Clickable Ad Space

Ads that feature Offer Extensions get more valuable SERP real estate, and feature bright buttons that are just begging to be clicked. In a world where even a slight change in wording and an added exclamation mark can drastically improve click-through-rates, having coupon offers attached to ads could mean skyrocketing CTRs and increased Quality Scores.

3. Conversion Tracking For Offline Actions

Marketers regularly struggle with measuring the offline results of their online efforts. An in-store purchase could be a result of someone seeing your online ad and remembering your business, but as an advertiser, you’d never be able to make the connection. Offer Extensions alleviates some of the problem by tracking how many users print and redeem your deal, bridging the gap between online ads and in-store results.

Will Search Marketers Accept Google’s Offer Extensions?

Threatening to destroy the Groupon deal empire and opening up the deal market to the masses, Google’s Offer Extensions is not a feature to be ignored. What will innovative marketers do with this exciting new advertising extension? There is certainly room for creativity and experimentation here, so keep an eye out for these coupon/advertisement hybrids on a search engine results page near you!

While it’s true that certain advanced features – most notably device-level targeting and keyword-level CPC bidding for mobile-only campaigns – are going away, and it’s likely that mobile CPC’s will go up, there’s a lot to be gained from these changes, too.

I, for one, welcome these changes. As someone who works with a customer list of more than 1,000 small and medium-sized businesses, I’ve found that mobile advertising adoption rates are exceedingly low with these advertisers. Probably only around 1 in 25 SMBs (4%!) had the time or expertise to create and manage separate mobile-optimized campaigns.

In my experience, only the most sophisticated advertisers at agencies and large, big-budget companies were using the mobile features. That’s a lot of wasted opportunity, and Enhanced Campaigns should do away with most of it.

In this article, I’d like to talk about some of the reasons I think this is positive news for the majority of marketers.

Exhibit A: Current Device Targeting Options

Previously, it was considered best practice to create separate campaigns for mobile and desktop targeting. This effectively doubled the advertiser’s workload as well as the complexity associated with managing the campaigns.

Here’s what the current device targeting options look like in AdWords:

It’s a beast. Again, some power users appreciated all these granular options, and those are the advertisers that are upset about the news.

But, the vast majority of AdWords users were turned off by the complexity of the settings and too many options, so they opted not to take advantage of any advanced mobile ad features, afraid that they’d screw something up and be wasting money on campaigns that they didn’t have the time to manage properly.

Exhibit B: Geo Targeting Options

Location targeting is essential to a successful mobile strategy. When AdWords was invented, geo-targeting was based on countries. The best practice was to have different campaigns for different locations.

Over time, they added the ability to get much more granular with location targeting – states, cities, radius targeting and all sorts of other options.

Again, there’s a tradeoff between control and ease of use. Setting up different campaigns for every possible location and device combination was untenable for most advertisers.

With Enhanced Campaigns, Google has made geo-targeting and device-targeting more like dayparting. You could always adjust your bids up or down based on time of day – this was useful because advertisers could bid less (or turn off their ads) at night, on weekends, or other times when leads were less valuable, for example, during times when their stores were closed.

In the new system, location- and device-based bidding will work the same way. Advertisers will be able to adjust bids up or down in certain geographic locations and when a search occurs on a mobile device. A bid adjustment of -100% will effectively turn off mobile targeting or advertising in that location. I see this as a vast improvement over the current system.

Exhibit C: Mobile Best Practice Adoption Rates

The above components (geo targeting and device targeting) are essential components of a mobile ad strategy. Previously, getting these components right was so complicated that almost no one used it. The types of businesses that are apt to get the most value from mobile search are small local businesses (dentists, restaurants, car dealerships, etc.) – one in three searches from mobile devices have local search intent.

Yet these also happen to be the least sophisticated advertisers! There was an obvious problem here – the advertisers who stood to gain the most from mobile search were the least likely to use it, because the mobile search options were the most complicated things to properly implement.

Enhanced Campaigns will increase adoption among the SMBs that could really benefit from mobile PPC. Some of the advantages for marketers that upgrade to the new system include:

• Better Reporting Options: The reporting options for mobile are getting a lot stronger, and there will be no more $1 per call tracking fee. They’re making mobile search ROI much easier to track and measure.
• New Mobile Conversion Type: Conversion tracking was always more challenging on mobile than on desktop search, because goal completions were often defined by a phone call rather than reaching a certain page. Google is introducing a new conversion type based on call duration – again, making it easier to measure the value of your mobile ads.
• Dramatically Simplified Campaign Management: Advertisers can now target users across all kinds of devices using the same campaigns, rather than having to explode their campaigns out for different devices and locations. This will drastically reduce the time needed to manage mobile ads.

I’m not saying the news is all good.

One of my complaints is that advertisers that were following the previous best practice will have a less than ideal upgrade experience. For example, desktop campaigns will automatically be set to a non-zero mobile bid. I would have preferred if the bid adjustment factor for mobile search weres set to -100% for desktop-only campaigns. And I wish they would have an optional ability to specify mobile bids at the keyword-level rather than just having a single campaign-level bid multiplier. And yes, mobile CPCs are inevitably going to rise as competition increases, etc.

Overall, I believe Enhanced Campaigns will be a boon for the advertising segment (small and midsized businesses) that stand to benefit most.