Optimizing Keywords and Negatives is a task I recommend to my clients that they do regularly. In this How To, I will include some real-world experience along with the basics of how to use the AdWords Search Term View to optimize keywords and negatives. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | How To: PPC | How To: SEM | Intermediate | Search Marketing Toolbox

It's been a difficult month for Google, and the company is bound to take another hit in the morning as a Wall Street Journal article makes the rounds -- an article that offers new details about the government sting that compelled Google to pay $500 million after acknowledging that it both allowed and helped Canadian pharmacies sell drugs in the U.S. in violation of federal law. To be clear, the Department of Justice investigation and settlement with Google is a done deal and there's nothing new happening specific to those legalities. But the WSJ article shines a new light on how the U.S. go [...]

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: Legal | Legal: Regulation | Top News

Say you're marketing an Android app via AdWords targeted to mobile devices, but your product only works on Honeycomb and newer versions of the OS -- still, you keep getting folks with older versions showing up on your landing page, and likely getting frustrated. That's exactly the type of problem Google is trying to address with new mobile targeting functionality for AdWords, announced this week. The new features will allow advertisers to target to specific versions of operating systems, to ensure the ads are going to the right users. Additionally, AdWords users will now be able to t [...]

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: Mobile | Top News

Google is releasing new functionality for AdWords that is aimed at helping them better allocate their budgets. The new feature will give advertisers impression share metrics down to the Ad Group level. Previously, impression share metrics were available only at the campaign level, which didn't help when advertisers were trying to determine which particular ad group should be allocated more budget. "Today you know that your campaign overall is profitable and you know that it has 'runway' but when you get down to the Ad Group levels you don't know much," Jon Diorio, product manager at Goog [...]

Related Topics: Google: AdWords

One of the opportunities we have as Paid Search Marketing professionals is to help business people communicate their marketing ideas without burdening them with the details of Paid Search. A few months back, I came across a tool that helped tremendously. We adopted it in-house, and tested it with a few client engagements. It is a great success. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | How To: SEM | Microsoft: adCenter | Search Marketing Toolbox