SMX Overtime: Here’s how to take control of your account ad groups and search terms
PPC veteran and SMX speaker, Brad Geddes, explains how to adapt your approach to search terms and conversions after Google's exact match update last year.
Brad Geddes has been involved in PPC since 1998. He is a co-founder of AdAlysis, an ad testing & recommendation platform, and a member of the programming team for SMX events. Brad is the author of Advanced Google AdWords, the most advanced book ever written about Google's advertising program. Brad has worked with companies who manage tens of thousands of small PPC accounts and other companies who spend millions on marketing each month. His experience ranges from owning his own agency, to managing a boutique agency, to overseeing programs that were official resellers of Google and Microsoft. Some brands he has worked with include: Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Thomson Reuters, YP.com, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Salesforce. One of his trademarks has been demystifying the complicated aspects of SEM. Not one to hold secrets, Brad prefers to educate his readers on the various aspects of crafting successful marketing campaigns to ensure the success for all parties involved.
Reverse-engineering AdWords Quality Score factors
Google recently launched a new version of the AdWords API that allows users to download Quality Score information at scale, so contributor Brad Geddes used this information to break down the weight of each factor impacting Quality Score.
Should You Create Ad Group Sitelinks in Enhanced Campaigns?
One of the nicest things about AdWords Enhanced Campaigns is that you can now control sitelinks at the campaign or the ad group level. From a feature standpoint, this sounds great. However, when you start considering the execution phase of creating sitelinks for every single ad group, the task can suddenly seem quite daunting. First, […]
How To Conduct Ad Tests In Enhanced Campaigns
Enhanced campaigns have brought about many changes to AdWords. One of the biggest changes yet to be discussed is the fact that your ad testing methods will have to change. One of the “features” of enhanced campaigns is that your campaign can now run on desktops and mobile devices with different CPCs that are controlled […]
4 Simple Lessons To Make CPA Bidding Work For You
I’m a huge fan of Google’s CPA bidding system. Setting bids is necessary; but merely setting them only leads to short-term progress. Your bidding work is only useful until the data changes, and then you have to set bids again. The maxim, “your data are only good until the data changes,” can be applied to […]
Geographic Targeting In An Enhanced Campaign World
AdWords enhanced campaigns will force many advertisers to change their campaign structures. One of the benefits that have been touted for enhanced campaigns is that you will need fewer campaigns, thus making AdWords easier to manage. For mobile targeting, this is true, as the ability to target mobile devices is now gone. However, for the targeting features […]
Should You Upgrade To AdWords Enhanced Campaigns?
Google made a huge splash last week when they announced Enhanced Campaigns. There have been both positive and negative reactions to the announcement. If you haven’t heard about the changes, here is the quick, bullet-point list: The ability to set mobile-specific bids will be removed (you can do bid adjustments at the campaign level) The […]
4 Ways To Determine Your Starting Bids
While ad testing, proper account setup and conversion tracking are necessary for a successful account, you can’t get any data without a competitive bid. If your bid is too low, then your ad never shows. If your bids are too high, then you can quickly lose a lot of money; and if you are new […]
Case Study: Quadrupling A Small Account’s Conversions In Just 90 Days
CPA Bidding in Google AdWords allows you to set a CPA bid, and then Google will do all the bidding for you. When it works, its fantastic, as you don’t have to spend all day trying to set bids inside the account. Instead, you can focus you time on more permanent improvements, such as testing […]
Why You Must Choose A Winning PPC Ad
One of the worst ways of testing ads is: Writing new ads Turning on one of Google’s ‘optimize’ features Letting Google serve your ads Writing new ads Let Google serve your ads repeat… However, I find this is a very common testing method. There’s a big problem with this method: there’s no delete. Just by […]
How To Easily Manage & Test Millions Of Ads
You must test ads to make your paid search account grow and thrive. That fact is no longer debatable – it is just a best practice fact. Ad testing in small accounts is very easy as there are not thousands of ad group or hundreds of thousands of ads to track. However, in large accounts, […]
5 Most Common Ways PPC Accounts Get Out Of Shape
When you first build a PPC account, it’s usually well structured, lean, doesn’t have any fat, and hopefully performs well. As accounts grow, offers change, websites change CMSs, accounts start to get out of shape. AdWords is now over ten years old. Many accounts have a decade of changes and additions which have grown out […]
How To Find Success With Google’s Display Network
Google’s display network is massive, encompassing more than 4 billion daily page views, 700 million monthly users, and reaching more than 80% of the online audience. Yet, with all this inventory, many marketers fail with display marketing. The major reasons are they either are trying to reach the incorrect goals or they don’t understand how […]
How To Manage & Measure Local PPC Accounts
In my last column, I looked at some of the differences between small and large accounts as the best practices vary for each. In this column, we’re going to specifically focus on one of the most common small accounts: local accounts; and examine some of the best practices for this type of small account. A […]
How Best Practices Differ In Small & Large Accounts
There are a lot of great articles written about paid search and best practices. However, almost all these articles ignore one important aspect of paid search: account size. For instance, it is a best practice to bid at the keyword level, and every large account should be doing that on most of their keywords. However, […]
Ad Testing: Are You Using The Wrong Success Metrics?
Everyone knows you should test ads – that’s not debatable anymore. However, what is debatable is which of the ads you are testing is actually the best ad. I recently polled a large group of marketers and asked them of these ads, which one performed the best: Take a moment to decide which you think […]
8 Features Advertisers Really Need From Google AdWords
Google AdWords has seen a flurry of releases recently. Some have been good (Display Campaign Optimizer) and others bad (rotate changes) for advertisers. Many of these features are items Google wants to see as they help increase their bottom line or make it very easy to advertise. However, these new features are not necessarily what […]
The Who, When & Why Of PPC Account Audits
Auditing your PPC accounts on a regular basis is something every company should be doing. Performing an audit lets you step outside of your normal day-to-day activities within an account to reevaluate the big picture and see where large opportunities may lie. Normally, when you hear about a company doing a PPC audit, it’s a […]
4 Pieces Of PPC Conventional Wisdom You Should Possibly Ignore
Best practices are called such because in most cases they work. In the PPC world, they are a set of processes or layouts for which conventional wisdom has concluded they are the best method for creating or managing accounts and landing pages. Conventional wisdom is an idea that is widely accepted because it is usually […]
How To Run Your PPC Accounts Like A Project
Managing PPC accounts can be overwhelming. There is so much to-do, and no one ever has enough time. This leads most people to just make huge todo lists of items they either should be doing, or want to eventually do inside their account. The problem with to-do lists is that they are easy to ignore. […]