7 Hidden Features In AdWords To Make Your Life Easier
Simple, little-known tricks for easier AdWords account management from columnist Fred Vallaeys.
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Frederick Vallaeys's latest articles
These 10 Analytics Reports Will Improve Your AdWords Results
I recently hosted a Hangout for the Google Partners community about how Google Analytics (GA) and AdWords can work together to help improve PPC results. With the speed at which new features get added, it’s easy to overlook one or two cool capabilities so here’s a roundup of 10 of my favorite ways to use […]
How To Improve Shopping Ad Performance & Quality Score In AdWords
By late August, Product Listing campaigns in AdWords will be retired in favor of Shopping campaigns, so if you haven’t started migrating, don’t delay much longer. You can run both campaign types start tweaking Shopping campaigns now so that they’ll be performing great by the time PLAs go away later this summer. In my last […]
How To Manage Bids For AdWords Shopping Ads
Last month, I covered the basics of how Shopping campaigns in AdWords differ from Search campaigns. The key finding I had was that, with Search, you have to add keywords to target more queries. In Shopping, all queries that match your products are targeted by default, and one of the main reasons to divide products […]
Starting A Shopping Campaign In AdWords? Forget All You Know About Keywords!
Now that Shopping Ads and Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are getting more prominent positions on the SERPs (and taking away traffic from search ads); I’ve started to focus on them more with my clients. I found that working with Google Shopping campaigns is a good deal different from working with traditional keywords and text ads; […]
This AdWords MCC Script Will Save You An Hour Every Day!
If you’ve kept count of how many of my posts during the past year have touched on AdWords Scripts (6 out of 16), you’ll know how useful I believe they can be to streamline repetitive tasks in AdWords. I use them all the time for accounts I manage; and without them, I simply couldn’t be […]
4 Steps To The Perfect AdWords Audit
I recently participated in a few SEM tune-up clinics where we did live reviews of AdWords accounts. While I hope I provided a few interesting tidbits, I think the thing advertisers are looking for in these sessions is insight into the process that other practitioners go through when checking an account. So whether you’re doing […]
How To Use AdWords Scripts Efficiently In Agencies And Enterprise SEM
I’m a big fan of all the things you can automate using AdWords Scripts — from calculating account-level Quality Score, to creating ads from a spreadsheet, to optimizing keywords using data from the Search Terms report. When using scripts to manage a single account, it’s well worth the effort to install and tweak them because […]
A Former Googler’s Routine For AdWords Management
It’s been seven months since we launched Optmyzr’s first tool at SMX Advanced in Seattle — the Quality Score Tracker — and we’ve been busy adding tools, reports and optimizations since then. Now, one of the most common questions we get is when to use various optimizations — and, of course, these apply no matter what tools […]
AdWords Bid Management And Account Structure Mistakes To Avoid
On my one-year anniversary of working as an AdWords practitioner instead of a Googler, Brad Geddes interviewed me about Quality Score for his WebmasterRadio.fm show, Marketing Nirvana. He asked for my thoughts on AdWords now that I’m a user rather than someone building it, and I thought that was a great question and one worth covering […]
3 Ways AdWords Scripts Will Make Your Holidays Merrier
The holidays are officially upon us, and if you’re reading this, I must give thanks to you for your time. When I still worked at Google, this was the time of year when new product launches came to a crawl since most advertisers were too busy to deal with change, and only the most persistent […]
5 Conversion Tracking Tips For AdWords
Last month, I covered how to use call tracking for AdWords to shed some light on how to track phone calls as conversions. This month, I’d like to continue in that vein and share some more tips for tracking and optimizing by conversions, whether they are of the call or online variety. When I first […]
Demystifying Call Tracking In AdWords
Recently, I’ve been helping more companies in the local vertical; and for many of them, the ultimate goal of buying search ads is to get a phone call from a new prospect. Tracking these types of offline conversions has always been complicated, and I have to admit that one of the product areas I found […]
How To Automate Mobile Bid Multipliers — And Other New AdWords Scripts Tricks
September 5th marks the first anniversary of AdWords Scripts. I’ve been using them extensively to automate tasks ranging from reporting Quality Score to creating entire AdWords accounts from spreadsheets of products and services. Scripts have come a long way since they were launched, so to celebrate their first year, I’d like to share five tips […]
4 New Reports To Optimize AdWords For Better Results
There have been quite a few new tools and features launched in Google AdWords (my former employer) over the past couple of months that may not have gotten the attention they deserve amidst the much more hotly debated launch of Enhanced Campaigns. Now that we’ve all transitioned and Enhanced Campaigns can just be called “campaigns,” […]
Quality Score Explained By A Former Googler
With the continuing expansion of ad space at the top of the page (from ad extensions like sitelinks with descriptions), it’s more important than ever to make sure your ads have a great ad rank. But CPCs are on the rise — so unless you can improve your conversion rate so you can increase bids, Quality Score […]
How to Automate AdWords Ad Creation & Landing Page Checks
Automating AdWords as much as possible is every advertiser’s dream, especially when dealing with the massive accounts we see in enterprise-level SEM. This article provides a few examples of how we at Top Tier Marketing have automated some of the more laborious tasks of running AdWords. Hopefully, these examples will give you some ideas for […]
4 Ways To Take Your AdWords Scripts To The Next Level
Last week, I presented at HeroConf in Austin and shared some advanced tips for automating AdWords account management with an audience of PPC account managers. They seemed to like what I had to say; so, I’ll share a few of the more advanced scripting tips with you here. When you manage PPC accounts, you likely […]
Workarounds To Make Enhanced Campaigns More Flexible
Last week at SMX West, I was on the “SEM Best Practices Debate” panel. Several of the topics we debated were related to Enhanced Campaigns, clearly something on the minds of search marketers these days. This month, I’ll recap a few take-aways from the event and share some ideas for workarounds and automation that may […]
How Account Quality Score Can Guide AdWords Optimization
Last month, I covered four ways to use AdWords Scripts to improve AdWords account management. I didn’t share any actual code for fear of geeking out too much, but people seemed interested enough in how to use Scripts to track historical Quality Score (QS), so this month, I’ll share step-by-step instructions and give you the […]
Search Funnel Data Now More Actionable In AdWords
Google just announced that data from search funnels will now be incorporated in the campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads tabs where it will be easier to act on. This is a welcome change for all advertisers; advanced advertisers will find it easier to incorporate the additional conversion metrics into their strategies and newer advertisers may […]
Four Ways You Can Benefit By Using AdWords Scripts
The best kept secret for saving time and improving results in AdWords may very well be AdWords Scripts, a lightweight automation tool that is easier to use than the API but more powerful than the standard interface and the AdWords Editor. As highly as I think of the AdWords UI (I helped build it for […]