Category Archives: How To

Google AdWords Bid Simulator

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The Google AdWords bid simulator is quite impressive. This was a tool that until recently was in beta. You use the tool within your AdWords account. The Bid Simulator is different than the keyword tool that Google offers to suggest other keywords and give you an idea of traffic as well as competition.

What Bid Simulator Does
Assuming you have a keyword for one of your campaigns within AdWords you can try the simulator. Not all of the keywords will have the simulator option but if you see the icon next to the cost per click that you are bidding you will be able to try it. Essentially you can determine the amount of traffic you can expect to receive for a particular keyword without having to raise your bid and spend the extra money. Take a look at this image. You can see that the current bid for “play game” is $0.20 and the estimated impressions, clicks and cost may also be shown.

google_bid_simulator

The image does not show the estimated clicks or cost as this was a test account. This simulator is based on estimates, however read more to understand why it is so powerful.

Power of Bid Simulator
The bid simulator is very powerful. However first realize the estimates it provides are estimates of what would of happened in the past. In other words I had checked to look at the dates between 10/3/09 and 10/9/09. If the bids had been increased to the CPC amounts you see in the image then the simulator provides the estimated cost and clicks you would have received during that time period.

For those who are stock analysts you will know the phrase “past performance does not predict future behavior“. Therefore the simulator does not predict the future but gives you a pretty good idea.

Typically you would have to spend the money by bidding higher to determine the impact of the bidding. This is extremely valuable information at your fingertips available without having to spend the additional money before knowing the results.

How to Use the Bid Simulator
To use the bid simulator you choose the Keywords tab in AdWords. Next look at the maximum CPC column with your maximum bids. If there is a small blue icon you can click it to see the image as you see above. Not all of your bids will have the simulator but many will.

AdWords Bid Simulator

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Everyone loves to be able to predict the future. Now if you could only predict your future spending and whether or not additional spending would result in better results or not. Google AdWords is trying to assist you in doing just that. Here is their explanation of the simulator:






Bid Simulator takes some of the guess work out of cost per click (CPC) bidding by estimating the number of clicks or impressions you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid.

From Google’s official blog here is the post related to the AdWords bidding simulator, see the tutorial here, and/or watch the video below:



Bid AdWords
A great way to bid adwords is to first be able to determine your potential best price for the ads. While this may not show your return on investment, if you already know the value of the words this will allow you to attempt to scale at the best price. Adwords bidding is an art, but with the simulator they have added a science element to this.

Typically you would have to change your bids, wait until they take effect and watch your spend change. This could take time and you would have to keep track of your changes to determine the optimum price. However with the bid adwords tool you can do this in real time without spending any money.

Run Banners on Google

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You may or may not know that you can run banner ads on through AdWords. When most people think of Google AdWords they immediately think of the text ads. The reason this seems to be the case is due to the fact that when you are on Google.com you will only see text ads.

However when you run an advertisement you are able to be on the Google.com site or on one of their publisher sites. A publisher site must opt in have banner ads displayed instead of text ads, or both. Therefore through Google AdWords can run Banner ads on the Google network.

Tip
If you are considering buying banner advertising a particular website, you may first want to check Google. Here is why. Some websites run Google ads, and some of them have opted in to banner ads. If they have opted in to banner ads you may as well check by using the placements within AdWords to determine if that site runs Google ads and if that site.

If they do run banners instead of completing an insertion order with them for a specific amount of spend you may as well first test them through Google ads when you can run banners. This is a great way to test the site’s banner ads and how they work for you without having to agree at a time to a particular spend. with Google you do not have to pay a CPM price you will pay a CPC price for the banners.

Yahoo Quality Index Much Like AdWords Quality Score

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A better quality advertisement on Yahoo can allow you to obtain higher rankings in their pay per click search marketing without increasing your cost per click.

Yahoo Quality Index
Much like the Google Quality Score that I wrote about recently Yahoo has their version which they call the Yahoo Quality Index. Essentially they are trying to determine if you have a relevant advertisement. They wish to present quality advertisements to visitors of their site. The better your Quality Index of your advertisement, the more likely you will achieve a high ranking position in relation to other ads and spend less money than others that have a lower Quality Index score.

How is the Quality Index Computed
To compute the Quality Index Yahoo looks at your advertisement, the keywords in the ad, the keywords you are targeting, how many clicks you receive and how you compare to others that are your competition.

What is Good and What is Bad
When reading the Google Quality Score a 1 is bad and a 10 is best. For Yahoo Quality Index they show a bar with 1 to 5 bars, 1 is bad and 5 is best.

How to Increase Your Quality Score
To increase your quality score you need to micro manage your advertisements and campaigns. Create ads that incorporate your keywords, either hard code them by typing the word in the ad or use their “insert keyword” function. [Note: When using the insert keyword be careful to check that inserting a keyword will make sense when the full ad is being read by a user]. Therefore the more relevant your keywords to your ads the more likely your score will be higher.

Also, although Google and Yahoo have not said this (at least I cannot find it) I firmly believe from experience that the correlation between the keywords, the advertisement, and the landing page the advertisement is sending the individual to, makes a difference as well. So make sure your landing page correlates to the keywords you are using and the advertisement.

Conclusion
Manage your Yahoo ads much like you would your Google ads, optimize keywords – ads – and landing pages for the higher score, higher rank, and cheaper overall cost when compared to your competitors.

Google AdWords Editor WARNING

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If you use AdWords and use the desktop AdWords Editor application you may need to double check the settings. I have noticed recently that some of the settings for a campaign within the Editor do not update my AdWords account. For example a new campaign created in the Editor was set for the content network and Relevant pages across the entire network, after multiple uploads of changes it was never sent to AdWords. When I looked in the campaign settings it was set to Relevant pages only on the placements I target. Obviously these are two completely different settings.

Double Check AdWords in the Browser
I strongly suggest you double check campaigns and campaign settings. I only noticed the discrepancy after a particular campaign was not yielding any impressions. At first I assumed it was just my fault, however that exact same issue has happened multiple times. Be sure to double check your settings and other campaign components.

Google AdWords Editor
If you do not use the editor I highly suggest you give it a try. The AdWords Editor is a software application you download for free from Google. It is very powerful, allowing you to set up campaigns, make editors, copy, paste and provides more management functionality than using AdWords through the browser. It also allows you to manage multiple accounts and manage accounts offline, you can make edits to campaigns and upload whenever you like. Get your free copy of the AdWords Editor from Google.

Google Quality Score to Rank Higher and Pay Less

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AdWords Quality Score
Did you think that with Google AdWords the highest bidder won? Many do, but that’s not always the case. AdWords Quality Score is a score from 1 to 10 for each of your keywords as calculated by Google AdWords.

Rank Higher for Less Money
If you have a higher Quality Score for a keyword than another bidder you may obtain a higher listing result and with a lower maximum CPC bid. How is this possible? It is made possible by the way Google AdWords calculates your Quality Score.

Calculating Quality Score
The AdWords system looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text as well as the search query. It is also speculated that the landing page and relevance to the ad text as well as search query may also be relevant however I have not seen that stated by Google. Quality Scores of keywords can change.

Test it out by creating a campaign and ad group with only a few related keyword phrases and then include them in a text ad. You can see the Quality Score within the AdWords editor or within the web based AdWords system, you just have to enable it.

Check Out Squidoo

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Squidoo is a free tool to publish any content you like. Take a look at Squidoo.

You can quickly, very quickly, publish and article about anything. With little to no knowledge of programming at all you can quickly create an amazing page of content, what they call a “lens”. Not only can you quickly publish content, but you can easily incorporate content from the webs best sites and services. You can easily add delicious links, Flickr photos, RSS feeds, Google blog search results and much more. Moving around these modules is extremely simple, just drag and drop. Take a look at this Domain Lens I created in just minutes, and just as fast created a GoDaddy Promo Code List. There is much more that can be added, so do not judge the usefulness of Squidoo on that one test lens I created.

Google AdWords Changed their Display URL Policy

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In February, 2009, Google announced they are changing their display URL policy in AdWords. Recall that Display URL and Destination URL are two different things. The Display URL is as it sounds, the URL that is displayed when someone views your advertisement.

The change is that all the display URLs in one ad group must have the same top level domain.

Here is an example of what is allowed in one ad group:
deal.longest.com
www.longest.com
www.longest.com/brianiscool

Here is an example of what is not allowed in the same ad group:
deal.longest.com
deal.brianlongest.com

Google says it is for your own good because you do not know what you are doing so they are here to help. Thanks Google.

Google Conversion Optimizer

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If you have not tried the Google Conversion Optimizer with AdWords you may want to give it a try. As opposed to monitoring your bids daily, you can try to let Google monitor them for you. I say you may want to try it as you should always not just blindly believe anything will work without first testing it.

How it Works
That being said, here is how it works, you set the maximum cost per acquisition (CPA) that you would like to pay. Instead of constantly monitoring your ad campaigns and adjust your cost per click (CPC) you let the conversion optimizer monitor and adjust for you while attempting to maintain your CPA.

The conversion optimizer has access to data you do not have. From that data it is able to predict your likelihood of obtaining a conversion. It looks at the search query of the user utilizing past history of conversions for you, the location of the user, and conversion history of particular sites. Therefore these factors that allowed you to obtain past conversions are weighed before your ad is placed and the ad is only placed if the factors lead the optimizer to believe a conversion is possible at or below your CPA.

Requirements
First you have to be using the AdWords conversion tracking, the code AdWords provides that is placed on the page after a successful conversion on your site alerting AdWords of a conversion. Secondly, you must have received conversions already, the optimizer needs past data to be able to start predicting the likelihood of success. Once you have at least 30 conversions in 30 days you can utilize the conversion optimizer. Lastly, your conversions must be at or near a similar rate for the past couple of days.

It is worth giving it a try, first you obtain conversions yourself and be sure you are using the conversion tracking code. Then after you have data and stable data, you can utilize the conversion optimizer.