• Hitting your budget and losing out on available impressions
• Missing CPA targets
• Not realizing an account has been paused or is no longer getting traffic
• Failing to install a conversion tag on new landing page
• … and more

The first step in setting up alerts in Google AdWords is to dream up some worst-case scenarios. In our agency, for example, we need to know when a campaign spends 95% of its budget because if we hit up against budgets on a consistent basis, we are likely losing impression share and have some bidding work to do. That might throw up a big red flag to our client. So… red flags = alerts!

We might set up this alert like the following: 

Other worst-case scenarios might be:

• a website going down
• conversion rates dropping below a target
• cost per conversion going above a target
• someone forgetting to un-pause a campaign

Using alerts to signal problems early on can be a real savior for any advertiser. Make sure to do these at the MCC level (if possible) and alert more than one team member for redundancy.

Once you have some alerts set up, let them run for a few days and tweak as needed. But keep in mind, you cannot Edit an existing alert in Google Adwords! Instead, you’ll need to create it over from scratch. Another good practice is to advise your team on how to handle alerts that signal problems. Put together a contingency plan and assign responsibilities accordingly. Worst-case scenarios can and should be managed as long as someone with authority is paying attention!

Does ad position affect click-through rates (CTR)? Yes.

Does ad position affect your campaign’s cost? Yes.

Do ads in the top ad position get more conversions? Yes.

Does ad position affect conversion rates? No.

Can you guess the most important question above? Yes, it’s the one answered No. This also happens to be one of the most misunderstood points about ad position. Listen to what Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, has to say:

“We have used a statistical model to account for these effects and found that, on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad.”

That’s pretty straightforward, and you should trust Hal. To be more accurate, it’s totally possible that for any given account ad position may actually correlate with differences in conversion rates. But in aggregate – and in virtually all of the PPC accounts we have managed over the years – we have not found this to be the case.

So, to recap: if you want more clicks, put your ad at the top. If you want more conversions, go for the top. But if you do that, you’re going to spend proportionately more money. Just don’t expect those clicks from the top to convert at a higher rate.

It’s all the same when it comes to ad position and conversion rates.

In the past, when we’d run Dimensions reports by Day, the date would appear but the actual “day” would not. We’d see something like: Oct 11, 2011… Oct 12, 2011… etc. Not very helpful if you want to analyze weeks of data to look for similaries across, say, Saturdays and Sundays.

Now what we see (screenshot below) is the day just before its date: Tue, Oct 11, 2011… Wed, Oct 12, 2011… etc. When we download this report, we find it much easier now that we don’t have to whip out the calendar to make additional notes on what day falls on which date. (Note: We did find ourselves doing some quick excel magic to extract the day from the string, allowing our pivot table to show the right stuff.]

We’d like to thank the AdWords team for not only listening, but also for helping us save time and improve our day-to-day workflow. Hey agencies, did you notice this, too?

We stumbled upon one of those improvements and thought we’d share it with you.

In adCenter Desktop, when you have a large group of broad match keywords that you would like to create phrase and exact match versions for, the long method to do this is to select your keywords, copy and paste into your ad group, change their match types, and repeat the process until you have what you need.

A much faster way to accomplish this, thanks to a nice shortcut in adCenter Desktop — which Google’s AdWords Editor cannot boast — is to right-click on a keyword or group of keywords, choose Add Match Type, and click All. The result is pretty slick: instant keyword match type expansion! But wait… it gets better.

adCenter was keeping track of search queries, categorizing them as broad, phrase or exact, and assigning data to each match type without you even knowing it. Now you can view performance statistics to see data for each of the new match types. For example, splitting out a broad match keyword that earned 100 conversions last month could reveal 45 conversions came from the exact match version, 25 from the phrase match, and the rest from broad. This is great information to have, and all you needed to do was “unhide” it.

Before you call it a day, you need to do one more thing. Since AdCenter automatically assigns the ad group’s default bid to these new match types, you’ll need to set new bids accordingly. It’s a bit tedious, but well worth the time — your account will love you!

[Google AdWords agency support person],

Thanks for doing the work and for sending this (PDF document of AdWords account analysis and recommendations), plus for following up with the raw data (which we requested in order to further look at the same data they were referencing – p.s., when the data came, there was no date range anywhere on the document, so it was still difficult to look at the same data in the advertiser’s AdWords account – who sends data without referencing the date range from which the data is derived?? I mean, who does that???)!

In reference to the PDF, page 4 points out that during off-peak times, (our advertiser client: “the advertiser”) approaches “market” impression share, and that there is a gap between the advertiser’s impression share and the market during peak times. If we bid to a CPA target, how might we use this trend data to improve the account? In other words, if account clicks decrease, it is because conversion rates are decreasing and we are trying to hit target CPA. If we assume that the Google data shows we are missing out on an opportunity, how do we bridge the gap, knowing that we’re only decreasing bids to hit target CPA? Any ideas or insights would be great! (hint: I can’t imagine what these ideas might be — messaging that speaks to off-peak time periods? I don’t think so…)

Page number 6 assumes that the keywords on which we’ve lowered bids would actually convert just fine, if only we would increase bids to get these ads on page 1, but I’m not sure that’s indicative of reality. My feeling is that we have bid these keywords down for a really good reason – they are either not super relevant to the advertiser’s value proposition, or they are branded terms, where users have demonstrated they are really intent on seeking out the brand rather than signing up for another brand. (We’ve tested these branded terms extensively, of course.)

Thanks for listing some specific kw’s. We show that for (insert phrase-matched kw here) we have a CPA of (dollar amount), which is (about 30%) higher than target (dollar amount) CPA – but also that the Google Conversion Optimizer is doing the bidding – your spreadsheet is looking at the 1st page min estimated bid versus our current maximum bid – but our current max bid has no bearing on anything, b/c this is a conversion optimizer-managed campaign. We’ll go through the other keywords in the spreadsheet – maybe we’ll find something!

Page number 7 seems fallacious. The inference is that in general for this account (actually, the Google folks say this applies to just about any account), keywords in high ad positions convert better, which is totally false. There is a correlation between keywords in high ad positions and strong conversion rates; but the causality is that we bid higher on higher-converting keywords. We cause this correlation to be so.

Would love any thoughts.

SEM has grown very fast in terms of click spend and sophistication for several years running. The Google AdWords interface (both web and AE) continues to get more jam-packed with various bells and whistles (ways of looking at & controlling your click spend). 3rd-party technology for reporting, optimization, keyword discovery, ad optimization, etc., is as prevalent as ever.

CMOs need to know what’s important – what should their focus be, in order to get the best return on their time and effort. The answer gets back to the core of what search is all about, and it brings to mind the saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

1) Focus on what your company brings to the table – what is the true value proposition, or need that your company fills?

2) What sorts of keywords might searchers use to seek out your products & services? Remember – the beauty of search is that users can find what they are looking for (rather than stumble across things they didn’t know they wanted! — that’s more for display!). Sure – go crazy with the long tail if that’s what makes you feel good – but don’t stray too far from your relevance curve.

3) Strive for a consistent thread in terms of user experience, starting with: a) bid on relevant keywords where user intent likely has to do with your value proposition; b) match keyword categories with ad text that is both relevant to your keywords and which encourage the click, but that also stays true to your value proposition; give the user a consistent post-click experience, with a landing page that messages benefits, additional info, and that includes the same offer/call-to-action mentioned in the ad, if possible.

4) Ask whether you are tracking and measuring the right things. It’s easiest to move SEM programs forward with a lot of daily conversion data. But at the end of the day we also need to measure actual revenue or lifetime value, or a suitable proxy for those. The trick is to be able to use a metric that gives the SEM manager enough data to do their job, but still (via an internal tracking system) be able to match that daily conversion data up with ‘harder’ metrics.

5) How good is the data? CMOs need to understand the data that they are looking at in order to gauge the accuracy of the data and the degree to which it’s telling them what it’s telling them. Google AdWords and Google Analytics often provide great data for making correct directional changes; but they are no substitute for a company’s internal database, which should be used to check against data discrepancies on a regular basis.

If the CMO stays focused on these big-picture items (where, actually, the details are all-imortant!) she will have the wind to her back.

Check out the vid: