Managing AdWords Campaigns

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This article is about the daily operation of AdWords campaigns. I emphasize five important topics in this article: -  Pausing and resuming campaigns and Ad Groups -  Understanding why accounts are slowed, and knowing how to reactivate a slowed account -  Coping with slowed and disabled keywords, situations that can be baffling to the uninitiated -  Understanding and choosing geo-targeting -  Implementing Google’s conversion tracking feature Pausing and Resuming Portions of Your Campaigns One advantage of AdWords advertising is the control you have over stopping and restarting portions of your marketing. Following are some reasons why you might want to interrupt your advertising:

-  Budgetary. Your return on investment is suffering and your business is leaking marketing dollars.

-  Assessment. You want data from different portions of your overall enterprise to settle without ongoing activity distorting your ROI calculations.

This factor is especially pertinent to affiliate marketing, in which the marketer must balance site statistics, AdWords statistics, and reporting statistics at the affiliate agency.

-  More assessment. You need time to catch your breath in AdWords, survey the account, and analyze your ROI.

-  Breakdown. Not your breakdown, I hope, but the breakdown of some portion of your AdWords effort. You may stop and restart elements of your campaign down to the Ad Group level. You may also delete keywords, but you can’t pause and resume keywords short of plucking them out entirely and then building them back in. The pause-and-resume system in AdWords allows you to stop activity without losing settings. The system responds quickly, if not quite instantaneously. However, it can take up to three hours for reporting statistics in the Control Center to catch up with paused reality. When a campaign is running, of course, statistics never catch up to reality there’s always a lag of no more than three hours. Little instruction is required for pausing campaigns and Ad Groups. In the case of campaigns, you can do the job from the top page of the Campaign Management tab, like this:

1. Click the Campaign Management tab.

2. Use the check boxes to select one or more campaigns you want to pause.

3. Click the Pause button.

You pause and resume Ad Groups in the same manner, but from the Ad Group page. Specifically:

1. Click the Campaign Management tab.

2. In the Campaign Name column, click any campaign. 3. Use the check boxes to select one or more Ad Groups.

4. Click the Pause or Resume button. Paused campaigns and Ad Groups continue to display their statistics and to contribute those numbers to your account or campaign totals. However, the display of those statistics is date-sensitive. So if you use the date menus to specify a day in which some Ad Groups were paused for the entire day, those Ad Groups show no data.

Repairing Broken Campaigns Sometimes things can go wrong. Specifically, Google puts its nose in your account, inhibiting the distribution of your ads. This grim fact is frustrating at first to nearly every advertiser, but it’s all in the cause of relevance, which in the end is the key to everyone’s success. Things can go wrong with your marketing effort that have nothing to do with Google’s intrusions and corrections. You might not convert leads to sales on your site. You might spend too much for clickthroughs, generating high clickthrough rates (CTRs) but dragging down your return on investment (ROI). These issues seek a variety of solutions ranging from product pricing to site design to advertising strategy. The purpose of this section is to show you how to deal with the problems that arise and are solved in the AdWords Control Center, namely, recovering from slowed and disabled account elements. Reactivating a slowed account Google puts the brakes on your campaigns for one basic reason: low CTR. Google assesses your clickthrough rate on two extreme levels: keyword by keyword and account-wide. For the most part, Google begins these measurements after 1000 impressions.

Under certain circumstances (for example, after a disabled keyword is reinstated), fewer impressions are counted. If your account’s total CTR is below the threshold of 0.5 percent, which necessarily means some of your keywords are below that level, Google might (probably will) slow the account. If the overall account CTR is acceptable, Google slows individual keywords when they don’t perform up to spec. When the account is slowed, the Control Center displays a notice. You may reactivate the account whenever you like with a single click of the button in the notice. Every third time you do so, Google charges your account five dollars. Nearly everyone accrues a few of those charges, but be careful about reactivating the account without correcting the problem, which resides in your Ad Group(s). Fixing troublesome keyword performance is a matter of discarding the keyword, rewriting the ad with which the keyword is associated, changing the matching option of the keyword, or adjusting the bid amount to encourage a higher clickthrough rate.

These creative issues are discussed in Articles 8 and 9. Recovering disabled keywords Google never stops the activity of an advertiser’s entire account, though it does slow the distribution of all ads when the account isn’t performing well. At the keyword level, Google does stop ad distribution completely when an ad is failing on its keywords’ search pages. Three factors must correspond to motivate Google to disable a keyword: -  The associated ad must accrue at least 1000 impressions, unless it’s a formerly disabled keyword in use again. -  The CTR must fall below 0.5 percent for ads in the top page position or below slightly lower thresholds for lower positions. -  The performance meltdown must happen on Google.com, regardless of the ad’s performance on the extended distribution networks. Google first issues the At risk warning in the Status column of the Ad Group page, as described and illustrated in Article 9. Google might also slow the ads associated with the failing keyword. Then, if you make no corrections, Google lowers the boom and disables the keyword, meaning that ads associated with that keyword no longer appear on any pages in Google and throughout the extended networks.

When bad things happen to good keywords Not uncommonly, Google slows or disables keywords that appear to be thriving. This phenomenon is a source of mystery to new advertisers, who watch in horror as Google takes their best keywords out of play. The advertiser’s best keywords are not necessarily Google’s best keywords. The reason for this contradictory scenario is that Google computes the deciding CTR on advertising performance on Google’s search pages only. It does not factor in ad performance on its search or content partner sites. If an advertiser chooses to distribute ads to the search network and content network (in Campaign settings), the Control Center’s statistics for the campaign total all metrics generated throughout the networks. Ironically, Google doesn’t break out the important numbers regarding performance in Google. Instead, Google implements the “At risk” warning system a surprisingly blunt tool in an otherwise laser-sharp reporting environment. Frustration can run high when good, productive, profitable keywords are disabled. I’ve seen keywords with an overall CTR above 3.0 fall under the knife because their hidden performance numbers on Google were below the 0.5 threshold.

The question naturally arises, Why do some ads perform so well outside Google and so poorly on Google search pages? Several reasons contribute to this puzzle. Important sites in the extended networks display ads differently from Google, and those display differences can work favorably for certain ads. Perhaps consumers are more accustomed to the presence of advertising in Google than on other sites. Whatever the reasons, expect to run into the situation. The AdWords community has buzzed with complaint about this issue, wondering why advertisers are not offered a choice of getting off Google’s pages entirely. If advertisers are allowed to opt in and out of the Google Network, why not the home site? After all, when robust keywords are disabled because of Google-only performance, everybody loses the advertiser, the search network owners, the content publishers, and Google.

Following are two facts to know when a keyword is disabled: -  Keywords in good standing continue operating at full throttle, triggering the appearance of your ads. -  Keyword phrases that include a keyword that is failing elsewhere in the account are slowed along with the failing keyword, even if those phrases are performing well in their Ad Groups. So, if the keyword mp3 is disabled, the phrase portable mp3 player is disabled also, no matter where it is used in your account.

You may resuscitate a disabled keyword, but the process is not as easy as the one click that reactivates a slowed account. Google really doesn’t want underperforming ads appearing on its pages, and it regards a low CTR as a mark of poor relevance. Therefore, advertisers may not simply turn the keyword back on in the same Ad Group. Here are your options:

-  Ignore the disabled keyword. Let it stay disabled and forget about it.

-  Delete the disabled keyword. Doing so gets rid of the problem but doesn’t reactivate an account when it has been slowed by a slowed or disabled keyword.

-  Change the matching option of the keyword, leaving it in the same Ad Group.

-  Delete the keyword from its Ad Group and put it in another Ad Group.

This option, while allowed, brings an extraordinary level of scrutiny to that keyword’s performance. Google no longer allows 1000 impressions to accrue to resuscitated keywords, and boots them into disability at the first sign of low-CTR trouble. You may continue reviving the keyword in this fashion, but the exercise is futile and frustrating and doesn’t address the underlying problem, which is the poor relevance of the keyword to the ad, and the ad to the searcher’s keyword. Pros and Cons of Geo-Targeting Geo-targeting is one of the newest and most valuable of the Campaign settings. I describe how to select target countries and U.S. regions.. There’s really no mystery to it:

1. Click the Campaign Management tab.

2. Select any campaign by clicking its check box.

3. Click the Edit Settings button.

4. In the scrolling list, select one or more countries.

If you want to geo-target U.S. regions, select United States regional targeting. Then select one or more regions from the new list that appears. Geo-targeted ads appear on the search pages of people residing in the selected countries or regions. Google is reasonably accurate in determining the location of users.

Setting Up Conversion Tracking Conversion Tracking is Google’s answer to third-party software packages that trace traffic through a site. Specialized programs provide a more detailed picture than Google does of where traffic comes from, how it proceeds through the site, and the manner in which it exits. Google’s tool is geared to tracking how many clickthrough visitors get through a simple conversion process at the landing site. In most situations, a customer who clicks through an AdWords ad is asked to perform some sort of behavior on the landing page. If the advertising site merely wants traffic, no conversion is necessarily called for. But most landing pages are geared towards collecting a registration or sign-up or selling a product.

Affiliate marketers aim clickthroughs at other companies’ sites, so conversion tracking doesn’t work for affiliate marketers. Implementing conversion tracking in your account is simple, but it does require a knowledge of HTML code, at least to the extent of being able to cut and paste preset code into a Web page’s source document. After you alter the document, you must upload it to the site’s server. Google provides the code. Without getting technical, here’s a description of conversion tracking in action:

1. The advertiser pastes Google’s code (which is javascript) into the page to be tracked. In most cases, this page is not the initial landing page, but the page a customer lands on after performing a conversion. So, the code might be placed in a “Thank You” page after a newsletter sign-up, for example.

2. Google tracks consumers as they click through ads and land on the advertiser’s site.

3. If the customer performs the conversion action and lands on the postconversion page, Google’s javascript tabulates the activity.

4. Google reports conversion tracking statistics in the Control Center. Google offers two versions of conversion tracking: basic and customized. The customization mostly consists of the ability to put in a price value on a product sold at the target site, so Google can perform ROI statistics on the Control Center pages. Most advertisers who are unaccustomed to conversion tracking start with the basic version, which does a fine job of tracking how many clickthroughs end up on the post-conversion page. This basic statistic is crucial in calculating the advertiser’s ROI and the effectiveness of AdWords marketing. To set up your account for basic conversion tracking, follow these steps:

1. Click the Campaign Management tab.

2. Click Conversion Tracking.

3. Under Basic Conversion Tracking, click the Learn more link.

4. Click the Start tracking button. Select a language and your site’s security level. If you operate a secure commerce site, your security level on the post-conversion page is most likely https://. If not, your page’s prefix is the regular http://.

5. Copy the javascript code.

6. Paste the code into your post-conversion page.