The ROI Revolution Blog

Be Your AdWords Account Historian

January 28, 2010

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana

Previously tucked away under the tools menu in the old AdWords user interface, the "My Change History" tool is an account manager's best friend and as such, has been moved to a more prominent place within the account under the reporting tab.

Why has this tool been granted such a prominent position in the new interface, alongside such heavy hitting account management tools as Google Analytics, Conversion Tracker and the Report Center? Well, sure it's a reporting tool like the others, but it's unique ability to track changes to your account, coupled with its performance metric graphs and visual timeline overlay make it a key weapon in any AdWords account manager's arsenal. It's placement under the Reporting tab is a testament to its usefulness.

While managing any AdWords account, it is common to make tens or even hundreds of changes to your account in one sitting in an effort to optimize traffic for better return on investment. Periodic tweaking of your account is essential to long-term growth and greater ROI. However, these changes are only beneficial to you if you can account for which ones resulted in performance improvements, and which ones didn't. In fact, it is the accountability of PPC optimization that affords us confidence in the power of split testing to boost profits.

And so, AdWords has given account managers the "My Change History" tool which records all changes made to an account for 2 years prior to a given date, then categorizes those changes for easy access.

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Is it Time For a Winter PPC Account Makeover?

January 19, 2010

January is a fresh start, a time for resolutions, and a time for cleaning up the mess made from the holiday season. The same should apply to your Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Breathe new life into them with fresh keywords, ad text, and competitive research.

Here is a 5 step plan to give your PPC accounts a (much needed) winter makeover:

1. Read Blog Articles For New Keyword Ideas: Read your industry blogs to keep up with the latest buzz words. Reading the latest and greatest articles may help you think of new ways people will be searching for your products. Setting up a Google blog reader to follow blogs from your industry can help make this task much more time efficient.

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Want more traffic? Check your delivery setting.

January 13, 2010

Often times our clients want to get as much traffic as possible, yet their campaign settings are not set up appropriately to accomplish their goal and that's where we come in.

There are two different types of budget delivery standard and accelerated.

Standard Delivery: Selecting this option can potentially limit the number of times your ads show throughout the course of the day. This option designates the campaign to spend the daily budget allocated steadily throughout each day.

Accelerated Delivery: Selecting this option guarantees that your ad will show as much as possible throughout the course of each day except in the event that the budget you allocated for that campaign is depleted before day's end.

As an AdWords advertiser you must decide which of the two settings is a better fit for you and your overall account budget.

To switch between Standard Delivery and Accelerated Delivery, follow these steps:

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Easy Recipe for Successful Ad Text

January 7, 2010

When it comes to ad text "Always Be Testing" is the motto that we hold in high esteem here at ROI Revolution. If you continually test your ads (to beat the current best performer) you will constantly improve the performance of your campaigns.

It is important to remember that there are a few strategies and tips you pretty much always need to implement as you are writing and testing ads. I"ve come up with an "ad recipe" that I keep on my desk to ensure all necessary elements are included in the new ads I write.

I"ll break down each ingredient:

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Qualify Your Customers With Your Ad Text

January 6, 2010

With PPC advertising, the best use of ad copy is not just to attract prospects, but sometimes to filter out searchers who are unlikely to become your customers.

Since you pay for each click to your site, when a click-happy searcher pops into your site just to browse or to do a little price comparison, you're probably wasting some of your precious ad spend.

One way to effectively ward off some of these searchers is by including the price of your product or service in your ad. You obviously can't eliminate clicks from these users entirely - if they want to click through, they're going to. But adding the price makes them less likely on average to want to click.

For searchers who sincerely think they might be interested in your product or service, your price acts as a great filter, keeping out prospects that don't want to pay or can't afford your price point. And if the searcher has zero interest in spending money, your price makes it loud-and-clear that they won't be getting any freebies by clicking your ad.

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Updated: Urchin 6 Demonstration Webinar

January 5, 2010

We've updated our Urchin 6 Demonstration webinar to include examples of Urchin's CPC integration (AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing), tracking and reporting for the next presentation on Tuesday, January 12th at 2:00pm ET.

During this 35-40 minute webinar we'll be reviewing a few of Urchin's signature features along with pricing and upgrade information. The webinar will be conducted online and over the phone for your convenience (this is a live event, no recordings will be available). The presentation will be followed by Q&A, so don't miss out on the chance to bring your Urchin 6 product questions to the experts!

The updates we'll be going over include:

The Cost Per Click (CPC) Data Import Manager allows you to create CPC Sources. It enables automatic extraction of CPC Campaign Data from AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). The CPC Sources can be linked to existing profiles and this will enable automatic inclusion of the CPC Data into Urchin reports.

Once the data has been imported, Urchin has the following features to manage your CPC campaigns:

• The Keyword Generation Tool allows you to generate and manage keywords and to see their performance information.
  
• Direct links to AdWords allow you to navigate directly from Urchin to the appropriate screen in your AdWords account.
  
• The Urchin Tag Manager inserts a dynamic keyword insertion tag {keyword} in ad destination URLs. This feature simplifies the URL tagging experience and allows you to seamlessly import AdWords cost data into Urchin.
  
• A CPC Structure group of reports has been added under the Advertisement Optimization section.
  

Join us live by registering for our free Urchin 6 webinar.

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