In February, Adwords introduced a new toolbar on their campaigns tab, which is now available across all the tabs in your Adwords account.


My favourite part of the toolbar is this down arrow, which means you can download a report showing whatever you have in your table right that moment. This is fantastic, because, when you are using the main interface every day (rather than reports which you might use weekly), you get used to a certain way of looking at the data, and here you can export it just like that.


The 'All Campaigns' button drops down to give you 3 choices - All, All Enabled, All But Deleted. The All choice is fantastic, as it allows you to see all those campaigns you might have deleted, so that they aren't really gone forever. I haven't yet found a use for the All But Deleted and All Enabled - and frankly, don't understand what the difference between them is.

Segment
The segment button allows you to segment the results in the table (not in the graph) by timeframe, click type, device and keyword match. Timeframe is useful for comparing adjacent time periods, but is too much information when using the keywords tab. Click type isn't useful for me, because I don't use call clicks. Devices could provide some VERY useful information, telling you how many of your users are mobile, and keyword match is useful for tweaking your campaign.

Filter
Here you can create your own filter to apply to your data, kind of like in Google analytics. You can exclude clicks, costs, conversions, status types and lots of other things, without having to export all the information first.

The other buttons are the usual ones - changing columns and graph display.

These improvements to Google Adwords are just making it more and more unnecessary to use other software to manage your Adwords campaigns. I believe that using the normal Google Adwords interface coupled with Adwords Editor, you don't need to use any other software, this should give you all the flexibility you need to manage campaigns of any size.

PPC (Pay Per Click Marketing) is where you place a short ad on a search engine or network site and pay only when someone clicks on your ad.

The great thing about this payment model is that you only pay for people actually interested in visiting your site (i.e. they will click through) and you can see from the reports a lot of detail about each click. PPC is one of the most accountable of all marketing spends.

With all the information at your fingertips, there are lots of things you can do to optimise (or reduce) your spend and ensure you are getting the most relevant traffic for your money.

Here is a list of things you should check at least monthly, to ensure your PPC money isn't going down the drain.

1. The Search Query Report (not the keyword report). The search query report shows the terms people actually used to visit your site. Using this, you can find keywords which should be made negative in your campaigns. For example, if you own a shoe store and see a lot of people arriving via the term socks (and you don't sell socks), then maybe you need to add that as a negative keyword. Note this kind of thing shouldn't be a problem if you have exact match keywords, but could if you use broad match.

2. Check your bounce rates against your Ads and keywords - whichever ads and keywords are resulting in a high bounce rate or low time on site  need to be reconsidered. Those ads are obviously not targetted to your key market, but they are still costing you money. Try to fix them by making them more targetted, or delete them.

3. Click Through Rate - if you have a very low click through rate, it could be due to one of a few of things, but, if you are ranking well and for the right keywords, a low CTR could be because your ad copy is not enticing. Improve your ad copy, make it more compelling and more professional. Use keywords in your heading and try to identify unique things about your business which means people should click on your ad instead of a competitors.

4. Bidding Wars - The thing with PPC marketing is that it is an auction type process, you bid and you get a placement. The higher you bid, the higher the placement of your ad. For some competitive types, this can be addictive, and they can bid themselves right to the top. The things you need to remember are firstly, top spot isn't always the spot which will get you the most clicks and secondly, you need to question whether that particular term is worth the cost you are spending.

5. Cost per conversion - calculate an approximate cost per conversion for each of your ad groups to see if you are staying within a reasonable budget. For this to work, you need to have Google Analytics on your site, and then you can either use the Google Conversion Optimiser, or create your own. Make sure you judge the costs you are spending for traffic and conversions against what you are ACTUALLY happy to pay for them.

Regular monitoring of your ad words account will mean that you minimise your wasted spend. Don't just set your Adwords and leave it, or you could see your money going right down the drain.

One report I love for making improvements to any Adwords campaign is the 'Search Query Performance' report. This is very different to the 'Keyword Performance Report'.

The Search Query Performance report show you exactly what terms people searched for when they came to your site, whereas the Keyword Performance report shows you what keyword in your adwords account  the click was attributed to. In Google Analytics, you will see keyword performance results, not search query performance.

For example, in your Adwords account, you might have the keyword "leather shoes", which is a phrase match keyword.

If someone typed in 'white leather shoes' and then clicked on your ad, the search query performance report would record one visit against ' white leather shoes', whereas the keyword report (and Google Analytics) would record one visit against "leather shoes".

So what can you do with the search query performance report? Here are just a few things you can do after analysing the kind of search queries people are using to arrive on your site;

1. If people are arriving using search queries irrelevant to your site  - for example if you sell shoes and people are arriving on terms like 'shoe polish', then add the negative term 'polish'. The search query report can help you find negative keywords you might never have considered.

2. If lots of people are using similar terms, you might want a dedicated ad group and dedicated copy for those. E.g. if a lot of people are arriving from terms related to 'tennis shoes', (and assuming you sell tennis shoes), then you might want dedicated ad copy and an ad group for tennis shoes.

3. Similarly, make sure that what people are looking for is related to the landing page you are sending them to. If not, make a new ad group for those terms and have a dedicated landing page.

4. If there are a lot of uses of 'synonyms', then you might want to add them as their own keyword in your account, which will make them more relevant and might reduce your cost per click. 

The conversion optimiser is a tool available in Google Adwords which uses your conversion tracking data to optimise your placement in every ad auction to get you more 'converting' clicks.

What happens is, instead of putting in a cost per click, you put in a cost per acquisition. This means, how much you are willing to pay for a conversion (e.g. sale or sign up) on your site.

For example, you maximum cost per click, might be $1. If 1 out of 10 clicks to your sites actually converts, this means that your 'cost per acquisition'(CPA) is $10, because it took 10 x $1 clicks for you to get a conversion.

So, what the optimiser does, is reverse engineer this. You say what your ideal cost per acquisition is, then they figure out, using your conversion rate data for each ad group, what your cost per click for each ad group should be.

This is just automating something that is pretty straight forward. If you have a small account, this is something you could do yourself, and that would be better because you have total control. For larger accounts, this might be more dfifficult, depending on whether you have your own software to help you.

Problems

1. One of the limitations to using the Google Adwords optimiser is that you have to have had 300 conversions in your campaign in the last 30 days for it to be enabled, because they need a good sample of data to estimate your conversion rate. This makes sense, but is not convenient for smaller campaigns, with less than 300 conversions per  month.

2. I take anything Google offers with a big cup of salt - as soon as you put a CPA in there, they know how much you want to pay. If you say you are willing to pay up to $20 for a conversion, why would they want to help you get your cost down to $15?

3. Users feedback has shown mixed reviews - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.  People have reported increasing CPA.

So, if your account isn't big enough, or you don't want to show Google your cards just yet  - try optimising your account yourself!

Do It Yourself

1. Estimate the CPA you are willing to pay. E.g. $20

2. Check out the conversion rates of your Ad groups (making sure you have had a decent number of conversions, not necessarily 300!). Lets say, 5%


0.05 x $20 = $1.

In this case, your maximum cost per click for that Adgroup should be $1.

This shoudl be monitored closely, because if your conversion rates change, then your costs will change. If you make any changes to your ad group, like new keywords, landing pages or ad content, your conversions are likely to change, and therefore so will your cost per acquisition. If so, your maximum cost per click will need to be recalculated, because it might no longer be appropriate.

So you set up a PPC account as best you can, but still you aren't getting the traffic you want. Or maybe you want an extra boost of traffic toward the end of the month. Here is a list of fixes you need to try...

1. Create new Ads: Check your stats - are your ads getting impressions but not clicks? Maybe you aren't writing alluring ads. Create some new text ads, using a different approach to your usual one. Point out what makes you different, offer specials, and include action words. Try a few new and different ads and then keep an eye on them to see which ones work

2. Increase Cost Per Click: I know you don't want to hear this, but if you check your account and your impressions are low, it might be that you aren't bidding competitively enough. Similarly for if your rank is very low, maybe you won't get many clicks. Position 1 isn't necessarily the best, but being at the bottom might restrict your visibility.

3. Increase your Daily Budget: This is the case if you are getting traffic, but maybe you want more. If your campaign is being restricted by budget, Adwords will usually tell you. If you are meeting your daily budget, then it is likely you can spend more and get more clicks.

4. Loosen Match Type: If most of your keywords are exact or phrase match, you could get more impressions and maybe more clicks, by changing your matches from exact to phrase, or phrase to broad. When loosening your account, remember to add negative keywords.

5. Keyword research: Do more keyword research, increase the number of keywords you use. Many people start a PPC campaign and then never do keyword research again. By constantly checking your campaign performance, industry blogs, and the compeitions websites, you could come up with whole new ad groups of keywords to get you traffic.

6. Give the Content network a go - It doesn't work for everyone, and it needs a different set up to the search network, but if you are looking for a new audience and more clicks, shouldn't you give everything a go?

7. Increase your times/locations - when you set up your campaign you choose a geo location and times to show the ads. If you have been restrictive in either of these but are now after more traffic, consider increasing either or both.