August 2008 - The Official Clickable Blog

If you’re a Clickable user, you may have noticed a new feature in the Manage section called "Ad Scheduling." So what is it?

Ad Scheduling is a powerful tool that allows you to pause your campaigns on certain days of the week (known as "week-parting") or times of the day (known as "day-parting"). The most common way to use this functionality is to pause campaigns on weekends. (Many businesses do considerably more business on weekdays and find it very hard to convert on weekends, so pausing their campaigns on Saturday and Sunday is a great way to save money.) However, Ad Scheduling allows you much more precision than this: you can choose to turn off ads for half-hour intervals throughout the week. To do so effectively, you need solid data about when your campaigns are performing and when they aren't. You can find this information using the AdWords Hourly Report View.

Building an hourly report in AdWords is fairly simple. After running your campaign for a few weeks to generate usage data, follow these steps:

1) Log into your Google AdWords account.
2) Click on the Reports tab.
3) Click Create Report.
4) From the Report Type options, select Campaign Performance.
5) In the Settings, set the "View (Unit of Time)" to "Hourly (regardless of date)"; set the Date Range to "All Time"; and, for Campaigns, press the radio button for "Manually select from a list" and choose the relevant campaign from the list that appears.
6) Finally, select a name for your report at the head of the "Templates, Scheduling and Email" section, and click "Create Report."

The new Hourly Report will now appear in your AdWords Report Center. Click on the report to view it, and you will see your campaign's average performance at various hours of the day for a number of metrics, including Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Avg CPC and Cost.

Using this information, you can determine when your campaign is underperforming and pause it at those times using the graphical Ad Scheduling tool in Clickable's Manage section. Just go to the campaign you want to manage, click on "Campaign Settings," then click on "Ad Scheduling & Serving."

Using the "Ad Scheduling" tool, you'll be able to activate or deactivate your campaigns at half-hour intervals to maximize returns.

Good luck!

Tony, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. “Clickable Gurus” participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

In recent months, Google has made significant changes to the algorithm it uses to calculate Quality Score. In an effort to increase the quality of keywords, ads, and landing pages, Google has again modified the old CTR (Click-Through-Rate) * Max CPC (Cost-Per-Click) formula from the past.

You can read more about it here:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215

What does this means for you? More than ever you must ensure that your account structure is well thought out and that your keywords, ad copy and landing page all fit together thematically.

A few tips to consider:

1.) Whenever possible, include your keywords in your ad copy

2.) Create a number of concise ad-groups. This will help you achieve #1 as well. If you sell several different types of products - think about campaign structure, ad group structure and create a clean hierarchy

(Example)

Campaign = Cakes
Adgroup 1 = Blueberry Cakes
Adgroup 2 = Cherry Cakes
Adgroup 3 = Strawberry Cakes

As you can see, I did not create one adgroup named "Cakes", but rather I broke down each specific type of cake and assigned it to its own adgroup. This will allow me to write descriptive ad copy for each individual adgroup - which in turn will allow me to connect with the user at a much deeper level. (Ehren discussed this issue in more detail a few weeks ago. Click here to read his post.)

3.) Landing Pages - Be sure to carefully select landing pages and think about which landing page best represents the keywords and ad group you are working in. Your landing page should include as many keywords as possible from your ad group, and it should directly address the product or service that the user is searching for.

I hope this helps you better understand Quality Score.

Trace, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. “Clickable Gurus” participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

There are many ways to test ad variations in Google AdWords.  This post describes one of my favorite methods for getting the best ad possible. 
 
When creating text ads at the beginning of a campaign you should try out two very different ads. (To make sure you have a fair comparison, select “rotate evenly” in your ad group settings so that both ads will be displayed about the same number of times a day. The AdWords default is "Optimize," which displays ads more frequently if they have a higher CTR and Quality Score.) As we move along in the process we’ll test more precise variations, but, for now, we want to a very basic idea of what drives conversions.
           
Once you have a significant number of clicks on your ads, you will likely have two very different sets of statistics for those ads, on everything from CTR (Click-Through Rate) to Clicks, Conversions, etc.  If the difference in performance isn’t all that significant, you may want to try starting the process over: delete the poorer performing of the two ads and again try a completely different ad. On the other hand, if the performance difference between the two ads is significant, delete the poorer performing ad and create a new ad based off of the better performer.  However, instead of trying a completely different ad this time, just change one thing that you would like to test: the headline text, for instance, or a single word in one of the description fields. By limiting the number of changes in your ads, you can determine exactly what is working and what isn’t.
 
Our “Create Ad Variations” tool inside the Clickable solution helps you do this by generating up to 8 ads using different options that you give us for headline and description fields. Simply enter one or two headlines, and up to two variations for each description field (as well as your display and destination URLs) and the tool will generate as many as eight variations on your ad, using the fields you have entered.  We provide the best performing ad in your ad group for reference as a starting point. (The “Create Ad Variations” tool is available in the “Manage Ad Group” section of the “Manage” tab when logged into the product. You can also find more information about it in the “Product Guide” section of Clickable University.)
 
The process of improving ads should be a science, not a guessing game. By making sure you are systematically eliminating things which decrease the performance of your ad, you can know what is causing your success.
 
Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru
 
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. “Clickable Gurus” participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

Clickable is excited to announce the full availability of Microsoft adCenter in our Clickable Pro product, concluding a successful beta period. Clickable customers can now easily manage search marketing accounts from the three major search engines - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - in one intuitive interface.
 
To add your first Microsoft adCenter account to Clickable in as little as 5-10 minutes, click on the ‘MSN: Add Account’ tab on the left of your screen.  To add more network accounts, click on the ‘Add New Account’ tab on the bottom left of your screen, select the ad network you would like to add an account for and proceed through our quick and easy setup wizard.  You can also add new ad network accounts from the 'Network Account Information’ section in the ‘Settings’ area, linked from the right of the main Clickable Pro product navigation.
 
Clickable makes it simple for you to manage all your ad network accounts in the same way, by providing a consistent interface that is standardized on search engine marketing best practices. To manage your Microsoft adCenter campaigns in Clickable, you will need standardize them a little, and we guide you through that process with a quick setup wizard once your account is imported.
 
We look forward to hearing from you.  Please let us know if you have any feedback.