Google Adwords Editor Version 9.5

Google Adwords Editor - New Features

Campaign experiment settings:
Version 9.5 includes support for campaign experiments. You can perform the following tasks in

Google Adwords Editor:

• Apply and edit an experiment status (e.g. “control only”, “experiment only”, “control and experiment”) at the ad group, ad, or keyword level.
• Apply and edit a Default Max. CPC, Display Network Max. CPC, or Max. CPM bid multiplier at the ad group level.
• Apply and edit a Max. CPC bid multiplier at the keyword level.
• Download and upload experiment status and bid multipliers in both CSV and XML import/export.

Adwords Editor Location extensions support:

Google Adwords Editor now provides support for new and existing location extensions. In Version 9.5, the address doesn’t have to already exist in the account to create the extension.

• Create new manual location extensions for any address.
• Modify address of existing business locations.
• Download and upload location extensions in both CSV and XML import/export.

Adwords Editor Background download:

One or more accounts can now be downloaded in the background while you’re working on another open account. This allows users to save time and continue working while downloading a large account. You also have the option to select and queue up several accounts for download so that you don’t have to start the download process separately for each account.

Adwords Editor - Minor Updates

Adwords Editor - Additional campaign settings:

The following three new campaign-level settings are supported and can be edited, sorted, and imported/exported via XML:

• Enhanced CPC (enabled/disabled) -- Applicable to Manual CPC and Budget Optimizer campaigns.
• Delivery method (standard/accelerated) -- Standard delivery is applicable to all campaigns. Accelerated delivery is applicable to all campaigns except Budget Optimizer and Percent CPA campaigns.
• Ad Rotation (optimize for clicks/optimize for conversions/rotate) -- Applicable to all campaigns.

Adwords Editor - Destination URL links:

You can test your destination URLs when you click the icon located next to the destination URL edit box on all tabs. The destination URL will open in your default browser.

Adwords Editor - IP addresses and non-ASCII characters in URLs:

Display URLs, destination URLs, and placements now allow:

• Non-ASCII domain names (e.g. münster.com, россия.рф)
• IPv4 addresses in place of domain names (e.g. 12.34.56.78)
• IPv6 addresses in place of domain names (e.g. [2001:db8:85a3:0:0:8a2e:370:7334] )

Display URLs and placements will also allow non-ASCII characters in the URL path after the domain name (e.g. münster.com/Käse, yandex.ru::спорт). This is not supported in destination URLs.

Adwords Editor - Unlimited number of search conditions:

Advanced Search now allows you to add an unlimited number of search criteria in the Settings or Performance statistics fields.

Adwords Editor Version 9.5 - Additional image ad dimensions:

Image ads with the following dimensions are now supported:

• 320x50 (now valid for mobile image ads as well)
• 300x50
• 425x600
• 300x600

Adwords Editor - Revert warnings:

When you revert more than one item, or a new campaign or ad group that contains information, Google AdWords Editor will alert you with a summary of changes to be made and allow you to cancel the revert. A "Don't show this message again" checkbox will allow you to proceed in the future without any prompt.

In addition, in the Tools | Settings dialog, a Revert section allows you to enable or disable the Ctrl-Z shortcut for Revert. You can also enable or disable the revert warning in this dialog.

Adwords Editor - Streamline Add/Update Multiple:

Version 9.5 offers a Preview or Process button in the Add/Update Multiple tool. Preview allows you to preview your data and edit your column assignments. Process will skip the previewing step and will take you to the last step of the Add/Update Multiple tool and display a summary of changes.

On the last step of Add/Update Multiple, a checkbox labeled “Automatically accept all imported changes” is now available. If the box is unchecked, you will be able to review your changes when you click Finish and review changes. If the box is checked, you’ll automatically accept all changes when you click Finish. The checkbox will remember your choice from the last time you used the Add/Update Multiple tool.

Adwords Editor - Item status and disapprovals:

Google AdWords Editor now displays item status in the Status column and allows you to manually pause or enable an item by editing the status icon. In addition, you can now see specific ad disapproval reasons by mousing over the disapproved status.

Adwords Editor - Updated first page bid estimates:

Google AdWords Editor v9.5 supports the updated first page bid estimates, which take into account additional factors when determining your bid estimate.

Adwords Editor - Service announcements:

A yellow alert box will display important service announcements impacting your Editor usage.

From Inside Google - Today, innovations in targeting, optimization, and measurement can help you achieve greater performance with your Display Network campaigns. We’re investing heavily in these areas, and we’re pleased to announce several tools that give you better measurement, transparency and value for your display advertising campaigns.

More @ http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/06/today-innovations-in-targeting.html

Google +1 around the world

A few months ago Google released the +1 button on English search ads and organic search results on google.com. More recently, Google have made the +1 button available to sites across the web, making it easier for people who love your site to help their friends and other users find your content in Google search.

Today, +1s will start appearing on ads and organic search results for Google pages globally. We'll be starting with sites like google.co.uk, google.de, google.co.jp and google.fr, and then expanding quickly to most other Google search sites soon after.

We’ve also partnered with a few more sites in Europe, Japan, India, Australia and New Zealand where you’ll start seeing +1 buttons in the coming days.

More @ - http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-around-world.html

Google Adwords - Broad Match Modifier

Today Google Adwords introduced the broad match modifier, a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer's search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants.

The graphic below illustrates the relative reach of different keyword match type strategies. As you can see, modified broad match keywords match more searches than the equivalent phrase match keyword, but fewer searches than the equivalent broad match keyword. Match behavior also depends on the specific words you modify. For example, the keyword formal +shoes will match the search “evening shoes,” but the keyword +formal +shoes will not.



During initial tests, advertisers who mainly used phrase and exact match found that adding modified broad match keywords increased campaign clicks and conversions, while providing more precise control than with broad match.

Modified broad match keywords have a traffic potential closer to phrase match than broad match. If you mainly use broad match keywords in your account, switching these keywords to modified broad match will likely lead to a significant decline in your overall click and conversion volumes. In order to maintain these volumes, we recommend keeping existing broad match keywords active, adding new modified broad match keywords, and adjusting bids to achieve your target ROI based on observed performance.

If you're in Canada or the UK, you can log into your AdWords account to start adding modified broad match keywords today. You can also use the AdWords Editor or the AdWords API.

This feature is currently available to advertisers in Canada and the UK as an open beta.

New Search Engine www.cuil.com to beat Google

A startup founded by engineers from Google Inc. and other tech giants is launching a search engine that claims to cover three times as many Web pages as Google. Cuil Inc. plans to launch today and is optimistic to deliver better results than other major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Cuil will have better abilities by having an interface that helps clients search across more Web pages and study them more accurately.

The site’s results page resembles an online magazine — a different look and feel from search juggernaut Google’s. “You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president, and one of the engineers.

Cuil search Engine was developed and being run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google flagship search engine in pretty much every way. The difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Cuil does not assign priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does. Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Cuil results are automatically categorized.

When you search for a common name, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In comparison to Google’s globe-spanning data network of data centers, Cuil’s two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total run fast to outpace Google’s crawlers.

The search engine will make its maiden debut today and certainly with its great publicity so far, will rink in the online media and pages as a force to reckon with. However, even before it goes all the way, Cuil is getting the worst consumer dissonance ever. Online surfers have said it’s even worse than Alta Vista and that it’s a pathetic search Engine. But we have to wait and see what these ex-Google guys are offering.

by David M N James

Google To Go After Paid Links?

[editorial] Google appears to be going after paid links, and they want you to do the work for them by reporting such links, regardless of the reason they were bought or sold.

Check out Matt Cutts’s post How to report paid links and notice that he appears not to have responded to the comments that mention Text Link Ads or similar brokers. This will be a huge disappointment to all those small websites that make a bit of money selling sponsored links. Whatever reason the sponsor uses them for is their business, but if they perceive Google’s move to mean ditching the links, then there goes a lot of revenue.

The other problem is that they seem to want us, web surfers, to make the distinction between whether a link is used for SEO or for traffic. If the ad code uses Javascript, according to Cutts, then it’s for traffic because there’s a redirect or nofollow. Any other form of sponsored code means the links were sold for SEO (even if they were free).

So that means that little publishers like me who earn roughly $35-55/mth in AdSense and a bit more from paid links - and work very hard to earn even that much - are going to get screwed by some jealous newbie blogger who thinks the other person is making a fortune because they have a lot of sites. Or if I do a link exchange with a site to get relevant niche traffic, and it’s misconstrued as a paid link. Very nice.

Cutts says in his article that they’re collecting datasets to test some algorithms. He repeatedly refuses to clarify how the information supplied by unpaid tattletales will be used.

Google seems to be going after a monopoly on advertising, telling webmasters what they can or cannot have on their sites. Does anyone else now think it’s a conflict of interest that search engine as powerful as Google is monopolizing advertising?

By the way, SEJ’s Carsten Cumbrowski left a very detailed, rational explanation of why this move cannot possibly work. It’s as valuable a read as any other comment, if not more, and less hot-headed than this post.

Google AdWords 101: Landing Pages

Launching a PPC (define) campaign is still the best way to advertise online. You can measure your results. You can make changes on the fly. You can control your destiny.

Last time, we looked at the basic steps to set up a Google AdWords campaign. Now let's look at how to test your results with an easy landing page test.

A/B Landing Page Testing

With your paid listings in place, it's time to use A/B testing to perfect them.

In Google, you can have multiple ads in any ad group. When you're ready to do an in-depth keyword analysis, isolate the keywords with the highest CTRs (define) and the largest impression numbers in their own ad groups. This allows you to write two creatives for a specific keyword and test the results. The code is similar to what we discussed last time, www.yourdomain.com/?engine=AdWords&keyword=blue+widget, with addition of "+1" or "+2" (numbering the different creatives) at the end of the link: www.yourdomain.com/?engine=AdWords&keyword=blue+widget+1. This way you learn which ad for this keyword sends the best converting traffic.

The process actually is a little more complicated if you want to do it efficiently. You now have two major numbers to work into a further set of calculations. The first is the CTRs for each term. I usually turn off optimization during the first round of testing, so each ad gets an equal number of clicks.

You then calculate the CPA (define) for each ad. Divide total CPC (define) for the ad by the sales it brings in.

Sometimes the CPA differences jump out at you, making it tempting to let the winner be your chosen ad before looking any further. This could be a big mistake. It's one of the parts many people overlook in the battle to perfect paid listings. When you have a significant difference in the CTR and CPA, you must explore what each can mean to the cost of doing business.

Let's take an example. Blue widget's creative 1 generates 80 clicks from 1,000 impressions at a cost of $0.50. The CPC can vary a little, but for easy understanding and calculating, let's say both creatives have the same CPC and a CTR of 8 percent. Creative 2 generates 40 clicks at the same $0.50 with a 4 percent CTR.

The tracking shows us that creative 1 gets eight sales (conversion to impression rate: 0.8 percent) and creative 2 gets five sales (conversion to impression rate: 0.5 percent). Thus, the CPA for blue widget creative 1 is $5: $40 CPC divided by eight sales. The CPA for blue widget creative 2 is $4 : $20 CPC divided by five sales.

It's true that creative 2 costs less to get a sale. But since creative 1 generates more sales from the available traffic, the question of quantity versus quality must be taken into consideration. As long as both are profitable, you need to do more calculations.

If the gross profit per blue widget sold is $8, the profit per sale is $3 for creative 1 and $4 for creative 2.

But what about the number of impressions? Given the limited number of searches for any keyword, the CTR and profit per sale can be critical.

Let's say there are 50,000 searchers. Creative 1 generates 400 sales at the conversion to impression rate of 0.8 percent. Creative 2 would generates 250 sales from the same 50,000 impressions. Creative 1, then, generates 400 sales at $3 profit per sale for $1,200 for every 50,000 impressions. Creative 2, meanwhile, makes $1,000 from the same amount of traffic. (It gets a little easier the more you do this.)

The next step is to test improving the CTR and the CPA. With advanced Web analytics, you can then do visitor path analysis to see where visitors go on the site as a group when they come from a certain ad set. This allows you to make further changes to links on your page and where you land searchers when they do click.

Any successful PPC campaign has to work with the site it's sending traffic to. The more the two work in conjunction, the better the results will ultimately be.