Bonus Chapter 1 Ten-Plus Tools to Make Your AdWords Life Easier

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Bonus Chapter 1
Ten-Plus Tools to Make Your
AdWords Life Easier
In This Chapter
(cid:1)Keyword research tools
(cid:1)Account management and automation tools
(cid:1)User-friendly reporting tools
W
hile the online AdWords interface includes many helpful tools, devel-
opers have created many third-party tools for keyword research,
account management and automation, and reporting that can make your life
easier and give you valuable data on the competition and the internal work-
ings of your own account.
Keyword Variant Generator
www.leadsintogold.com/keywords
www.askhowie.com/kvg
I’ve created a handy tool that adds phrase-match, exact-match, and negative
syntax to lists of keywords. Called the Keyword Variant Generator (KVG), this
tool is a programmed Excel spreadsheet that allows you to dump up to 3000
keywords into Column A, and generate the same keywords in quotes in
Column B, brackets in Column C, and preceded by a hyphen in Column D, as
shown in Figure BC1-1. You can then copy and paste these new variations
into your ad group keyword lists.
If you’ve tried adding quotes, brackets, and hyphens manually (which I did
for many months before getting smart and programming the functions), you
know how time-consuming and annoying the process can be. You end up with
k[eyword]and “keywor”dand have to correct everything by hand. Copy-
and-paste is much quicker and not prone to typos.
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AdWords For Dummies
Figure
BC1-1:
The KVG
automat-
ically adds
quotes,
brackets,
and a
hyphen
to each
keyword.
The KVG sells for $39.95 (you can read the exciting sales letter at www.
leadsintogold.com/keywordsto find out the history of the tool and why
no sane person should be without it), but for you, dear For Dummiesreader,
it’s my gift. Go to www.askhowie.com/kvgto download your very own
copy. Just treat it like a $40 piece of software, okay?
The FreeWordizer
www.askhowie.com/freewords
I’ve written about this tool in Chapters 4 and 5, but it’s so important to your
online success that I have to cover it again just in case you skipped those
chapters because you wanted to find out how the book ends. I created the
FreeWordizer to provide a reliable source of powerful and free keyword
research in an online tool. Yahoo Search Marketing, the business formerly
known as Overture, has provided such a tool in an on-again off-again fashion
for years, and during the writing of this book it disappeared for several days,
amid swirling rumors of its final demise. It did reappear, but many of us in the
keyword business got jolted out of our complacency and looked around for
alternatives.
The two keyword research tools that provide the most useful data are Keyword
Discovery and WordTracker (both are discussed later in this chapter). I find
Keyword Discovery’s results more applicable to my business, although
WordTracker is fine as well. When I had the FreeWordizer built, I arranged to
make the top 100 Keyword Discovery keywords available for free.
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Bonus Chapter 1: Ten-Plus Tools to Make Your AdWords Life Easier
The interface is simple: a text box and a Research button. The instructions
are equally simple:
1. Type a keyword into the text box.
2. Click Research.
After a few seconds (sometimes more, but hey, it’s free), you’ll see a list of
the top 100 keywords that contain the word or phrase you entered, along
with the number of searches during the previous 12 months, as shown in
Figure BC1-2. Click any of those terms to drill deeper, in exactly the same
fashion.
Figure
BC1-2:
The
keyword
book returns
a variety of
keywords
on very
different
topics.
In Figure BC1-2, you wouldn’t use the keywords given because they represent
very different markets. If you entered the keyword bookto target customers
who want to learn how to publish a book, you would then click the sixth
result, book publishing, which received a not-too-shabby 744,704 searches
over the past year. You can see the results of that search in Figure BC1-3.
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AdWords For Dummies
Figure
BC1-3:
You can see
submarkets
in the
general
Book
Publishing
market,
listed by
number of
online
searches.
The Split Tester
www.askhowie.com/split
When you run two ads or landing pages simultaneously, and send half of the
traffic to one and half to another, you’re conducting a scientific test designed to
tell you which branch of the sales process is more effective. Google will tell you
which ad achieved a higher CTR, but it won’t tell you when your results are
conclusive. How do you know when your test is done? When can you say for
sure that Ad #1’s CTR of 2.6% is truly better than Ad #2’s CTR of 2.3%? Five
clicks? 15? 30? Every click you get after the magic one is wasting precious time.
The answer is found in the zany world of inferential statistics. With a small
number of clicks, you’re just not sure if your results are real or are just random
chance. You need a certain number of clicks to be reasonably certain one ad is
out-pulling another. That number depends on the difference between your
CTRs.
You can input your results into a statistical package or split-testing Web page
to find out whether to keep your test running or start a new test. Visit www.
askhowie.com/splitto be redirected to the free split-tester tool, shown in
Figure BC1-4.
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Bonus Chapter 1: Ten-Plus Tools to Make Your AdWords Life Easier
Figure
BC1-4:
Enter the
clicks and
impressions
for each ad.
In Figure BC1-4, the first ad received 34 clicks from 400 impressions, while the
second ad garnered 17 clicks from 395 impressions. The Spit Test Analyzer
returns a 95% Confident rating, meaning that this difference can be explained
by randomness only 5% of the time.
I make marketing decisions based on the 95% confidence rating, because the
value of making quick decisions outweighs the downside of being wrong one
out of every 20 tests. If you aren’t comfortable at 95%, you can let the test run
longer to go for a 99% confidence rating.
KeyCompete
www.keycompete.com
KeyCompete allows you to “spy” on your competitors’ AdWords keywords. It
works in two ways: You can enter a keyword and get a list of Web sites bid-
ding on that keyword, and you can type in a Web site and get a list of their
keywords. The first feature is a convenience only, since you can find out
who’s advertising on a keyword by searching that keyword on Google. The
second feature is the powerful one, since you can duplicate hours of your
competitors’ keyword research and testing in just a few seconds. As the
KeyCompete Web site notes, “Advertisers with larger keyword lists win more
traffic at a lower cost per visitor than their competition.”
In Figure BC1-5, I’ve typed the name of one of my Web sites, www.vital
healthinstitute.com, since it wouldn’t be fair to show you the keywords
from someone else’s AdWords account. KeyCompete returns a list of key-
words that I’m using in AdWords, ranked by how well my site does for each
keyword in the organic search engines.
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AdWords For Dummies
Figure
BC1-5:
Enter a
Web site to
discover its
AdWords
keywords.
Click any of the keywords to get a list of Web sites advertising that keyword.
Then click any of the Web sites to find out its keywords. You can toggle back
and forth to generate a hefty list of keywords — not speculative ones, but
actual keywords used by real players in your market.
KeyCompete is not cheap, fortunately. The $299 per year annual subscription
will keep this tool exclusive enough to be useful. You can sign up for a one-day
trial for $19 if you just need to set up one campaign. I find myself checking out
KeyCompete several times a week, and my clients are always impressed when
I toss them a few keywords they haven’t thought of yet (now you know my
secret).
Alexa
www.alexa.com
Alexa.com tabulates traffic and links for millions of Web sites, probably
including yours. Enter a URL to see its Alexa ranking (Dummies.com, for
example, is ranked 26,091, meaning that 26,090 Web sites get more visitors
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Bonus Chapter 1: Ten-Plus Tools to Make Your AdWords Life Easier
than Dummies.com). You can view detailed graphs of the traffic over time,
the same way you might view a stock on a financial Web site. Figure BC1-6
shows the trend for Dummies.com over the past five years. You can see a
short period in the spring of 2005 where the site catapulted into the top
10,000, as well as periods in 2003 where it all but dropped out of site.
Figure
BC1-6:
Alexa.com
provides
traffic
details for
millions of
Web sites,
probably
including
yours and
your
competi-
tors’.
You can use Alexa to compare Web sites. After entering a URL, click Traffic
Details to show a graph. At the bottom of the graph are text boxes with room
to enter four additional URLs. Figure BC1-7 shows a graph comparing the
home pages for CNN, Fox News, and The New York Timesfrom April 2006 to
April 2007.
You can use the Alexa data to see how successful a company’s marketing
campaign has been, at least in terms of generating traffic to its site. Perry
Marshall points to www.coffeefool.comas an example: its Alexa ranking
rose precipitously in October 2006, coincident with its AdWords ads showing
up on a large percentage of Gmail pages.
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AdWords For Dummies
Figure
BC1-7:
Alexa
allows you
to compare
Web sites
for their
reach (% of
total
internet
users),
traffic rank,
and number
of page
views.
Keyword Discovery
www.keyworddiscovery.com
Keyword Discovery is the most comprehensive keyword research tool on the
market. It’s expensive — $70 per month — and a bit clunky about exporting
and saving the search results. You can also get the top 100 Keyword Discovery
words for free from the FreeWordizer (covered earlier in this chapter).
In addition to lists of closely related keywords and its historical search
volume, Keyword Discovery also includes the very helpful “related key-
words” feature. You can enter a search term and request terms that are
related or synonymous, yet don’t contain the keyword itself. You can then
drill down into each of these terms to create tightly focused ad groups based
on keywords you might not have thought of by yourself.
WordTracker
www.wordtracker.com
WordTracker is the other heavyweight keyword research tool. Similar to
Keyword Discovery, but considerably less expensive at under $300 per year,
WordTracker pulls its data from different sources. Some marketers find the
WordTracker results more accurate, while others prefer Keyword Discovery.
Unless you’re playing in a hyper-competitive market, either will probably suit
your needs.
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Bonus Chapter 1: Ten-Plus Tools to Make Your AdWords Life Easier
WordTracker allows you seven projects simultaneously, compared to an
unlimited number for Keyword Discovery. If you’re good about downloading
your projects to spreadsheet or text file, that limit shouldn’t bother you too
much.
AdWords Reporter
www.adwordsreporter.com
If you’re a visual sort of person, AdWords Reporter can turn your gigantic
and confusing AdWords reports into meaningful graphs. You can see your
traffic, sales metrics, campaign performance, and other metrics over time,
even superimposed to help you identify relationships. For example, you
might discover that your CTR increases when your ads run in position 5
instead of position 6. In Figure BC1-8, I’m tracking transactions (vertical bars)
against ad position (horizontal-ish line) for each day in March for the Gout
campaign. In the table above the graph, you can see the ROI from each ad
group. Only the bottom three groups produce a positive ROI; armed with this
information (the tool itself is color coded, so the good groups appear in
green and the not-so-good ones in red), I can quickly identify poorly perform-
ing groups in need of remediation.
Figure
BC1-8:
AdWords
Reporter
creates
useful
graphs
and charts
from your
AdWords
reports.
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AdWords For Dummies
AdWords Reporter is a Windows-based tool that downloads to your desktop.
You feed it a new report every month (see Chapter 14 to set up recurring
reports) and it returns pretty (and potentially profitable) pictures. It took me
about two minutes to configure the report, following the directions on the
tool’s Web site. I downloaded the report to my hard drive, imported it into
AdWords Reporter, and within seconds I was able to understand my AdWords
account in a whole new way.
AdWords reporter costs $149 for the Professional Edition, which is probably
all you need unless you are in charge of multiple client accounts or run
AdWords for a larger organization. And if your boss is paying, then why not
go for the Enterprise Edition for twice the price?
AdWords Desktop Editor
www.google.com/adwordseditor
You can download a free application that allows you to manage your
AdWords account on your computer desktop without needing an Internet
connection. Your changes won’t show up until you reconnect and upload
those changes, and your updated account statistics won’t appear on your
desktop until you log on and download them. You can search, sort, and filter
campaigns, ad groups, and keywords much more quickly and easily with the
AdWords Editor than you can online. You can make bulk changes to keywords
and ad copy, something that currently cannot be done online. You can use
familiar copy and paste shortcuts to manage keyword lists and ad text, and
you can also save drafts of ads and keyword lists without uploading instantly.
The editor makes it simple to switch back and forth quickly between cam-
paigns, and even different accounts, in the case where you operate multiple
AdWords accounts or manage several client accounts. (See Figure BC1-9.)
You can add individual ad groups to a single campaign or multiple cam-
paigns, specifying the maximum CPC for search and content separately
(see Figure BC1-10).
In Figure BC1-10, I’ve created five new ad groups. The top two will join the
AdTool campaign, the third inserts into LIG, the fourth into Gout, and the fifth
into Snoring. The ad group names follow the campaign names, and the num-
bers just after that indicate the default maximum CPC for each group. The
last group, Sleep Apnea, has two numbers: The first is the default maximum
CPC for search and the second is the same for content.