We’ve just added two new cities to our AdWords Seminars for Success tour, Detroit and Minneapolis.

So far, the seminars have been a great success. Both Denver and Seattle are completely sold out. However, in addition to the sellouts, the feedback from attendees has been wonderful.

I’m finally getting a chance to talk in depth about split testing, profit by impression, lifetime visitor values, and quality score to audiences who are hungry for this knowledge.

The seminars are broken into two sections, intermediate and advanced. Here is the current outline for the agenda:

Intermediate Session (8am-noon):

• The Search Process
• Best Practices
• Keywords
  • Generating Keywords
  • Creating Keyword Lists
  • Match Type
• Negative Keywords
• AdWords Keyword Tool
• Effective Search Ads
• Landing Pages
• Optimizing AdWords Accounts
  • Optimizing For Traffic
  • Optimizing For Conversions
  • Optimizing For Quality Score
  • Optimizing For the Content Network
• Conversion Tracking
• AdWords Tools
  • Traffic Estimator
  • Copy/Move Keywords/Ad Text
  • Advanced Search and Editing
  • Ad Diagnostic Tool
  • Disapproved Ads Tool
  • Change History
• Reporting Options

The afternoon session (1pm-5pm) includes:

• Advanced Ad Types
  • Local Business Ads
  • Image Ads
  • Video Ads
  • Mobile Ads
• IP Targeting & Geo Keywords
  • Local Targeting Options
• Advanced Ad Display
  • Ad Scheduling
  • Position Preference
  • Ad Serving
• Budget Settings
  • Ad Delivery
  • Bidding Options
• Calculate Your Maximum Bid
• AdWords Editor
• Google Analytics
• Split Testing
• Invalid Clicks
• My Client Center
• AdWords API
• Resources

I hope to see you there, it’s a very enjoyable, knowledgeable (and long) day.

Google recently caught up with other local search engines by showing traffic on local.google.com .

Here’s the key to what the colors mean:

• Green: more than 50 miles per hour
• Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
• Red: less than 25 miles per hour
• Gray: no data available

Google has launched online seminars and Google @ work seminars for people to learn more about the new Google Apps programs.

There are three types of online seminars:

The seminar types are:

• Google Apps overview
• Administration and deployment
• Google Apps education edition

The signup page is here.

In addition, if you’re lucky enough to live in one of hte cities they are visiting, you can see the demos in person (I’m surprised Chicago isn’t on this list).

Google @ work signup page here.

The first step to good keyword organization is to identify your ad groups. Microsoft’s adLabs has a nice tool in helping to first determine your ad groups.

The Keyword Group Detector tool lets one input a keyword and then see the related items to that keyword.

It’s similar to the often forgotten Google Sets project.

This can be very useful for finding related keywords, or starting to group similar words together.

A search for a word like ‘marketing’ will bring back related words such as advertising, ads, etc. Words that are more likely to be adjectives than ad groups.

A search for a more commercial term such as ‘ipod’, brings back ‘ipod mini’, “i-pod shuffle”, “apple i pod”. These different terms are better served in their own ad group.

The tool works off of sorting data, so it doesn’t care about spellings. Some will like this as it’s the reality of searches. Other’s won’t like this as they don’t want to make ad groups from misspellings. Either way, be aware that some of the keywords will be either misspelled or jargon.

In the above example, “ipod” can be seen to be spelled as: i pod, ipod, and i-pod. It is important to understand those are the words being searched even if they don’t translate into being an ad group.

If you are just starting down the road of organizing keywords, this can be a useful tool to do some research.

The newest version of the AdWords editor has been released. It several new features which should make managing campaign through the editor instead of the web based interface much easier.

Site Targeting

New Features:

• New tab in the top data pane which lets you view your site targeting sites
• Pause/resume sites
• Change destination URL
• Change bids
• Change budget
• Pause/resume campaigns
• Delete campaigns
• Adding sites

Comments:

• When adding sites, you have to know exactly what site you’re adding. There is not a search feature.
• When adding sites, I would suggest you do it through the web based interface and not the editor.

Negative Sites:

• Ability to add/remove single or multiple campaign or ad group negative sites

Comments:

• Can’t add a negative keyword or negative site to multiple campaigns at once. Must choose each ad group or campaign individually.

Edit while you wait:

• While you are uploading an account, you can now open another account to begin work.
• This is a great feature as sometimes it can take well over an hour (and sometimes multiple hours for a lot of changes) for changes to be posted which locked up the editor from being able to do anything else.

Count Your Selection

• At the very bottom of the editor is a tally of how many data items you’ve selected.
• Since you can only work with one data item at a time (except in bulk import mode which doesn’t have the count screen), its an easy way of telling how many items your change will affect.

Pause / Resume Keywords, Ads, or Sites

• Google recently released their pausing and resuming of keywords and ads
• You can pause sites in site-targeting campaigns
• Or pause keywords or ads in an ad group

New Export Features

• I have no idea who really wants to have their account in HTML, however, you can now export an account, campaign, or ad group to an HTML format.
  • Google says this is for people who don’t use the editor, but even for them, I think spreadsheets are easier.
• Export current view to CSV. This is useful for exporting a custom view, or changes to another person for review or comment before finalizing an upload.

Paste Special

• You can now ‘paste special’ into multiple ad groups. If you have keywords or ads copied and wish them pasted into multiple ad group - you can now do so.
• The shortcut key for paste special is Cntl + Shift + V
  • More AdWords Editor Shortcuts

Final Comments & Links

Overall, a solid upgrade to the editor. The background posting will save a lot of time. It’s also nice to see upgrades to the functionality of the editor with regards to what can be done through the interface

I’m still quite surprised that Google has not introduced the ability to manage geographic targeting options at the campaign level yet. This is one of the most requested features I hear from editor users. It’s also one of those settings that forces a user to not just use the editor, but one that a user must login to finalize campaigns going live (and with a lot of campaigns it can take a while through the interface).

Hopefully, the editor will continue to gain ‘campaign level’ AdWords features and not just ’software enhancements’.

AdWords editor download page.

I just heard that the newest version of the editor will be out this week with several new features.

It will finally have the ability to add and edit site-targeting campaigns. The implementation of this one will be interesting as most of the choices for site-targeting campaigns are search or browser driven. Will you have to be online to use this feature, or will it be an offline database?

Pausing and resuming keywords will be added.

And finally, background posting. If this works like I’m hoping, it will be a much anticipated improvement.

Negative embedded match gives an advertiser the ability to show for every variation of a keyword, except for the keyword itself. This negative matching feature is only available on Google AdWords at present.

Why is it useful?

• Allows you to control ad serving for an ad group (resolve conflicts with other keywords triggering your ads).
• Allows your ads not be displayed for low ROI keywords, yet show for all their more specific variations.

How does negative embedded match work:

• Insert -[keyword] into your ad group.
• Insert “keyword” (you could also use broad match) into your ad group

An Example:

For this example, the scenario would be that you sold all types of laptop accessories. However, the keyword ‘laptop accessories’ has a low ROI, but every more specific (3+ word combo) has a good ROI. In this case, you would want your ad to show for all variations of ‘laptop accessories’ but not when the actual keyword ‘laptop accessories’ was searched.

• Insert -[laptop accessories] into your ad group
• Insert “laptop accessories” (you could also use broad match) into your ad group

You should have an ad group that looks like:

Take Control of Your Ad Serving

An advertisers desire should be to control ad serving to the point where their ads are only served on profitable keywords. It’s important to find negative keywords that are not helping you work towards that goal and filter out underpreforming keywords.

Last year Microsoft did quite a bit of TV advertising for their search products. These TV commercials didn’t seem to dent their online query share.

Ask.com has also gone down the same route, and didn’t see a large query share change.

I just saw a commercial for Microsoft adCenter on Sci-Fi. Interesting demographic, those who are watching random movies on the Sci-Fi channel at 10am (I only turned it on as I wanted background during breakfast. I have no idea what the movie is about, but had to look up when I heard adCenter).

Like many commercials these days, they are using a different link to their product, presumably to track sign-ups via their TV efforts: goadcenter.com which redirects to goadcenter.com/TV.

Microsoft believes in their adCenter product. It’s biggest downfall is the query share. It will be interesting to see how this affects their total advertising base.

I’ve been going back and forth with Google for 3 months trying to get to the bottom of ‘Account Quality Score’. I’ve heard rumors that it only affected how many keywords you could have active. I’ve heard conflicting reports that it’s based on overall keyword quality and spend (which would make sense if it’s only purpose was total number of keywords in your account).

Those rumors were from Google, and the clarification finally came from Google. Here are the answers to four difficult questions:

1. How many keywords can I have active in my account?
2. What determines an account’s quality score?
3. How does it affect my keywords?
4. Can under preforming keywords affect other keywords (i.e. should I axe them)?

How many keywords can I have active in my account?

A normal account starts with a 50k keyword limit. This limit can only be adjusted by a Google employee, it is not automatically adjusted. There are some reps who keep tabs on accounts and will raise this limit for you without you having to talk to them; hence it appeared that this number was an automatic shifting scale. Turns out it was behind-the-scenes manual work.

What determines an account’s quality score?

Account quality score is a roll-up of all the keyword quality scores in your account. These quality scores aren’t just averaged, they are first weighted by impressions and clicks, and then averaged.

How does it affect my keywords?

The account quality score is factored into two areas of your account.

The first is your actual keyword quality score. Keyword quality score is made up of: ad copy, keyword CTR (overall and most recent history), account quality score, and ‘other relevancy factors’.

The second is minimum bids. If you have a high account quality score, Google will be a bit more forgiving on new minimum bids where they don’t have much historical knowledge (this and combined with the min bid update coming next week should make for some nice changes for new keywords). If you have a low account quality score, your min bids could be a bit higher.

Can under preforming keywords affect other keywords (i.e. should I axe them)?

In the past, this question has always ended in conflicting answers. Sometimes you’d hear a ‘yes’, but the explanations were around content match or management. Sometimes you’d hear ‘no’, with the explanation that keywords don’t affect other keywords.

With the explanation of the ‘account quality score’, it seems this is now a firm ‘Yes’.

Since account quality score is impression weighted, a few under preforming keywords aren’t going to make a large difference. However, if you have many under preforming keywords with low impressions, or a few low preforming keywords with high impressions - they are worth removing from a quality score standpoint.

From a quality score standpoint… - Not Conversions

This was the important statement from above. If those keywords are under preforming and don’t convert - then axe them.

If they are converting and are profitable keywords, then of course, you might not want to get rid of them. You might want to figure out how to raise their quality score, but in the end, it’s your dollars. You’re the one who is being (or not being) profitable by keyword.

Google has a sophisticated ad serving technology. An advertisers job is to understand enough of that technology to manage their account to what is profitable. If you have a lot of ‘poor’ quality keywords that all convert - then by all means, if that’s profitable, don’t kill the keywords just to satisfy AdWords. Either find out how to make them higher quality, or just keep them as they are making you money.

Related Information:

• Quality score presentation (everything is correct except for ‘account quality score’ - this will be updated soon)
• Improving landing page quality score
  
• How to view your quality score

If you are using the AdWords editor and see ‘invalid string errors’ and there are a few other similar errors, there seem to be three reasons this happens.

1. The editor files have become corrupt. Uninstall and reinstall to fix the problem. I’ve seen this happen 3 times in the past week. I’m not sure if it’s related to a windows security update or something else. However, it seems more prevalent than normal programs becoming corrupt.

2. An upper level password has changed. If you nestle MCCs, it’s possible to lock yourself out of an account. There are two ways to handle this. The first is to use the new passwords when trying to download accounts. You will have to ‘get latest version’ again, so your current changes will be lost. However, the issue here lies that you might have accounts listed in your available accounts that you can’t get to. There isn’t a way to clear this list, so if you want a clean interface, uninstall and reinstall.

3. There was a TOS update on the account which hasn’t been accepted. You cannot accept a TOS update via the editor. You’ll  have to log into the account directly and accept the TOS. The advantage here is that once you accept the TOS, you can post your changes without downloading the account again - so no lost work.