AdWords Improves, Marketers Rejoice

Like buses (and clichés), upgrades and improvements to the Google AdWords interface seem to come in twos. Over the past few weeks there have been a couple of changes that really enhance the sophistication of their offering

Here's a quick overview of two of the major changes.

Optimise For Conversions

Up until now AdWords allowed two options for delivering adverts:
– Show all adds evenly
– Optimise based on click-through rate

The latter was used to ensure that the best click-through rate was always achieved. The main argument against this was the fact that a good click-through rate didn't necessarily mean the advert was the best fit for a given campaign, for example:

An advert offering 'Free Beer' would get a great click-through rate, but if the offer was subject to many unwelcome conditions or not clearly displayed on the landing page, the great click-through rate could just mean lots of wasted clicks/budget. By clearly preparing the visitor and managing expectations you can often get a better conversion rate, whilst turning away 'unqualified' customers.

Thankfully AdWords has now added a third option allowing optimisation of adverts based on their conversion rate – meaning that adverts which help the overall ROI of a campaign will rise to the top and show more frequently.

Advanced Bid Management

As a PPC Account Manager many weekends and nights have been spent manually making changes to ad copy and keywords (when not using an advanced 3rd party management tool!) due to the lack of automation features. So it was happy day when Google announced they had added in some pretty slick automation to note only help with scheduling of changes, but also with some more advanced features.

Examples of usages could be:

• Enable ads promoting a special offer late on a Sunday night when the offer goes live
• Automatically raise your bid to the first page CPC for all keywords in a campaign that contain the word ‘sale’
• Intelligently change bids to ensure your level of competitiveness keeps up with rivals

All in all it was a pretty good month to be an AdWords user. Hopefully it’s a sign of things to come as the more advances the system takes, the better ROI we can drive for clients