the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

As someone who makes a living by trading time for money (to the horror of self helpers everywhere), anything that saves me time in my work is very high on my list. It not only saves my clients money, it also increases my time available to work on other projects. My inner Dicky Fox says, “hey! that’s a ‘Win Win’.”

The Adwords Editor is proving to be that special time saving tool. I find myself building a campaign and thinking, “wow, this is so much easier than it used to be”. Kind of like the cheesy car commercial where the lexus is parking itself and the guy can’t believe he used to have to park the car himself. (I’m sorry, but I would never let a car parallel park itself, am I crazy? That’s ridiculous. How lazy are you?? I live in Chicago and it’s a point of civic pride to have strong parallel parking skills. Tangent over.)

The biggest time savings upgrade by using Adwords Editor: Copy and Paste. (also my 2 favorite words)

I build trump-sized campaigns. Lot’s of them, all the time. Let’s say for example, I have 20 IP targeted city campaigns, all of them are nearly identical in terms of keywords, but I have seperated each city to control spending and ROI by region.

The old way: A nightmare. Web-based, relying on Google’s site to be working at top speed.

Create new campaign.

Save. Wait.

Enter settings.

Save. Wait.

Create Adgroup.

Save. Wait.

Create Ad.

Walk to kitchen and get coffee.

Enter each ad line one by one.

Save. Wait. Enter keywords.

Go back to kitchen and make toast.

Save. Wait.

Repeat 19 times.

Argh!

The new way in the Adwords Editor:
1. Enter your 20 campaigns.
2. Build one adgroup with ads and keywords
3. Cut and paste the adgroup into the other 19 campaigns.

Time savings: At least 30 minutes.

Money savings: If you bill out at $175 per hour, you just saved yourself, or your client $87. Not bad!

Some of the other updated features with Adwords Editor 3.0

* Site targeting: AdWords Editor now provides full support for site-targeted campaigns.
* Negative sites: Add or edit negative sites for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns.
* Edit while you wait: If you manage multiple accounts with AdWords Editor, edit another account while your changes post.
* Count your selection: The status bar now displays the number of rows you’ve selected in the data view.
* Pause or resume ads, keywords, and sites: Use the Status menu in the edit panel to change the status of selected items.

Updated features:

* Export to HTML: Your HTML export will show or hide deleted campaigns, depending on how you’ve configured your preferences. The HTML export is ideal for showing your account to someone who doesn’t use AdWords Editor.
* Export to CSV: In addition to account, campaign, and ad group snapshots, you can now export custom views. The CSV export is ideal for spreadsheets or other applications that can read structured data files.
* Paste to multiple ad groups: Select multiple destination ad groups via the Edit menu > Paste Special.

The Adwords Quality Score update is propogating over the next couple days, as per the Adwords blog

we began rolling out improvements to the Quality Score algorithm, which will update the Quality Score for keywords in your account over the next 3 to 4 days….

As a result, you may see the minimum bid for your keywords increase or decrease based on the updated algorithm

The reason I’m calling this one the Manning update is because it’s the absolute opposite of the bumbling Grossman leak late last week. Why Manning, because he’s smart and learns from his mistakes. Because Peyton Manning takes what the defense gives him, and will kill you all day long if you don’t adjust. He doesn’t force his agenda, and doesn’t need to throw the ‘Brett Favre’ every play. He knows if he wants to win, he just needs to poke and prod at your weakness, until you make an adjustment.

If we go back to the superbowl, we saw that Peyton Manning did his homework. He knew that the weakness of the Bears Cover 2 defense is the pass to the flat underneath the corners/safety’s. Peyton’s not special for knowing that, the whole world knows that. Buy he took what the Bears gave him, and they never made an adjustment otherwise. What’s the Adwords equivalent to a pass underneath? A very small adjustment, a penny here and a penny there.

From WMW:

It seems like the changes are live and kicking, i see some pressure on about 5% of my keywords so far. Strange this time “blue cool widget”

“was great” “now great”
Min bid was .04 now .05

Like Manning, Google learned from past mistakes with the previous quality score updates. You can’t blow up the entire industry to make more profit, or you lose your base. This was a small, predictable adjustment, so far at least. As Google looks at it now, they’d rather make 10 small updates a year, increasing the rake a few pennies each time, than make 1 update a year to jump $5.00. It’s small, but Google will take it. And at the end of the day, they’ll go home with the trophy.

You’ve heard nary a complaint from me since the notSuper Bowl about my beloved Bears, but when presented a chance to compare Google to Rex Grossman, I could not turn it down….

Quality Score Update > The Adwords Advisor has confirmed on WMW that what some people are seeing today IS NOT the Quality Score update coming next week.

A quick update to my previous post.

Here’s the message I received when I pinged the tech folks, which basically confirms that what some of you are experiencing is a tech issue that will be addressed as quickly as possible.

Thanks for all of the reports. This is a technical issue - we’ve now identified the problem and expect to have this resolved soon. Please note that this is unrelated to the Quality Score update that we plan to release next week.

So, please accept my apology for the upset this has caused - but please don’t mistake this for the Quality Score update to come.

AWA

I was wondering, in light of the quality score - minimum bid ‘technical issues’ this week, if anyone had noticed a corresponding jump in their adsense earnings? Meaning, in the last day or so, with the huge jump in minimum bids, has this been passed through to Adsense publishers?

Adsense is not my primary source of income, so I’m not the best person to ask…are there any heavy hitters out there who can shed some insight?

Yahoo Indexes Adwords Tracking URLs

One of our SEO’s here pointed out this odd SERP from Yahoo this afternoon.

Take a look at results 1 & 3:

If you look at the tracking variables, these are clearly Adwords ads that have been indexed by Yahoo. Not only are they indexed, but they rank as #1 and #3 for this particular query. So, one would tend think about how this could screw up your analytics. Basically, if you were utilizing an java-based analytics program any conversion that came through this url would be attributed to your Adwords PPC campaign, at least on the surface. This would result in a couple things:

1. Your ROI for Adwords would be falsely inflated.
2. If it happened on a large enough scale for a big advertiser, you can see the potential ramifications.
3. Yahoo loses credit for any traffic it sends you organically, and eventually makes itself less relevant.
4. Google share price increases

Update: Further discussion on this topic from SEORoundtable

Some of you are still sorting through the carnage that is your recently converted Panama account trying to figure out where everything went. Hopefully I can save someone the 15 minutes I just wasted hunting around the new interface.

How to Delete a Campaign:

Yahoo Panama has a 20 campaign limit per account, unless you know Paris Hilton or Dick Cheney, in which case you can have 21. So, when I logged into one of the accounts I manage that was recently converted, I saw I couldn’t create a new campaign, which I desperately needed. So, next step, delete one of the old campaigns that is underperforming and replace with a new one, right?

OK, where do you delete the campaign?

>Dashboard Tab
>Scroll down to the Campaign name, click on it
>Look for the Campaign Button on the right side
>Click on the arrow for the pull down
>Select Delete

Please stop laughing now…it seriously took me 15 minutes, maybe more, to find that option. If I was a usability expert I could tell you why.

I’m a couple days late on this news, but wanted to post it anyway. SEMPunch gave me a heads up to this post with a nice email, and it’s definitely relevant to my readers….in short:

SEMPunch used the Panama bulk upload function and then watched as the account was disabled and is unable to be recovered.

I have not verified or experienced this firsthand, but if it is a real bug, it’s a good one to know about.

Read more…

A friend of mine is a stock analyst out in California. When it comes to money, he’s probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. He almost never loses, at anything. I’ve actually been in Vegas with him when the pit bosses told him to take his money and go home. He was killing them.

This is why I was so suprised when he told me, while on vacation last September, that he had a big position in Yahoo. Being someone who knows Yahoo better than a lot of people who work at Yahoo (ie, my reps), I obviously saw them as breathing their last gasps of air in the PPC market. Of course there was hype about Panama, yada yada yada yhoo.

Of course, technical analysis of stocks doesn’t exactly correlate to the day to day performance of a company, so I told him what I thought about Yahoo as a business, and he remained cautiously bullish on the stock price. Since then, I casually watched as the stock dropped, which made complete sense to me, and shook my head, wondering how my friend who is so smart could make such a bad pick. Fast forward to January, and Yahoo starts to rally in anticipation of Panama. So, as of today, the stock is almost exactly where it was in September. Where does it go from here?

My friend emailed me today and asked, “Do you think Yahoo has legs. Nice little rally from the low $20s.” Granted, I know absolutely squat about investing in stocks, but that never stopped me from having an opinion. Here’s my reply:

“There’s 2 factors:

1 – Their new quality score system – a la google adwords

2 – Their share of ad spend / inventory

Assuming their inventory levels stay the same they will make more money selling the same amount they are now. This quality score factor just got implemented this week. Go back and look at Google’s profitability as soon as they implemented their quality score. They did it 2x, the most recent being Fall 06. I bet you their profitability skyrocketed. What this system does is penalize poor ads/web sites by forcing them to pay through the nose to run ads, where before they could buy clicks for .10. The number of advertisers who drop out is far outweighed by the people who stay in the game and overpay for traffic that they undermeasure.

Look for a major jump in profits starting right now.

Secondly, they have to win back the ppc advertisers who told them to *** off because their system was a pain the ***. They seem to be making progress with it, but I don’t know for sure. They seem like they are trying, but I don’t believe in their current management team. They don’t really seem to understand, or be committed to, search marketing. They have the content game down pat, better than google by far, but their technology is so poor, and they do stupid things, like shut off their free tools that everyone likes to use.

Anyway, they need to keep improving their content, because it’s what drives the inventory, but they also need to get serious about engineering. If I was them I would offer the top 3-5 engineers at google some type of package they can’t refuse. Something.

It’s there for them to take, they just need to execute better.”

So, we shall see what the future holds. Maybe my friend is right, maybe Yahoo has legs. What do you think? Buy or sell?

Yahoo apparently read my suggestions yesterday and quickly came up with revised strategy for their keyword tool

We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.

So, again, Yahoo makes another poor strategic decision. If you were Yahoo, wouldn’t you wait until you had this new tool ready before you basically quit supporting the old tool? At that point you would make the requisite PR push, promoting your new, improved search platform and hey look at the new tools we’re building for you.

This whole Yahoo Google thing somehow reminds me of the ABA/NBA (if you are too young for that reference I’m sorry). The ABA was clearly superior in style (better uniforms, Moses Malone and Dr. J, afros, mutli-colored ball), but the NBA was smarter, and got the core business fundamentals right, and now no one knows about the ABA. That’s what we will have in 15 years. My kids will be asking me why I cry when I read a story about Yahoo. I’ll say, oh, if you could have only seen Yahoo play in their prime…

sniff sniff.

***UPDATE - The inventory tool is now back online, mysteriously