We've been using AdWords for about a year with a good amount of success. However, we're looking to ramp up this area and I have a few questions. We're in an industry where there are few "hot" keywords but we've managed to optimize on the Long Tail but crafting detailed ads for many of our keywords (which our competitors are either failing to advertise on or are simply posting generic ads). However, because we have ads on so many keywords (tens of thousands) I feel like we're not optimizing things and don't have a proper system in place. In the interest of getting a little more organized I'm wondering about the following: 1. Is there a way to dynamically insert keywords into the body of the ad instead of just the title? It seems like this is what Amazon and eBay are doing but I only know how to do the dynamically inserted title thingie. 2. Is there a way to view cost per conversion separately for the search networks and the content network at the campaign level? I see how to do this at the Ad Group level but not at the campaign level. That would be really useful. 3. Is there a way to auto-insert split-testing over multiple groups within the same campaign? In other words, let's say I have 25 groups in a campaign and I want to add two new generic ads to rotate in all of those groups. Do I have to go into each group and do this separately? I really appreciate any help with these questions. TIA!
1. You can apply the same syntax into the Body Content in order to use dynamic keywords in the body content. 2. & 3. I recommend Google Analytics to help you figure out your cost per conversion ROI, A/B Testing. Its free so, just try it
Yes, you can still use {keyword: alternate text} *anywhere* in your ad. You can even use this in the landing page URL e.g. http://www.adwordmiracles.co.uk/index.php?kw={keyword} so that you can utilise that keyword on the actual landing page. Remember {Keyword} {KeyWord} and {keyword} will give you the matching search term with first word capitalised, all words capitalised, all words lower case respectively. Not that I'm aware, unless you start to use external tools for your tracking. Having said that, have you looked at other software to manage your SEM PPC campaigns? The only reason why I say that is because I used to be a software developer for one such tool and most are pretty useful for managing campaigns that have more than 10,000 keywords ... try optimizing that sort of search terms by hand and it soon becomes a nightmare as you've most probably realised! As far as I'm aware, yes you *do* have to add these manually into each group seperately. However, someone is bound to come along soon and say otherwise Hope this helps Howard I really appreciate any help with these questions. TIA![/QUOTE]
Cool. Thanks for the tips on dynamically inserting keywords into the ad body. I'll definitely look at options for better integrating AdWords and Analytics. We've got the Analytics code on our site already so I'm hoping this won't be too tough. And I'd love to hear any recommendations for software that we can use to manage our campaigns. I've looked into this a bit before (looked at Toast and some other apps) but they were too expensive for us at this stage (we're only spending $1,000/month on AdWords or so).
Well with $1k/month budget, you're better off running it yourself by hand ... it's a pain, but there you go. When your budget gets to be about 10 times that, then that's when you need to start looking into automated alternatives. Cheers Howard
One thing I always recommend is that AdWords users split their content network and search networks into separate campaigns. I realize this can create more work because you need to set prices individually, but I find that most industries see a difference in response rate for content vs. search (e.g. some industries get great traffic from contextuals on other sites, whereas some industries [mostly B2B] see far better results from search). Separating those into campaigns will also help you to see campaign-level CPA from your main screen. Hope that helps!
I'd love to do that (split campaigns based on content vs. search) but the incredibly retarded limit of 25 campaigns prevents us from doing that (since we're already bumping up against that limit). I can't for the life of my figure out why Google puts these restrictions in place. It makes no sense.