"Let stay together, baby."

In today’s post, which is our third installment of this week’s PPC Love Series, I will be telling a tattered tale of heartbreak that has occurred over trying to use AdWords and Anlytics reporting separately for eCommerce clients. Fortunately this story has a happy ending, one that would keep Cupid himself aflutter. In the words of Al Green, “Times are good or bad, happy or sad…” My aim with this post is to make them more good/happy and to show you that you can use both AdWords and Analytics reports in harmony.

My biggest challenge in managing PPC accounts for eCommerce clients has been not being able to see revenue data in Google AdWords. Conversions and conversion tracking really don’t do me much good because my clients’ products have different values, so I can’t assign specific values to conversions. Of course, my keyword revenue data is available in Analytics, but I can only add one secondary dimension at a time to drill down this information, choosing either match type, campaign OR ad group. This isn’t entirely useful if I want to do bid changes that factor in revenue or ROI, as I need to have a complete data set to upload changes into AdWords.

Because I love you, I have found a work around, and I am happy to share it today with you. It’s fairly easy, and it’s worth the extra few minutes you’ll spend compiling your reports in the long haul. Combining your AdWords metrics with your Analytics data will allow you to analyze your PPC campaign on many new levels. You’ll never look back! I will stop keeping you in suspense about this newly defined, revamped relationship between your AdWords and Analytics reports. Consider them turned around and made up (thanks, Al!).

In this post I’ll be detailing how to pull together a keyword report with revenue data, but you could apply this to any account level (campaign, ad group, keyword). So, without further ado, let the reporting honeymoon begin.

Step 1 – Analytics Custom Report

Build the report you want in Analytics. All your AdWords data (clicks, impressions, cost, etc.) is actually available to you in Analytics (assuming your account is linked to Analytics), you just might not know where/how to access it. The easiest way to get all the information you want in the same place is to create a custom report.

On the custom report tab, click the button at the top of your screen to create a new custom report. You’ll want to make sure that you’re creating an Explorer report, and not a Flat Table report, because you’ll be segmenting your data further once it’s created.

Since I’m only interested in Google data for this report, I made sure to filter this report accordingly:

Essentially, you just want to recreate the metrics available to you in AdWords in Analytics. Not all metrics are available, but the key ones are. Here’s the final structure of my custom report:

If you need more information about creating custom reports in Analytics, check out Google’s Quick Start Guide.

Step 2 – Export Your Data From Analytics

Okay, this is the only part of this process that can be a little labor intensive if you have a lot of keywords in your account. After you’ve created your report, run it and make sure you’ve set your view to show the maximum number of entries on your screen, 500 (you can change this at the bottom of your report in a small drop down menu). Then go to the top of your screen and click Export, then choose CSV as your file type.

Frustratingly enough, Analytics will only export the data that is shown on your screen, so you’ll have to dump your keyword data into your report 500 keywords at a time. I just created one report and copied and pasted all subsequent exports into my original. Keep things easy for yourself and don’t edit your columns until after you’ve dumped in all your keywords.

Step 3 – Reformat Keywords

To prime your report to merge with the data you’ll be pulling out of AdWords, you’ll need to format your keywords like the appear in AdWords with the keyword identifiers for each match type (“phrase”, [exact]). The fastest way to do this is to sort your keywords by match type, then use a blank worksheet to edit. Copy and paste keywords one match type at a time onto your blank worksheet and use the concatenate function in Excel to put parentheses or brackets around your keywords.

Copy your concatenated list and paste back into your original report to overwrite the keywords in your keyword column, but make sure you use Paste Special – Values to only copy in text. Otherwise you’ll paste in your formula, which won’t work since your original data is on another sheet.

Here’s what my Analytics report looked like when I was finished:

Step 3 – AdWords

Head into AdWords, and download a keyword report. Make sure your keyword match type is included in the data you export, and also make sure you’ve run the exact date range you used in your Analytics report. Clean up your report by getting rid of getting rid of data you don’t need. In this example, I got rid of all paused keywords, since I’m looking to make bid changes on active keywords, and then I deleted my status column. When this was all said and done, here’s what my report looked like:

Copy or move this worksheet into the same Excel file that houses your Analytics sheet.

Step 4 – Combine and Be Amazed

Now it’s time to combine your AdWords and Analytics reports to have campaign, ad group AND revenue/ROI data for each keyword! To do this, go back to your Analytics sheet and add in columns for the missing AdWords data you want to add. Make sure that you add the columns in the same order that they appear on your AdWords report. You’ll need the columns to be in the same place because you’ll be referencing data by column number.

A brief note, the CPC shown on your Analytics report is actually your keyword’s avg. CPC, and not your max CPC. I just changed the column title, and then set up my report to pull in the max CPC from my AdWords sheet. So, I added three columns (campaign, ad group, max CPC) where they appear in my AdWords report:

To make the real magic happen, we’ll be using the VLOOKUP function in Excel. After you’ve created your campaign, ad group and max CPC columns, click in the first cell of your campaign column. The VLOOKUP function will match data from another table based on your leftmost column. If you’re not well versed in Excel functions, just use the Formula Builder in Excel to plug in the correct data. To get to the Formula Builder, go to the Insert menu at the top of your screen and choose Function. Double click VLOOKUP and you’ll get this box:

Basically, you’ll just need to tell Excel which cell to try to match (lookup_value), which will be the data in your first column, the range of data to use to match from, the number column of the data you want to display (in this case, campaign, which is column 3). You’ll want to use FALSE as the range_lookup, which will tell Excel to match your keyword value exactly. This is why I had you format your keywords in the same way they’re shown in AdWords.

Don’t worry if you’re not an Excel wizard. I used this help topic from Microsoft when I first started doing this, and found it to be more than adequate to get me started: VLOOKUP.

Copy your formula down to all rows in your Campaign column. To populate your Ad group and Max CPC columns, simply copy the formula in your campaign column, paste into each subsequent colomn, and then change the the column index number for each column (4 and 5 in this example). Congrats! You’ve merged your reports. Just a one more small thing to do…

Step 5 – One Last thing…

To make your new, combined report workable, you’ll just want to copy and paste your report onto a new sheet to get rid of the formulas. This will make tweaking your data possible, like using the report to do bid changes. To do this, just copy all rows, columns, create a new worksheet and paste as values (Paste Special – Values).

Just a brief note, I wouldn’t recommend trying to do this backwards by pulling data via the VLOOKUP function into your AdWords sheet data. Why? You might have keywords in AdWords that have not generated data in Analytics yet.

I hope this post will help you find the love that exists between your Analytics and AdWords reports. If you give it a try, let us know in the comments below.

Check back tomorrow for Kayla’s final post in our series, Hopelessly Devoted To Revenue!

In my personal experience, I have developed a love-hate relationship with many of my keywords. Although you might be thinking I’m crazy at this point, allow me to explain myself further as I’m sure some of you have been here at one point or another. On one hand, I’m very proud of the diamond in the rough keywords that continue to raise the bar and convert consistently for my clients at low costs. On the other hand, there are also those stubborn keywords that I struggle with on a daily basis for several reasons. Sound familiar? Whether they’re eating up too much budget, leading to low Quality Scores or becoming restricted by something that’s out of your control, not all choice keywords like to cooperate.

For the purpose of today’s post, I’d like to focus on the variety of AdWords’ Keyword statuses in order to provide a better understanding of how they function and affect the keywords in your account, in addition to offering up potential fixes.   As of today, Google incorporates four major types of keyword-level statuses, some of which could cause your ads not to show:

Inherited

Inherited keyword statuses appear when your keyword is contained within a paused campaign or ad group. If that is the case, your keyword then inherits that status as well. For example, your ads will not show if the campaign/ad group is paused, pending, deleted, suspended or ended.

• Diagnosis: If your keyword’s status says campaign paused or deleted, reactivate the campaign or ad group. If status shows campaign pending, your keywords will automatically activate once your campaign reaches it’s scheduled start date.

Manual

Manual keyword statuses appear after taking a direct action on the keyword itself, rather than the campaign or ad group. Manual actions include pausing or deleting keywords.

• Diagnosis: If your keyword’s status is showing paused, simply reactivate it. If your keyword was deleted, however, you cannot resurrect it in the same ad group. In order to “reactivate” a deleted keyword, your only option is to replicate that same keyword in a new/separate ad group.

Approval

Keyword approval statuses provide you with information regarding the editorial review process. Essentially, you can then use this status to figure out exactly where in that process your keyword actually is. Keyword statuses of this nature include eligible, disapproved or site suspended.

• Diagnosis: If your keyword status says eligible, they can trigger your ads. However, if the status is showing disapproved or site suspended, you need to take further action and ensure that your keywords abide by Google’s keyword guidelines and policies. For example, a keyword may become disapproved for improper use of a competitor’s trademark without permission.

System

System-related keyword statuses indicate that something else, such as a lack of search volume, is affecting that keyword’s ability to trigger your ads. This is Google’s way of ensuring that the AdWords auction isn’t clouded by unqualified or obscure search terms. In this case, for example, a keyword could be too specific or severely misspelled to gain any traffic. Statuses of this nature include Low search volume and Rarely shown due to low Quality Score.

• Diagnosis (Low Search Volume): If your keyword status is showing Low search volume, it has been temporarily suspended from the AdWords auction because: a) there is little, to no search traffic on Google properties for that keyword, or b) it’s irrelevant to users’ searches. If this is the case, you have two options. First, you could leave that keyword alone and see if people begin searching on that term in the future. This is particularly handy for advertisers looking to gain exposure for recently launched products or services. Your second option would be to simply delete that keyword and hit the drawing board for new ideas.

• Diagnosis (Rarely shown due to low Quality Score): If your keyword status is appearing as Rarely shown due to low Quality Score, it has also been temporarily suspended from the AdWords auction and therefore your ads will not show a majority of the time. Fortunately, Quality Scores are dynamic values that can change over time, so you can do a few things to improve upon this and get your ads showing again: a) select only relevant keywords, b) choose a new destination URL that relates to your target keywords, b) insert your keywords into the headline and copy for your ads. The key here is relevancy, and Google is prepared to punish those who don’t practice the concept, so choose your keywords wisely!

At the end of the day, Google offers a variety of keyword statuses that could be harming your traffic without even knowing it. Developing an awareness for what these statuses are and the affects they’re having on your traffic is half the battle. Hopefully you were able to take away something insightful from today’s post, so I would encourage any and all of you to leave some commentary below. Thanks for reading.

Because we have a good amount of clients, the amount of touch time I have with each is extremely valuable, putting an emphasis on efficiency. With that said, I typically need to dig a little deeper because our staff is extremely talented, which makes it difficult for me to poke holes in their existing strategies. I’ve found that the most loyal tool in my analysis arsenal is the AdWords graph feature (And AdCenter’s now that they’ve added this). It’s always the start of any diagnosis I’m conducting. It allows me to quickly sort through and visualize large data sets at many levels of granularity and at several different periods of time. What I’m looking for with this information are trends. I want to identify changes in the account and draw attention to significant or subtle changes in the account that can be acted upon. Here are some examples of graph settings I look at and what I’m looking for in each:

Year Over Year CPL Performance:

AdWords Graph | Year-Over-Year Data

I take a look at year over year performance to have a better understanding of seasonality and how far an account has come in the past 12 months. The above chart is a branded AdGroup. You can see that 2012 January performance on cost per conversion is considerably better than 2011. Not only is it better, it’s also more consistent as the line is more flat than previous years. These are the types of results I want to see and are something that is valuable to show a client, especially on accounts with a high level of seasonality where month over month stats may vary. This chart only shows part of the performance though. To get a full understanding of the performance you need to start swapping the first metric:

Year-Over-Year Cost Performance:

AdWords Graph | Year-Over-Year Cost

This is a shot of the same AdGroup but looking at cost. What this allows me to see is that, while CPL did improve dramatically on the previous chart, spend actually decreased. Sometimes true performance can be clouded by the performance of metrics and drawing out additional information could allow me to better understand what is happening on an account. An assumption I can make here, and one that took only a few seconds, is that CPL performance improved because this account manager “cut out the fat.” The manager probably reduced spend on keywords that weren’t working and probably invested more heavily in the keywords that were working, which allowed her to spend more efficiently and produce a lower CPL. To prove this, I’ll need to look at one more metric for year-over-year.

Year-Over-Year Conversion Performance:

AdWords Graph | Year-Over-Year Conversions

Here’s that same AdGroup with the same date range on conversions. As you can see, 2012 is actually driving more conversions than 2011. This is what ties it all together and proves to me that optimizations over the past year have resulted in significant improvements in account performance for this branded AdGroup. This account manager is driving a significantly higher volume of leads for a significantly lower cost, resulting in higher budget efficiency. Now I can go give her a high five. Plus, it took me less than a minute to run through this entire process. I could scrub the entire account at the ad group level (30 AdGroups) in this manner in less than 10 minutes. With that said, looking at year over year data isn’t necessarily enough to have a full understanding of the accounts performance. From here, I’ll go into a six month trend analysis, starting with:

Clicks Versus Cost Per Click:

AdWords Graph | Clicks Versus Cost-Per-Click

Now I’m at the account level and I’ve stretched my date range back about six months. The first thing I want to see is how the account was managed from peak season, which on this account is August, through their slow season, which on this account is December. I already know that on this account, budget is reduced through the slow season and they are limited by budget so there is no shortage of opportunities to find clicks. What this report is showing me is that cost-per-click shrank in relation to overall clicks. I assume that this was a tactic to mitigate a loss of traffic by lowering position and driving more volume for each dollar. During the high months, I’d imagine position was raised to gain more exposure and relevance when people are buying. I’ll confirm this by swapping cost per click for average position, which I did and the graph confirmed my assumed results. Now I want to know if the strategy paid off.

Conversions versus Cost:

AdWords Graph | Conversions Versus Cost

Here’s where things get interesting on this account. As you can see in the business months at the start of the graph, the relationship of conversions and cost was close; high conversions and high cost. In the slower months a gap forms where conversions are peaking out considerably higher than cost. This shows better efficiency in the slow months, which we already noticed on the AdGroup graphs earlier. You can also see towards the end of this graph that the trend converges again as we head into January, which is one of this clients busier months. What this arms me with, is the ability to realign strategy with the client and walk them through the progression of their account. The best part is, I don’t actually push buttons or pull levers in this account and I’ve got the trend and strategy over the past six months pegged in about 15 minutes worth of research.

Performance on this account was outstanding so there wasn’t much for me to dig deep into but a similar analysis using only graphs on another account could uproot some items that need immediate attention. When I find trends that don’t look great to me, I zoom in on the date ranges in question and start doing a comparative analysis of the time period directly preceding the goof. It’s then that I’ll start looking at overall metrics to see what shifted and I’ll analyze change history reports to see if it was user caused. If so, we can easily go back and revert to the previous state and pick up with a new optimization. Analyzing accounts doesn’t always take a long time but you should make a habit of analyzing your accounts on a short-term and long-term basis regularly. If you only stay within the day, week, or month, you might be losing site of just how much your account is changing.

The process of setting up an ACE within the AdWords interface has always been fairly straightforward, following these steps:

1. Set experiment parameters (name the experiment, determine the split percentage between control and experimental changes, select a start and end date, save)
2. Define your experimental changes (depends on your goals, but could apply changes to: keyword bids, keywords, ad text, ad groups, keyword match types, ad group bids and/or keyword insertion)
3. Let your control and experimental splits run and accumulate traffic (calling an experiment without statistically valid data could leave you worse-off in the end!) You’ll know you’ve received enough data to make a statistically valid decision when 1-3 up or down arrows appear next to your experimental data when segmented in the interface, depending on the level of probability required for your test.
4. Decide if you’ll keep or reject your experimental changes and apply based on your decision (Pretty straightforward…did the experiment work? Apply changes. If it didn’t or didn’t work as you thought, you can delete those changes and make a new experiment to test something else.)

Now that we’ve refreshed ourselves on the steps to setting up and running an ACE in the interface, on to the real fun…how to make this process a little easier by using the Desktop Editor update!

Here’s the long and short of it: when you are applying changes in the interface to whichever level of the account structure you’ve decided to test, it’s moderately difficult to make bulk changes to your experimental data. However, with one of the more recent Desktop Editor updates, we gained the ability to make some changes to our ACE’s within the Editor quickly and easily. There are still some things that you must do in regards to the ACE in the interface, as the actions are not supported within the Editor at this point, but…we’ll take it!

Supported Changes in Editor

• • Apply and edit an experiment status (ex: ‘control only,’ ‘experiment only,’ ‘control and experiment’)
  • Apply and edit a default max CPC, Display Network max CPC, or max CPM bid multipliers at the ad group level
  • Apply and edit a max CPC bid multiplier at the keyword level

• • Change the maximum CPC bid and destination URL, add new keywords, change keyword text, and change keyword match type
  • Download and upload experiment status and bid multipliers in both CSV and XML import/export

Not Supported Changes in Editor

• • Creating, pausing or deleting an ACE
  • Display segmented experiment and control statistics

Certainly the addition of these features to the Editor are handy and going to make editing Experiments just a little simpler on PPC managers, but let’s review how running ACEs in your campaigns can improve account performance:

• Determine if a keyword still sees traffic volume with a decrease in max CPC to a lower position (decreased cost per lead/click)
• Test if your searchers respond more to text copy that reads “Buy Now” vs. “Shop Now” (increased CTR)
• Conduct research on a new landing page layout (increased conversion rate)

Your turn! How do you PPC Hero readers use the AdWords Campaign Experiments to find ways to tweak account performance? Share your thoughts, ideas or direct experiences in the comments section below! Thanks for reading!

I’ve come across a lot of situations like this in PPC, where I had misconceptions about what was and wasn’t, and when I was told otherwise it blew my mind. I wanted to share four PPC misconceptions about keywords with you, so you aren’t the one going around the office singing “give me the beach boys and free my soul.”

Misconception 1: You can’t use keyword-level destination URLs on the Display Network.

We all know the Display Network doesn’t show stats for individual keywords. Instead, it uses the keywords in an ad group to identify a theme and combines this along with your ad copy and landing pages to determine where to show your ads. This is why you can only see stats at the ad or ad group levels.

Because of this, I was taught that there’s no point to having destination URLs for keywords because the Display Network doesn’t recognize individual keywords. Makes sense right? This idea is even backed up by Google itself by a blog post back in 2007. Take a look at one of their tips for the content network:

Now this post is over 4 years old so it’s possible this was true at the time as everything on the Internet changes rapidly. However it still ranks high in SERPs and likely continues to perpetuate this misconception. The truth is, you can have keyword-level URLs on the Display Network and they do serve a purpose.

You can put Display campaign destination URLs at the keyword, ad, and managed placement level. The order of priority for Google is managed placement > keyword > ad. If you don’t have a managed placement URL it triggers the keyword level, if there’s no keyword level it triggers the ad level.

How do these keyword destination URLs work? If someone clicks on a Display ad, Google will determine which keyword best matches the content on that site and use that keyword’s destination URL. Take a look at the example below of a suggested Display Network ad group for baby clothing generated from Google’s contextual targeting tool.

You could just have ad level URLs pointing to the main baby clothing page, but you could get even more granular with keyword level URLs. For “cheap baby clothes”, you could direct people to your clearance page; for “organic baby clothes”, the organic section; for “trendy baby clothes”, your newest arrivals page. You see where I’m going.

Now I’ll admit, I haven’t fully utilized keyword-level destination URLs in my Display Network campaigns, but it’s definitely something I will be testing out and blog about in the future.

Misconception 2: An average position of 1 means you are showing in the top spot above the organic results.

Ah position 1. First listing on the page, above the organic results, site links galore!. If you see your keywords are showing in an average position of 1 it means you are showing in the top spot on the page right? Wrong.

If there are no ads showing above search results and your ad appears on the right hand side as the 1st one, then that would mean the 1st rank. If there are no ads above the search results or on the right hand side, but the advertiser’s ads show up under the search results, then too the position would be 1st rank.

To illustrate this, below is an example of ad position with ads above the organic listing…

… and the ad positions without ads in the top spot.

What was the 4^th position in the first example, now becomes position 1 when no ads are showing at the top. Position 1 is what will be reported in AdWords for the Digital Impulse ad.

So take average position with a grain of salt, as position 1,2,3,4, etc. don’t necessarily mean the same spot on the page.

Misconception 3: Once you delete a keyword, it looses its account history and you cannot reactivate it.

I have a problem with getting rid of things. Now, you won’t see me on an episode of hoarders, but my apartment is full of things I haven’t used in months or years. I’m afraid that as soon as I get rid of something I’ll figure out a use for it.

The same thing can happen in a PPC account. You hold on to keywords that haven’t ever performed well because maybe, just maybe, one day they will. On top of that, I was told that once your delete a keyword you can’t reactivate it, and that’s sort of true.

You can see below, that when you select a deleted keyword the “Change status” box grays out and you can’t change the status.

However, if you deleted a keyword from an ad group and try to add it back into the ad group, look what happens:

When you click save, the keyword is active again and still maintains the performance history it had before it was deleted.

Now, I don’t recommend deleting keywords if you think there’s a reasonable chance you’ll want to reactivate them in the same ad group, but if you’re holding on to poor performing keywords because you are afraid that as soon as you delete them you’ll want to activate them again, don’t worry.

Misconception 4: When you add a new keyword into your account its Quality Score reflects how well it’s performing in your account.

When you add a new keyword into your account, AdWords automatically assigns it a Quality Score. This QS is based on the keyword’s historic performance on Google.com until it achieves a significant number of impressions in your account (according to Google, significant means a high number somewhere in the multiple of thousands). This is referred to as the impression threshold.

Once the keyword receives significant impressions, its QS will start to reflect how it’s performed in your account, and historic performance will be a lesser factor.  This is important if you have a lot of keywords in your account that have very low impressions: these keywords will not be evaluated based on their own QS in the account.  Until keywords reach the impression threshold, there’s little that can be done to influence their QS.

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These are just four of the PPC misconceptions I’ve come across while working in the industry but I’m sure there are many others. If you know of any PPC misconceptions please post them below!

This is the fifth installment in our series Fully Utilizing AdWords’ Ad Extensions in Just 5 Days! Today, I will cover everything you need to know about AdWords social extensions and how they can benefit your search and display network campaigns.

What are social extensions?

Social extensions are used to enhance your social marketing efforts by allowing you to share +1’s between your AdWords campaigns and your brand’s Google+ page. As a result, all of the +1’s surrounding your brand can now be quantified and packaged as a single value. Similar to Facebook “Likes”, each +1 acts as a consumer’s stamp of approval, or recommendation of a particular product or service. This becomes a win-win situation, since companies can now earn more visible approval of their brands, while the consumers can now see recommendations from friends that share similar interests.

How do social extensions work?

Social extensions are appended at the Campaign level and associate your AdWords campaigns with a Google+ page. In the long run, these ultimately serve as annotations that can help influence the friends and family of your current customers to pursue your brand as well.

By default, AdWords search and display network ads all have a +1 button associated with them (Note: your account will not be charged when a user +1′s your ad). As a result, users who +1 your ad endorse that specific landing page you’re directing traffic to. With social extensions enabled, however, all +1’s from your ads accumulate on your brand’s Google+ page instead. As a result, the total number of +1’s on your Google+ Page is also applied to your ads with social extensions.

This creates a larger social web presence for both your ads and your Google+ Page, making it more likely that someone who sees them will see recommendations from friends as well. Since annotations make your ads more relevant, they can also indirectly increase your overall ad performance.

How do social extensions affect my AdWords ads?

Unfortunately, social extensions have no direct impact on your AdWords campaigns. Although there have been discussions about the possibility of integrating +1’s as a explicit factor in determining your Quality Scores at some point in the future, +1’s are not directly related to any other metrics at this point in time.

On the other hand, social extensions do have the ability to influence your ad performance indirectly. For example, let’s say that I’m looking for a new pair of Nike’s and come across two retailers with ads offering Nike shoes:

• Ad #1 is for a generic shoe retailer.
• Ad #2 is for a generic shoe retailer that was +1’ed by a few close friends.

With no pun intended, put yourself in my shoes and ask yourself, which ad you would be more likely to click on? If you chose Ad #2 that offered your friends +1 stamps of approval, then hopefully you’re starting to catch my drift. In this way, +1’s can indirectly influence your CTR because they are endorsements of particular ads that have been “socially approved.”

How do I enable social extensions in my ads?

First and foremost, you’ll want to verify your brand’s Google+ page and confirm rightful ownership of your page. Although this may seem like a waste of time, this is a precautionary measure Google takes to ensure that your +1’s stay with your brand, and your brand only, rather than having competitors take the credit for your reputation.

Once you’ve verified your Google+ page and acquired the correct URL, you have a few options to choose from:

• Create a new campaign with social extensions.
• Add social extensions to a campaign or edit an existing social extension.
• Use an existing extension from another campaign (shared).

For a more information on how to enable social extensions in your account, check out the AdWords Help Page for detailed descriptions of each.

Are social extensions right for me?

Social extensions are definitely something worth looking into if you haven’t already, especially if your brand is actively involved with Google+. Although they don’t affect your campaign performance directly, social extensions are a great way to expand your brand reach and entice more clicks from users.

Have you had any personal success with social extensions? I would encourage anyone to leave feedback about their experiences below! Stay tuned for our series wrap-up post coming later this evening!

Benefits

All of AdWords’ ad extensions are touted as tools to help you increase CTR, but how can location extensions in particular aid in your advertising? The biggest reasons to use location extensions are simple: increased relevancy and effectiveness. If you have location extensions enabled in your accounts, when someone searches for a service or product that you offer and is relatively close to your physical location, they may see a pop out of your business name, location and phone number. Seeing that you are close and easy to find, they may be more likely to shop or do business with you!

Where Can They Show & What Do They Look Like

Location extensions can show on either the Search or Display networks and will trigger on mobile device searches, as well. Dependent on the particular format of a particular website or whether or not the search was completed on a Search Partner’s site, etc., a pop-out map showing your location may show up along with your text ad. Location ad extensions usually look like this:

Your ad will populate as usual, but with extended information showing your particular brick and mortar location, as you can see here with the ‘Cheers’ example. Now your searcher knows you are within a reasonable distance to their location, so they are more likely to visit your location than a competitor who doesn’t have a location listed. Should your searcher be looking for you on a mobile device, your address may be clickable for directions directly on their device.  Keep in mind, if you also have a phone number listed in your location extension, you could opt-in to call metrics and give your mobile searchers a click-to-call option (more on call extensions in Abby’s post here!).

How to Implement

You can enable location extensions fairly quickly within the AdWords interface. Once you are logged in to your account, toggle to the ‘Ad extensions’ tab. Here you’ll see an option to select which extension you want to work with from a drop-down menu:

Once you have selected to add a new location extension, you have the option to either manual enter an address for your location or use an address from your Google Places account, if you have one (and you should). If you select the manual entry option, you’ll be prompted to select which campaign you want to apply the extension to, and then will see a drop-down box to select the extension you want to use. If there isn’t one already present in the account, you’ll see an option to add a new extension and the space to do that will look like this:

As you can see, there are open boxes for you to fill in with you location information, and then select a map icon and/or business image to complement your ad. Click ‘Save’ and you’re done!

Probably one of the nicer elements of location extensions is that you can apply the same or multiple addresses to all campaigns within your account. Once a location extension has been added to the interface, you can go back and select other campaigns to apply that existing extension to. However, keep in mind if you share a location extension with multiple campaigns, making a change to one of those location extensions will apply that change across all campaigns using that extension. You can also apply multiple location extensions to a single campaign, but know that you have to meet the following criteria in order for multiple addresses to show with your ad at one time:

• Appear in the top ad position on Google.com
• Be a high-quality ad
• Your campaign is linked to a Google Places account
• You are the primary business owner, and
• Your Google Places account contains at least one location in a given city/area

Ad-Level Location Extensions

The commonplace practice for location extensions is to add them on the campaign level, however there is an option to apply location extensions at the ad level for a more targeted user-experience. Ad-level location extensions are a single address linked to a single ad and they tend to serve less often than those location extensions added on the campaign level as they will only show when the searcher is within the target radius set for that address or if the searcher queries one of your keywords and a location term that is located near your address. As another note, your ad will never show without the location extension if it’s added on the ad level, so be sure no matter who triggers your ad, your location in that ad will be relevant to the searcher.

Well, that’s that! You’ve officially received a 101 lesson in location ad extensions! If you haven’t implemented them yet, give it a go and let us know your results! If you are already using location extensions to improve account performance, tell us how it’s been going, and any tips or tricks you’d like to share with our loyal readers, in our comments section below.

What Are Product Extensions?

Product Extensions allow you to link your Google Merchant account with your AdWords account to create enhanced ad listings on SERPs. Basically, once your Merchant account is linked to your AdWords account, AdWords will display specific product information for products that are related to a searcher’s query. So, when your text ad is generated on a SERP by a search query and Google determines that you have a relevant product based on that search term, your product image, title and price will be displayed below your text ad.

Here’s what you’ll see when someone expands your Product Extensions plusbox:

A brief side note, don’t confuse Product Extensions with Product Listings. Product Listings display your product information from your merchant feed on Google SERPs and are not connected to your AdWords account. Below is an example of a Product Listing.

The best way to think of the different between Produce Extensions and Product Listings is that Product Extensions allow you to nest your Product Listing under your AdWords text ads. If you want to read more about Product Listings, check out this page from Google.

Why Should You Consider Using Product Extensions?

Product Extensions will give you increased visibility on SERPs, not to mention additional free real page estate. Plus, displaying your product information with your text ads will increase the profitability of your ads, as searchers will be more likely to click and buy a product they can see. Product Extensions give your ads essential information searcher’s need to make a purchasing decision. If a searcher can see your product’s image, name and price before they click your ad, you’ve helped accelerate them further into the buying cycle.

How Do You Implement Product Extensions?

Under the Ad Extensions tab in AdWords, select Products.

Select your desired campaign from the drop-down menu and then check the box to “Extend my ads with relevant product details from Google Merchant Center.”

Select the Merchant Center account you want to associate with your campaign. Please note, however, that you will need to have already linked your AdWords and Merchant accounts. For information on how to do this, here’s an article from Google’s support page. You can also check out our post here on PPC Hero about setting up your data feeds in your Google Merchant account.

Your Product Extensions will take a searcher to the destination page listed for your product in your merchant account, not the destination URL of your text ad. Your Product Extensions will inherit the same CPC as your text ad, but if a user simply expands the Product Extensions plusbox without clicking through to your site you won’t be charged.

Also, once you create your Product Extension, it can be easily shared with any campaign in your account simply be selecting the extension from a drop down list.

Another important thing to note about Product Extensions is that they will not show up on Search Partner or Display Network sites.

What Performance Data is Available for Product Extensions?

You’ll be able to view all your regular account statistics (clicks, impressions, CTR, CPC, cost, average position) for your Product Extensions.

Unfortunately data at the individual product level is not available, and keep in mind that if you activate or deactivate a product extension feed, you will reset its statistics to zero; i.e. AdWords won’t keep historical data for your Product Extensions.

Hopefully this has been a good introduction to Product Extensions if they’re new to you, and if you’re not currently using them in AdWords I hope you’ll give them a try! They’re relatively easy to set-up, and will have a positive effect on your e-commerce related PPC efforts in AdWords.

Questions? Comments? Let us know below!

Stay tuned for another installment in our Fully Utilizing AdWords’ Ad Extensions in Just 5 Days! series from Kayla tomorrow, who will be covering Location Extentions.

This coming week, some of my fellow PPC Hero’s and I will be posting daily with in-depth analyses of all 5 of the current ad extensions available via Google AdWords. We’ll not only show you how to access and implement each of these ad extensions, we’ll also explain how we’ve used them for our own clients and explore the effects they’ve had on account performance!

Here’s a quick look at what days we’ll cover each extension. Make sure you check back every day next week so you can implement all these extensions in your own accounts quickly and start improving performance immediately!

Monday: Sitelinks Extensions – Felicia

Tuesday: Call Extensions – Abby

Wednesday: Product Extensions – Sarah

Thursday: Location Extensions – Kayla

Friday: Social Extensions – Dave & Series Wrap-Up