In the past 6 months, my relationship status with adCenter and the desktop editor has changed from “It’s Complicated” to “Engaged.”  I have become proficient with these PPC tools and if I don’t know where something is, I poke around until I find it.  But this stumped me for sure: How in the world can I save time and upload a bulk list of negatives?  I don’t have to insert each keyword into their ad groups individually, do I?  If that is the case, this relationship is over.  Don’t get me wrong, I am all for working on solving a problem, but I would never get to anything else in my accounts!  So, I asked for help.  Yup, the adCenter editor and I went to counseling and here is what I learned.

Step One:  Gathering Your Information

In order to create a negatives keyword list, you need to perform a Search Query Performance report.  If you have not pulled this report in a while, I suggest taking a 3-month snapshot.  This will be a lot of data to sort through, but it’s all valuable information!  Sort your excel spreadsheet in ascending order by the search term and start scrolling.  The first move is to find search inquiries that are completely bizarre and have nothing to do with your account and mark those as negatives.  It could be a word, a phrase, or you may want to eliminate the entire search as an exact match.  Next, sort by conversions.  This is a great way to actually expand your account by adding in these higher converting words or phrases.  On the flip side, you can exclude things that have not converted or have a very low click-through rate.  Once your exclusions are made, create your new upload sheet.

Step Two: Prepping Your Information

Creating your bulk upload sheet is simple.  Create your columns and fill in your information.  The following columns are required for upload:

• Type:
  • The column will be filled with either “Campaign Negative Keyword” or “Ad Group Negative Keyword.”  This will depend on where you want your negative to be placed.
  • Will it be on the Campaign or Ad Group level?  Remember, Ad Group level negatives will trump Campaign level negatives.
• Campaign:
  • The column will be filled with the different Campaign names and is needed for Campaign AND Ad Group level negatives.
• Ad Group:
  • This column will only be needed if “Ad Group Negative Keyword” is the Type.
• Status:
  • This column should say “Active.”
  • Negative:
    • This column will be filled with the negative keyword you want to upload.
    • Remember that adCenter will not recognize a match type column for negative keywords.  So where you would actually delete out the match type signifier out of your Google keyword column, for adCenter, you will need to add them in!
      • Phrase Negatives should be signified with “quotes”
      • Exact Negatives should be signified with [brackets].
      • Broad Negatives – tricked you!  There is no such thing in adCenter… don’t forget that!

Step Three: Uploading Your Information

In the editor, you can upload in a couple different ways.  You can choose to cut and paste your information and hope that you have all of your columns set up correctly, or you can import from an Excel spreadsheet.  We are going to go with the latter because it puts up less of a fight!

Log into your account, synch the account to make sure the editor and the User Interface are on the same page and click the “Import” icon in the Home Tab in the Data box.

Once you have the Import Wizard screen open, you will pick the last option, “Import from a modified Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet.”

One thing to note when using this function, is that you must uploaded your data from a single tab excel workbook and save it to the desktop.  If you have multiple tabs in your document, the editor will become confused and not know what information to pick… (Ladies, does this sound like any ex-boyfriends you know!?  Just playing guys!)  So, keep it simple – one tab!

The editor will ask for a file name and then it will actually give you the option to view your import (al la Google!).  This is the best feature of the Import Wizard, which is why I prefer using it instead of the cut and paste method.

Once you hit “Next”, you are on your way to upload!  The rest of the process is the same as uploading your keywords or your bid changes.  Don’t forget to synch your account back up with the User Interface when you are done with all of your edits!

This uploading technique is quick and simple and should save you a whole heck of a lot of heartache with adCenter.  See, you don’t have to break up and throw all of your campaigns out on the street after all.  Just by giving your account tools a little love, you too can have a strong, healthy relationship with adCenter.

Please let us know what tools make your life as a PPC Manager a little bit easier!  Be sure to check out Sarah’s post tomorrow about the love between AdWords and Analytics reporting.  Thanks, as always, for reading PPC Hero!

If you missed any part of this series, you must revisit it; especially if your account is suffering from low click-through rates.  As Kayla said in her intro, there have been some updates on extensions and we have learned so much about them this year.  Now we have the stats to prove that they are a worthy tool in our PPC toolbox.  Read on friends and know that not all accounts can be born with silver spoons… you have to work on making them successful.  So get started today and thanks for reading PPC Hero!

Site Links by Felicia

Call Extensions by Abby

Product Extensions by Sarah

Location Extensions by Kayla

Social Extensions by Dave

What if I promise you it will deliver not only one but three Facebook Advertising secrets? Or if I told you all those secrets were on display within the first  3 minutes of the video?

Oh, just go ahead and watch it already:

So if you were paying attention you probably noticed three things about this very first No Pants Subway Ride footage:

1. You have to start with something attention-worthy to begin with. If the subway riding improv artists had merely been wearing bermuda shorts on their winter subway ride, it would have been a bit weird, but not obviously striking in a place like NYC.  So you have to start with something truly noteworthy to begin with, but that alone is oftentimes not enough.
2. A pattern makes a bigger impact than a one-off irregularity.  One no-pants subway rider was rather easily ignorable.  The woman of her video took note of the rider, and went right back to her book.  Two pantless riders was weird but not absolutely compelling. But by the third no-pants-wearing rider, the woman put her book away and the improv actors had her absolute, full attention.
3. When people sense the pattern, they look to others to figure out what it means. The woman in the video wasn’t sure what to make of all these pantless subway riders.  Indeed, she looked anywhere from scared to more than mildly unnerved about the whole thing until she made eye contact with another rider. Once she makes that eye contact (at the 2:32 mark in the video) the woman absorbs the other riders reaction as her own: he thought it was hysterical and so did she.

So how does all this apply to Facebook Advertising?

Well the first 2 points directly relate to regular ads:

• Start with ads that are hard to ignore, through visually striking and emotionally compelling images that cary a high “story factor.”  You need to get people’s attention in the first place.
• Make your ads a patterned campaign.  The same attention-grabbing ad will soon become easily ignorable over a very short time frame.  Just like new and exciting billboards quickly fade into background noise after a while, except “ad fatigue” happens much faster on Facebook.  So think in terms of a campaign worth of ads, rather than one-off ad attempts.

And the last point applies to Sponsored stories:

• Use sponsored stories to help your audience “make sense of” the pattern you created with your ads. Sponsored stories spotlight the social proof required to move your newly and creatively advertised product from a curiosity to a curiosity worth investigating seriously.

Why Sponsored Stories Make the Difference

While the first two points are fairly standard advice — write great, attention-grabbing ads & keep the ads fresh — it’s this third point that’s relatively unique and widely underused in Facebook advertising today. Social Media is, by definition, social. So social proof is HUGE, and therefore one of the most powerful leverage points you can use in your advertising.  And sponsored stories helps you use social proof to your advantage.

That said, sponsored stories work best in a situation where people are already looking for social cues, and creating that situation is exactly what a great Facebook Campaign can provide.

First, let’s look at the data available for a leads-based client. In AdWords on the Campaigns tab, here are the headers I see in my report data:

I have outlined the conversion metrics in the red box on the right side of the menu. Conversions, cost per conversion and conversion rate are fairly straightforward, and likely very familiar to you. You’ll notice that in this particular account I’m only being shown data for conversions that happen once per click. I’ll come back to what this means a little later when we dive into an ecommerce account, but I just wanted to point it out here first. The last column for view-through conversions is probably the least familiar to you. View through conversions are the number of online conversions that happen in any specified time frame after a user saw your image or rich media ad on the Display Network, but didn’t click. Translation: they saw your ad, didn’t click, but converted later without clicking on another Display Network ad.

View-through conversion data can be extremely helpful in creating strategy for your Display Network campaigns. This information can help you determine the most effective placements on the Display Network, and can help you optimize your campaigns based on how people are engaging with your ads even if they aren’t clicking. In other words, just because someone doesn’t immediately click your ad doesn’t mean it’s not effective or memorable.

To get the most out of your view-through conversions, you’ll want to make sure you’re de-duplicating your data. De-duplication is a feature in AdWords that, if enabled, will exclude conversions from users that viewed your display ad but later clicked on your search ad. If this setting is disabled you’ll have to take your view-through conversions with a grain of salt, as you could be getting duplicate conversion counts. So, you’re much better off to enable de-deplication.

To enable de-duplication, go the the Reporting and Tools menu in AdWords and choose Conversions from the drop down list. Once on the Conversions page, select the settings tab from the tabs on your screen and you’ll see the link to edit/enable your de-duplication option:

Now let’s look at an account tracking conversions for an ecommerce client. As you’ll see below, my report information offers me more varied conversion data:

As I mentioned above, I have my conversion data for one-per-click conversions, but now I also have conversion data for many clicks (the fifth and sixth columns above). What does this mean? One-per-click conversions count a conversion for every single click on your ad. If multiple conversions happen after the click,  one-per click conversion reporting will still only report one. Obviously this data is more useful for leads-based client accounts, as it is unlikely that you’d be asking a user to convert in more than one way. Leads-based accounts would count things like filling out a contact form as a conversion, or signing up for an e-newsletter, and these things only need to happen once. It is important to note, however, that you can track multiple types of conversion actions (downloads, signing up for a newsletter, requesting more information, etc.),. Viewing data on conversions by purpose or action name is available on the Dimensions tab:

For more information about defining different conversion types, visit this page in Google AdWords Help online.

Many-per-click conversion data will count multiple conversions per click. This information is useful for tracking conversions that have individual value every time they occur, like an ecommerce purchase. So, one user click can generate multiple conversions (purchases).

You’ll also notice columns for the value of each conversion for both one-per-click and many clicks, which is another useful metric for ecommerce accounts. This is actually pretty simple information, as it’s just the average value, or dollar amount, of each conversion/purchase. While this would generally only show up in ecommerce accounts, you can also assign a dollar value to other lead types, so you’d be able to track this for other conversion types as well. Please note that if you want to assign a value for you conversions you’ll need to make sure the conversion code on your site is also modified. For more information about setting up this information, check out Google’s help page on goals and funnels.

Lastly, the final column provides the total conversion value, which is the total value of all the conversions for a given date range divided by the total cost for all clicks. In other words, this column is showing you your ROI.

To sum all this up, here’s a brief overview of everything I explained above:

• View-through conversions – number of conversions that happen within 30 days after a user saw, but did not immediately click, your ad on the Display Network
• Conversions (1-per-click) – count conversions per one click (multiple conversions after the one click are not counted)
• Conversions (many click) – count conversions every time one is made, i.e. will count multiple conversions per click
• Value/conv. – average dollar amount of your conversions/transactions
• Total conversion value – ROI (value/cost)
• Conversion purpose/action – the specific type of conversion you’re asking users to perform (newsletter sign-up, catalog request, contact information, etc.)

I hope this helps you make more sense of your AdWords conversion tracking, and also helps you dive a little more deeply into your PPC accounts. Will this information help you report on your conversions more thoroughly? Let us know in the comments below.

As always, thanks for reading and stay tuned for more from PPC Hero!

Now, I am not going to go all Sigmund Freud on you… this is really just about exploring how people think and how they find things they want based on different factors in their lives.  As search marketers, we must tap into the minds of our target audiences.  There are three segments we will take a peek at – geography, demographics and economics.  Researching within these segments can give you an insider view on how to best market your client’s brand.

“Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.”

Margaret Mead has the right idea and I am convinced she would have made a brilliant Internet marketer.  We need to create quality ads that appeal to the right audience and get the right traffic to our client’s websites.  Writing for the masses just doesn’t work anymore.

Geography

What appeals to Southerners might not appeal to Northerners.  East Coast and West Coast – totally different mentalities. You wouldn’t use the same vocabulary trying to target a “Valley Girl” versus a “Jersey Girl.”  So how do you reach both of those groups with the same product?  (The only way the same ad would work for both of those ladies is if your client sells hair products…)  First, take a look at the language that you are using in your ads.  If you are targeting the Midwest for a client who sells soft drinks, you will likely use “pop” to describe their products.  On the East Coast, you will use “soda” and if you are targeting anywhere in the South, you just use “Coke” to describe anything carbonated.

Of course, Google makes it easy for Internet marketers to implement geographical targeting.  You can target by region, state, city, zip codes and even a specific mile radius.  You can even use Analytics to see where the most traffic is coming from.  However, it’s figuring out how to speak to those people that’s the difficult part.  Use the Internet as your tool – seems pretty basic, doesn’t it?  Have you ever done a search to see what a particular area of the country is all about?  What are the top attractions in the area?  What do people like to eat there?  What is the fashion like?  Where do people shop?  What groups settled there originally and how does that impact the area?  What is the history of the area?  Finding these answers should give you a good start on writing effective ad copy for that geographical region.

Demographics

Gender, Age, Race, Married or Single, Professional or Trade.  Ever thought about these factors when writing an ad?  Well today is a good day to start.  You can use local government websites to find all sorts of information about the demographics in your advertising area.  It’s information gathered from the census survey and other big brother efforts. J  Take a peek at this screen shot from a site called Stats Indiana comparing three affluent areas around the country.  We see a break down of population growth, employment stats, race stats, industry types and average salary.  All of these things can make targeting the correct demographic a bit easier.

Consider this scenario:  your client produces fine lingerie (Think Pink!).  We all know that even though lingerie is made for women, it’s really for men.  So how to you appeal to both genders?  You need to write an ad appealing to men so they will buy lingerie for their ladies.  You also need to write an ad targeting ladies since they will likely want the same product for more practical purposes!  To do this, try different calls to action and varying headlines in your ads.

Economics

Prospective customers of varying socioeconomic status will respond differently to the same product.  Again, what is important to one group will not be important for another and therefore, your ads need to reflect this.  When targeting a more middle class audience, try using language touting the company’s discounts and deals.  Conversely, you might want to try language giving product benefits and not even mention cost when attracting an audience with a larger wallet.   Consider another scenario: two couples are going on vacation and are looking for rental cars.  They search “rental cars” on Google and this is what they find:

The jet-setting power couple that makes $200k a year is more likely to click on the top ad while the newly wed couple that is watching their pennies will probably click on the bottom ad.  I guess you could say, put your ad copy where the money is…

It’s not technical, it’s not scientific… it’s just how our brains work based on different factors that each of us encounter in our lives.  Advertising based on search intent is a HUGE topic and a little overwhelming to understand, but it can be an even bigger help to Internet marketers.  To learn more about the “technical side” of search intent, check out Jessica C’s post on Session Based Broad and Advanced Location Targeting.

I would love to know your thoughts on this!  Have you tried it in any of your campaigns?  Have I convinced you to start!?

You may understand that you need to consider click-through rate, but what’s a poor click-through rate? What can you DO about it? Why is it so low?! There are a million questions, and they’re all interrelated. WordStream’s free new tool, the AdWords Performance Grader, looks to address several of those questions in one convenient report. It will analyze several elements of your account and offers comparative metrics (as compared to other advertisers within a similar spend range), as well as suggestions for how to improve each. You can check out the AdWords Performance Grader site for a more in-depth description of each account element analyzed, but some of those which were most interesting to me are described below.

Wasted Spend:

Analyzes your number of negative keywords vs. the average for similar-spend advertisers. This may be important to note if your number of negative keywords is massively different from that of similarly-sized advertisers, however, each industry and account will of course require different numbers of negatives due to its keyword targeting strategy and the broadness of negatives added.

Quality Score:

This section offers a graphical representation of your average Quality Score for various impression-size groups, as well as an impression-weighted average Quality Score rating for your entire account. It is useful to see your average impression number vs the average quality score for that group of keywords, and may help you to understand whether your longer-tailed, less-trafficked keywords have developed sufficient Quality Score to keep your CPC low or not.

Click Through Rate:

Offers a graphical representation of the top 200 keywords’ click-through rates along with their average ad position, as well as a curve representing the similar-spend average. Each little circle on the graph, when moused-over, will indicate which keyword is represented. This is a very useful visual display of performance differences based on position within your account.

Text Ad Optimization:

In addition to giving a general overview of your number of text ads both active and per ad group as compared to similar-spend advertisers, this part of the tool will indicate both your “best” and “worst” text ad as compared to the expected CTR for their position, as well as an overall account average. This can be a helpful quick overview of ad elements that are working and which are not, if the ads in your account do not vary widely from ad group to ad group.

In the future, I hope that this tool becomes popular enough that WordStream might be able to develop industry-specific data for each budget range, but of course, the ability to do so will depend entirely on participation levels. As it stands, the tool gives a great overview of general account performance and areas of possible improvement, and is definitely worth checking out!

I want to say that I don’t think automated rules will ever take the place of getting in there yourself and making changes to your account. They are extremely valuable though if you don’t have time to manage your account daily, or if there are changes that need to be made at inopportune times. This post will walk you through the process of setting up automated rules to enhance account management.

Automated Rules Overview

The table below shows the different changes you can automate across the four account levels.

I work with a retail client who has a limited budget, so it’s very important that we spend the budget at the right times to drive the most sales. Sales for the client increase substantially on the weekends so I want to use campaign automated rules to increase budgets during peak sales days.

Changing Budgets

Since sales spike during the weekends, I want to increase the daily budgets for my campaigns on Saturdays and Sundays. Instead of changing the budget myself whenever it is I decide to wake up on Saturday, I can tell Google to do it for me.

Select the campaigns for which you want to change the budgets then go to Automate and select “Change daily budget when…”

The green box below will open up for you to create your rule.

Step 1: Apply Your Rule. Decide which campaigns the rule will apply to. You can change the budget for selected, all enabled, or all but deleted campaigns. I chose my top converting campaigns so I want apply it to just the selected campaigns.

Step 2:  Set The Automatic Action. What change do you want to happen? I want to increase my weekend budgets by $5.oo. If you have a lot of campaigns which have budgets that change frequently, you might want to select a maximum budget. By setting a maximum budget, you make sure that your rule will not set a new budget that exceeds the maximum you want to spend in a day. Keep in mind that the rule will still run, but only budgets that stay within your maximum will be updated.

Step 3: Set Requirements. You can add requirements so that your rule only runs when specific criteria are met. For example, if I only wanted to increase weekend budgets if my selected campaigns converted more than 10 times I can require that conversions must be greater than 10. For now, I’m going to leave requirements blank and increase the selected campaign budgets no matter what.

Step 4: Set The Frequency. You can set the rule to occur once, daily, weekly, or monthly. This is going to be a weekly change since I want budgets to increase every weekend. For the day I chose Saturday and I set the start time to 12am. If you’ve set requirements, this is where you select how much data Adwords should consider to determine if a campaign meets the requirement. Since I want all my selected campaigns to increase in budget, I’m going to leave this field as is.

Step 5: Name Your Rule. Give you rule a name that will make it easy for you to identify. If you have multiple rules running in an account or if there are multiple people working in an account, it can become difficult to keep track of which rules do what. Since I’m the only one in this account titling it “Increase Daily Budget” is specific enough for me.

Step 6: Set Up Email Notifications. I recommend sending an email every time a rule runs so you can make sure it’s activated at the proper times.

Step 7: Preview Changes. Always, always, always, ALWAYS preview your changes. This is how I realized I had set my budgets to increase BY $25.00, not increase TO $25.00 the first time I set up the rule. When you preview your changes you’ll see what the changes would look like if the rule were to run now.

Step 8: Save Your Rule. All that’s left to do is click save and your rule is scheduled to run.

So we’re all done now right? Wrong. If you are increasing your budget just during a specific time period you also have to set up a rule telling Adwords when to decrease it. Below is a screen shot of the automated rule settings to decrease daily budgets back to the original amount.

Managing Automated Rules

You can view and manage all your automated rules in the Control panel and library. Note that if you edit any of the rules it will create a new rule and the old one will be deleted. Each user is also only able to have ten active rules running at a time so make sure to pause active rules you don’t want running anymore.

Hopefully you’ve got a better understanding of how to implement Adwords automatic rules into your accounts. If you have any questions about the types of automatic rules or how to set them up, please post below!

Google’s Contextual Targeting Tool: Video Script

There are many ways to approach advertising on the Google Display Network, and one of the most beneficial is contextual targeting.  In this approach, an advertiser sorts targeted keywords into very tightly themed ad groups, which Google then matches with the content on pages within its display network. But for this to work well, ad groups need to be small, with only 3-5 keywords.  Making such tiny, specific ad groups requires a different approach than you use in search campaigns, but don’t be daunted: Google’s contextual targeting tool is here to help!

The contextual targeting tool enables users to quickly and easily create keyword lists. You simply type in the keywords or phrases you want to target and within seconds Google creates a list of keywords sorted into suggested ad groups. The contextual targeting tool will give you insight into how Google identifies themes for ad groups, while also helping you create more tightly themed ad groups for your Display Network campaigns.

Here’s how it works:

To find the Contextual Targeting Tool, go to the Reporting and Tools tab and then select it from the drop-down menu. You can also find it on the Opportunities tab under “Tools.”

Enter your target phrases or keywords into the search box. When choosing keywords, our best practice at Hanapin is to pick top-performing search terms and build display ad groups around them.

Next, click on “Advanced options” under the search box. Here you choose the location and language you want to target.

Then click search and watch Google work its magic!

Google sorts the keywords into suggested ad groups and also offers a Max CPC bid for each. This suggested bid is based on historical bids for ads that have been competitive on the sites your ad group is predicted to appear on.

There are three ways you can tailor Google’s suggestions to your account.

First, you can filter out words you don’t want.  Let’s say I don’t sell surf skate shoes in my “Surf Shoes” keyword list. I can simply delete that item and save the new list.

A second way to tailor Google’s suggestions is to expand a suggested ad group. Click “Expand” next to the ad group you’d like to dig deeper into and Google will generate more ad group options. However, keep your products or services in mind. If I don’t sell Soft Surfboards, I don’t want to include the suggested Soft Surfboards ad group.

Thirdly, you can customize Google’s results through the predicted placements. Click on an ad group and Google will show a list of the pages it believes an ad from that ad group will appear on. If you click “Expand All” you’ll see the specific page within the site that your ad could appear. This feature is especially helpful because you can see which sites would bring in irrelevant clicks before you waste your budget, and you can then exclude them from your display network campaign.

After you’ve customized Google’s suggestions, click the ad groups you want to keep and choose “Export to Adwords Editor.” You’ll be prompted to enter a campaign name, but this isn’t required. Once you hit export, your data will open in a .csv file.

From here, you can change the suggested max CPC bid to make it most appropriate for your account. Once the file is complete, import it into the AdWords Editor. Be sure to set the daily budget and target only the Display Network. Post the changes and voila! You have new, tightly themed ad groups running on the Display Network.

The Contextual Targeting Tool is still in beta, but considering the high value of this tool, we hope that it will be available to all advertisers in the coming months.

Thank you for tuning into Hanapin Marketing’s video blog. For more news and information about the pay per click industry, check out our blog at PPC Hero.com and our Twitter account, PPCHero.

Google Insights is insanely easy to use.  Type in the keyword you are interested in, select a country, (and, hey, even drill down as far as state or city) and a time frame and hit search.    If you would prefer, your results can be based upon time frame, or by region, instead of making the search term the main focus.  Insights will then spit out the breakdown of searches by category, as well as the regional interest data for the term. You can

break up this data by ‘Forecast’, a graph, or ‘News Headlines’, which is pretty straightforward.  Furthermore, you can click on either the category, or the location of regional interest to see the top search terms and rising searches for the term.

How Does Google Insights for Search Work

Google Insights analyzes actual worldwide web searches via Google, from all domains, in order to calculate the number of searches that have been done for the terms inquired, relative to the number of searches for the terms over time.  You can narrow down data by region or time frame and can also choose to see data for select Google properties, including: images, web search, product search, and news search.  *Note: Not all categories are yet available in all locations.

On the results page you will see a graph with the search volume, which lays out search volume (or interest) over time, for the terms you have entered.  The graphs are scaled from 0 to a 100 with the totals next to the bars by the search terms.  Check out this article, to read about how Google normalizes Google Insights data.

Below the graph, you can see the top regions, which, by being clicked, will be further broken down into cities.  If there are several terms being analyzed (the max is five), you can toggle between terms to see which locations have the highest search terms for each, with comparisons to the other terms that you have entered.  Alongside the  list of regions, you will see a world heat map which geographically displays the search volume index with defined regions, cities, and

metros.

Further below the regions, you can see search terms including the terms that currently have the highest number of searches, as well as the search terms that are currently increasing in volume.  Again, if you are analyzing more than one term, you will need to toggle between the terms.

Above the graph, you can find a breakdown of how categories are classified with an approximated percentage.   By clicking on a category, you can then see the same graph with the relative interest rates and forecast, as well as the regional interest and search terms.  You can further breakdown the categories into subcategories for a deeper dive.  There, you will see the same metrics including a graph, top locations, and search terms.  Google defines this data by aggregating IP address information from users’ logs in order to make educated guesses about where search queries originated.

How Can Google Insights Help My Account?

Looking at the top search terms and rising searches helps with well-rounded keyword research for not only keywords that are already heavily used but also for those that are on the up and up.

Insights can help you select advertising messages. In example, a baker working to determine which of the following would resonate best: fuel ‘cupcakes’, ‘wedding cakes,’ or ‘pastries’ to market their services.

Insights can be used to determine seasonality.  For instance, resorts, wedding-related retailers, or holiday items, may benefit from knowing which terms are highly seasonal.  If the results are fairly consistent over years, then you will be able to anticipate peaks and falls in demand, and budget accordingly.

Entering into new markets is also made easier by Insights.  This is perhaps the most fascinating to me.  By looking at regional data, you can determine which markets currently have a high demand (search volume) for your product.  If feasible, you can begin to campaign in these markets in order to globally increase sales.

Furthermore, by looking at regional data, you can select keywords individually for each region.  For instance, Massachusetts has high search results for ‘cupcakes’, whereas Louisiana has high search results for ‘wedding cake’.  Moreover, the term ‘pastries’ was not the highest result in any region.  This data can be used to ensure that campaigns and ad text are created specifically toward the demand in regional area.  Nationwide, we can see that the searches for ‘cupcakes’ is forecasted to grow, so it may be a good idea to prepare ‘Cupcake Campaigns’ for the entire Nation as it is likely that these searches will continue.  Using Insights, you can be sure that you are reaching the largest number of potential consumers as possible.

The Google Insights tool is a great way to look at, analyze, and understand search query data.  I think I speak for all search engine marketers when I say that we are always testing, adding, and rewriting ad text.  What better way to test ads than with search terms and phrases that are statistically prevalent in the targeted area?  On top of that, growing accounts can always use more keywords.  Make sure your account includes all of the current top searches as well as those on the rise!  Check out the Google Insights tool and let me know what you think!

Has anyone else utilized the Google Insights tool?  I would love to hear about your experience, as well as any tips or tricks that you would like to share!

For more information about Google Insights, visit http://www.google.com/support/insights/?hl=en-US.

Recently, Google added negative keyword lists to AdWords.  This handy new feature makes it much easier to manage your negatives at the campaign level, as you no longer have to update each campaign individually.  You can just add a new negative keyword to a list, which will then apply to all of the campaigns that are sharing that list.  What’s really great about this is that if your site could potentially make changes to products, geographical area, shipping, pricing, etc. you can simply delete the negative list from the corresponding campaign(s) or just go straight to the list and delete out a few terms without downloading your negatives and sorting through them.

We’ve always had the option to add keywords at the Campaign level (made especially easy with the AdWords Desktop Editor), however, these new lists make your exclusions easier to manage and more targeted.  Follow the steps below to learn more about making and applying negative keyword lists in the AdWords interface and Desktop Tool.  Before we go into creating negative lists, let’s take a minute to review a couple of good ways to generate negatives with a couple of tools available to PPC managers.

Review for Finding Negative Keyword Ideas

Let’s use the example of a shoe store website that specializes in men’s dress shoes.  Our hypothetical site doesn’t sell any ladies fashions or any athletic/casual men’s options, but they might in the future.

The Keyword Tool can be used to generate both keyword and negative keyword ideas.  Add search terms in to the tool that you’re trying to get your ad to show up for then take the time to go through the list and identify keywords that will bring in traffic that isn’t looking for your product or service.

You can use the keyword tool to locate keywords and negatives at the same time by using the drop down menu on the keyword tool to download a keyword as a negative.  The example below is for a store selling dressy men’s shoes, but not women’s.  This can also be done easily by downloading the terms and doing it manually in good old Excel.

You can also use the search term report located on the keywords tab in the AdWords interface to see all of the queries that resulted in an impression for your ad in a specified time period.  From this list, you can sort by spend and conversions to determine if a certain query is being used a lot but not resulting in the right kinds of traffic for your site.  Then, take a broader view of the list and identify terms that just aren’t relevant (even if they aren’t spending a lot).

You’ll want to group your negatives into themed “buckets” to add as a list later.  So, taking our above example, let’s say at the time being, your shoe store doesn’t sell men’s active shoes, but you look to do so in the future.  For now, it doesn’t make sense to waste impressions and clicks on customers looking for hiking shoes (or some other activity).

You can choose to break your lists down to a broad “Sports Shoes” list or break it down even further with a list for “Hiking Shoes,” “Basketball Shoes,” “Cleats,” etc. Get the idea?  Then, when your site changes, it’s easier to find and delete the necessary negative keywords.  It’s really up to you how targeted you make these lists – look at your goals and plan accordingly.

Creating Negative Lists in the AdWords Interface

First, you need to click on the ‘Control Panel and Library’ option under All Online Campaigns, then ‘Negative Keyword Lists’.

Select the ‘Add a New List’ option and title your list.  Remember that creating themed lists of negative keywords will help you to use them as efficiently as possible.  Click save and your list is created.

You can return to your created lists and edit the term and match type by just clicking on the list. Then, just hit save and it will update your list, and all of the campaigns linked to the list.

Next, you need to decide which campaigns this list is going to apply to.  To do this, go to the keywords tab in the interface and scroll all the way down to the bottom where your negative keywords are located and click to expand.  There is an option for Keyword Lists on the Campaign level side.

From here, you can select which campaigns you want your list to apply to.  You simply highlight the campaigns and click “add”.  When you go to edit this negative list, it will automatically apply to all of the campaigns that you have the list set to.

According to AdWords Help, you can delete lists permanently by going back to the Control Panel and Library in the AdWords interface, clicking on Negative Keyword Lists and selecting the list you want to remove.  However, after I set up a practice list, I wasn’t actually able to delete the list, just the keywords I had added to it and which campaign I had applied to it.  The list itself still technically exists.  This isn’t really a problem, as the list has no negatives applied to it, however I found it frustrating.

There you have it! Adding negatives across campaigns is now just a few clicks away.  Next time you set up a new PPC account or if you want to give them a shot in an existing account, I think you’ll find it has a lot of benefits.