Google AdWords:Ads Preview Tool

Ad Preview Tool lets you see your ads on Google SERPs  without actually searching for them live.  Why would you want this?

•  Because every time an ad shows up, it creates an impression.  Every time an ad is clicked, you pay for it.  Every time your ad is seen and not clicked, its click through rate (CTR) gets lower and the ads Quality Score goes a notch down.  Ads Preview Tool  shows you same search result page you would see from Google without accruing impressions. 
• Ads Preview Tool  lets you search the location for which your ads are targeted.  If you advertise, say, plumbing equipment in Detroit, you cannot see your ads in live search from your Ohio IP.  (If you could, it would’ve meant your ads get a lot of useless impressions).  Ads Preview Tool solves this problem.

To use the tool, go to Tools tab in you account management view:

 

Tools tab in Campaign Management view

Choose Ads Preview Tool on the right side of tools page:

 

Ads Preview Tool on Tools page

Fill in your keyword and location:

 

Ad Preview Tool page

If your ad is targeted  for a city, you’ll be able to choose it after you choose the state.  Hit “Preview Ad” button.  ”Return” removes all location information you’ve entered.  You can add new search quires into the Google preview search window.

A few more thing about the tool:

• Ads preview Tool works in real time.  It reacts to changes in bids, ad variations and groups immediately, just as live search would.  
• SERPs you see are not the same for other people.  Ads Preview Tool, as well as live search, gives you pretty accurate idea of what’s going on but not the single universal truth which doesn’t exist. 
• Ads Preview Tool can be used externally with same functionality.  Search for [ads preview tool] on Google.  
• Yes, it is called “Ad Preview Tool” (singular) on it’s own page.  

Google AdWords My Change History tool

Google AdWords keeps all changes made to your account.  You can access this information (since January 1st 2006) from your account using the free AdWords tool, My Change History.  You can track all changes or filter for date interval, type of change, account, campaign, ad group and user.  It doesn’t show changes in login, and billing information.  The tool also provides Chart view in several metrics.

1. On the Account menu bar, go to Campaign Management tab and choose Tools link:

2. Go to My Changes History in the bottom of the right column:
    

3. On My Change History page you can choose dates in two formats: default quick date range that gives you ending date and a drop-down menu of periods ranging from a week to two years, and exact date range with fill-in windows for dates.   AdWords’s  help page is a bit out of date: it says you can see changes made in last 3 month.  In the current version you can see changes in up to two years window anywhere past January 1 2006.

   Affecting level lets you choose a campaign within your account and an ad group within a campaign. Change type lets you filter change history:

   

4. Once history is loaded, you will see a list of changes in reverse chronological order.  All events are marked with “Changed”, “Added” or “Removed” iconlets:

   

   Columns: Date/User (shows you who made changes for accounts under multiple management), Campaign, Ad Group, Description:

   

    

5. Yet another useful feature of My Change History is Chart view option.  It visualizes the effect of your changes on important campaign parameters: 

   

    

    

    

    

   For example: CTR view:

   

    

   Or Cost view for the same changes:

   

   Flags on chart reflect events:  

   

    

    If you click on the flag, you will retrieve changes made on this day.  Charts help you to understand the effect of changes you made on your account performance.  However, they don’t have analysis tools, and they don’t show several metrics at once.  The best you can do is zoom in and out.  Don’t use charts in My Change History  for real-time decisions: they are extrapolated for several hours ahead and rely on information on average 3 hours behind.  

How (NOT) to ruin your AdWords account

Google makes it easy to permanently harm your AdWords account.  The main result of doing so are higher costs of any future ad campaigns.  Here’s what NOT to do:

1. If you set low max CPCs for your keywords, your ads will appear on lower positions, making them less likely to receive clicks, making their CTR and Quality Score lower.  Bonus: every time you ad is shown and not clicked your CTR drops.  Next time, for the next auction, ads Quality Score is lower and the chances in the competition as well.  Google AdWords compensates for lower CTR for lower positions, but only partially.
2. If you choose keywords irrelevant to your landing page, your Quality Score I mentioned above will be lower.  QS is a factor by which your max CPC is multiplied before entering the auction.  It is a complex internal AdWords variable, and it is recalculated every time your ad is about to appear.  Two known factors taken into the account are CTR and the landing page relevance.  To be fair, AdWords wouldn’t let you use very bad keywords.  You cannot advertise IceCreamDeliveryService.com in searches for kites and gliders.
3. If you have a low-ranking destination site, you QS (and campaign performance, consequently) will suffer.  Don’t hide your keywords from the Googlebot in images with non-descriptive tags.  Don’t call your logo with company name  img0001.jpg.  Don’t explain what you do in flash animation.  Spiders don’t recognize images, animation and JavaScript (at least yet). Actually, there is not much you can do to improve your PageRank beside site optimization, and many ways to ruin it surely and permanently.
4. Another factor affecting QS is your account history. That’s right, if your used parakites and gliders campaign received no clicks, you will start your advertising icecream trucks and refrigerators from a (financial) pit. 
5. Bonus: if you really set out to muck up your relationship with Google forever, hire a backhat SEO.  They can build you special landing pages artificially increasing your site relevance to the chosen keywords. If your site is marked as spam, its PageRank is set to 0.  And if you ever register a new domain and start a new life, Google will remember your name and your spammer history.  And, by the way, the rules defining spam change all the time.  Paid links were OK two years ago, and now it is very blackhat technique.

Good news:  Google AdWords has many special instruments making possible tracking and improving every detail of your campaign.  I will return to them in my future posts.

Organic results or paid placement?

Your website can appear in search results in two places: organic results and sponsored links.  Both can be improved with well-applied effort or well-allocated money.  How do you choose between them?

Search engine optimization specialists (SEO) will tell you that organic results are, well, organic.  They reflect your actual content as well as reputation (isn’t it cool, things like karma, reputation and love expressed quantitatively?), they improve with time, and they are hard to mess with.

Advertising yourself in pay per click (PPC) campaign has its advantages, too.  

• Ad campaign starts to work immediately.  Search engine optimization takes much longer to bring useful results, it is more expensive in the short run (short as in years) and gets you only so far. 
• People who click only on organic links are harder to convert.  In short, they don’t shop, they research.   This may change as more and more prospect customers become technically sophisticated, but so far, unless your product is a computer professional tool or a geeky toy, straightforward ads may be more useful in terms of getting real paying customers.  On the other hand, organic visitors are free. 

Ideally, you should do both SEO and PPC.

• Your ads compete against other ads on max bid and quality score.  Higher PageRank and relevance of your site means higher ad quality score means lower CPCs for same positions (or higher positions for same CPCs).
• It is impossible to optimize a website for every relevant keyword without compromising the content meant for human reading.  In the end, you don’t write for the search spiders nor sell to them. 
• If you are big and lucky, your ads on top of the search results page AND your organic results on top of the organic list together will drive competitors down the page. 

Advertising yourself: how to use Google AdWords

Google AdWords is not the only marketing tool out there.  I promise I’ll be back with Yahoo and MSN later.

1. Type “google adwords” in google search window.   Capitalization doesn’t matter.  If Google AdWords is not the top result, something must be wrong. You will be prompted to log in or to create your account if you don’t have one.  You @gmail account is not an AdWords account, but you can use same name and password here.
2. Next screen will prompt you to choose the “edition” — a set of the available tools.  The rest of this post deals with the  
3. Welcome to Adwords screen prompts you to choose the language you customers speak and your location.  You are not charged anything and have no obligation until you confirm your account.
4. Create an ad.  This is what your customers will see, and you have only 95 characters (100 including display URL) to claim their attention. That’s why it is called “creating”. Technical requirements:  25 characters of relevant words in a title and two 35 character lines to explain.  Fourth line is for the short display URL, fifth for an actual URL there customer arrives.  The actual working  site is a must — Google AdWords checks for this before letting you to pick keyword.  Relevance, however, is not verified at this point:My actual ad: 
5. AdWords lets you pick search keywords on the next screen and suggest some categorized choices based on the available content of your destination site.  These are the words by which you will be found.  For the first random ad Keyword tool suggested keywords relevant to my old reviews and recipes site where no seaweed or brides are ever mentioned. For the actual ad, AdWords suggested keywords relevant to search engine marketing.  In some cases, prospect clients may not know professional terms for the products or services they need — it is your job to figure out how they call what they need.  These will be your additional keywords.  Bear in mind that different words have different CPC rates, and usually more specific are cheaper than more general.
6. Next screen prompts first to choose currency.  This setting cannot be changed once your account is created. Next, you choose daily budget Choose a currency, daily  budget and maximum cost per click. Budget controls frequency of your ad appearance: you can spend any amount starting with $1.00, but once your budget is used up, your ads will not show for the rest of the day.  Cost per click (CPC) combined with relevance of your ad controls the position of your ad among competing ads. 
7. Figure out the relevant CPC and realistic budget.  What is your conversion goal?  Do you really need to be in the top results?  Suppose you choose “best” keywords and outbid your competitors on CPC, but don’t get any deal.  You end up spending too much on an ad campaign. Traffic estimator link on the same screen will show you estimated CPCs, ad positions, click and cost per day.  If you set maximum CPC too low, the estimator will show the word “non-active”: your ad will never appear in searches for this keyword.
8. Review your selections and sign up.
9. On Campaign management screen go to My account -> account setup -> billing preferences.
10. Choose payment option.  It cannot be changed easily.
11. Hit “proceed”, sit back and watch.  I choose very low daily budget and relatively low CPC for this example campaign.  After first  24hour cycle Account summary on Campaing Management screen showed zero clicks and zero impressions.That means that they were shown lower than competitors’ ads — most of people searching for sem marketing specialist never got to see Adpuma ads. After second cycle still zero clicks and over 800 impressions.   And no one of this 800+ people was impressed sufficiently to actually click on ads!  
12. Next step of campaign is tuning ads.   Google AdWords allow you to create a group of ads to show in rotation, automatically choosing the most successful one to be shown more often.  An ad campaign can contain several ad groups.  Each group has it’s own set of keywords.  AdWords allow broad or specific matching and negative keywords.  We will talk about groups and campaigns in the next post.

How to drop “wordpress” from your blog address

Why bother?  Because your blog looks more personal with its — that is, your — own name in address.  Because you can move it to another platform without confusing your readers or search engines too much.  Because Yourname.com  contains the information you want your readers to know and omits details that don’t matter.  Who cares if it wordpress, or blogspot, or whatever else.  

To change yourname.wordpress.com to yourname.com you need to purchase yourname.com domain or map your blog at wordpress to the existing one.  Complete instructions can be found on http://wordpress.com/  main page under Advanced tab on the top right of the page.  It is a WordPress.com premium feature.  Domain and mapping cost $15  a year, mapping to the existing domain $10/year.  The process is fairly straightforward, the most complicated part is DNS resetting.  Don’t repeat my mistake — if you consider purchasing domain for your blog, check if the name you want is available and register it with WordPress. 

1. In your blog, go to the Options in the top menu:
2. Under Options choose Domains:
3.  Enter your domain name there prompted:
4. If you registered your domain with a registrar other than WordPress, you will have to edit nameservers for your domain in your original registrar.  Wordpress’ prompt gives you proper names to replace with.  Adpuma.com was registered with Yahoo.com.  In Yahoo you have to go to “Domain control panel” page (you will need to sign up) and choose  ”Manage advance DNS settings” option on it.
5. It takes up to 72 hours for changes to propagate.  In my case it took about 30 minutes.   You will be prompted to pay with WordPress credits.  They can be purchased via PayPal, 1 credit= $1.