The Real Reason AdWords Isn’t Working For Many Small Businesses

By now, you’ve probably read the New York Times piece that’s been making the rounds lately. If not, here’s the upshot: it concludes that Google AdWords isn’t practical for small businesses.

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time the Gray Lady has gone after AdWords, nor is it the first time that the paid search community has responded so vigorously in its defense. The real tragedy of the latest piece isn’t that AdWords has been singled out – it’s that the Times (and the business owners it interviewed) have once again missed the point.

I Get It

Before I go into how the article got it so wrong, I should say that I see where the author and her interviewees are coming from and that I sympathize with their positions. Let’s face it – times are tough for small businesses.

Customers are becoming increasingly choosy (and have many more options, and therefore more power, than they did in the past), external costs are going up, and rising above the noise of the paid search space is becoming harder. However, saying AdWords isn’t a viable option for small businesses based on a single metric – media cost – is way off base, and more than a little misleading.

In the article, author Adriana Gardella highlighted several small-business owners who chose to turn their backs on AdWords due to cost. Online shopping tool Hukkster was one example. Erica Bell, one of Hukkster’s two co-founders, claimed that “determining which keywords drive traffic simply wasn’t worth the expense.”

Another company highlighted in the piece was event organization firm Skylight Group. For owner Jennifer Blumin, cost wasn’t necessarily the problem with AdWords, but rather the quality of conversions resulting from Skylight’s strategy. Blumin said that her company was “inundated” with poor-quality inquiries, many of which simply couldn’t afford Skylight’s services.

Fundamental Misunderstandings

Both these examples reveal fundamental misunderstandings about AdWords as a paid search platform.

For Hukkster, the perceived costs of running an effective AdWords campaign were prohibitive – but Gardella chose not to mention how much time, if any, Bell and her co-founder had put into researching keywords that would result in higher conversion rates from the outset, or search terms that similar businesses were using. Similarly, Skylight – by Blumin’s own admission – was bombarded with inquiries, suggesting that the problem isn’t with the platform itself, but how they managed it.

Here’s where the biggest disconnect occurs for many people when it comes to PPC. It’s not about the cost per click – it’s about how much effort advertisers put in.

At WordStream, we work with lots of AdWords advertisers, many of which are small businesses. Unfortunately for most, the situation isn’t great. However, dismissing paid search as a customer acquisition strategy would be crazy. Why? Because for many AdWords customers, the cost of the ads isn’t the issue.

Yes, many of our clients come to us in need of some serious help, but empowering businesses to take control of their paid search initiatives is about evaluating what isn’t working – and why – before making decisions based on real insight. If you just throw money at a problem, it should be no surprise when it turns out to be expensive.

Mistake #1: Infrequent Logins

PPC can be a tough nut to crack for small businesses, but devoting just a little more time to managing a paid search campaign can be enough to put you ahead of the vast majority of advertisers.

With more than half of AdWords users only bothering to optimize their campaign once per quarter, is it any wonder that some small businesses are failing to see the results they’d hoped for? Let’s take a look at an example client.

Mistake #2: Not Enough Activity

After this client performed an audit of their PPC campaign, they discovered that their paid search efforts left a lot to be desired. Having added just 30 keywords to a campaign – in three months (and no new campaigns, or ad groups or ads!) – is obviously not enough to generate success.

As a result of the lack of account activity, virtually all aspects of this customer’s PPC campaign suffered. Poor keyword targeting and low quality ads subsequently resulted in low click-through rates. This, in turn, had a negative effect on the client’s Quality Scores and Impression Shares.

Mistake #3: No Negative Keywords

This advertiser also failed to add any negative keywords to their AdWords account, resulting in significant waste in PPC spending.

In the following figure, you’ll see that the yellow bar is our recommendation of how many negative keywords should be added to this AdWords account (based on the advertiser’s budget and industry), versus how many are actually included (zero).

Looking at this example of projected waste for the next 12 months, it’s easy to see why so many business owners mistakenly believe that paid search isn’t for them – but simply putting in a little more work can solve many of these problems.

AdWords isn’t a magic bullet that will solve businesses’ paid customer acquisition problems. Like anything else, success takes hard work and dedication.

However, none of these aspects of paid search were addressed in the article, which is likely why the PPC community was so quick to point out the flawed reasoning behind it. It’s easy to blame cost and say that AdWords is “too expensive” for small businesses, but that doesn’t make it true.

How You Can Beat The Odds (Whatever Your Budget)

So, what does all this mean for the average small-business owner thinking about taking their tentative first steps into the world of paid search? Well, there is some good news.

Firstly, the bar set by many AdWords advertisers is very low. This means that even a small amount of work can make a huge difference and put advertisers ahead of their competitors.

Secondly, it would be easy to dismiss the PPC campaign of the client featured in my example as a failure – but, on the contrary, this business owner is actually a genius. Why? Because they realized their paid search efforts weren’t working, and they proactively took steps to find out why by performing an audit.

Once they discovered why their AdWords campaign wasn’t performing, and learned how they could improve their efforts, they were able to start making improvements.

There are more than enough myths about AdWords out there. Articles like the most recent piece in the New York Times merely serve to create and perpetuate more.

6 Tasks To Automate In AdWords Without Scripts Or Tools

When we think about automation in PPC, our minds tend to jump to expensive tools like Marin, Kenshoo and Acquisio or advanced algorithms and Google Scripts.

However, you shouldn’t let the word “automation” scare you into forgetting the simple things that make it great: speed and consistency. Today, I’m going to take you through six common PPC tasks you can do yourself for free in AdWords through the magic and wonder of automation.

Search Query Reports

Working with multiple clients, there are certain tasks I want to do at least once a month — things that can be fairly time consuming and also will look amateurish if I forget to do them. Mining search queries is one of these tasks. You certainly don’t want your boss or client looking through your broad match terms and finding that your “Honda Cars” campaign has spent thousands on Honda lawnmower queries (I’ve seen it happen).

With this in mind, I decided to start automatically emailing myself the data I need, saving at least 15 minutes per week, per account and much more importantly, reminding me to actually pull the reports I’m supposed to.

Now, that Honda example I alluded to might be an extreme example, but consider the other end of the spectrum: a small account that hardly changes from month to month. After doing SQRs for a year, ignoring the need for them can become an easy thing to do — “I’m pretty sure there are no useless terms showing up, so I won’t check it this month” (or next month). What happens when new search trends or products start sneaking in and your own laziness has caused you to miss them? The answer is not “good things.”

To create a useful and automated search term report, you need to first open up your Search Terms data from the Keywords tab by selecting “Details” > “Search Terms” > “All.” From here, apply the filters relevant to your particular account. In my case, this first report is looking for all Keywords that have spent twice my cost per conversion target without converting.

Once you apply this filter (or any filter that applies to how you normally do your search query mining), click on the download button to schedule this report. I do this on the first of the month for my small biz clients and weekly on specific days for larger accounts that need checking in on more regularly.

Rather than jump through these hoops every time, I just open Excel straight from my email, select the queries that look like they’ve wasted money or aren’t too relevant, and drop them back into the AdWords Editor as negatives.

I call this my “money wasting terms” report. Another SQR report I email myself is “CTR killers” — a list of irrelevant search terms sorted by high impressions and a low number of clicks, e.g. clicks 1000.

Work out what you “need” to see every week/month and set up the report. I also recommend setting up a report for “terms to add,” which might look something like: Conversions > 2, Added/Excluded matches “None.”

Automated Bid Changes

There are plenty of ways to automate bid changes that don’t involve paying any money to anybody (other than our good friends at AdWords). You could just use the Google Conversion Optimizer, and I’ve seen good success from it on larger campaigns.

However, for smaller campaigns or accounts without conversion tracking, automated bid rules can save you a ton of time as long as you make sure to check in on them.

I have one client whose ads perform way better in position three than any other position — it seems to be the sweet spot of conversion rate and cost.

For them, we have a relatively simple automated bid strategy set up, which utilizes two rules running concurrently. The first increases bids every day on keywords that have an average position less than 3.2 (with a max bid set to avoid things getting out of hand). The second rule runs exactly the same way but bids keywords down 5% that are higher than position 2.5.

There are lots of options out there for automated bid adjustments. For accounts without conversion tracking, you could try bidding down all keywords with bounce rates way above your average.

You can overlap a lot of these different bid rules to build a system that is much more robust and complex than could be done manually, and without wasting a lot of time. Make sure any overlapping rules make sense and aren’t causing anything crazy to happen (use min and max bids if worried).

Changing Ad Status

For offer-based ads, try using “Enable ads when…” and “Pause ads when…” from the “Automate” button within your ads tab.

I have a client who shows different messaging based upon the day of the week. During the week (Mon-Thurs), they run weekday package specials and for Fri-Sun they have ads showing their weekend pricing. I can automate to pause my weekday ads and unpause my weekend ads on Thursday night and vice versa on Sunday night.

The same thing can be equally useful for one-time events like pausing holiday specific ads. Nothing looks worse than ads where the content has expired — “Great Xmas Deals” tends to lose impact in February.

Dimensions Reports

Ever been in a meeting with your boss/client and have them ask something like, “Which countries are we selling well in?” or “How’s our traffic from tablets doing?”

These are the kinds of questions that, when answered quickly, show that you’re on the ball with your account — allowing you to send out exactly the kind of positive “this guy knows what he’s doing” vibes you want to be oozing with. They’re also the kind of questions for which I all too often have to stumble and say, “Err, I’ll get back to you on that.”

There are loads of these different insights you probably want to schedule for yourself:

• Geo performance
• Top landing pages
• Device performance
• Time of day
• Day of the week
• Call data
• Etc.

I schedule these reports at the start of the month for each client. That way, I can quickly go through each report and mentally check off the major areas I need to be monitoring for each account.

The automation here is all done from within the download box in your dimensions tab. Essentially, all you have to do is set up your data in a way consistent with how you regularly want to see it — for example, the past 30 days for Geo data, filtering out non US traffic and sorting by conversions. Once you’ve done that, just open up “Email and schedule report” and send on the first of the month.

Account Alerts

An easy piece of AdWords automation you should set up is email alerts.

I typically have at least 3 daily alerts set up for my accounts: one for Conversions coming in below my daily “low goal” (see example below), one for cost-per-conversion spikes, and one for costs being way over my daily average.

I set my alerts to email me at 7:00AM if the data from the previous day matches any of these conditions. This means that first thing when I check my email, I know if I have any fires to be fighting. Of course, your fancy software platform might do this for you, but there’s no reason you couldn’t be doing it easily and cheaply yourself.

Pausing Campaigns

“I want my [insert holiday] campaigns to go live at [insert unsociable hour in the morning]” is a phrase that doesn’t have to depress the account manager who is in tune with their automation inner peace.

I regularly use the “Enable campaigns when…” and “Pause campaigns when…” options in AdWords to do exactly that for me.

The most recent example I can think of was for a client whose site was going to be down on a Sunday between 2:00AM and 4:00AM for essential maintenance. I simply set up two rules: one pausing all live campaigns and another re-enabling them.

Another good example is from a client whose sales team could only handle a set number of leads per day — once campaigns hit a certain number of conversions, the automated rules which ran every hour paused for the day.

The goal with all of these automation tips is always the same — making things easier on you and eliminating errors and mistakes. If there are any others that you regularly use in your accounts, let us know in the comments below!

AdWords Top Movers Report Update: Now With Conversion Stats, Device-Level Segmentation

The Top Movers report debuted in AdWords last June to help advertisers quickly see performance changes in their accounts. It was helpful, but somewhat rudimentary with reporting on just clicks and cost changes. Today, Google announced that conversion data will begin appearing in the Top Movers report as well as device-specific insights.

Note that the report shown on the Home screen still includes just Cost and Clicks data, you’ll need to click on the “see full report” link or navigate to the Dimensions tab on the Campaigns screen to see the conversion data.

The Top Mover detail below is now sorted by Top Increases for Conversions and Top Decreases for Conversions. This performance data is segmented by device/network level, including by Search Partners, as shown in the example above. However, unlike the example below, the live examples I’ve looked at so far have included only one device-level segment per ad group, which is much more helpful. This type of segmentation will help advertisers quickly see if there are troubled areas at the device-level even if conversion stats overall look stable.

The conversion data will be a big help for managing performance campaigns. However, the ability to see changes in conversion rate and cost per conversion data would be especially helpful for understanding the impact on ROI.

The change has rolled out globally, so if you’re tracking conversions you should see this update in your account now.

How To Use AdWords Scripts Efficiently In Agencies And Enterprise SEM

I’m a big fan of all the things you can automate using AdWords Scripts — from calculating account-level Quality Score, to creating ads from a spreadsheet, to optimizing keywords using data from the Search Terms report. When using scripts to manage a single account, it’s well worth the effort to install and tweak them because of the amount of time you’ll save down the road.

But when it comes to managing enterprise-level AdWords, or managing multiple accounts as an agency, the truth is that a lot of the time saved ends up wasted in the minutiae of keeping everything organized and running. AdWords Scripts were not built with multi-account management in mind. Luckily, there are a few ways to address these shortcomings.

What follows are my five tips for making Scripts more efficient when you’re managing multiple (or very large) AdWords accounts. The first three are tricks to more easily manage scripts across multiple accounts.

1. How To Update A Script Once & Have The Changes Apply To All Accounts

Until Google introduces a way to run scripts from MCC accounts, we’re forced to add the same code in each account where we want to use it. While it’s not ideal, I can live with the inconvenience of adding the same script to multiple accounts — but the real waste of time starts when you fix a bug or make some improvement to the code.

These code changes don’t automatically propagate to the other accounts, so unless you go back and update the code in each account manually, your hard work to improve a script won’t benefit all of the other accounts you’re working on. That’s a problem….

So, what’s the solution for keeping a script synched across many accounts? Move the main functionality out of the code you put into AdWords and host it somewhere else. Then, serve up this remotely hosted code every time an account needs it.

There are a few options for where to keep the code: Russ Savage explains how to host your script for free on Google Drive. I prefer to host my remote scripts on Amazon S3, where I can take advantage of automatic versioning so that I can easily request an older version of the script if I happen to break something while making changes.

Here’s a code sample that shows how to request a piece of code from Amazon S3 or another web server.

Put this in AdWords:

function main() {

var fileToFetch = "http://www.example.com/myscript.js";

   var scriptFile = UrlFetchApp.fetch(fileToFetch);

   var scriptText = scriptFile.getContentText();

   SETTINGS.className = "remoteScript";

   eval(scriptText);

   var script = eval('new '+SETTINGS.className+'();');

   script.main();

}

Put this in your remotely hosted file, http://www.example.com/myscript.js:

function remoteScript() {

this.main = function() {

     Logger.log("Hello World");

   }

}

2. How To Change Settings Of A Script Without Changing The Code

Once you have your script hosted remotely so it can be called on the fly by any account that needs it, you may find yourself still logging into each account to change the settings. For example, many reporting scripts might be useful to run daily, weekly and monthly, and changing this involves changing some code.

Including settings that you might want to change in the main code is not ideal since it forces you to maintain many versions of the same script or tweak them every time you want to change even the smallest thing. When managing multiple accounts, managing many versions of the same script can quickly get out of hand, leading to errors like unintended changes in an account, running outdated scripts which don’t include your latest improvements, and wasting your time by making you manually go into accounts to make changes.

So, what are some ways to let one script run with different settings for each account you manage? I do this by keeping the script completely generic and putting all settings in a Google Sheet. The script looks at the Google Sheet every time it runs to get my settings, and then it uses those to finish what it’s supposed to do.

Not only does this allow me to use exactly the same script code in every account, it also lets me keep settings for all accounts in a central place. Now, when I want to change the date range or another setting for a script, I no longer need to go to that account to make the change but instead I just change the settings in the spreadsheet.

Here’s some code you can use to read in the settings from a Google Sheet. Just set the first row in the sheet to the names of the variables used in the script and then put the values for those variables on a new line:

var SETTINGS = new Object();

SETTINGS.taskSheet = SpreadsheetApp.openByUrl
(“htt://url_of_my_google_sheet”).getSheetByName("My Tab With Tasks");

var rows = SETTINGS.taskSheet.getDataRange();

var numRows = rows.getNumRows();

var numCols = rows.getNumColumns();

var values = rows.getValues();

// Read Header Rows

var headerNames = new Array();

var row = values[0];

for(var i = 0; i < numCols; i++) {

 headerNames[i] = "" + row[i];

}

// Read Data Rows With Settings And Run Script If Needed

for(var i = 1; i<numRows; i++) {

 var row = values[i];

 for(var j = 0; j < headerNames.length; j++) {

   var headerName = headerNames[j];

   var value = row[j];

   SETTINGS[headerName] = value;

 }

}

Now, your script can reference SETTINGS.variableNameFromColumnHeader and get the setting from the Google Sheet.

3. How To Run More Than 150 Instances Of Scripts

AdWords limits every user to authorize up to 150 scripts. That’s usually more than enough if you’re managing one account, but if your username is for an MCC where you have 15 accounts, now your 150 scripts are shared, and you really only have 10 scripts per account you manage.

The workaround for this one is simple, but a bit annoying. I simply create a new login for each account I manage. I use that unique login to add scripts to the account so that I can maintain my full allotment of 150 scripts per account.

The next two tips are useful even if you’re only managing a single AdWords account, but it’s a large one or you’re looking to make tons of changes…

4. Prevent Scripts From Timing Out When Making Many Changes

This is a tip I got from the Google Developers site, and I experienced the difference it can make firsthand so I thought it was worth sharing here. Scripts will run much more quickly if you avoid switching between reading and writing from AdWords.

Even though scripts don’t have an explicit capability to submit changes in batch, they are optimized on Google’s end to do batch changes when possible. They will hold off on making changes to an account as long as possible and then make all the changes in bulk, which is much faster. When you switch from a command that make a change to a command that reads from AdWords, they process all pending changes in bulk.

So, if you alternate between reading and writing, your script will be much slower than if you do 100 write operations in sequence before doing another read.

Here’s an example: when you are updating bids, you might be iterating through every keyword to first ask for the keyword metrics, then calculating a new bid and then submitting the new bid. That will be very slow and, in my experience, I’ve done fewer than 300 bid changes during the 30 minute maximum time a script can run.

A better way is to read in all the keyword data first and calculate the new bids, storing the new bids in a variable. Only once all the calculations are done should the script submit the new bids, one right after the other. Doing it that way, I’ve processed thousands of bid changes and not even hit the 30 minute execution limit.

5. Get Around The 250,000 Entity Limit In Scripts

Building on the previous example, your script would still fail to complete if you were trying to make bid changes for an account that has more than 250,000 keywords because each script can at most process 250,000 entities using iterators like keywords.next(). A simple workaround is to do as much of the work as possible using reports instead of iterators.

A report has no problem fetching all the metrics for millions of keywords in a matter of seconds. The 250,000 limit does not apply when iterating through all the rows of a report, so now it’s possible to calculate bid changes for every keyword. Only when that’s done do you start to send the new bids into AdWords, again doing them sequentially, avoiding switching between reading and writing. So long as you have fewer than 250,000 bids to change, you should be alright.

Those are five ways to make Scripts more useful for agencies, advertisers with very large accounts, and others who need to work on multiple accounts. Happy scripting!

Yahoo Wants Back in the Search Game

Yahoo is rumored to be planning a return to the search market, with two projects they hope will get the company back on the map with their own search engine. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has reportedly spearheaded two projects, code-named Fast Break and Curveball, in order to take back Yahoo’s organic and paid search in-house.

Right now, Yahoo has a long-term search and advertising contract with Microsoft’s Bing, which provides Yahoo’s organic search results and related search advertising. The contract was renewed last year, but Mayer was reportedly not happy about it.

The current one-year contract will expire at the end of March. But whether Yahoo could possibly have anything in place to replace the results they get from Bing search would likely be a long shot.

Yahoo has apparently brought many of their top Yahoo executives onboard with the project with plans to see something within a three to four-month time period, which would put it after the current Microsoft contract expires. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft would even be willing to renew a contract on a month-to-month basis or on anything shorter than a year, if Yahoo is successful in creating their own search engine.

On top of that, there is also the fact that Microsoft also powers the international versions of Yahoo, leading to an additional complication with search algorithms in other languages. If Yahoo decides to create their own search engine, it’s very likely they would first start with English before expanding it to any other languages, making a Microsoft deal for those search results crucial. Google is the alternative, but it’s unclear if a Yahoo-Google relationship would be a possibility.

Mayer is clearly bringing Yahoo back to its familiar roots in search, something the company used to be well known for. But Yahoo’s own history as a search engine has been varied. Once powered by Inktomi, Google then powered Yahoo search results in the early 2000s until 2004 when it began implementing its own search technology for search results. However when Carol Bartz became CEO, she jettisoned Yahoo’s own search technology in 2009 in favor of the contract with Microsoft.

Another issue with Yahoo potentially starting its own search engine again is that Yahoo currently receives 31 percent of its revenue from its search deal with Microsoft. Any change to that deal would definitely make shareholders uneasy unless Yahoo can make that much money independently from Microsoft.

It’s also complicated by the fact that Yahoo no longer runs its own self-serve pay-per-click system to power search advertising, similar to Microsoft AdWords and Bing Ads, although they did previously have that technology. Those search result ads are also displayed through Bing Ads and is part of the search deal.

When the search deal expires at the end of March, we’ll likely get a better idea of where Yahoo is going with their own search engine, based on if it is renewed and on what terms. Considering Mayer’s Google roots, it isn’t surprising that Mayer wants to explore Yahoo becoming its own search engine once again, and being able to have more active control over it.

AdWords Patent Infringement Costs Google Big Money

The court in Virginia has ordered Google to pay a royalty for all AdWords advertising revenue to Vringo for patent infringement, for infringing upon two patents it owns. Google is appealing the judgment, which could be worth billions of dollars.

Vringo, which bills itself as a video ringtone and Facebook company, purchased 500 patents from Nokia in 2012, including the AdWords infringing patents in question, which was bought from Lycos. Vringo then sued Google, Microsoft, AOL, IAC, Gannett, and Target for infringements.

In 2012, Google and its advertising partners were ordered to pay $30 million plus an ongoing royalty for licensing of patents. This week, the Virginia judge, Raymond Jackson, set an ongoing royalty rate of 6.5 percent on part of the AdWords revenue, which was significantly higher than the 3.5 percent royalty that was the jury’s recommendation. Ars Technica reported:

The math is a little confusing. Today’s order sets a royalty rate at 6.5 percent, on a “royalty base” of 20.9 percent, for an overall rate of 1.3585 percent. The royalty base is supposed to calculate what the Vringo-owned patents add to Google’s search system.

After redesigning its AdWords system, Google decided it no longer infringed upon the patent. However the judge in the case believed that the redesign wasn’t clearly different. This means that as long as this element is included in the AdWords system, it infringes upon the patent.

Google had sought a lump sum payment rather than an ongoing royalty payment.

What is interesting about this patent infringement case is that Vringo says that there was no intent to copy the patents:

Even though there was no evidence of copying—Vringo admitted as much—a willfulness adjustment was still appropriate, the judge found. “Defendants’ misconduct continues presently and Defendants have taken no remedial action,” wrote Jackson. “In fact, they have redesigned a system that clearly replicates the infringing elements of old AdWords.”

In last week’s order, Jackson said that Vringo had proven infringement of both the old and new AdWords systems. While he didn’t go into the details of changes Google made, he did write that all Google had done was apply the “LTV” or “long-term value” score at a different point in the ad-selecting process. It was basically the same: “It is undisputed that new AdWords continues to use a candidate advertisement’s LTV score that includes a predicted click-through rate in the process of choosing which advertisement will ultimately be shown to the individual performing the query.”

Microsoft decided to settle the Vringo lawsuit last year by paying a $1 million and agreeing to an ongoing licensing agreements. Microsoft also agreed they would pay 5 percent of the amount that Google pays for patent usage.

At this time, it isn’t clear exactly how much Google will be on the hook for if the appeal is unsuccessful, since Google doesn’t report on earnings from AdWords specifically. However, it is believed that Vringo will get more than $1 billion from it.

Google has already appealed last week’s jury verdict, and is appealing this week’s royalty verdict as well. Both Google and Vringo agreed that nothing will be paid out while the case is still before the courts.