Google AdWords New Top Movers Report Aims To Automate “What’s Changed” Reporting

Google has started rolling out a new beta ‘Top Movers’ view in AdWords’ dimensions tab. For us, it’s currently only appearing on certain accounts; we understand from Google that this is currently in limited beta release and available to select advertisers only.

The new Top Movers report in Google AdWords shows you which campaigns and ad groups had the largest changes in clicks and cost between two timeframes.

Located under the “Dimensions” tab (View: Top Movers), the report compares performance for two consecutive time periods of equal length, and finds the campaigns and ad groups that experienced the largest change between the two periods. You can compare periods of 7, 14, or 28 days, or look at reports generated in the last 90 days.

At the top of the report is a dashboard summarizing ten of the largest moves in clicks or cost. Changes that aren’t significant enough to be a top mover are grouped in “Other changes.”

Below the summary is detail on each top mover. What is not immediately apparent is that the details table (shown below) has two modes, Cost and Clicks. You select which you’d like to view by clicking the “Cost” or “Clicks” headers above the summary table.

A nice feature that’s not readily apparent in the example below is that Top movers are broken out by Network, so you can see whether the changes are coming from Google search or Search partners traffic.

Google will also consider changes to your account and list “Possible causes” (see Adgroup: Red Roses below) like bids were increased, ad group was paused, keywords were added, when available.  

A handy time-saving feature is the link to the View change history report for each top mover.

A top mover is measured primarily by size of the change, not the percentage change. Changes will only be attributed once. For example, if a campaign has only one ad group, and that ad group see a huge increase in clicks, the campaign will, too. However, only the ad group will show in the report as a top mover.

Reports for each day are available by 6:30pm Pacific time on the following day. Not that a report will not be produced if the account has seen fewer than 100 clicks in total over the previous seven days. Top movers reports are available for up to 90 days.

While the Top Movers report is a welcome addition to AdWords, we would love to see conversion metrics as well as cost and clicks – a report of top increases and decreases in conversion rate could prove very useful in reactive CPA optimization.

6 Cool New Advertising Options In Google AdWords

It seems like it’s been a crazy few weeks at the Googleplex with the amount of new features that have been added into AdWords. We’re going to take a quick look into 6 of the different features available that you might not have heard of and want to get set up in your account.

RLSA – Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

What is it?

RLSA stands for Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. It has been available in beta form for a while now and was just recently pushed live across all accounts. RLSA allows you to add your existing remarketing lists into Search-only campaign. For example John clicks on your ad then lands on your site and gets a remarketing cookie. Using an RLSA linked campaign you can choose to bid for when John and other previous site visitors are searching for any specified keywords on AdWords.

This gives you a couple of extra options for targeting:

1. You can use an RLSA list to bid on very broad keywords knowing that you are only showing to those users who have already been on your site. Let’s say you own a bookshop and John visited your ‘Moby Dick’ page – you could choose to show an ad for that particular book to John when he later typed in a much broader ‘books’ search to Google and know that your ad is still probably relevant and likely to convert.
2. Alternatively, you could also create an RLSA campaign with just really strong, previously converting keywords in it and bid them up to a higher position (this is my preferred strategy). This means for any of your power keywords you can try and dominate top positions in the rankings that you know will drive conversions. You can afford to do so because you know you are only bidding on heavily qualified traffic that converts really well.

How do you implement it?

If you already have remarketing tags on your site, go into your shared library and then audiences. You should see that you now have a column labelled ‘List size (Google Search)’ – this is the amount of users you can use RLSA for.

Once I know I have users in my remarketing lists, I set up a new Search Network Only campaign named ‘Campaign X – RLSA’ to which I add my desired keywords and then hit the Audiences tab. From here you can ‘Add remarketing’ to your search campaign just like you do on the display network.

What are the results like so far?

During the beta stages we saw a fairly mixed bag of results from RLSA, but had about 30% of accounts where it was a significant boost to Conversions and CPA.

Affinity Groups

What is it?

Affinity groups are new ways to bid on Interest Categories in the Display Network, which originated out of Google’s attempts to create video-friendly groups of people. Affinity groups are a little broader than ICMs, which tend to be narrowed down quite a lot. A high end hotel, for example might use the Affinity group ‘Luxury Travelers’ to target the types of people Google thinks live the Jet Set lifestyle.

How do you implement it?

Exactly the same way as you would do with ICM. Go into your list of Interest Categories when changing Display Network settings and you should now see the following:

From here it’s as simple as opening up your category list and finding things that relate to your audience.

What are the results like so far?

So far my Affinity Group campaigns have performed slightly better than my ICM and Topic campaigns, but worse than Contextual and Managed Placements, according to Google Analytics stats.

Similar Audiences

What is it?

Similar Audiences are an attempt on Google’s part to help you reach a similar group of people to those that you have in your remarketing lists. Google looks down the information it has about those people and says ‘hey, these other people are pretty similar, you would do well to advertise to them’.

How do you implement it?

Similar Audiences can be added from your Remarketing lists section in a Display Campaign’s Display Settings. Make sure you tick the ‘Show Similar Audiences’ button to make them visible and you should see those lists appear.

5 Good Habits To Ensure You Have Success With AdWords

Through the years of working with AdWords, I’ve experienced many different scenarios and worked in many different environments. It’s funny how sometimes you don’t even notice the good things around you until they’re gone.
When I’ve changed jobs or positions in the past, I’ve sometimes forgotten the habits I had so carefully built up. After some time I started to ask myself why I ever stopped doing so to end up implementing the habit again with great success.
I’ve recognized 5 habits that have made me better at managing AdWords campaigns, but they can be pretty much used in any kind of creative environment.

1) Don’t Work In A Vacuum

I have often met advertisers who have been working for years on their account with different degrees of success, but who have, as of late, rapidly experienced declining results.
Even though there can be many reasons to this, one of the most frequent ones is that advertisers didn’t look beyond their own AdWords account. It’s important to realize that your AdWords ads appear alongside ~10 other ads as well as:

• Organic Search Results
• Google Maps Listings
• Related Search Queries
• Image Results
• Product Listing Ads

If you don’t pay attention to what your competitors are doing, then you’ll never know how to go about optimizing your campaigns. You can, of course, try to shoot bullets into the dark hoping to hit something, but it’s a lot easier when you can see what kind of obstacles you’re up against.

Reasons Why You Should Pay Attention To Your Competition

Ad Extensions: If your competitors have suddenly been granted AdWords Seller Ratings, launched Product Listing Ads or have created more effective Ad Sitelinks, then you’ll most likely experience a rapid decline in your AdWords bottom-line.
New Promotions: Your competitors will sometimes have new promotions that will steal all your traffic. This especially happens if you’re in an industry where you’re just reselling the same products. You will most likely experience a decrease in performance if your competitor is having a 20-30% Spring Sale.
Copied Ad Copy: I’ve seen countless examples of great AdWords accounts where their ads had been copied word for word. This greatly diminished the returns of the formerly successful ads.
Making sure that your ads are always unique (even if it means reinventing the wheel) is crucial for your future success.

2) Try Likely And Unlikely Changes – Don’t Just Stick To Your Own Opinion

Just because a certain keyword or ad copy doesn’t strike you as the best way to go, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try it out. There are so many different people in the world that might react differently to different factors.
If you only build your AdWords campaigns based on what you like and what you find aesthetically pleasing, then you might be missing out on big performance gains. I’ve shaken my head several times in dismay because I “had to” run ads that I didn’t personally like, but that did the job a lot better than the new, fancy ads I had just created.
Keep an open mind during your brainstorming sessions and commit to regularly testing your variations. You might be surprised by how well a “bad” ad performs.

3) Divide And Conquer

If you’ve read any inc.com or Lifehacker articles in your career, then you’ll most likely be obsessed about keeping your work area organized and neat. To eliminate all clutter often allows you to focus better on the task at hand and can drastically reduce the time spent on any given task.
With AdWords, this practice gets even more important.
I rarely work with accounts I haven’t already built from scratch or at least reorganized. Even though it’s time-consuming to reorganize large AdWords campaigns, I find it absolutely necessary unless I’m up for spending twice as long optimizing or spotting trends in campaigns.
Keeping track of hundreds or even thousands of keywords can be an impossible task if you don’t divide them into easy-to-manage campaigns as well as ad groups.

4) Don’t Be Lazy

AdWords is not about magical breakthroughs or complex strategies. Achieving success with AdWords is mainly about making sure that your foundation is covered.
When teaching Google AdWords management I often highlight the basics over and over again. At some seminars intermediate attendees have been vocal about the fact that they didn’t come to listen to the basics and that they were wasting their time. In many cases, I’ve been able to open their AdWords accounts on the monitor and point out where they haven’t followed the basics. Simple changes could easily improve their campaigns.
As human beings, we often look for shortcuts or overnight successes that will skyrocket us to the next level without having to work quite as hard for it. AdWords managers are no exception to this.
The truth of the matter is that if you follow a rather simple approach to building and maintaining AdWords campaigns, you’ll more than likely have your hands full of weekly management tasks. Only after you have the basics in place, is it beneficial to start looking at some of the more advanced strategies to increase your AdWords performance.

5) Get Feedback And Sparring From Other Professionals

Many accounts have been lost due to simple mistakes or lack of double-checking. Even after working with AdWords for years, I still double-check all my work before uploading it to the AdWords account and I frequently get colleagues to review big accounts for me.
After working with the same account for months or years, you’ll start to get blinded to the opportunities that are lying in front of you. Getting a third party to review everything with a fresh set of eyes can serve a great purpose. I usually use the following reviews as ways to open my eyes to new account changes:
Third Party Reviews: I like to classify these as third party reviews, as not everyone has access to other AdWords professionals inside the same organization. Getting another AdWords professional to review your account (favor, payment or quid pro quo) is a great way to find out what you’re missing.
Campaign Presentations: This is another thing that I personally like doing a lot. I’d schedule a presentation with some of the most curious individuals in my company and I go through the entire account explaining why I’ve done certain things.
It’s quite normal that while I’m explaining the campaign structure or ads to other people, I’ll come up with new ideas or see the campaign in a new light.
Internal Reviews: Having a colleague who doesn’t know anything about AdWords asking you why you’ve chosen a certain keyword or why an ad has been written in a certain way can also be beneficial. In my experience the two other forms of feedback work better, but if you have no other choice, then internal reviews from inexperienced colleagues can be better than doing nothing.

Habits Are Nature’s Way Of Keeping You On Track

Many times we end up straying from the path we had originally laid out for ourselves. Sometimes we discover new and better paths, but sometimes we take on “the grass is greener on the other side” kind of attitude.

Always trying to find the “next big break” can be a certain way to take away consistency and resilience in anybody. Working consistently on a mediocre thing will often produce better results than never being fully committed to a strategy.

Image credits: Google

Maximize Your Online Marketing Results Through Product Listing Ads & Auto Targets

Integrating your AdWords account with your Google Merchant account in order to create a Product Listing Ads campaign is becoming more and more commonplace as time goes on nowadays as the most awaited PLA's are Available Now for Indian Marketers.

I must admit however that I believe that for certain products and industries, Product Listing Ad campaigns are the best way to expose your products to your targeted audience.

This depends of course on the nature of the product you are promoting but especially applicable to ecommerce-based businesses, Product Listing Ads are becoming the clear path to take if you want to increase AdWords profits.

It has simply become impossible to ignore the benefits and results that can be achieved from Product Listing Ads at this point in time.

Increased Visibility with Product Listing Ads

A key factor to take into consideration is visibility; the image below serves as a great example:

If you were to click on one of the ads above because you are looking to buy some “cowboy boots” online, I’m pretty sure the ones getting most of your attention would be the image ads (which are the PLAs).

Something else worth mentioning is the fact that when a potential customer performs a search for a product, you can be eligible to show on both results: regular search ads as well as PLA ads. This of course will ensure you’d have more coverage.

Earn a Google-Trusted Store Badge and Gain Credibility

Earn this badge if you qualify, and meet the program performance standards required by Google. This will definitely help you gain confidence from your customers and allow your potential customers to feel more comfortable when doing business with you.

As it can be noticed in the image above, the regular search ads’ PLAs may come off as an annoying new roommate in college. Or worse even, it is also drawing more attention in the SERPs.

Good thing for us, we are not search ads and as marketing agencies, independent marketers, AdWords specialists and business owners, it can all truly represent a great deal of benefit for us all.

Maximize your Product Listing Campaign Exposure & Performance with Auto Targets

Something that is an imperative part of having an efficient and successful PLA campaign is having a well structured AdWords campaign. In order to have a great structure, you should divide your products up into Product Targets.

This is done with the help offered through the Auto Targets tab.

Product Targets Are Products you Group Together

In simple terms, product targets are a group of products that you decide to group together based on different attributes such as brand or product type, just to name a few. This gives you a lot of flexibility because you can group your products up at will.

As a best practice, you should separate your products, categorize and organize them with the help of Auto Targets.

If you don’t do this, it’s the same as having a regular search campaign in which all your keywords are meshed together into one single ad group. This, I think we can all agree, is not the best of ideas.

Auto Targets Help You Optimize Your PLA Campaign

Through Auto Targets, you can play around with your product’s exposure and it will also greatly simplify your work when the time to optimize the campaign arrives.

If you have your products well-organized and separated with Auto Targets, you’ll be able to easily identify the products that have the highest ROI, and which are the ones that are causing your funds to disappear without giving you an even return on investment.

When you identify your best ROI activity, you can adjust bids and budgets accordingly.

Another reason that makes Auto Targets so helpful, is the flexibility you acquire when grouping products together since you can do so based on certain attributes such as brand, condition, label, product type, ID (ID can only be used for the exposure of individual products).

Group Products Together Based on Promotions

Another way of grouping them together could be based on a promotion. If you have a group of products that all have a 15% discount, you can create an Auto Target for them and group them up.

It could also be done based on which are your best-selling products, or which are the products with the highest profit margin for you.

Those are some good core ideas I offer since I’m pretty sure you can think of several different ways of grouping up your products as well; which in the end as we know, those very groups of products that you put together are the Auto Targets.

When Should I Get Started with Auto Targets?

It depends, if you’re an ecommerce-based business and already have a PLA campaign, the right time might be exactly now. If you don’t have one yet, I strongly encourage you to create one and take advantage of the benefits you can obtain from Auto Targets right away.

Personally, I’ve experienced positive results through the use of PLA campaigns in combination with an adequate campaign structure and of course, with the use of Auto Targets. I’ve obtained higher amount of conversions as well as I’ve witnessed a drop in cost-per-conversion and have seen how PLA campaigns have taken away some protagonism from search ads.

How to Set Up Auto Targets

Setting up Auto Targets is quite a simple thing to do (even more of a reason to make sure you are using them). All you have to do is go to your PLA campaign and create a new ad group. Then after you’ve created it, click on the Auto Targets tab.

Afterward, select the ad group where you will be adding the Auto Target and define it based on which attributes you will be putting your products together for (i.e. product type, brand, condition, AdWords label, AdWords grouping or ID). Please remember that this can only be used to expose a single product. You can also combine up to three of these attributes in order to group your products together.

How to Track your PLA Marketing Efforts

The marketing efforts made on your PLA campaign can be tracked. The simplest way to generate a good idea, as stated before, is by efficiently grouping products together through the use of Auto Targets. However, if you want to get more granular, you can also do so as well.

In order to do so, you need to make proper use of the Google Analytics URL Builder:

The fields in red are the required fields. You need to add your website’s URL but it has to be the specific URL of the individual product, not just the URL of your homepage.

Next, fill the rest of the fields with information that will serve as referrals to help you identify and track back each product’s performance.

Once you’ve filled the required fields, click on “Generate URL”. This will automatically generate a URL for you. This URL then has to be included in the data feed in your Merchant account within the [Adwords Redirect] attribute column field (If one does not already exist, you’ll then have to add it to your data feed separately).

Once this has been done, you will be able to track information from the product’s performance in your Analytics account by going to Traffic Sources/Advertising/AdWords/Destination URLs.

You can look for important metrics such as conversions, bounce rates, average visit durations and all sorts of useful information.

A Big Task If You Have A Lot Of Products

If you have a wide list of products in your data feed tracking, then all of them could turn into something a bit tedious for you due to the fact that you would need to generate a URL for each and every single one of them manually.

However, if you are really interested in getting as much information as possible from them (which you should be doing since the data that you get is what will help make or break a campaign), then I suggest you take the time necessary to do it and just go for it!

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate and emphasize the above-mentioned suggestion. If you have an ecommerce-based business and have an AdWords account, don’t wait any longer and start taking advantage of PLA campaigns and all the benefits that can be obtained through such platform. In no time at all, you may notice a difference in your online marketing effort results and start experiencing more sales at a much lower expense.

What Else Are You Telling Google When You Hit the Search Button?

Paid search is an incredibly effective marketing channel because the user explicitly tells the advertiser what she is looking for. The searcher's query is matched to an advertiser's keyword, enabling that advertiser to deliver a specific response to the declared need.

However, the search query itself isn't all that Google takes into account when determining which ads to show. Every time a user performs a search, she is also sending additional information along with her query, whether she knows it or not.

Device, location, and past behavior are just a few of the secondary signals leveraged by Google to improve customer experience. Savvy marketers can further target their advertising by understanding and utilizing these signals.

Target by Device
While Google's Enhanced Campaigns update drastically changes the device targeting options available to advertisers, the searcher's device type (computer/tablet/smartphone) and operating system are still factored into ad serving. Quality Score (and thus cost-per-click charged to advertisers) is calculated separately by device for each keyword. AdWords' reporting still allows advertisers to segment all performance metrics by device.
For an advertiser leveraging app extensions to link her ad, Google ensures that the correct version of the app shows up based on the device's operating system (Android or iOS). Advertisers can also designate ad copy and extensions as "mobile preferred" in Enhanced Campaigns. Those ads will be shown in response to searches on a smartphone.

Target by Location
Google is extremely adept at determining a user's location, and advertisers can leverage this secondary signal in two ways.
If an advertiser is targeting a large area, she can find additional opportunities by segmenting this audience via AdWords location targeting. By cloning campaigns and targeting high- and low-value geographic locations separately, advertisers can allocate budget differently between these audiences and even provide customized messaging to each.
Enhanced Campaigns also offers new geo-targeting features that allow advertisers to modify keyword bids based on a searcher's location. Advertisers can even adjust bids based on a searcher's proximity to a physical location.

Target by Past Behavior
I can't count how many times I've received a panicked email from a client saying, "I've been searching all morning, and now suddenly our ads aren't showing!"
Many advertisers don't realize this is an intentional and beneficial AdWords feature that keeps low-value impressions from negatively impacting click-through rate. If a searcher repeatedly enters the same query over a short period of time without clicking on an ad, Google assumes that the ads aren't relevant, and stops showing those ads to that user for a short while.
Google has another similar and often misunderstood feature. If a searcher clicks on an ad and then quickly clicks her browser's "back" button, Google sees that as an indicator that the ad's landing page didn't provide the searcher with what she wanted. An option may appear below the ad, offering the searcher the option to block all ads from that advertiser. Once again, this feature is a benefit for advertisers, removing wasted impressions from uninterested searchers.

Google is currently beta testing Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. This feature allows advertisers to cookie visitors to their site and then leverage this cookie data to later target these visitors when they perform a search on Google. There are many ways advertisers can use this feature, such as serving specialized ads to searchers who have never visited the site or serving different ad copy to searchers who have recently visited but did not convert.


Google has access to an array of additional user information via Google Accounts, but it is utilizing caution about using this data in order to avoid privacy issues. It remains to be seen if and how Google will leverage this opportunity in the coming years. In the meantime, advertisers should ensure they understand and leverage all current secondary signals in their paid search marketing.

Tips for Effective Online Marketing

Online marketing is increasing for clients looking to review their return on investment.  Client budgets are being reviewed more often and marketing dollars are being squeezed to provide the highest conversion rate per dollar spent.  Here are a few tips to build your campaigns.

Bid On Your Competitor’s Brand Names
I know, this may seem a bit odd and ill-practice, but when you think about it, most of the time if they are your competitor you offer the same brands.  Maybe not everything would be the same, but a high percentage.  Make sure you are also utilizing the brand names in long tail keywords, not just the exact phrase.

5 Things To Improve AdWords Performance In Under 60 Minutes

Many of us don’t have the time to always be checking our AdWords accounts. I’ve lately talked to many new Clients who actually dreaded going in and optimizing their AdWords accounts because they felt they had to spend several hours in order to get anywhere.

Even though nothing replaces time well spent optimizing an AdWords account, sometimes the best way to get an increase in performance is simply by doing something quick. A couple of quick optimizations will always be better than just ignoring the problem.

In this blog post I’ve therefore listed five optimization strategies that can be implemented in most AdWords accounts within 60 minutes.

1) Check Your Dimensions Tab For Bid Adjustment Opportunities

If you have been running your AdWords account for 2-3 months and have more than 100 conversions you’re most likely going to have a lot of data that will allow you to make more strategic optimizations.

Bid adjustment is an optimization that you can implement rather quickly. You have the opportunity to adjust your bidding dynamically depending on what time of day or  day of the week it is. This will allow you to dynamically change your bidding according to your conversion data for any given hour or day combination.

This can be rather effective if your account see big fluctuations in conversion data:



According to this data, we have a less great (but not bad at all) ROI on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, but on Mondays we’re seeing great ROI.

Adjusting the bidding on these days will allow us to achieve a higher return on our investment and it will literally only take 5 minutes.

You can do the same for the hour of day although it gets a bit more complicated to set up:



The takeaways in the screenshot above (reduced for simplicity purposes) are the following:

1. We’re being killed in the first hours of the night
2. We come strong out of the morning and around noon
3. In the evening we see poor returns

In this case it would be good to reduce our bidding in the evening to increase our ROI and at the same time increase our bidding in the morning time to get more of the highly converting clicks.

2) Lower Bidding For Keywords With Conversion Costs Above Your Benchmark

A quick filter in your AdWords account can help you reduce the spend that your unprofitable keywords have.

If you look at the last 28 days (or since you last optimized your bids) you’ll be able to find all unprofitable keywords. To do this I recommend the two following filters:

1) Find all keywords with a cost per conversion higher than your upper limit:

With this filter we can quickly find all keywords that have a cost per conversion of more than $100 (the limit in this account). Depending on the cost per conversion we can then reduce the bidding with 10, 20 or 30%.



2) Find all keywords with high costs, but no conversions:

The former example only found keywords with a cost per conversion higher than $100. You’ll however most likely have keywords that cost you a lot of money, but doesn’t convert at all. To find these you need this filter:



The filter will now show all keyword with no conversions, but a high ad spend. These should either be analyzed to find out why they’re not converting or excluded from your campaign at the current time.

3) Review Your Entire Account’s Search Term Report To Add Negative Keywords Fast

Going ad group by ad group to find negative keywords can be quite time-consuming. A fix to this is to simply find negative keywords based on your entire campaigns.

Access first your campaign and then click on keywords. Now you’ll be able to see all the keywords in a given campaign. By clicking on the ‘Keyword Details’ dropdown menu you can now choose to see all search terms from the entire campaign at once:



This gives you an edge over going from ad group to ad group. True, it’s not recommended to add keywords directly from the search term report with this approach, but the goal here is to find negative keywords. Seeing everything at once will save you plenty of time and you’ll be able to review everything quickly.

4) Exclude Poorly Converting Locations

If you’re advertising in a big geographical area you’ll most likely have some areas that aren’t converting as well as other areas.

By accessing the Dimensions tab and then clicking on View Geographic you’ll be able to see a list of your campaign’s performance in any geographical area. I recommend you to narrow the columns down, so you get aggregated data from only the Country/Territory and Region. If you’re only advertising in a single state I can recommend you to add the Metro Area or City columns to get more precise data (but don’t add both):



As you can see in the screenshot you can experience some rather big discrepancies depending on what state your ads are shown in. Florida is for this campaign converting at a price that’s twice as high as Texas.

By either excluding Florida or changing the bidding to get more clicks from Texas and pay less for our Florida clicks will in this case bring a better ROI to the table.

5) Create Minor Variations of Already Successful Ad Copy

It can be hard to always find time to think of brand new ads that you honestly believe have a better chance of converting clicks than your current Champion ad. Throughout the years I have developed an approach for when my colleagues or I are short of time.

Instead of changing the entire ad I’ll just make a minor change to a word or change the order of the two description lines. You’ll sometimes see that even the smallest changes can have an impact on your AdWords performance.

So the next time you’re dreading the task of creating new ads try to just change a couple of words. This will give you some data to work with next time and possibly a nice little increase in conversion rate.

I’ve often seen that getting a small increase also helps morale and will inspire you to write new and even better ads.