One of the core skills for PPC marketers is reporting. The ability to beautifully visualize data and draw insights from it is a big factor in optimizing your ad campaigns.
At Optmyzr, we’ve built several tools for reporting to help you make understanding your campaign performance easier. In this article, you’ll learn about our top reporting features that will simplify reporting.
1. Add multiple date range options to your report.
Most reporting tools only give you the option to add one or two date range options in your reports. With Optmyzr’s report designer, you can include as many date range options as you want in a single report. These can be absolute or relative date ranges so you can automatically schedule reports.
For example, you can have data for the last month, the month before the last, or last year in the same report. In widgets providing comparison data, you’ll also find previous period date ranges for easy month-on-month or year-on-year analysis.
2. Measure performance at the account, campaign, and label levels in the same report.
We understand that if you’re using labels in ad platforms, you want to be able to report on them. In the report designer, you get the option to report at the account, campaign, and label levels. What makes this feature really cool is that you can have all three levels in the same report.
For example, you can compare the performance of your branded and non-branded campaigns, or one category of products with another in the same report. Also, if you want to use labels for reporting but don’t want to create them in the ad platform, you can use Optmyzr labels.
Another great addition to this feature is the ability to report on a specific campaign type or bid strategy. If you’re preparing a report on automated bidding campaigns, you can just select the respective bid strategies and include only those campaigns that work on automated bidding.
3. Preview your report while configuring.
Preview your report simultaneously while configuring different settings for multiple widgets. This streamlines the report creation process and eliminates the need to constantly switch between the settings and preview pages.
You can make real-time adjustments to your report widgets, such as data selection, filters, and visualizations, all while observing the immediate impact on your report’s appearance. This not only saves you time but also ensures that you can fine-tune your reports with precision.
4. Create up-to-date reporting dashboards.
You can share links to reports, schedule them, or update them on a schedule. This helps you create a reporting dashboard that can be updated on a schedule (every day, every week, or every month).
5. Schedule your reports based on rules.
This feature provides a highly customizable way to automate your report deliveries. Using this option, you can set specific conditions that determine when you should and shouldn’t send reports, based on the KPI values you set.
You define a specific condition around the deciding metric(for example, impressions). If the metric doesn’t meet the condition, the report won’t be sent to any of the designated recipients.
In essence, this feature gives you precise control over when and to whom your reports should be automatically delivered.
6. Add instant tables and charts from Google Analytics 4.
In Google Analytics 4, we’ve introduced a time-saving feature: instant tables and charts. These widgets are set up with the ideal combination of dimensions and metrics, aiming to instantly provide answers to your most critical questions about website traffic.
With these pre-configured widgets, you can conveniently access essential insights without the need for manual setup, ensuring a faster and more efficient experience while analyzing your web data. It’s all about simplicity and speed, so you can focus on what matters most – understanding your online traffic.
7. Insert date ranges dynamically.
If you’re scheduling reports, it is essential to be able to automatically insert the correct date. You can automatically insert dates using the date range insertion feature in any text box in the report. What makes this feature so useful is that you can insert the date in any format.
For example, you can choose to display dates like September 1 – September 30, 2015, or just September 2023.
8. Get text-based explanations for changes in your key performance metrics.
The PPC Narrator widget goes beyond raw data and gives you text-based explanations for changes in your key performance metrics. It offers valuable context on how these fluctuations impact your business, shedding light on critical factors such as reduced visibility or variations in revenue.
The insights are intelligently tailored to the chosen ‘sentiment,’ whether it’s Positive or Critical, providing you with a deeper understanding of the underlying dynamics within your data.
This empowers you to make informed decisions with confidence, leveraging the full potential of your reports.
The AI-powered summary is available in a PDF format and live report links.
To make sure you can include data from different sources, we have the Image Box widget, Custom text box widget, Spreadsheet data import widget, and Spreadsheet chart widget that lets you insert screenshots, tables, or offline data. You can take a screenshot of the particular view you would like to include in the report and insert it in the template.
10. Mark up for cost-related data.
This feature lets you mark up the cost-related data in a report by a certain percentage. This feature is available in Optmyzr’s Report Designer and can be selectively enabled in accounts.
Please feel free to send us an email at support@optmyzr.com if you would like to enable it on your account.
Improving your reporting helps draw better insights from your efforts ultimately leading to better campaign performance. If you’re looking to save time and get the most out of your reports, try these 10 features.
Not an Optmyzr customer yet? Thousands of advertisers — from small agencies to big brands — around the world use these tools to manage over $4 billion in ad spend every year.
Sign up for our 14-day free trial today to give Optmyzr a try. You will also get the resources you need to get started and more. Our team will also be on hand to answer questions and provide any support we can.
Weather often impacts the behavior of consumers. For example, rainy weather would lead to an increase in demand for cab and shuttle services. And, a heat wave compels people to stay indoors which leads to an increase in demand for air conditioning and similar services.
Not only the buying of products, but weather can also impact the moods of consumers. They might be interested in watching romcoms or sitcoms when the weather is pleasant. On dark cold nights, some may prefer fantasy while others may love watching horror movies. Similarly, during the summer or spring break, you’d see an increased interest in social activities for both kids and adults.
Now, suppose you are someone with a business that sells services or products that can be impacted by weather changes, like, cab services, cosmetics, apparel, streaming platforms, etc. You always want to reduce wasted ad spend. In that case, you know how important it is to stay on top of these changes and target the right audience for your ads.
In this article, you’ll learn:
How weather-based campaigns work
The benefits of running weather-based campaigns and
How to do weather-based advertising
How does weather-based advertising work?
Let’s say you are a cafe owner and you have your specials of the day out on the display. On a rainy day, you’d put hot cocoa. And on a sunny day, you’d prefer to put peach iced tea as your special to attract customers.
Once they are in your cafe, they can order anything from the menu. The important thing here is to attract customers and make them want to enter your cafe, which you do by posting special, relevant messages on the display.
Similarly, when advertising, you can choose to manage campaigns based on weather. For example, you can have one campaign with cold beverages and another for hot beverages. And then on sunny days, you advertise the campaign with cold beverages.
The 3 levers you need to do weather-based advertising
Target the right set of locations
Have conditional changes in the campaign based on the weather for those locations
Have a way to automate this process
3 benefits of weather-based advertising
1. Personalized campaigns
Weather-based advertising can help localize and personalize your ads according to your customer’s location and weather.
2. Relevant messaging
Weather-based campaign management can make sure that the end-user of your product or service sees a relevant ad that resonates with their mood.
3. Enhanced ad ROI
Personalized ads and relevant messaging can lead to an increase in leads, engagement, and then conversions.
Examples across industries
There are several industries that can benefit from weather-based advertising, and use this strategy to boost their campaign performance. Here are some examples.
Retail or ecommerce
Advertisers all around the world can use weather forecasting to show the right kind of ads at a particular location.
For example: showing ads for umbrellas on the days when the forecasts say it’s going to rain in 2 days. Or, showing ads for seasonal products like sunscreen around the time summer is about to start.
Apparel
Similar to the ecommerce industry, apparel stores — online or offline — need timely advertising based on the current weather conditions.
For example: showing ads for pullovers or sweaters for a colder week and pausing campaigns selling windcheaters for the weeks with no cold waves or rains in winter.
Cab services
In cities or places with unreliable public transport, a lot of people use third-party services to book cabs for commute. So, with the business knowledge of how the population of a certain area uses your services and the understanding of the current or future weather conditions you can manage your campaigns profitably. And you can also choose to target the right locations and set budgets for those campaigns based on demand and weather.
How to do weather-based advertising?
You can use the OpenWeather API to get weather updates for the locations of your choice and then add them to your campaigns as targets or exclusions.
However, manually doing that would be very time-consuming and also exhausting, as you’ll always need one or more team members to check the weather conditions and then make relevant changes to the campaigns.
There are some workarounds though, like using scripts. But then you need to maintain them and have your own API key for the OpenWeather API or, another very popular one from Optmyzr.
However, these are not simple and straightforward to implement. But if you’re an Optmyzr customer, we’ve made things easier for you with the ‘Optimize Campaigns by Weather’ tool.
Optmyzr Weather-based Campaigns
But why use day-to-day weather forecasting when seasons change over months?
Weather conditions can be added to work with the change in seasons by using automation to check the weather of upcoming days and accordingly adjust the target locations, campaign status, targets, etc.
There is one other reason why you should leverage weather-based advertising. With evolving global climates, there are some locations where the traditional summers now look like pre-monsoon seasons. As climates get warmer, it would make sense to look at the day-to-day weather conditions and then plan your strategy. That’s where weather-based advertising can help you.
There are even more applications for using weather forecasting conditions in PPC campaigns. But the important thing is to understand how it can be used as leverage for your campaigns.
We hope the ‘Optimize Campaigns by Weather’ tool helps you smartly execute your campaigns. But if you’d like to know more about it, please reach out to our support team at support@optmyzr.com. Or if you’re not a customer already, and would like to try it out, sign up for a 14-day free trial today.
Location targeting is a way for advertisers to clearly specify the location they want their ads to show. It is a crucial aspect for any ad campaign.
Advertisers can choose different content for their ads based on geographic locations. Many advertisers, however, stumble in setting it up due to its non-intuitive UI, or they incorrectly estimate the reach of their campaign budget.
It’s important to honor the rules of engagement for different ad network location targeting. Applying the same strategies across all networks may not yield the best results.
In this article, we’ll dissect the major ad networks’ location targeting options and offer some general rules on how to approach location targeting. Our goal is to provide a framework to guide you rather than specific instructions to follow.
Basics of location targeting
When selecting a location to target, you can choose:
To target the exact location
A radius around it
Nearby/related locations.
You can target specific elements like ZIP codes, cities, DMAs (Designated Market Areas), or countries. County or DMA targeting may have overlaps depending on how they are defined.
If you manage campaigns for multiple locations with designated budgets, consider using ZIP code exclusions while using county or DMA targets. Adding a location to a campaign provides a focus for the campaign. However, including too many locations in a single campaign can hinder budget efficiency.
It is generally recommended to target no more than five major locations and preferably avoid multiple time zones within a single campaign. If your campaign targets the entire United States, ensure your budget covers the entire country and that your creative aligns with various regions to avoid message translation issues.
Why is adding exclusions important?
Exclusions work in the same way as targeting; they allow you to exclude specific spots or radii. The most effective practice is to identify specific exclusions within a radius or set overlapping exclusions to protect a specific location.
Let’s say you’re managing several locations on a single ad account and need to ensure each location receives its individual budget. In this case, you’d want to avoid budget overlaps that might divert leads meant for one location to another. This is where exclusions prove invaluable.
What location metrics should you monitor?
When setting your locations, you’ll also have access to metrics per location. If a particular location is not getting sufficient exposure or if the cost per engagement is too high, it might be time to reassess whether that location deserves your budget.
Optmyzr’s geo-mapping and value based bidding rules can help assess and action these insights.
The main metrics to consider in location targeting are:
Average CPC: competitiveness as well as cost of living
CTR: are you speaking in the language of your prospects by location?
Conversion Rate: is a location a prime location for your prospects?
Location targeting rules of engagement for different ad platforms
Now, let’s dive into the specific rules of engagement for each major ad network. It’s worth noting that this post was written based on the current rules of each platform, and we will update it if any changes occur.
Google
Google Ads’ location targeting functions at the campaign level. Thus, you should treat each location as a campaign objective. When combining multiple locations in a single campaign, consider the search patterns, auction price, and customer profitability in those areas. One crucial point is that Google Ads operates based on the account’s time zone, not the user’s. Hence, consider this when structuring your ad schedules and optimizing campaigns.
Microsoft
Microsoft’s location targeting is similar to Google’s but with a few crucial differences. Location targeting can be set at an ad group level, which can simplify your campaign structure. Also, since ads serve in the user’s time zone, scheduling can be more precisely aligned with your target audience’s habits. These factors make Microsoft Ads potentially more effective for advertisers struggling with budget and servability issues on Google.
With Facebook, the most specific campaign settings, including location targeting, operate at the ad set level. However, Facebook’s robust audience network offers more flexibility and specificity when it comes to location-based targeting. Remember, though, that targeting too small a location may result in your ads not being served, due to privacy-first web considerations.
Amazon
Amazon differs slightly as it allows anyone, anywhere to purchase from your product line, making location targeting less important. However, if there are areas where you don’t want your ads to be served, exclusions are available.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s location targeting rules mirror those of Facebook, with the ad set being more important than the campaign. However, given the types of ads that LinkedIn runs, it’s crucial to carefully consider the type of campaign and creative you intend to use.
Final Takeaways
In conclusion, effective location targeting can be complex but it’s an essential component of successful ad campaigns. We hope this guide helps you navigate the unique location targeting settings across these major ad networks.
We are thrilled to share one of the more exciting product updates: Smart Shopping Campaign through Optmyzr.
What is Optmyzr’s Smart Shopping Campaign?
Optmyzr’s Smart Shopping Campaign is a campaign type for e-commerce that offers a perfect blend of automation and control.
This is a game-changer in the world of online advertising. It combines the automation benefits of smart bidding (TROAS or target return on ad spend) with the control and precision of manual campaign management.
Why we built the Smart Shopping Campaign?
Traditionally, advertisers faced a dilemma when choosing between standard campaigns and Performance Max campaigns. While standard campaigns offered better cost control and alignment with margins, they often struggled on visibility and ranking. On the other hand, Performance Max campaigns provided extensive reach but compromised on product selection and placement.
To address this challenge, we developed the Smart Shopping Campaign through Optmyzr. Through the power of automation layering, it enabled advertisers to get the benefits of smart shopping campaigns in standard ones; all while bypassing the need for Performance Max creative and fully surrendering to black box AI.
What are the advantages of Optmyzr’s Smart Shopping Campaign?
The key advantage of Smart Shopping with Optmyzr is that it retains the controls found in standard campaigns. This means you can structure your campaign according to your business requirements. Gone are the days of lumping all products into a single product group. Instead, you can now segment and bid appropriately for each product.
Furthermore, our Optmyzr’s customer value rules empower you to leverage value-based bidding, providing intelligent data that fuels the system.
If your focus is on shopping campaigns and you don’t intend to run video or display campaigns, Smart Shopping through Optmyzr is the ideal choice. It empowers advertisers to harness all the benefits typically reserved for Performance Max campaigns while retaining a high level of control. By running product listing ads exclusively, you can avoid placements that may not be profitable, and focus on lower funnel transactional intent.
However, it’s important to acknowledge the effectiveness of Performance Max campaigns. When properly set up, they can deliver excellent return on investment by enabling advertisers to speak to all parts of the buying funnel and across different creative. Nevertheless, it is crucial to monitor your budget allocation.
Our Performance Max widget on the dashboard and the feed auditing tool help you track and optimize your spending. By ensuring there are no duplicates in your product titles, you can fine-tune your campaigns for optimal performance.
Smart Shopping through Optmyzr has recently launched this quarter and is available for all Optmyzr Core+ subscriptions. We continuously update the tool’s logic based on performance comparisons with other campaign types.
Not an Optmyzr customer yet? This is the best time to sign up for a full functionality trial and unlevel your marketing!
March was a great month for us at Optmyzr. From our biggest-yet product release to our first annual Digital Marketing Shero awards, there’s a lot we want to share with you.
Recently our product team went through a sprint cycle and launched some powerful new tools while also upgrading the existing product usability, to ensure you have the best workflow to manage your PPC campaigns across all your marketing channels (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon).
We’re always excited to share what’s new and exciting at Optmyzr, but last month’s product releases presented a unique opportunity to celebrate the amazing women in our product team of which 80% of them were women. They deserve a shout-out for their tireless efforts to keep Optmyzr a customer-focused solution.
But for us, it’s not just about celebrating and encouraging our own teams. We also try to support other digital marketers in the industry and give them a platform to shine and showcase their skills.
The winners of the 2023 Optmyzr Digital Marketing Sheroes Campaign
So in March, International Women’s Month, we initiated a campaign to recognize and celebrate the unsung women in digital marketing who deserve to be recognized for their excellence.
We reached out to our online community and asked them to nominate someone they knew who fit the bill, and the nominations blew us away. We got entries for so many women with a range of marketing superpowers and expertise. After reviewing all the nominations, we found our top 10 including the winner.
So without further ado, let us introduce you to the woman of the hour, the winner of our first annual Digital Marketing Sheroes Award — Krystal Taing!
Krystal Taing
With exceptional skills in strategic engagement, SEO best practices, and clear communication, Krystal has set a high bar for excellence in digital marketing. But it’s not just her expertise that sets her apart. She is known for her positive leadership supporting her team and everyone around her.
We’re proud to recognize Krystal as an incredible digital marketing leader and can’t wait to see more of her in the future.
Also worthy of special mention are the 9 finalists of this year’s Digital Marketing Shero Awards. Here they are in no particular order.
Ashley McCarnan
Meet Ashley McCarnan, known for her talent for contextualizing data to provide meaningful solutions for her clients. She’s a natural leader passionate about empowering her team to bring their authentic selves to every project.
Our next shero is Charu Gupta, an expert in creating authentic brand personas that resonate with audiences. She encourages optimistic and problem-solving approaches in her teams and has mentored over 40 professionals in her career, many of whom are now in leadership roles.
We’re thrilled to introduce our next shero, Emma Glover, a specialist in social media strategy and account-based marketing. She focuses on building honest and strategic partnerships with her clients and also runs a female-first agency where her teams have the support and opportunities to thrive and grow.
Meet our next shero, the amazing Natalia Ramirez, an expert in optimizing digital content to improve online user experience. She has a passion for technology and entrepreneurship and thrives in roles that require adaptability, creativity, and strategic thinking.
The next shero on our list is Pavithra Sekar. She specializes in improving brand recognition with positive online conversations. She is known for her superb organization and networking skills and knack for building long-term relationships with the audience.
Meet the incredible Sarah Carling, an expert in SEO, PPC, analytics, email marketing, product development, CRO, and more. As Buoy Health’s Growth team leader, she has driven traffic to new heights in all channels while balancing motherhood and her professional growth with sharp organizational skills.
Next, we have Stephanie Wallace, a data-driven marketer with expertise in SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, influencer, and PR. She’s a strong leader in the industry and an inspiration for volunteering her professional services to support causes like PAWS Atlanta, no-kill animal shelters, etc.
Introducing our next shero, Thuha Wright. She specializes in PPC and consults businesses to help them grow and develop their in-house teams. She has years of experience in the travel industry and has honed her expertise in digital marketing channels as growth drivers.
Finally, we have Veronica Ruiz, a multi-faceted consultant with expertise in various areas of digital marketing. She takes a performance-focused approach, specializing in paid search and social. Veronica also volunteers as a digital strategist for charities and non-profit organizations.
Congratulations to all of them for showcasing exceptional innovation and leadership in this ever-changing digital landscape. Their expertise in various fields of digital marketing is truly impressive, and we’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to recognize their achievements and contributions through this campaign.
Shero-Special PPC Town Hall: Insights from the All-Women Expert Panel
As part of the Digital Marketing Shero campaign, we also produced a special episode of PPC Town Hall. In line with our initiative to recognize talented women in the industry, we brought on an all-women expert panel with Navah Hopkins as the host and guest speakers Motoko Hunt, Andrea Cruz, and Sarah Stemen.
These industry pros shared profound knowledge, actionable tips and advice, and many moments of light-hearted humor.
We’ve cherry-picked some quotable moments from each speaker so you can get a glimpse of their awesome conversation.
Let’s jump right into it and see what these phenomenal women had to say.
Get actionable PPC tips, strategies, and tactics from industry experts twice a month.
Know Your Marketing Superpowers
Sarah explained that she turns to online search for everything, even when Yahoo was the popular search engine. This puts her in a great position to understand searchers and their behavior.
Motoko Hunt, on the other hand, shared her global understanding as her marketing superpower. She said that Google is dominant worldwide, but local search engines may have an advantage in understanding customer behavior in specific industries and countries.
For instance, Bing’s growing market share in Asia and the availability of smaller local search engines for advertising provide additional opportunities for reaching audiences beyond Google.
Andrea added by highlighting the importance of efficiency in today’s marketing landscape. She emphasized the need to identify new platforms and channels that can help maximize resources. She advised marketers to look for such opportunities constantly and be mindful of how metrics may differ in different regions.
As actionable advice, here are great ways to stand out as a strong digital marketer:
Staying up-to-date on the latest trends
Understanding global and regional markets
Identifying new opportunities to optimize your marketing strategies
Networking Helps Staying Inspired and Motivated
Staying motivated can be challenging, especially in the post-pandemic world where remote work has become the norm. So what keeps marketing professionals motivated?
Andrea shared her secret, saying that conferences always make her feel energized. Interacting with people and learning from their experiences allows her to incorporate new learnings into her work.
So, whether attending conferences, taking courses, or seeking inspiration from others, finding what keeps you motivated is essential to success in the marketing world.
Andrea’s actionable advice on this:
Finding a marketing club nearby, taking online courses, or simply taking a moment to step back and look at things from another perspective. So many great people are doing great work out there that can inspire and motivate you.
Prioritize Self-Care for Work-Life Balance
Balancing work and personal life has always been tricky, especially in today’s fast-paced world. Our speakers shared great suggestions to achieve this balance in this exciting Town Hall episode.
Navah especially highlighted the importance of prioritizing self-care by blocking off time on your calendar for yourself. She stressed that we need to give the same level of commitment to ourselves as we do to our work. This means setting boundaries, protecting your time, and not being afraid to say no.
They also discussed the importance of leaning on others for support, both personally and professionally. As Navah mentioned, we need to be easy on ourselves and not expect to do everything all by ourselves.
Here’s the takeaway.
Managing work-life balance requires intentional effort, self-care, and setting boundaries. It’s essential to prioritize personal time, seek support when needed, and be gentle with ourselves in the process.
A Strategy to Increase Your Earning Potential
In a conversation about the infamous wage gap, Motoko raised another critical issue — the confidence gap. She said that women tend to stay silent and don’t even think about asking for more. So it’s crucial to build confidence and take actionable steps to justify your ask, be it more pay, benefits, flexibility, etc.
She offered a key tip to keep track of your performance and achievements. This can be a powerful negotiating tool, as you can clearly show your value to the company.
Andrea also added that documenting positive feedback or accomplishments is important to use as leverage in future negotiations.
Ultimately, the key takeaway is:
Recognize your worth, advocate for yourself, and be confident to ask for what you deserve.
Drawing the Curtain on Digital Marketing Shero Campaign
Our amazing panelists of the Shero Special Town Hall deserve special thanks for collaborating with us on this campaign to support our sheroes.
And as we wrap up our first annual Digital Marketing Shero campaign, we look forward to many more initiatives celebrating digital marketers who deserve a platform to showcase their achievements.
For now, thank you all for your support and nominations.
One of the many reasons I joined the Optmyzr team is the laser focus on delighting customers through pragmatic innovation.
We’ve been busy building some really powerful tools at Optmyzr, and this month we have one of the biggest product launch announcements in our 10-year history. Given how many new features we’re launching, we want to give you a handy cheat sheet on the following:
What They Are
What They Do
Why You Care
Here’s the complete list of features launched (you can use the links to jump to that section of the post):
Performance Max Updates
Competitive Analysis
Change History Annotation
Analytics Metrics
Improved Rule Engine
Optmyzr Express Innovations
While some of these innovations are a long time coming, others are proactive innovations to ensure you are equipped with the best workflow to manage your PPC campaigns across all your marketing channels (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon).
We are passionate about our customers achieving profit and happiness and love suggestions and feedback, so at the end of this post, we’ll share how to make feature requests.
Performance Max Updates
Our Performance Max insight module on the dashboard bakes in the Mike Rhodes script, which segments traffic sources for Google channels (thank you for letting us build upon your work, Mike!).
Where this module goes above and beyond implementing the script yourself is a clear view of important metrics for your stakeholders, as well as the ability to check different moments in time.
We believe Performance Max can be very powerful when implemented correctly and want to ensure you have the best-in-class tools to manage this campaign type. One of the keys to a successful Performance Max campaign is including audience signals to help kickstart the learning.
E-commerce is at the heart of Performance Max, and we delight in enabling our customers to win. That’s why we introduced the Create Assets For Performance Max for Retail tool.
Knowing what your competitors are up to is a powerful way to ensure your campaigns stay ahead. While native solutions like auction insights can give you a piece of the picture, the data is limited to search impression share stats.
Enter Optmyzr’s Competitive Analysis tool, which gives you insights into:
Which competitors are competing with you?
When did they start competing with you?
On how many entities are they competing with you?
While the Auction Insights show results at the account level, the Top Competitors from Optmyzr (using proprietary technology) show results at the keyword, ad group, and campaign levels.
This tool is a step above native auction insights because it gives you a more comprehensive view of which brands are competing with you over time. Having this understanding will help you understand:
Fluctuations in the auction price.
Changes in conversion rates.
Who might be worth actively going after with a competitor campaign?
This tool sheds light on competitors at the following Google Ads entity levels:
Campaign
Ad group
Keyword
Change History Annotation
One of the most exciting workflow updates is our change history annotation. You’ll be able to see the full change history of your connected accounts and make notes along the way!
This will enable you to:
Maintain a record of what you did and why across networks.
Hold your team/yourself accountable for actions taken (or not taken) in the accounts.
PPC Investigator has always enabled you to understand what has been happening in your account. This added layer of insight will enable you to understand exactly which actions caused changes in performance (good or bad).
We believe you shouldn’t have to leave Optmyzr to get access to these valuable insights and are delighted to empower you to understand what happened when (and why).
At the moment the Root Cause Analysis in the PPC Investigator is for Google Ads only. But the Cause Chart supports Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Reporting and Analytics
PPC doesn’t live in a vacuum, and bringing in analytics metrics so we can position results in context with other marketing channels helps everyone win. With the depreciation of universal analytics, having the means to gracefully transition to GA4 while keeping SEO empathy at the forefront of PPC.
We support the following metrics:
Additionally, we now support analytics metrics in Rule Engine so that you can take a more collaborative approach to your marketing.
When reviewing data, it’s important to be able to see the full breakdown of performance. This is why we introduced segmentation across campaign, ad group, and keyword levels (upgrading previous functionality that just looked at account-level segmentation). You can find this data in the performance comparison widget.
Reports also allow for bulk entity (account, campaign, ad group, keyword, etc.) selection so you can quickly set up templates and identify performance changes across your book of business.
Improvements To Rule Engine
Rule Engine is at the heart of Optmyzr. It’s what enables us to bring API-specific optimizations to brands who may not have coding resources or don’t have the time to code a custom solution.
The main Rule Engine updates include:
Bulk Entity Selection: we now empower you to capture multiple entities in a single keyboard shortcut.
Percent Rules Across All Optmyzr Supported Channels: we love Google and its ability to empower marketers to win. We also love Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Yahoo Japan. You now can set rules for all our supported channels based on top percent entities.
Product Scope For All Campaign Types: e-commerce lives and dies by product data quality. Optmyzr customers can now get product-level data to empower their Google and Performance Max shopping campaigns.
Standard Shopping With Smart Bidding: not every brand will be able to justify the additional assets for Performance Max, and it’s not reasonable to ask them to forfeit all the value of smart bidding. Our tool now empowers brands to access smart bidding (TROAS) while maintaining a standard shopping campaign.
Optmyzr Express Innovations
One of the biggest ways we empower our customers is through time savings. Optmyzr Express enabled marketers to achieve big wins in their accounts with limited effort. We added the following updates to Optmyzr Express:
DSA (dynamic search ad) Sculpture: this tool allows marketers to identify and exclude search terms triggered by their DSA campaigns/ad groups. Beyond ensuring the traffic is of quality, this also helps identify and end potential cannibalization.
Fix Ads: we’ll highlight ads with poor ad strength and/or few headlines and descriptions. You’ll then get creative suggestions powered by historically well-performing ads and our intelligent suggestion system.
Missing Ads: we’ll highlight ad groups without RSAs (responsive search ads) and give you suggestions for creative.
Exclude Placements: we’re beyond excited about this tool’s ability to help with Performance Max and traditional display/video campaigns! Our tool will help you remove unwanted placements (mobile apps, websites, and youtube videos) at the campaign or account level. This tool focuses on high-cost relative to your other placements that have zero conversions.
Solving for Impression Share: whether you need to fix impression share lost due to budget (we’ll help with stand-alone and shared budgets) or you need to increase the impression share of a converting smart bidding campaign (maximize conversions with a CPA goal or maximize conversion value with a ROAS goal), this tool can help!
Testing Smart Bidding: it can be scary to opt into a bidding strategy that may not have served you well in the past. This is where our Express optimization can help - we’ll enable an experiment for a given TCPA or TROAS.
Enable Converting Keywords: life happens and sometimes a converting keyword gets removed. So while we can’t get the original keyword back, we can get a new version of it going on the match type it was on.
Remove Negative Keyword Conflicts: negative keywords are powerful ways to shape budget allocation - yet sometimes they get added accidentally. This tool will give you the option to remove the negative OR pause the conflicting keyword.
If you’re not already using Optmyzr Express, we strongly suggest you connect with your customer success hero to schedule training on leveraging it. You also can check out this tutorial.
Final Takeaways
Innovation is only useful if it makes life better for those it’s attempting to help. We believe the areas we’re focusing on continue our mission of democratizing high-value automation and account management across accounts of all sizes. The greatest gift you can give us is feedback on where you want us to focus next and what problems you’re facing.
Every single one of these optimizations came from a customer conversation and how we could help them achieve more out of their ad spend/with their team.
Thanks to YOU (our customers, industry peers, and sources of inspiration) for enabling our product roadmap and our brilliant and fearless women-powered product and innovation team.
And while the rest of us were celebrating Women’s Month, our product team, made up of 80% women, was busy with their latest sprint cycle to give our PPC community more tools and capabilities for success.
We’re always excited to share what’s new and exciting at Optmyzr, but this month’s releases represent a special opportunity to shine the spotlight on our amazing women in product development and engineering.
Not an Optmyzr customer yet? This is the best time to sign up for a full functionality trial and unlevel your marketing!
Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor, and 2022 was anything but smooth. From Google’s automation updates and several tech migrations, there was much to get used to.
Well done on getting through a choppy year, and to the start of a new opportunity.
For us, things haven’t changed in 2023. Not really.
Amidst the uncertainty in the PPC world, you can always count on Optmyzr to do what’s right for you. Our capabilities may evolve with the ad platforms, but fundamentally we’ll always be what PPC marketers need.
In 2022, our product roadmap restored some of the control and visibility you lost when Google made the shift to responsive search ads and Performance Max.
Behind the scenes, our team worked tirelessly on the migration to the new Google Ads API to make sure we didn’t abandon you when you need us most.
So when we say that our customers are priority #1, we mean it. Optmyzr wouldn’t be where we are — celebrating our 10th year in business — without you.
This year, we have a lot of exciting things already in progress: added capabilities for platforms beyond Google, integrations with other marketing tools, new layers of automation, and more.
But first, let’s look at the biggest updates of 2022.
Here’s a quick look at our top products for the year 2022 and a sneak peek into this year’s roadmap.
Top Updates of 2022
Optimization Updates
Stay on top of broken URLs in Google Ads
The URL Checker utility has been upgraded with an improved workflow, making it easier to create and manage settings. You can now pause ads and keywords linking to broken URLs, and re-enable these entities in a future run if the issues are fixed.
Get PMax listing groups data in ‘Top Product & Listing Groups’ widget
We’ve updated the Top Product & Listing Groups Widget for Google Ads to include top listing groups data from your Performance Max campaigns. It makes your Shopping product groups and Performance Max listing groups accessible under one interface.
As a reminder, you could see data earlier for both Standard and Smart Shopping campaigns. Performance Max has taken the place of Smart Shopping.
Campaign data for Sponsored Brand videos is now included in dashboards and reports for your Amazon PPC accounts. This removes the inconsistency in data for this campaign type.
Audits and Analysis Updates
Perform root cause analysis for Microsoft Ads
PPC Investigator now has more capabilities to analyze Microsoft Ads accounts.
After picking a metric to investigate, Root Cause Analysis can now highlight specific campaigns, ad groups, product partitions, keywords, and other elements responsible for the change in performance.
In the Keyword Lasso tool, you can now select ‘Keyword Planner’ as a source of new keywords using the drop-down menu at the top of the page. Read more about it in our help documentation.
Evaluate Performance Max campaigns with 8 new audits
We’ve added 8 new audits to help maintain and improve the quality of your Performance Max campaigns. With these, you can easily identify gaps in asset groups and individual assets in terms of their structure and performance.
For example, now you can start using Performance Labels to assess various PMax assets and find asset groups with insufficient headlines, descriptions, images, and more.
Regularly audit and get quick, actionable insights on MS account health
Use the PPC Policy and Audits tool under the Insights section to identify different problem areas in your Microsoft Ads accounts, as well as to find optimization opportunities for your ads, campaigns, keywords, and more.
Visualize your Google Ads performance with funnel charts
For Google Ads accounts, the funnel chart feature is accessible in both single and multi-account reports.
Starting with impressions at the top of the funnel, clicks in the middle, and working your way down to conversions, you can easily visualize the performance at different stages of the ad journey.
Make sure all your ad groups have responsive search ads, even after the July deprecation of expanded text ads.
Our new script builds a bulk sheet with new RSAs for your entire account. It pulls text from existing ads and adds them as assets to suggested new RSAs.
Simply taking existing text from ETAs and adding them to new RSAs in existing ad groups can boost conversions by up to 7% at a similar CPA or ROAS.
Our popular Ad Text Optimization tool now has a version for responsive search ads.
As a hybrid insight and optimization tool, it’ll allow you to both review RSA performance data and modify text components (like headlines and descriptions), individually or in bulk.
Preview and add Google RSAs and RDAs directly from audits
If you’ve previously run an audit to find out which ad groups have fewer than two responsive search ads, clicking on the ad group name renders a preview of existing ads and their performance.
You’ll also be able to create new responsive search ads, call ads, responsive display ads, or expanded dynamic search ads (depending on campaign type).
Better your Google Ads performance with 10 new RSA audits
Easily spot gaps and inconsistencies in your RSA assets, and make changes wherever needed. We’ve got 10 new audits to help you identify and resolve potential issues.
Get new headline and description suggestions for Google and Microsoft responsive search ads.
When selecting this option, you’ll get top suggestions for ad assets from Open AI, allowing for greater variety and more choice when creating your ads.
Build Campaigns and keep them in sync with your Shopping Merchant Feed
Optmyzr now supports Performance Max retail campaigns in the following ways:
Create them in Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0
Keep them in sync with changes to your Merchant Feed using Shopping Campaign Refresher 2.0
Retail advertisers will find it easier to build Performance Max campaigns at scale, and automate sync with products entering and leaving a feed in near real time.
These updates require a Campaign Automator subscription to view.Go to the toolor contact support@optmyzr.com if you’d like to discuss getting access.
Organize ads with templates
Creating labels for different ads is now easier when you use Campaign Automator templates. Get added flexibility to manage and optimize all your ads.
Take bulk actions or customize your approach. For instance, run select ad labels on certain days, or get reports only for a particular set of labels.
Create new ads in paused state
You can now create new ads in a paused state and turn them on later via our Rule Engine or in Google Ads.
Please note that you can only create new ads in a paused state for the first template run. They will be automatically enabled in subsequent runs.
Expand your target group with broader URL targeting
Add broader targets for Dynamic Search Ad Groups using rules in PPC Policy and Audits.
For example, target URLs that contain the keyword “Optmyzr” instead of exact URLs. This lets you reach a broader audience, leading to more traffic.
You still have the option to use exact URLs for targeting anytime.
Learn With Optmyzr: The New Reports Experience
Our latest Learn With Optmyzr video shows you how quick and easy it is to create them with our new report designer.
Build report templates for single accounts, and set them up across your Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts without creating a new template for each account.
Or create comprehensive reports for clients who advertise across multiple platforms, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, and Google Analytics.
12 tools used and loved by over 10K Optmyzr customers
With an eventful year coming to a close, our customer and analytics teams identified the most used and talked about features of 2022.
Here are the 12 Optmyzr tools that our 10,000+ users made integral to their PPC management and optimization workflows.
We’re thrilled you loved and used so many of our new capabilities in 2022, and we’re ready to step it up in 2023. There will be many new updates and features, but the goal is still the same: to help you better manage your PPC accounts.
What to Expect in 2023
New features and capabilities to better manage ad platform automation such as Performance Max, Smart Bidding, and RSAs
Better integrate your business data easily, both to enhance ad platform decision-making and to run experiments
Support for the transition to Google Analytics 4 and changes in audience targeting
New Rule Engine strategies, audits, alert types, scripts and script support, and more automation layering
According to a recent benchmark study, Google Ads cost per lead has surged in 91% of sectors in 2022 compared to 2021. And, a recent report by PPCsurvey says that 98% of participants reported using Google Ads, compared to Facebook with 76% and Instagram with 64%.
This suggests that competition is higher in Google Ads, resulting in higher bids for fewer clicks per advertiser.
Microsoft, on the other hand, appeals to a particular niche. More people use Bing to search on their PCs, typically at work. So, on desktops, Bing has 36% of the US search market, while 11 billion searches are conducted on Bing each month globally.
Interestingly, Bing shopping campaigns have a 45% higher average ad click-through rate than Google, and Bing’s average cost per click on shopping ads is 30% lower.
Why should you care? With a challenging economy up ahead, it’s more crucial than ever to be competitive and watchful of your campaigns, especially this holiday shopping season.
And recently, we at Optmyzr have built some new tools and capabilities for your Google and Microsoft Responsive Search Ads. We also have a tool to convert your Microsoft Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) to Responsive Search Ads (RSAs).
Here’s a roundup of all of them.
Easily improve your RSAs with Ad Text Optimization (RSA)
You can now easily identify Google and Microsoft RSAs with ‘poor’ ad strength and tweak them for improved performance. You can also refer to your existing RSAs that have performed well when making the changes.
Additionally, you can find RSAs with fewer headlines or descriptions and add more to fill out all available asset spaces. And, you can filter and sort them based on performance metrics and make bulk modifications to various assets.
This tool is available for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Convert your Microsoft ETAs to RSAs using Ad Text Optimization (ETA)
This tool makes the job of turning your Microsoft ETAs to RSAs easier so that you don’t have to manually create RSAs from scratch.
It lets you download a CSV of all your existing ETAs in your account. You can then edit them, change their headlines and descriptions, and upload them back to your Microsoft Ads account with a single click.
This is launched only for Microsoft Ads at the moment. However, for Google ads, you can use this ETAs to RSAs script, developed by our CEO, Frederick Vallaeys.
Get specific suggestions in Responsive Search Ads utility
This dedicated RSA utility tool helps you identify ad groups with no RSAs or poor-quality ones. It also gives specific suggestions based on best-performing ad components in existing ETAs.
This tool is available for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Create ads directly from the side tray in PPC Policy and Audits
We now support creating various ads like Call Ads, Responsive Search Ads, Responsive Display Ads, and Dynamic Search Ads through the PPC Policy and Audits interface.
Suppose you identify an ad group with insufficient RSAs. You can create an RSA directly from the Audit Results page using this tool.
This is only available for Google Ads. However, PPC Policy and Audits for Microsoft Ads was recently launched, which supports a list of audits for your Ads.
Open AI gives ad asset suggestions in A/B Testing for Ads
When you create a new RSA while pausing one after A/B Testing, open AI will give ad asset suggestions based on high-performing ones, giving you a wide range of options for making ad creatives.
For now, this is only available for RSA headlines and descriptions.
This tool is available for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Better your Google Ads performance with 10 new RSA audits
We’ve got 10 new audits to help identify and resolve potential issues with your Google RSAs.
You can easily spot gaps and inconsistencies in your RSA assets and make changes wherever needed.
For example, the headline and description assets are too few and short, or there are some duplicate and underperforming assets. You can quickly make these changes to boost Google’s ability to create unique ad combinations.
Continuing its prominent role from this year, PPC automation is predicted to be a major industry trend in 2023. With the uncertainty of upcoming quarters, you’ll want to stay up-to-date with PPC automation to mitigate any negative market effects.
We got an early start on next year’s work to meet your needs in an evolving market.
The past month’s updates include quick audits to manage, optimize, and control the quality of your RSA campaigns; one-click optimizations with prebuilt Rule Engine strategies; and much more.
Here’s everything we updated in November 2022.
Audits and Insights
Evaluate Performance Max campaigns with 8 new audits
We’ve added 8 new audits to help maintain and improve the quality of your Performance Max campaigns. With these, you can quickly identify gaps in asset groups and individual assets in structure and performance.
For example, you can now use Performance Labels to assess various PMax assets and find asset groups with insufficient headlines, descriptions, images, and more.
PPC Policy and Audits are available for Amazon Ads (under Insights) to provide a more in-depth evaluation at various levels of your account.
Each audit has an individual grade; hover over the result, and more specific information will be displayed. This allows you to make periodic adjustments to achieve better results.
Better your Google Ads performance with 10 new RSA audits
We’ve got 10 new audits to help identify and resolve potential issues with your Google RSAs.
You can easily spot gaps and inconsistencies in your RSA assets and make changes wherever needed.
For example, the headline and description assets are too few and short, or there are some duplicate and underperforming assets. You can quickly make these changes to boost Google’s ability to create unique ad combinations.
Visualize your Google Ads performance with funnel charts
For Google Ads accounts, the funnel chart feature is accessible in both single and multi-account reports.
Starting with impressions at the top of the funnel, clicks in the middle, and working your way down to conversions, you can easily visualize the performance at different stages of the ad journey.
To help maintain control of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, including your Google and Microsoft Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), we at Optmyzr recently developed several powerful tools and features.
Here’s a blog post that summarizes all of them, with some useful links to jump right to the updates and tools.
A toolkit to supercharge your Amazon PPC campaigns
Despite an unsteady economy, Amazon is still the most popular online retailer in the United States. Even though people are cutting back on spending because of the recession, Amazon still attracts sellers and is preparing for another busy year.
So, whether you’re looking to refine a current strategy or start from scratch, we have the tools to help you manage your Amazon Ads effectively.
It feels like we’ve turned a corner on PPC automation.
Our customer success and sales teams now have more conversations about how to build and use automation, or how to make Google’s automation make better decisions for the accounts people manage.
Strong resistance from just a few months ago has given way to acceptance that we do indeed play in Google’s garden and, more importantly, confidence that there are still ways to get great PPC results.
Our own evolution at Optmyzr is similarly encouraging. We’re increasing our support for platforms outside Google, starting with Microsoft and Meta. This month, you’ll also see multiple updates aimed at helping ecommerce advertisers contend with the demands of the holiday season.
Here’s everything we updated in October 2022.
Responsive Search Ads
Create responsive display ads from the Audits tool
Actionable audits now let you create Responsive Display Ads without going to another tool. This is only compatible with Google Ads accounts.
For Google Ads, ‘Conversion By Time’ metrics have been added to the following scopes:
Account/Customer
Campaign
Ad group
Ad
Keywords
Ad group audience
These metrics make sure that conversions are attributed to the date on which it happened, rather than when the ad was clicked. Learn more about these metrics from Google.
You now have the option to choose which audit template you want to determine Google Ads audit scores.
From the account dashboard, move your cursor to the PPC Audit Score card on the right to reveal a gear icon. Click it to change your audit template for a single account or all the accounts you manage.
It’s remarkable how quickly we’ve all had to adjust to the new realities of advertising with Google and other ad platforms.
You can’t have a conversation about PPC these days without automation coming up. We hear about it every time we record a PPC Town Hall, in every call and chat with customers, and all over social media. Performance Max, Responsive Search Ads, and Smart Bidding with Target ROAS tend to come up most frequently.
Everyone at Optmyzr is working as hard as we can to make sure you’re able to use our tools to run great campaigns that meet the demands of modern PPC.
We’ve got some exciting updates for you this month, including support for Performance Max in two of our most popular shopping tools and an announcement on how we support Google’s new scripts experience.
Here’s everything we updated in September 2022.
Performance Max
Support for Performance Max retail campaigns
Optmyzr now supports Performance Max retail campaigns in the following ways:
Retail advertisers will find it easier to build Performance Max campaigns at scale, and automate sync with products entering and leaving a feed in near real time.
For campaign groups created using Optmyzr, we categorize the results in three ways:
Fully Upgraded: All campaigns in the campaign group were upgraded to Performance Max. We bring the new PMax campaigns back into the campaign group and refresh them as a PMax campaign group.
Partially Upgraded: If only some campaigns were upgraded and others are still Smart Shopping, we only refresh the Smart Shopping campaigns and do not give suggestions for new campaigns. You can refresh PMax campaigns using the “refresh existing campaign” option but will not be able to automate these.
Not Upgraded: A normal Smart Shopping campaign group.
For existing campaigns created outside Optmyzr:
If there is no automation, we will pick up the PMax campaign and allow refreshing and setting up automation.
If there’s any automation running for existing Smart Shopping campaigns and these are upgraded to PMax, we’ll map the old Smart Shopping campaign to the new PMax campaign and refresh this new one.
Ad labels have been added as a filter option in the Ad Text Optimization tool for responsive search ads. This helps limit the data you see to ads with a specific label.
Works with both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts.
If you’ve previously run an audit to find out which ad groups have fewer than two responsive search ads, clicking on the ad group name renders a preview of existing ads and their performance.
You’ll also be able to create new responsive search ads, call ads, or expanded dynamic search ads (depending on campaign type).
When editing a headline or description for a Responsive Search Ad in Optmyzr (Google or Microsoft Ads), you now have the option to create it as a new asset in the existing ad.
For example, you can turn the headline “Product X is available in three vibrant new colors” into a new one (such as “Product X now in red, blue, and orange”), adding it to any existing RSAs with at least one more open headline slot.
Both headlines will exist in your selected ads, and you can opt to remove either asset at a later time.
The attribute “network type” is now available in the campaign scope of the Rule Engine. This makes it easier to view search terms coming from the Search Partners network.
The attribute “ad group type” is now available in the ad group scope of the Rule Engine. This makes it easier to exclude search terms from Dynamic Search Ad ad groups.
If you use Google’s automatic migration tool to upgrade from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you’ll notice that it doesn’t migrate your goals in the process.
This makes the data in GA4 much less helpful in optimizing your ads.
The URL Checker utility has been upgraded with an improved workflow, making it easier to create and manage settings. You can now pause ads and keywords linking to broken URLs, and re-enable these entities in a future run if the issues are fixed.
This tool is only available for customers on current subscriptions. If you’re on a legacy plan, write to your account manager to discuss a solution.
Optmyzr now supports these seven Enhanced Scripts:
Flexible Budgets
Reach Target Monthly Spend
Check Destination URLs
Check Sitelinks URLs
Anomaly Detector
Hourly Campaign Level Dayparts
Report Hourly Stats
All of these have been updated to work with both new and old experiences.
If you were an Optmyzr customer before June 14, 2022, you will see a ‘Deprecated’ tag next to older scripts that we no longer support.
Get suggestions for Target ROAS/CPA adjustments
Get a new suggested Target ROAS value for campaigns running on the Maximize Conversion Value bidding strategy. You can then perform any of the following actions:
Apply suggested changes directly
View the strategy and add it to your list of Rule Engine strategies where you can
More widgets have been added for Microsoft Ads to help you better audit ads, ad groups, performance, and other levels e.g. “ad groups with too few Responsive Search Ads”.
You can now add search terms to a negative keywords list via an action in the search terms scope of the Rule Engine. This list can be created and edited with rules.
Ad platforms have been busy rolling out automation updates over the past couple of months. That’s kept the pressure on us to make sure our software is up-to-date with the latest advancements in PPC land.
August at Optmyzr HQ was all about translating those updates into features and capabilities. We’re happy to share that our team has more than delivered.
For example, with Responsive Search Ads becoming the default in Google and gaining priority in Microsoft, it was important for us to support them in our testing and optimization tools.
Here’s everything we updated in July and August 2022.
When editing a headline or description for a Responsive Search Ad in Optmyzr (Google or Microsoft Ads), you now have the option to create it as a new asset in the existing ad.
For example, you can turn the headline “Product X is available in three vibrant new colors” into a new one (such as “Product X now in red, blue, and orange”), adding it to any existing RSAs with at least one more open headline slot.
Both headlines will exist in your selected ads, and you can opt to remove either asset at a later time.
Our A/B Testing for Ads tool lets you make sure only the best ad copy is active. You can now select Responsive Search Ads in Microsoft to analyze, test, modify, and pause.
The Ad Text Optimization for Responsive Search Ads is an optimization and insight tool that breaks down and reviews your ad performance data by its components. It also allows you to make changes in bulk to different ad components.
This tools is now available for use with Microsoft Ads accounts.
Use the PPC Policy and Audits tool under the insights section to identify different problem areas in your Microsoft Ads accounts, as well as to find optimization opportunities for your ads, campaigns, keywords and more.
PPC Investigator now has more capabilities to analyze Microsoft Ads accounts.
After picking a metric to investigate, Root Cause Analysis can now highlight specific campaigns, ad groups, product partitions, keywords, and other elements responsible for the change in performance.
The ‘Find Negative Keywords’ tool now has a faster way to review suggestions. You can now archive or change match types in bulk for both Google and Microsoft Ads.
Some audit results will show a link to more details (as seen in this screenshot below for Extensions). This is available for campaigns (campaign settings, ad groups, extensions) and ad groups (ad group settings, keywords, ads).
Clicking the link will open a sidebar with more information related to that entry.
Configure widgets with ease, preview while editing settings, and add account/campaign selectors from within the widget settings.
Schedule quarterly reports
Report scheduling now includes the option to select specific months of the year.
Schedule reports for delivery in Slack
Select this option in the schedule window to deliver reports to mentioned recipients via Slack.
Note: This requires your Optmyzr and Slack accounts to be connected.
Include campaign names in reports
Just like accounts, dynamic insertion of campaign names is now supported using {CS1} where the number reflects the chosen campaign selector.
Additional metrics in Google Ads reporting
The following metrics have been added to the KPI, Summary, Top Campaigns and Performance Comparison widgets in our report builder:
Unadjusted conversion value
Conversion value adjustment
If you adjust Conversion Value Rules to optimize the conversion value of your budget, these metrics allow you to see the base conversion value as well as the adjustment made to it.
While WordStream was announcing they would deprecate the software part of their business, our product and engineering teams were migrating Optmyzr fully to the new Google Ads API.
We’re delighted to announce that not only is that migration effectively complete, but we’ve also managed to release several new capabilities during the same period. Here’s everything we updated from April–June 2022.
Optimize the ROI of your ad spend
Google’s ‘Maximize Conversion Value’ bid strategy with a target ROAS has two major advantages: it recognizes that not all conversions are equally valuable, and it allows you to use that to get the best possible return on investment.
As with any ad platform automation, this strategy is only as good as the data it runs on. So you’ll want to use our recent capabilities to structure that business data in a way that Smart Bidding can understand.
Once Google knows what drives results for your business, you can reap benefits such as:
• Higher quality conversions for the same budget
• Less junk and more leads that turn into paying customers
• More sales to profitable customers and fewer returned orders
Create training data for Google’s Smart Bidding algorithms
Optimizing for ROI or conversion value takes your ad budget as far as it can go. The first step is identifying segments (like location, audience, or device type) that tend to correlate with higher quality conversions.
We’ll show you a list of segments and ask you to score them from 1–5, with 1 meaning you want to see fewer conversions like that and 5 meaning you want to see many more.
Remember: Don’t base your scores on Google data (like CTR and bounce rate). Instead, work with business teams to identify the correlation between segments and insights such as:
Average order value
Lifetime value
Lead-to-sale conversion rate
Or any other model that matters to your profitability.
Because the people with access to this knowledge aren’t always on PPC teams, we’ve created a spreadsheet template you can give them. Once they rate different audience segments in bulk, just feed it back into the Segment Scorer.
Turn business insights into bid modifiers for Smart Bidding
Once you’ve scored enough segments, we’ll turn those ratings into a format Google Ads can understand: Conversion Value Rules. These values tell Smart Bidding how much higher or lower to adjust its CPC bid for that particular segment e.g. United States, repeat customers, mobile.
After you apply recommended changes to Google, Target ROAS and Maximize Conversion Value bid strategies will automatically start working to get you more of the conversions you value the most.
When it comes to applying Value Rules or any ROI optimization strategy, you can create several safeguards to both prevent unwanted behavior and maximize effectiveness. We’ve put together two guides to help you manage these processes.
Track your Performance Max campaigns in more Optmyzr tools
Performance Max is the biggest thing in Google Ads at the moment. A major shift in automation balance, it will absorb Smart Shopping campaigns in the next few months. Here’s where our product currently supports Performance Max data.
Shopping Analysis: This update provides an easy way to analyze product-level performance data for Performance Max campaigns (with Merchant Feed). There is no change from how you use this tool for Smart or standard shopping.
Spend Projection: Performance Max campaigns are now visible in the Spend Projection tool, allowing you to gauge how those campaigns will pace/exhaust an assigned budget.
Optimize Budgets: You can now meet spend targets and maximize return on investment for Performance Max campaigns, and reallocate budgets based on performance. Also available for multi-account budgets.
An easier transition to Responsive Search Ads
With Expanded Text Ads now not so expansive after their sunset on June 30, our support for search ad optimization will focus solely on Responsive Search Ads. Here are our updates for managing RSAs from the last three months.
Optimize your RSA ad copy
Our popular Ad Text Optimization tool now has a version for Responsive Search Ads.
As a hybrid insight and optimization tool, it’ll allow you to both review RSA performance data and modify text components (like headlines and descriptions), individually or in bulk.
Make sure all your ad groups have Responsive Search Ads before Google disables Expanded Text Ad use in July.
Our new script builds a bulk sheet with new RSAs for your entire account. It pulls text from existing ads and adds them as assets to suggested new RSAs.
Simply taking existing text from ETAs and adding them to new RSAs in existing ad groups can boost conversions by up to 7% at a similar CPA or ROAS.
Campaign Automator now supports bulk creation of Responsive Search Ads using existing Expanded Text Ads.
With ETAs no longer available for creation or editing as of today, this could benefit you if your campaigns still haven’t migrated to RSAs.
Watch the video below for more details and remember — you can still pause and enable existing ETAs both manually and via Campaign Automator:
Building a better Optmyzr experience
Everything we do begins and ends with making sure our customers aren’t just satisfied using Optmyzr, but happy to recommend it to other PPC marketers. These next updates were centered around improving that experience.
UI improvements to alert settings
We’ve released a friendlier interface for our Alert Settings page that includes capabilities such as:
Create alerts in bulk more easily
Select all the accounts you want at once
Support for monthly budget alerts for Amazon and Facebook accounts
Easier way to create and edit multi-account budget alerts
See campaign placement data on the account dashboard
The Campaign Placements table on the Account Dashboard shows and sorts performance data for all your campaign placements. With this, you can easily see which placements are working for any given campaign type.
People know us as Google Ads experts, but we’re keen to support advertisers and agencies managing other platforms as well. These updates for our support of Amazon Ads campaigns are a step in that direction.
Cut wasteful spend on Amazon Ads
We now provide suggestions for non-converting and costly product targets in Amazon Advertising campaigns. This is intended to help you reduce wasted spend and focus on better-performing targets.
Campaign data for Sponsored Brand Videos is now included in dashboards and reports for your Amazon PPC accounts. This removes the inconsistency in data we had earlier for this campaign type.
Monthly budget targets for FB & Amazon now on the Dashboard
Specify your monthly budget targets for Facebook & Amazon on the MCC Dashboard to get insights on how you’ve spent the budget and how it is pacing.
The Budget Pacing column indicates what percentage you’ve spent relative to what you should have spent as a share of the month (linear spending).
Click on the ‘bulk edit account details’ option to start entering your budgets for Facebook and Amazon ads accounts.
New UI with added functionalities for Automation Schedules
Quickly find what you’re looking for using the ‘Search’ bar and other filters like Account, Platform, Users, and more.
Bulk edit option modify frequency, recipients or pause/enable and even delete for multiple automation schedules at a time.
Shortcuts to access the relevant settings directly in the respective tools.
Use the right-side tray to edit or review the details associated with each schedule.
Express the value of your conversions better with the new Optimize Value Rules tool
Setting up Conversion Value Rules helps in optimizing an account’s performance by teaching Google’s automations (like those that handle Smart Bidding to optimize Target ROAS, Maximize conversion value, and Smart Shopping campaigns) more about your business.
The ‘Optimize Value Rules’ tool suggests conversion value rules that you can set up in your Google Ads account. These suggestions are based on data from the segments you score in Segment Scorer.
You can also see what’s in store for the coming months and suggest feature requests on the Optmyzr Roadmap.
It doesn’t matter how well your Google Ads accounts are performing – great marketers and agencies always want to do better. But there’s a perception among some marketers that it takes months to see meaningful improvements from your PPC campaigns.
This isn’t true.
With a tool like Optmyzr at your disposal and this playbook, you can start to see improvements in your Google search and shopping campaigns in 2 weeks – the same amount of time our free trial lasts.
So whether you’re just starting out with Optmyzr, thinking of giving us a shot, or want to onboard another client, here’s how we can help set your accounts up for success in just two weeks.
Note: We refer to Google Ads by default, but many of these capabilities can be applied to your Microsoft Ads campaigns as well.
Google Search Ads
Day 1: Set up alerts to monitor accounts and track budgets.
Set up Account Alerts to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like CPA and ROAS.
Set monthly budgets on the MCC dashboard and get notified when an account is underspending or overspending.
Install the Flexible Budgets enhanced script to make sure the account doesn’t overspend.
Install the Check Destination URLs enhanced script to stop traffic from going to broken landing pages.
Day 3: Analyze account performance and start optimizing.
In PPC Policy and Audits, run ‘Sample Policy’ to find areas of improvement in the account and customize policies based on your strategy.
Customize a weekly report from available Instant Report templates. Automate it to be emailed every Monday morning.
Run Optmyzr Express and do quick optimization tasks like testing new ads, adding new keywords, and winning more traffic for converting keywords.
Run PPC Investigator to see how and why conversions in your account changed in the last 30 days.
Day 5: Analyze search queries to add new keywords and negatives to your account.
Run Keyword Lasso to add new keywords from ‘Top Suggestions’ or use a custom filter to find suggestions.
Run Negative Keyword Finder to find account-level negatives and add them to shared negative lists.
Run Search Terms N-Grams to analyze the highest-traffic search terms in a word cloud to identify trends and new ad group themes, and to add negatives.
Pro Tip: Combine these optimizations into a single workflow usingBlueprints.
Day 6: Manage bids.
Manual Bidding
Run Conversion Grabber to acquire more traffic for converting keywords losing impression share.
Run First Page Bridger to push keywords with high Quality Scores to the first page of search results.
Run Reduce Bids on keywords that have zero conversions and high cost/CPA.
Automated and Smart Bidding
Run Optimize Target CPA and Optimize Target ROAS optimizations to change ad group-level targets for better performance when using Google Smart Bidding.
Pro Tip: Combine these optimizations into a single Workflow using Blueprints.
Day 7: Improve Quality Score and manage budgets.
Run Analyze and Optimize Budget to reallocate budgets to campaigns that are converting but losing impression share.
Use the Quality Score Tracker to analyze ad groups with low Quality Scores.
Run Quick Optimizations from the Quality Score Tracker to pause and SKAG keywords with low Quality Scores.
Day 9: A/B test and create new ads.
Use A/B Testing For Ads to pause underperforming ads and create new ones.
Test your ad components and make bulk edits (if necessary) using Ad Text Optimization.
Create new responsive search ads using the Responsive Search Ads tool to ensure all your ad groups have at least one responsive search ad.
Day 11: Set hourly bid adjustments and build custom optimizations.
Use the Hour of Week Bid Adjustment to set bid adjustments for different times of the week based on your optimization goal.
Try out Instant Strategies in the Rule Engine.
Bonus: Experiment with a custom strategy in the Rule Engine.
Day 13: Set bid adjustments for locations and demographics based on performance.
Use the Geo-Bid Adjustment to target and set bid adjustments for locations based on performance.
Run Optmyzr Express and perform quick optimization tasks like setting bid adjustments for age and gender.
Day 14: Create your own workflows and implement automation.
Create your own optimization workflow by building a Blueprint.
Automate your favorite optimization strategies using the Rule Engine.
Google Shopping Ads
Day 1: Set up merchant feed and monitor budget.
Link your merchant feeds to Optmyzr.
Install the Flexible Budget enhanced script to make sure standard shopping campaigns don’t overspend.
Pro Tip: Enhanced scripts can be installed at the MCC level. Read more about installing scripts.
Day 2: Filter out irrelevant shopping queries by managing negatives.
Use Shopping Negatives to identify competing and underperforming queries, and add them as negatives.
Try out the Instant Strategy ‘Non-Converting Search Queries(Shopping)’ via the Rule Engine to add negatives.
Pro Tip: Combine these optimizations into a single Workflow using Blueprints.
Day 4: Analyze feed and resync campaign structure.
Re-sync your campaigns with your merchant feed using Shopping Campaign Refresher 2.0.
Review attribute coverage for products using Merchant Feed Analysis.
Try out the Shopping Campaign Analysis tool to:
Identify the distribution of products for important feed attributes
Analyze performance by price, ROAS, product type, or category
Day 6: Manage bids.
Manual Bidding
Increase bids for product groups with high ROAS using Shopping Bidder.
Increase bids for converting product groups losing impression share with Optmyzr Express.
Reduce Bids for expensive product groups using Rule Engine (available under Instant Strategies).
Use Attribute Bidder to identify products with price points that have high ROAS, and to increase bids for such products if you have a GRIP structure.
Automated & Smart Bidding
Run Optimize Target CPA & ROAS to change ad group-level targets when running Google Smart Bidding for better performance.
Day 8: Create custom optimizations.
Use Rule Engine to convert your PPC strategies into optimizations for:
Managing Negatives: Create recipes to manage underperforming search terms in shopping campaigns
Managing Bids & Target ROAS: Create recipes for setting bids and target ROAS based on in-house strategies
Pro Tip:Watch this videofor ideas on how to use the Rule Engine to set up custom optimizations.
Day 10: Create your own workflows and implement automation.
Create your own optimization workflow by building a Blueprint.
Set up automation on your favorite optimizations.
Too good to be true? Try it for yourself.
Our mission at Optmyzr is to develop not just the tools that PPC marketers need today, but ones they can use to safeguard their true roles as digital marketing strategists.
That’s why everything in this onboarding guide has one eye on long-term results, and why we don’t gate any of our features to trial users.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial to experience for yourself how Optmyzr makes PPC management faster and your contributions more value-oriented. Use our roadmap and you’ll start to see improvements before the end of the trial period.
Campaign Automator: First Optmyzr tool to be moved to the new Google Ads API
As was already mentioned, Optmyzr is in the process of moving to the new Google Ads API, allowing customers to continue optimizing their accounts hassle-free.
We’ve moved our first tool, Campaign Automator to the new API and customers now have access to the following new features:
1. Review applied changes in Campaign Automator
Users no longer have to go through the process of downloading logs and csv files to review changes made to the tool. You can now easily identify which campaign was paused or which new ad was added recently. The changes can be reviewed under “Apply details” in the Optimization History.
3. Call Extensions at campaign and ad group levels
4. Choose where your ads appear
While creating Search campaigns, users can choose between Search Partner Network and Display Network.
5. Configure advanced location options
Users can choose from three advanced location options to target or exclude people based on their physical presence or areas of interest:
Target/Exclude based on presence or interest
Target/Exclude based on presence
Target based on search interest
Read the full guide to Campaign Automator capabilities.
Improvements to Segment Scorer
We have two new updates to the Segment Scorer that allow users to:
1. Toggle between viewing only segments that they’ve scored or viewing all segments, including ones that aren’t scored.
2. Search for a particular Segment Name or Segment Value using the Search bar.
Access more tools through Account Blueprints
Account Blueprints help users get started with goal-oriented tasks. When creating a Blueprint, users can create a custom task to choose from various Optmyzr tasks.
We’ve added more Optmyzr tools and options to schedule recurring tasks under Blueprints.
Users can now create tasks for the following tools:
Shopping Campaign Restructure
Create GRIP Structure
URL Checker
Bulk IP Exclusion
Customer Match List Updates
Optmyzr Express
Saved Reports
Manage Clients
Save and edit reports
Covid-19 PPC Analysis
Segment Scorer
Shopping Analysis
See what else is in store for the coming months and suggest feature requests on the Optmyzr Roadmap.
Our engineers are on track with rewriting our code and Optmyzr will continue to support advertisers with great PPC tools.
With much of our efforts focused on the migration, our updates in the month of January included improvements in Microsoft Ads management and getting templates for 2021 Annual Reports ready.
Here’s a roundup of all the key changes to Optmyzr from January 2022.
2021 Annual Report Templates
Are you still spending hours collating data and compiling your 2021 reports? Stop now and take a look at our Annual Report templates. You can get your executive and detailed annual reports for 2021 from the Reports menu.
As always, you can choose a report template that works best for you, and use it as it is or customize it to suit your needs better.
Microsoft Ads Management made easier
For all our Microsoft Ads managers out there, we have a new and improved Account Dashboard UI.
Get a bird’s eye view of how your account is performing, instantly preview and schedule your reports, and filter your data in just a few clicks.
What if there was a voice that reminded us of our past errors and told us when we’re about to make a bad decision that’ll end badly for us?
The Potential Wasted Spend metric does just that. The new addition to the Account Level Placement Exclusion Optimization tool tells you how much you’re potentially wasting by having non-converting placements on your account.
2021 was an eventful year for Optmyzr. From launching new capabilities and tools to improving existing ones, we’ve been doing everything we can to help make advertisers’ lives easier.
We’re thankful to everybody that has been a part of this journey, and we hope that you continue to choose us to improve your PPC management experience.
Here are the major updates across 12 months.
New tools/features -
Segment Explorer
In the Google Analytics interface, it is difficult to view performance data for multiple segments at a time - say number of sessions coming from California from Males using a mobile device.
The Segment Explorer lets you view performance metrics for all your connected Google Analytics accounts for multiple dimensions combined at once.
The new Segment Scorer allows you to score your segments based on how well they perform once you get a conversion from them. You can assign a number between 1 (lowest) and 5 (highest).
Once we get enough scores from your team, we’ll use that data to suggest Conversion Value Rules that will help optimize your account’s performance by teaching Google’s automations (like those that handle bidding) more about what’s valuable to your business.
With Campaign Experiments, you can analyze the performance of active experiments across all your Google Ads accounts in one place. Find winning and losing experiments, and apply or end them in a single click.
Optmyzr compares your experiment and its original campaign based on statistically significant data to highlight whether the experiment is winning.
Utility Tools: New Auctions Insights Visualizer
The new Auction Insights Visualizer enables you to generate charts using the Google Ads auction insights data. As Auction Insights data is currently not available via the API, you can drop data files into the tool and use the data.
We’ve also added a chart visualization of the auction insights to help users understand how their competitors are performing.
Our senior Engineer, Shashank Tiwari, who built the tool, was also featured in a Search Engine Journal article highlighting the utility of the tool.
Create well-structured Shopping campaigns and get more control over how they re-sync.
You can now create Standard or Smart shopping campaigns based on ROAS or Price points using the Shopping Builder. The system will also help you keep them up to date by moving the products from one campaign to another, depending on their ROAS/Price points, every time the Refresher is run. Read more about this feature here
You will now be able to view Facebook data along with other platforms supported by Optmyzr. You can:
1. See live data for all platforms in one place.
2. Mark as favorite, add notes, tags, and calculated metrics to help you monitor the performance of your Facebook accounts on the MCC Dashboard.
Campaign Projected Gain in AB Testing tool for Google & Microsoft
The Campaign Projected Gain feature gives you the projected gain for a selected metric, using the ‘Find winners by’ filter. This is Optmyzr’s estimation if an ad copy is optimized as per the suggestions shown in the tool. For example, if you are searching for winner ads by CTR, Optmyzr will show you how many clicks you can gain by pausing the loser ads.
Rule Engine updates
Account Level Placement Exclusion in one click
One-click optimization for Account Level Placement Exclusion is now available under the Placements section.
If you’re running smart campaigns, this update is especially useful as these campaigns respect only account-level placement exclusions. You can identify non-converting placements and exclude them from your account in one click.
You can also create your customized strategies in Rule Engine to get a report of or exclude placements at the account level.
Bid adjustment changes - ad group and campaign level
At the ad group level, users can create customized rules to analyze performance at the device, demographic, and audience level and change bid adjustments based on performance. Read on for more details.
At the campaign level, you can apply bid adjustments by devices. Adjust Bids by Device.
SA360 conversion data supported in the Rule Engine
Search Ads 360 actions and transactions are available in the Rule Engine for linked Google Ads accounts. Use this to gain extra insight from SA360 actions/transactions to make informed decisions.
Optimize Budgets Across Platforms now pauses the campaigns of a budget group if their shared monthly target is reached, and re-enable them on the 1st of the next month.
This helps make sure your accounts do not overspend across Facebook, Google, and Microsoft Ads.
New Budget management Features for Microsoft Ads
Spend Projection: We’ve added a new tool to help you see spend projections for your accounts. The system analyzes spend data, historical seasonality, and recent performance to predict how much an account is likely to spend within a selected time period.
Optimize Budget: Another new tool added for Microsoft Ads is Optimize Budgets. Use this to analyze spend data and reallocate budgets to campaigns based on performance, impression share, or to reach a monthly target.
Campaign Automator is a standalone Optmyzr product that lets you build scalable, automated, and inventory-driven PPC campaigns.
Watch this webinar to know more about Campaign Automator capabilities.
Users can also create Responsive display ads for Display campaigns using Campaign Automator. Here’s how.
New UI for Account Dashboard Google ads:
Including new widgets and functionalities
Easy access to Pre Built Templates
View Quality Score data
Analyze PPC Investigator Chart
See your Audit Score and access full PPC audit report
Review your tasks due and overdue
Workflows
More control over Account Blueprints
We now support both scheduled (paused or active) and on-demand Account Blueprints. You can create a Blueprint without scheduling tasks and run them on demand. Also, now you can choose to pause a scheduled Blueprint to not create new task alerts.
Zapier Integration: Send blueprint tasks or alerts to your project management system
With Zapier you can integrate Optmyzr with almost anything. For example: You can now send tasks created by blueprints to your own CRM or project management system (like Salesforce, Asana, Basecamp, Trello, etc.).
Learn how you can integrate Blueprints or Alerts with Zapier. You can also watch one of our YouTube tutorials.
Alerts
New alerts for Facebook, Amazon, Quality Score
New alert types for additional platforms, functionalities, and metrics. These include:
Alerts for Amazon and Facebook
Alerts for Quality Score in Google Ads
Alerts for custom calculated metrics available via your MCC Dashboard
Support to get Rule Engine alerts on the Triggered alerts page on all platforms
You can now get alerts on the Triggered Alerts page based on Rule Engine suggestions, allowing you to see all alerts in one place.
Get alert notifications directly in Microsoft Teams
Apart from Slack, your team can now be notified directly in their Microsoft team account. Whenever an alert is triggered, your team will be notified on Microsoft Teams as part of the chat for the Optmyzr app.
Search terms (specifically ASINs) can now be added as Product Targets or Negative Product Targets using the Search Terms scope of Rule Engine for Amazon.
This new action allows for more granular filtering based on performance and lets you add ASIN search terms as positive or negative product targets accordingly.
Optmyzr Express for Amazon
Optmyzr Express is designed to work as a to-do list and lets you breeze through multiple optimization tasks in minutes! It shows you optimization suggestions across accounts based on predefined algorithms.
A new scope, Campaign Placements has been added in Rule Engine for Amazon Ads. It allows you to see your Amazon Ads performance based on campaign placements and adjust bids (by %) for the corresponding placements.
This improvement helps you adjust bids by placements in a more granular way than the Amazon Ads interface, as our Rule Engine lets you filter by any condition that suits your needs.
Yahoo! Japan
We have added support for Yahoo! Japan Ads across multiple tools:
Rule Engine (scopes - keywords, campaigns, ad groups, and device bid adjustments)
Hour of Week Bid Adjustments
Pause Non-Converting keywords
Negative Keyword Finder
Keyword lasso
URL Checker
Optmyzr also has its very own roadmap now, where users can view upcoming updates and suggest feature requests of their own.
View the Optmyzr product roadmap & make feature requests
Optmyzr now has our own Roadmap page where users can:
If you work in search marketing or PPC, change being the only constant is no cliché; it’s a way of life.
Few changes in recent memory top the news that PPC stalwarts WordStream will sunset their PPC management and optimization tool, WordStream Advisor. Free trials and registrations are longer available to new users, and current subscribers will lose access once the AdWords API is deprecated in April 2022.
WordStream users are now faced with two options – either sign up for managed services with WordStream’s sister brand LOCALiQ, or find a new PPC software provider. The first one isn’t viable for many agencies – it’s like paying someone else to do what you excel at – and the second is challenging for anyone.
We’ve welcomed dozens of former WordStream users to the Optmyzr community, both in recent weeks and throughout the past. With their help, we’ve identified some of the reasons you might want to consider Optmyzr as your next PPC software partner – including functionalities you relied on in WordStream and having a proven onboarding process.
Why Optmyzr Is The Ideal WordStream Replacement
Optmyzr’s PPC optimization and management software has been recognized by customers and awards judges for its track record of helping search marketers stay in control of campaigns, maximize the value of ad spend, and recover time spent on repetitive tasks.
If any of these describe you or your team, Optmyzr might be the right fit for your business:
Search marketers who aren’t satisfied with results that are “good enough”
Agencies, brands, consultants, or enterprise teams managing multiple ad accounts
Responsible for a monthly ad spend of at least $10,000
Growing businesses, marketing generalists seeking high-level PPC recommendations, and anyone managing budgets under five figures should consider our free tool.
Optmyzr Capabilities You Miss(ed) With WordStream
Complete support for all major ad types (search, shopping, display) on Google and Microsoft Ads
Reporting, budget, and alerts support for Facebook Ads with additional capabilities in development
High-level insights and alerts for budget management across all ad platforms
Fully customizable reports with automated delivery options
Third-party integrations for Zoho, Slack, Zapier, Microsoft Teams, and more
To help you make the right decision, we’ve weighed up the offerings from Optmyzr and WordStream.
WordStream vs. Optmyzr: Your Favorite Capabilities, Enhanced
We get it – WordStream was a fantastic software provider, and you relied on their array of tools and capabilities. Changing software is always tough, but we’ve made sure that you’ll be able to enjoy the same outcomes.
Here are two of the most popular ones loved by other customers who migrated from WordStream:
20-Minute Work Week & Optmyzr Express
One of the best-loved WordStream functionalities is the 20-Minute Work Week tool. You can replicate any workflows you currently run using Optmyzr Express, which is designed to help you complete key optimizations in minutes.
Optmyzr Express is designed as a to-do list for your PPC accounts, letting you breeze through the most impactful tasks over a cup of coffee (or tea). Using Optmyzr Express is a lot like going through your email every morning, except it’s less stressful to actually make progress.
View all optimizations available under Optmyzr Express, or watch a 2-minute walkthrough of how it works for ad optimization:
Query Stream & Keyword Lasso
Another important tool from WordStream Advisor that’s popular with our customers is Query Stream.
Optmyzr’s solution to help you discover new keyword opportunities is called Keyword Lasso, and it looks at your search terms report to find queries that convert well or have a high click-through rate.
Check out this YouTube playlist to learn about some of our other capabilities to help you optimize keywords and search terms.
WordSteam Users Stop “Pulling Out Their Hair” When They Join Optmyzr
David McElligott from McElligott Digital Marketing LLC is one of several customers who signed up for Optmyzr following the sunset announcement from WordStream. In his words, here’s why he has no regrets:
“We’re definitely liking Optmyzr as a whole thus far; the difference from WordStream feels like night and day. Optmyzr gives me insights faster and easier, and I feel like we can really dive deeper into our client accounts without pulling out our hair.
“I was initially concerned about the leap in price between the two platforms, but since WordStream decided to abandon all its DIY users and only offer their own management, they tied my hands. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. The insights and the time saved are worth the ticket price.”
You Can Do More With Optmyzr, We Can Help
Switching software providers in the middle of active campaigns can be tiresome, but if you decide that Optmyzr is the right replacement for WordStream Advisor, we have a proven system to help new customers feel at home quickly.
Support for Onboarding And Beyond
We know the value of great customer support, which is why our team will be there to help you navigate the transition to our product. With Optmyzr, you’ll always have:
Complete control of your ad accounts
Dedicated, customized onboarding calls
Support and assistance in hours, not days or weeks
Stress-free assurance for ongoing API support
Ability to integrate any custom business data
Contract-free subscription with the option to cancel anytime
Additionally, you’ll get access to our goal-based onboarding guides that show you what tools in Optmyzr to focus on, and product tours and video walkthroughs to reduce the amount of time you need to be comfortable with our tools.
Having already had customers move from WordStream to Optmyzr, we understand the anxieties and requirements of a user who’s making a switch. Some of the first steps include:
If you still have questions or want to see a demo, write to our support team or drop us a message via our contact form. Like we said, we’ve got your back.
Despite its many iterations, the nature of search advertising remains the same: spend money to get your ads seen by the people most likely to click on them and give you a sale. But what happens when you don’t target the right keywords or audiences, or when you get plenty of clicks but they don’t convert at a good rate?
Budget bleeding is one of the most common PPC problems, affecting even the most seasoned account managers and strategists. While no account can realistically hit 100% efficiency, you can take steps to create as little wastage as possible.
Best Practices to Reduce Costs
Wastage in paid search can be broken down into two major categories:
Going beyond your prescribed budget: When you spend more than you or your client have allocated, there’s a chance it doesn’t go to the right places.
Serving ads that get clicks but not conversions: When your ads get clicks without converting, you’re giving platforms money while getting nothing in return.
In either scenario, the advertiser is investing money that doesn’t generate the returns it should.
Some of the common causes of overspending and low-converting ads include:
Not having an alert system for budgets
Managing multi-platform budgets separately
Failing to filter out irrelevant traffic (high clicks, no conversions)
Universal bid strategy with no adjustments
Low-quality or broken landing page experience
Tracking Your Progress
As with any outcome, it’s important to use performance indicators both in and beyond the ad platforms to see how much progress you’re making.
We recommend tracking the following metrics at different stages of your cost reduction effort.
Beginner Metrics
Click-through Rate
Conversion Rate
Beginner metrics are for when you want an initial lift. Use these as indicators of progress while you pause or reduce bids for keywords generating clicks without conversions, exclude placements leading to wasted spend, add negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic, and improve your landing pages.
Track these intermediate metrics after achieving some degree of growth. They will show you whether your efforts to optimize ad text/creatives and pause underperforming ads are working.
Advanced Metrics
Cost Per Acquisition
Customer Acquisition Cost
Last but not least, our recommended advanced metrics help you better understand if your bid adjustments are resulting in more efficient overall spend. Track these metrics when your campaign is running like a well-oiled machine.
Display campaigns in pay-per-click advertising are some of the most eye-catching ads you can run (when they’re done right). The Google Display Network (GDN) is a series of placements across Google properties and the web that helps you promote your business by showing creatives as people browse, watch YouTube videos, check their Gmail, or use their mobile devices and apps.
Google Display Network is designed to help you find the right audience, with targeting options that let you show your message to potential customers in the right place and at the right time. Use audience targeting or remarketing audience lists to find new prospects, or work with automated targeting.
Some of the ad subtypes you can run on Google Display Network include:
Responsive Display Ads: A combination of ad text, images, and logos. Google uses a machine learning model to determine the optimal combination of assets for each ad slot based on predictions built from your performance history.
Uploaded Image Ads: You can upload ads as images in different sizes or HTML5, for more control.
Engagement Ads: Run engaging image and video ads on YouTube and across the Display Network.
Gmail Ads: Show expandable ads on the top tabs of people’s inboxes.
Types of Display Campaigns
Display campaigns are a great way to expand the reach of your Search ads to other parts of the web. They also allow you to follow up with remarketing ads to new and existing customers.
Standard Display: You get full control over targeting the right audience, bids and budgets for your display campaigns, and ad creation. However, the time investment for setup and monitoring is significantly higher.
Smart Display: You don’t have to set up targeting for Smart Display campaigns, which automatically optimize your targeting, based on the campaign goal. Automated targeting uses website visitors, landing page insights, and your search campaigns’ best performing keywords to automatically target customers across the web.
Targeting for Standard Display Campaigns
Google Display Network’s targeting helps show ads to your preferred audience types – people who you think will be interested in your business or products. You can set targeting for your ad groups to show your ads to a certain type of people e.g. US residents aged 21-30 or female residents of the European Union (read more).
Different ways of targeting include:
Audience Targeting is for when you want your ads to be seen by a particular audience. This can be achieved using remarketing or customer match lists, affinity audience, or demographic targeting.
Contextual targeting is for when you wish to target a certain type of content. You can target keywords or topics in your ad groups.
To increase the impact of a particular targeting setting, bid higher on them. For example, if you’d like to make sure that your ads are shown to females of age 25-34 more, you can bid higher on this targeting option.
About Optimized Targeting
Optimized Targeting helps your campaign explore customers who have the highest likelihood to convert based on your campaign goal – sales, leads, brand awareness, etc. If you set up targeting for your ad groups, these targets are used by Google to find similar criteria to serve your ads on.
1. Set the right goal. Your goal will help you determine what topic or which audience you should target. Display campaigns can help you:
Promote your brand
Generate product awareness
Increase sales
Get more leads
2. Target the right audience (Standard Display). Connecting to customers at the right place and right time boosts visibility and the likelihood of getting conversions. Show relevant ads to customers by setting up contextual targets or using placements. Control the appearance of your ads by optimizing for demographics, locations, and schedules.
3. Use both Responsive Display Ads and Image Ads. These get the best results, rather than Image Ads alone. Best practice recommends that advertisers follow these guidelines while creating:
4. Set bids and budgets. Display campaigns can be set to run on manual bid adjustments or Smart Bidding strategies, depending on their goal. If you want to focus on impressions, consider Viewable CPM bidding. To get more clicks, consider Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks bidding. Aiming for conversions? Run your campaigns with Target CPA or Target ROAS. Display campaigns support custom bids for a particular target in each ad group.
5. Adjust bids for targets (Standard Display). You can set bid adjustments when your campaigns are running the Manual/Enhanced CPC or Viewable CPM bidding strategies. Bid adjustments can be set at the campaign level (for devices, times, days, and locations) and can also be used to bid more competitively for specific targeting methods (keywords, audiences, demographics, topics, or placements) in your ad groups.
13 Tips & A Checklist for Better Display Campaigns with Optmyzr
1. Create Responsive Display Adsfor Smart and standard display campaigns. You can create Display campaigns with responsive display ads in Google Ads account using Campaign Automator - a stand-alone tool by Optmyzr. Campaign Automator helps you to dynamically create, edit or pause ads based on your input source file. Check out this video about Campaign Automator.
2. Tweak campaign-level targets for Smart and standard display campaigns. Rule Engine can help you increase, decrease or set targets at the campaign level, based on the performance of your campaigns. If your campaigns are running on Portfolio strategies then Rule Engine will not make any change to the campaign level tCPA or tROAS.
3. Tweak ad group-level targets for Smart and standard display campaigns. You can set up Rule Engine strategies and automate them to run on fixed intervals and make changes to the ad group targets based on the performance. If the campaign is running on Target CPA or Target ROAS Portfolio strategy, you can still tweak the ad group targets using Rule Engine.
4. Modify CPC and CPM bids at the ad group level for standard display campaigns. You can create Rule Engine strategies to make changes to the ad group level bids based on the performance data.
5. Optimize your budgets. You can analyze how much the budgets linked to your display campaigns are going to spend by the end of a selected time period, using Spend Projection. At the same time, you can use Optimize Budgets to reallocate budgets across campaigns in order to meet the target budget. You can also set up a Flexible Budget script to make sure your display campaigns do not overspend, and at the same time use Reach Target Monthly Spend script to ensure you reach the target budget.
6. Update dayparts and apply bid adjustments for standard display campaigns. You can use Hour of Week Analysis to analyze the performance of display campaigns for a given time period and find out which day of the week and hour of the day gets you the most conversions or highest traffic. You can then use this information to make bid adjustments and edit dayparts using Hour of Week Bid Adjustments
7. Exclude locations and apply bid adjustments for standard display campaigns.Geo HeatMap offers a quick visualization of how much traffic do different cities, regions, countries drive for your campaigns. You can also choose to apply bid adjustments based on the bid modifier recommendations on Geo Bid Adjustments tool. You can also use Rule Engine to apply bid adjustments or exclude locations from the campaign.
8. Adjust bids by audience and device for standard display campaigns. Audience bid adjustments can be applied to both targeted and observed audiences, using the bid modifier recommendations from the Audience Bid adjustment. And, device bid modifications can be applied using Device bid adjustment tool. You can also use Rule Engine to create a strategy and apply changes. In order to exclude a device, you can apply a bid adjustment of -100% using Rule Engine. These bid adjustments also apply only to standard display campaigns.
9. Apply bid adjustment to age range and gender for standard display campaigns. You can create your strategy using Rule Engine to apply bid adjustments for gender and age range at the ad group level. We do not support the exclusion of demographics in the tool.
10. Manage placements for Smart and standard display campaigns.Display Placement Exclusion is a simple and quick way to identify your non-performing placements and exclude them from standard display campaigns. We also have optimizations to help you exclude placements at the account level – essentially the only way you can manage placements for Smart Display campaigns. You can also create custom optimizations using Rule Engine.
11. Set mobile app exclusions for display campaigns. You can quickly identify all mobile apps that are not converting for you and exclude them from the ad groups in standard display campaigns. You can even customize the Rule Engine strategy based on your requirements. You can create a similar strategy and run it at the account level to exclude mobile apps from all your campaigns; including smart display campaigns.
12. Manage bids for placementsin standard display campaigns. If you want to manage bids for your added placements, you can enable custom bid for the placements in an ad group (in Google Ads) and then add placements to the ad group with the required CPC bid using Rule Engine. This will update the bids for the existing placements, only if the campaign runs on the CPC bid.
13. Manage bids for display keywords in standard display campaigns. Display campaigns support custom bid for targeting methods, users can choose to support custom bid for one type of targeting method in an ad group. If you choose to allow custom bids for keywords, you can then use Rule Engine to change the bids for your keywords based on the performance data. This is applicable for campaigns running on eCPC and vCPM.
Manage Display Campaigns: A Handy Checklist
Using our PPC project management tool Account Blueprints, you can create and save a plan to help manage display campaigns. You can see a sample approach below, and the Blueprint is available in our account as “Optimize Display Campaigns in Optmyzr”.
Watch a brief walkthrough to build your own Blueprints for display campaign management (or anything else).
So much of our progress in November was centered on making Black Friday Cyber Monday more fruitful for our users. We added new controls for placements with Smart Shopping, included more Facebook Ads data, and provided the first step to better Conversion Value Rules suggestions.
Here’s a roundup of all the key changes to Optmyzr and Campaign Automator during November 2021.
Make account-level placement exclusions.
You can now exclude placements at the account level using Rule Engine. Use this for Smart Shopping and Smart Display campaigns which only respect account-level exclusions.
In the Rule Engine, add a new strategy and navigate to Optimize Placements > Exclude non-converting placements from account.
Apart from Slack, your team can now be notified directly in Microsoft Teams. Whenever one of your alerts is triggered, your team will be notified there as part of the chat for the Optmyzr app.
You can now view campaign performance for Facebook Ads in the Optimize Budgets Across Platforms tool, and use conversion data to decide if you’d like to change campaign budgets. Remember, you need to set up a client group before you can use this tool.
You’re also able to view all your platforms, including Facebook Ads, at once in the MCC:
1. See live data for all platforms together
2. Star, add notes, tags, and calculated metrics to help you monitor the performance of select Facebook Ads accounts
Get aggregate performance data for identical ads.
The ads widget in our Reporting tool will now show summarized data for an ad in different ad groups or campaigns. Analyze the performance of an ad while looking at a single row, rather than searching across campaigns or ad groups.
Auto-skip to next Blueprints task if no suggestions are available.
If there are no suggestions available in Account Blueprints during a particular task, you can choose to skip to the next one. The task will be marked as complete, and will respect all other tool settings in any Blueprint.
BONUS: Score audience segments to get Conversion Value Rules suggestions.
Our new Segment Scorer allows you to rate Segments based on how well they perform when you get a conversion from them. You do this by assigning a number between 1 (lowest) and 5 (highest).
Once we get enough scores from your team, we’ll use that data to suggest Conversion Value Rules that will help optimize your account’s performance by teaching Google’s automations (like those that handle bidding) more about what’s valuable to your business.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
Classic paid search was about controlling levers. New age PPC is about monitoring automation.
Google Ads is increasingly moving to automate many parts of its complex machine. Bidding, targeting, and even parts of the ad text experience are either fully or partly automated.
Smart Shopping is one of the more popular automations Google currently offers, and takes the bidding and micromanagement out of shopping ads. On the flip side, advertisers who think they can hand things over to Google once and get the results they want will be in for a shock.
While you may not control the bid strategy and adjustments with Smart Shopping, you can (and should) optimize many other parts of it: your campaign structure, merchant feed, and budgets are all still within your control.
Let’s take a look at how to work with Smart Shopping to drive the results you need while enjoying the convenience you want.
Best Practices to Optimize Smart Shopping
From our experience working with hundreds of advertisers as well as expert teams from the ad platforms, we’ve compiled a list of 14 recommendations for account managers and strategists new to Smart Shopping:
Get 20-30 manual conversions over the past 45 days across existing shopping campaigns and an audience list of at least 100 users before deploying Smart Shopping. The more historical conversion data you start with, the easier it will be to work with this automation.
Enable dynamic remarketing on your website.
Enable conversion tracking and assign values for transactions.
Try to regain as much control as possible with the tools that are available.
Never adopt a ‘set-and-forget’ approach to Smart Shopping campaigns. Use alerts to know when intervention is needed and optimize periodically as you acquire new data.
Make sure your feed is in good shape. Polish your product titles, make sure product descriptions are robust, and carefully select images. Google uses this information to build your ads.
Use multiple campaigns to club together products of similar characteristics or performance. For instance, create separate Smart Shopping campaigns for different:
prices or ROAS targets to avoid Google from exhausting the campaign budget on easy, low-value conversions
stages of the product life-cycle
product margins to include real business goals in planning
Alternately, follow Google’s recommendation to include all products in one campaign and keep tracking their performance to understand which products are being advertised on. As always, testing and close observation are highly recommended.
Be cautious about advertising the same products in multiple campaigns, as Smart Shopping will be prioritized over standard ones.
Keep an eye on the campaign-level Target ROAS and the actual ROAS. If you’re new to shopping campaigns altogether, consider defining a Target ROAS after 30-45 days at the earliest to avoid limiting initial data collection. Setting up a target that cannot be reached, results in your ads not being shown in the first place.
Exclude low-performing, high-cost product groups to steer resources towards better-performing product groups.
Be hawkish with budgets. This is one of the few things you can actually fully control on Smart Shopping, so take advantage.
Test, tweak targets, and compare performance to previously run standard shopping campaigns (if you have any).
Make seasonality adjustments to avoid sudden spikes in cost.
Tracking Your Progress
As with any outcome, it’s important to use performance indicators both in and beyond the ad platforms to see how much progress you’re making. Optmyzr recommends tracking the following metrics at different stages of your efforts to optimize Smart Shopping.
Beginner metrics
Beginner metrics are for when you want an initial lift.
Impression, Impression Share & Total Eligible Impressions: Know whether your ads are showing.
Conversions & Conversion Tracking: Make sure you’re feeding the algorithm the most accurate data possible. Beware of tracking multiple conversion actions as separate conversions e.g., ‘add to cart’ and ‘purchase.’
Click Share: Know how many clicks your campaign received out of all the clicks it was eligible to receive.
Click-through Rate: A low CTR may be an indicator of an unoptimized feed. Actual ROAS/Conversion Value: Understand how your products are performing and set a realistic Target ROAS.
Intermediate Metrics
You want to start tracking these intermediate metrics after achieving some degree of growth.
Daily Ad Spend vs. Target ROAS: Make sure scaling happens in a sustainable way.
Make sure your campaigns aren’t underspending and settling for achieving the set target.
Reinvest some of the ROAS in your campaigns at the scaling stage. As your campaign reaches its Target ROAS, simply increasing your budget doesn’t lead to scale.
Actual ROAS/Conversion Value: View these numbers by campaign, product group, or product to identify low-ROAS products.
Advanced metrics are for when your campaign is running like a well-oiled machine.
Cost Per Acquisition: Determine whether the cost of your conversions is within an acceptable range.
Target ROAS & Actual ROAS: Keep your target and actual figures close to each other and scale them bit by bit for sustained growth, rather than bursts of performance.
Click-through Rate & Conversion Rate: Monitor these during remarketing to pursue website visitors. Both numbers should increase.
Conclusion
In August 2021, Google Ads introduced Value Rules, giving advertisers better control over their Smart Shopping campaigns. While this isn’t and should not be used as a complete replacement of bid adjustments, it still allows for more control by allowing you to adjust conversion values. You can read all about Value Rules and how to use it here.
If you’re still not convinced about using Smart Shopping over Standard Shopping, you can read about different use cases to help you better understand which campaign type works best for your needs.
Our Q4 kickoff revolved around one core objective: making life less stressful and more manageable for PPC experts.
Here’s a roundup of all the key changes to Optmyzr and Campaign Automator during October 2021.
More actionable Slack notifications
A few months ago, we made it so you could receive alert notifications in Slack. Today, those notifications also include:
More information on current and target values
Links to Optmyzr tools that help you fix the issue or investigate further.
BONUS: You can also opt to receive notifications in Microsoft Teams. Here’s how.
Set conditions to stop automated report delivery.
Report automation makes sure your clients and stakeholders get timely performance updates. But sometimes, performance can be unusual and warrant further context.
To prevent misunderstandings instead of needing to clear them up, you can now set thresholds where an automated report will not be sent as previously scheduled.
If these conditions are met (e.g. conversions < 1,000), the report will be sent only to the schedule owner on your team. If they are not met, the report will be sent as usual to all recipients.
Use this feature to prevent reports from going out when additional context is required for unusual performance.
Visit the Report Schedule page, then select ‘Edit Schedule’ from the vertical bar next to any scheduled report. Conditions will be at the bottom and are set to none by default.
Monitor alerts for conversion metrics in Facebook.
Facebook and Apple might be at loggerheads, but you shouldn’t get caught in the crossfire. To give you sharper eyes your Facebook Ads campaigns, you can set up custom alerts at the account or campaign level for the following KPIs:
Conversions
Conversion Value
Conv. Value/Click
Conv. Value/Cost
You can also choose to notify multiple team members or redirect your own notifications to avoid clutter.
Get more control over how Shopping campaigns re-sync.
You can now change the Price/ROAS ranges and conversion thresholds for shopping campaigns created in Optmyzr via the Shopping Refresher tool or in automation schedules. There are some limitations and extensions to this update:
1. You can adjust ROAS ranges but not the number of campaigns.
2. Conversion thresholds can be changed in ROAS build-outs.
3. Price ranges can be changed in Price build-outs.
Search advertising is typically easier when you have deep pockets. But even small and growing businesses can and do compete by making smart, calculated decisions that give them the most value from their ad spend.
One of the easiest ways to measure whether your decisions are providing the desired financial outcomes is ROAS – return on ad spend. This metric is calculated by ad platforms as your total Conversion Value divided by how much you spent on Ads.
The Best Way to Improve Your ROAS
You can improve your ROAS in two ways:
Increase conversion value
Decrease costs
But it’s not really an either/or situation. Here’s why: Increasing conversion value without any real reason just creates an artificially high ROAS. And while you can do things to decrease costs – like spend most of your budget on profitable campaigns – lowering your ad spend or CPC bids too much leads to your ads being seen less frequently.
So the best practice in optimizing to improve ROAS is a combination of keeping costs in check while also making sure your ad is seen as often as possible by the right audiences. And it starts with the profit margin on the products being advertised.
Trying to unearth and piece together different data sets to identify key problem areas can be a long and tedious process. But you can find out why your ROAS is trending in the wrong direction in just a few minutes using the Optmyzr PPC Investigator. The tool displays a ‘Cause Chart’ indicating exact areas of wasted spend, overinvestment, and other underlying causes of lower-than-ideal ROAS.
Calculating your breakeven ROAS
Once you have a number for your profit margin, the next step is to figure out your break-even ROAS.
This is usually calculated as 1 divided by the profit margin in percentage form. So a 50% profit margin would yield a break-even ROAS of 200%:
You make $50 in profit on a $100 conversion
At a ROAS of 200%, you spend $50 on ads to make a $100 sale
All of your $50 margin goes towards the cost of advertising
As you spend less per conversion and your ROAS goes up, more of your margin stays in the bank instead of going to Google or Facebook. In the same example, a ROAS of 400% means only $25 of your margin goes to ad spend.
So while a 200% ROAS might look profitable on paper, it doesn’t necessarily mean your business is making money.
Maximizing Profits with Optimal ROAS Target
Finding the optimal ROAS target to maximize profits involves a series of cost-reduction optimizations including:
Limiting or eliminating overspending
Prioritizing profitable campaigns
Grouping products with similar margins together
Adding expensive, non-converting terms as negative keywords
Fine-tuning targeting or bid adjustments
Remember, there’s usually a tradeoff between ROAS and volumes. Generally, it’s difficult to achieve high numbers for both, so high-volume conversions tend to have a lower ROAS and vice versa.
Tracking Your ROAS Improvement
As with any outcome, it’s important to use performance indicators both in and beyond the ad platforms to see how much progress you’re making.
We recommend tracking the following metrics at different stages of your ROAS-improving effort.
Beginner Stage
Beginner metrics are for when you want an initial lift. At this stage, you want to track Conversions, Click-through Rate, Conversion Rate, and Quality Score.
These beginner metrics give you an idea of whether your conversions are growing as you optimize at a stage where reducing ad spend is rarely an option.
Intermediate Stage
These are the metrics you want to start tracking after achieving some degree of growth: Cost, Views, Clicks, Impressions, Cost Per Acquisition, Cost Per Click, Cost Per View.
Tracking these intermediate metrics is ideal for when you start to look at your account performance at a more granular level and begin the process of reducing how much you spend on each user.
Advanced Stage
Finally, when your campaign is running like a well-oiled machine you want to track Lifetime Value, Conversion Rate by Channel, Absolute TopImpression Share.
The advanced metrics help you better understand PPC’s contribution to the business on a level that goes beyond advertising, and help you optimize when factors like brand awareness and loyalty are relevant.
More on Managing ROAS
When your PPC account is performing well and receives a significant financial boost, it can be difficult to maintain returns. Here’s what you can do.
We at Optmyzr also have various tools including our pre-built Rule Engine strategy to manage bids to a target ROAS. Get in touch with our customer support team and we’d be happy to help!
Going beyond ROAS
ROAS is an important metric, but at the end of the day it is a metric set by Google and it might not always correspond with your bigger business goals. Take a look at what industry experts have to say about this here.
The behavior of your PPC budget is crucial to getting your strategy right, and the new Budget Report in Google Ads helps. With it, you can view daily spend, monthly spend limit for your campaigns, monthly spend forecast, cost to date, and any changes you may have made in between.
Optmyzr goes a step ahead with our Spend Projection Tool by analyzing your spend data, historical seasonality, and recent performance to predict how much an account is likely to spend by the end of a selected time period.
Here are some of the advantages our tool provides over Google’s Budget Report.
Adjust Target Budgets Based on Performance Insights
With Optmyzr, you can set up an account-level target through the Pro Dashboard, and then analyze and update daily budgets for campaigns. You can then select one or more campaigns in the Spend Projection tool to see how much more you need to spend in order to reach that target.
Being able to set target budgets based on these insights is advantageous because the projection is not limited by the budget you set for a campaign on Google. You can set any target and then push your daily budget to achieve it.
Reach a Target Budget with the Optimize Budgets Tool
Spend Projection isn’t just the only tool we have that helps users get their budgets working exactly how they want. The Optimize Budgets Tool, which helps you actually achieve targets, identifies campaigns that are losing out on Impression Share due to budget constraints. With that information, you can choose how aggressively you wish to spend. You can also reallocate your budget to high-performing campaigns, allowing you to get the most value out of your PPC dollars.
Spend Projection and Optimize Budgets together allow you to not just view spend behavior, but set target budgets and also meet them to maximize your performance. All very handy when budgets will be significantly impacted due to prevailing issues with the global supply chain.
Get Insights Based on Historical Performance
Spend Projection uses both trends and historical data. These are the factors that are included:
1. Day of the Week
Optmyzr studies day-by-day spend behavior when calculating your spend projection. So if you have a pattern of not showing ads on Saturdays or Sundays, the tool takes that into consideration.
2. Weekly and Yearly Seasonality
Weekly and yearly seasonality are considered in two ways: consistency over the past few years or since the account has been active, whichever is earlier.
For yearly projection, we take into consideration multiple years of spend data.
For Microsoft Ads, we look at the latest trends for individual campaigns instead of past years’ historical data at the account level.
Previous years’ data will be considered only if a common trend is identified, such as a sharp increase at the start of November ahead of BFCM.
3. Seasonality and Spend Patterns
Spend Projection doesn’t consider ad schedules, or bids by demographics and devices, except seasonality and spend patterns.
If there is no correlation or if your account has insufficient data, we will consider data from the past several weeks to predict spend.
All this information can help run better Campaign Experiments – also the name of our latest tool that now makes it possible for PPC managers to keep track of experimental campaigns as they’re being tested.
Get More Control of Budgets & Spending
Spend Projection and Optimize Budgets help thousands of PPC agencies and end advertisers understand how their budgets impact account- and campaign-level spend behavior, and then give them the tools to put money in the right places at the right pace.
Start a 2-week free trial of Optmyzr and you’ll also get the tools you need to bring in better traffic by optimizing keywords, ad text, display placements, and more.
Google Ads experiments are a great way to test ideas, hypotheses, and changes before applying them to existing Search and Display campaigns. But there are some issues with managing campaign experiments via the Google Ads interface:
If you’re an agency running experiments for multiple accounts, you have to remember which client you were running a particular experiment for. You have to go to the right account and sort out the one you were looking for from the multiple experiments you’re running for them.
Google only tells you that a particular campaign has an experiment running. There’s no way to know which experiment it was or what changes you had made.
Google doesn’t warn you when you make any changes to a campaign that has an experiment running. Say you want to run an experiment on Smart Bidding; you pick a campaign and set up the experiment, but your control campaign still lives in the ads interface. Now, if you put in a new keyword, a negative keyword, new geo-targeting, etc., in the control campaign, it all happens in isolation from the experiment. Google doesn’t warn you that this might pollute your experiment.
For now, Optmyzr serves to fix things from an MCC perspective. So if you’re an agency, you can see all the experiments you’re running for multiple accounts in one place. The tool gives you better insights into the experiments you’re running, what’s complete and what’s not.
What our Campaign Experiments tool does
With the Campaign Experiments tool, you can view and analyze the performance of your Google Ads experiments across all your Google Ads accounts and use the comparative information to decide between either keeping the campaign experiment(s) or ending them.
Campaign Experiments Capabilities
1. Sorting
Once you’ve selected the accounts and experiments you want to see, you can see if your Campaign Experiment is trending in the right direction. You can also sort the table to view the highest performing experiment or check out which experiments are getting you the highest lift in CTR.
2. Expand the Experiment Row for More Details
You can expand the experiment row for more details by clicking on the account name. You’ll see the original campaign on which the experiment is running, check out all the performance metrics, and see the confidence level regarding how successful the experiment is, if at all.
Performance Details
The metrics show you how they are performing as compared to the original campaign. The value under a metric is the current performance of the experiment for the given date range, and below it is the difference between the original campaign performance and the experiment’s performance in number and percentage.
Confidence Level Based on Performance
The confidence levels in green suggest a positive trend, in red as negative and no color being neutral, which means there is no clear indication of the experiment being successful yet.
The confidence level is calculated by comparing experiments against their original campaigns. Based on statistically significant data, it is determined if the experiment has a better chance of being a successful campaign, based on the metrics like CTR, Conversion Rate, Conversion Impression, Revenue Impression, Revenue Cost, or CPA.
3. Applying Changes to Google Ads
With the “Apply to Google Ads” button, you’ll have three options:
Update original campaign: Selecting this would make changes to your original campaign to reflect the changes made in the campaign experiment.
Convert to a new campaign: This will add your experiment to a new Google Ads campaign with the same budget as your original campaign.
End experiment: If the experiment is not successful, you can end it using this option.
Run Winning Experiments with Optmyzr Processes
With Google rolling out new automations every other week, getting experiments to run smoothly has become paramount. Instead of monitoring individual performance metrics, you can manage all the experiments across accounts in one place.
An iterative process like the Campaign Experiments tool helps you set the process in place and run things smoothly.
See for yourself how easy it is to track your Google Ads experiments. Get access to Campaign Experiments and all our other tools by starting your 14-day free trial now!
It’s been a busy quarter for us at Optmyzr, building PPC tools that help save time and hassle. From keeping up with keyword match type updates to capabilities that will serve you well in the years to come, we’ve got plenty to share.
So here are all the major updates to Optmyzr from the past 3 months. Let’s look at some of the big ticket items from this past quarter, and you can find the full list of other fixes and improvements below that. Just click the menu items on the left side to navigate easily!
Track your testing easily with Campaign Experiments.
Tracking your PPC experiments through Google Ads can be annoying. The interface doesn’t allow you to easily track test campaigns, their changes, or even remind you that you have any running.
Campaign Experiments in Optmyzr goes a long way in solving those challenges, and we’re only getting started with it.
Now you can analyze the performance of active experiments across all your Google Ads accounts. Find winning and losing experiments, and apply or end them in a single click.
Optmyzr compares your experiment and its original campaign based on statistically significant data to highlight whether the experiment is winning.
This feature is now live for all subscribers on one of our currently listed plans. If you’re on one of our older plans, contact support to find out how to get access.
Dig deeper into Analytics data with the Segment Explorer.
Google Analytics makes it difficult to view performance data for multiple audience segments at a time – like sessions from male users via mobile in the US.
Introducing the Segment Explorer, our latest tool that lets you view performance metrics for all your connected Google Analytics accounts for multiple dimensions combined at once. Segment Explorer allows you to add different audience segments to your view data in a straightforward way.
Please note that not all combinations of segments (dimensions) are allowed through the API. Selecting an invalid combination will display an error message.
Get involved with our product on the Optmyzr Roadmap.
Optmyzr now has our own Roadmap page to further align our plans for our software with what PPC managers and strategists actually want. On this page, you can:
View our product roadmap
Make feature requests
View other people’s requests
Vote and comment on items
Go there now to make a request, vote on what others have asked for, and to see what’s made the cut to become part of our plans!
Updates from September 2021
1. New-look account dashboard
Introducing a brand new design and functionalities on the Account Dashboard for better and faster visualization. New capabilities include:
See changes in account PPC audit score and get info on grades for different levels (campaign, keywords, etc)
See data based on campaign type, bid strategy, or campaign groups; select any of these new filters in the left-side menu
Top elements get extended into a full table to see all data for more metrics
View and run Blueprints tasks that are due and overdue for your account
2. Download white-label PDFs of Quality Score Tracker data.
This new feature allows you to easily download and share all information available in the Quality Score Tracker. Click the download icon on the top right, and select ‘Save PDF’.
3. Edit the schedule owner for your reports
You can now change the owners for report schedules for Google Ads, Amazon Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads – either one at a time or in bulk.
This feature is only available if you are the owner of your team’s account.
4. See difference in performance in KPI Widgets
You can now see the total numeric difference between two periods being compared in KPI widgets. Change value is indicated with corresponding arrow signs.
This is available for use with Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Amazon Ads, and Facebook Ads accounts.
5. Pick multiple values in the Rule Engine
The Rule Engine now supports multiple values when applying the “contains”, “does not contain” and “ignore case” conditions.
Search for multiple values of an attribute rather than creating separate conditions for each one.
6. Adjust bids by campaign placement for Amazon Ads
You can now see Amazon Ads performance based on placements and adjust bids (by %) for corresponding placements.
For Sponsored Products, adjustments can be made for Top of Search and Product Pages placements.
For Sponsored Brands, adjustments can be made for All Placements below Top of Search.
This improvement helps you adjust bids by placements in a more granular way than the Amazon Ads interface, as our Rule Engine lets you filter by any condition that suits your needs.
Updates from July & August 2021
New in the Rule Engine
1. SA360 conversion data now supported in the Rule Engine
Search Ads 360 actions and transactions are available in the Rule Engine for linked Google Ads accounts. Use this to gain extra insight from SA360 actions/transactions to make informed decisions. Learn More
2. Find text anywhere in ads with the Rule Engine
We added the ‘Any headline/description/path’ to Rule Engine strategies for ads.
You can now easily search for specific text anywhere in your ad instead of creating separate conditions for headline, description or path. This new attribute looks for your selected text in all components at once.
3. Add multiple values to Rule Engine conditions
We’ve added the operators ‘In’ and ‘Not In’ to the Rule Engine. This lets you create or modify rules without having to create multiple conditions using ‘Is’ or ‘Is Not’.
4. Quickly find restricted keywords in Rule Engine
We added the Serving Status attribute to the Rule Engine to help you easily identify keywords in your account with low search query volume.
New in PPC Investigator
1. Easily compare to same period of previous month in Optmyzr
Reporting widgets and PPC Investigator now support the “same period previous month” option to compare data sets.
If you now wish to compare performance data from August 1-6 with data from July 1-6, simply select this option instead of a custom date range.
New for Optimizing Ads
1. Filter by ad count when you use A/B Testing
You can now filter by ad count in the A/B Testing for Ads tool. View only those ad groups with fewer/more than a specific number of ads, or apply a range.
You no longer need to struggle to identify single keyword ad groups, or ones with a certain number of ads in them.
2. Find and label ads with low CTR
We added a new pre-built strategy in the Rule Engine to help you find ads that have a click-through rate lower than the ad group average.
Go to Rule Engine > Optimize Ads > Find Ads with Low CTR to identify and label these ads.
New for Optimizing Keywords
1. Pause keywords with low QS in Google Ads
A new Rule Engine strategy is available: Monitor Quality Score Components for Keywords.
This strategy suggests keywords with a low QS (<3) and/or low-ranked QS components, allowing you to pause them with a click. You can also add labels to these keywords to analyze and resolve issues.
2. See keywords on automated bidding that aren’t making the first page
The First Page Bridger now shows you keywords on automated bidding that aren’t making it to the first page. While you still can’t adjust bids for these keywords, you can use the information to make other decisions.
And because the list of keywords opens up in the Rule Engine, you can automate this check to occur as often as you need it to.
New for Optimizing Budgets
1. Impression Share metrics added for multi-platform budgets
Four new Impression Share metrics have been added to the Optimize Budgets Across Platforms tool:
Search IS lost (budget)
Search IS lost (rank)
Display IS lost (budget)
Display IS lost (rank)
2. See impression share lost due to rank when optimizing budgets
Recent IS Loss (Rank) has been added to the Optimize Budget tool, along with Recent IS Loss (Budget). View both and make informed decisions when optimizing your Google Ads budget.
3. More control to limit multi-platform overspending
Optimize Budgets Across Platforms now pauses the campaigns of a budget group if their shared monthly target is reached, and re-enables them on the 1st of the next month.
New for Managing Workflows
1. Contextual help to improve your PPC Audit grade
We’ve added additional contextual help to each widget section when you review your PPC Audit report.
You’ll see a brief explanation of why we recommend certain fixes, additional context from Google Ads, and tips on which tool in Optmyzr can help you improve your audit grade.
2. Send audit reports in a click
There’s now a faster way to share reports from the PPC Audits tool. Just use the new ‘send email’ button without needing to schedule delivery.
3. Snooze tasks that aren’t a priority
Getting suggestions you don’t want to see? You can now snooze tasks in the suggestions sidebar on the MCC dashboard for a day, a week, a month, or a year.
The task will no longer show or be counted toward the total suggestions for that account. It will still be available in-tool, in Optmyzr Express, and for other users in the team.
4. Get Slack alerts for Rule Engine strategies
If you have Slack integration enabled, you can now set up alerts when your Rule Engine strategies have new suggestions.
New in Account Blueprints
1. Easily manage team roles for Blueprints
You can now manage Account Blueprints roles for all your team members. Assign roles in bulk, create new ones, and change someone’s role without needing to enter the Blueprint wizard.
2. More control over how you build Blueprints
We now support both scheduled (paused or active) and on-demand Account Blueprints. You can create a Blueprint without scheduling tasks and run them on demand. New options include:
Create Blueprints in either format (scheduled and on-demand)
Add pre-built Blueprints to your account in either format
Assign multiple tasks to a role in scheduled Blueprints
Select tasks in bulk and assign them a frequency in scheduled Blueprints.
Convert scheduled Blueprints to on-demand and vice-versa
Search for Blueprints by name
Filter Blueprints by format/type
New for Microsoft Ads
1. Changes to Broad Match Modifier support for Microsoft Ads
The addition of keywords using the Broad Match Modifier match type is longer supported for Microsoft Ads in the Keyword Lasso and Optmyzr Express tools.
Existing BMM keywords will continue to serve under the new Phrase Match behavior.
2. Greater control for search terms and spend in Microsoft Ads
We’ve added two new pre-built strategies to the Rule Engine for Microsoft Ads:
New and Declining Search Queries Report to monitor significant changes in the performance of a search query
Pause Low Quality Score Keywords to avoid spending on keywords with low QS and no conversions
3. New metrics for Microsoft Ads
In line with a recent Microsoft Ads update, Average Position has been removed and 6 new metrics have been added in its place:
Top impression share
Top impression share lost to rank
Top impression share lost to budget
Absolute top impression share
Absolute top impression share lost to rank
Absolute top impression share lost to budget
You can now see the new metrics in Rule Engine and create custom strategies with them.
New in Campaign Automator
1. Broad Match Modified removed from Campaign Automator
The Broad Match Modified match type option for keywords is grayed out in all Campaign Automator templates.
You can also bulk-edit keyword match type from BMM to Phrase Match for as many Campaign Automator templates as you need to.
Keywords already operating under BMM still show, but no new keywords can be added under BMM.
2. Bulk edits for Campaign Automator
You can now make the following bulk edits in Campaign Automator:
Replace a column header. If the column name in your source file has changed, use this option to change it in your CA template as well.
Replace text. IMPORTANT – this feature is case-sensitive and replaces any occurrence of the text, irrespective of spacing. So replacing “shoes” with “sneakers” will result in:
Buy shoes at the lowest price → Buy sneakers at the lowest price
Buy blackshoes now → Buy blacksneakers now
Buy running Shoes → no change
3. Apply campaign & ad group labels
You can now add static labels like ‘Test 1’ or ‘Optmyzr’, or use dynamic insertion to create labels like {Brand} or {Category}. Each variation will be added to the applicable entities.
4. Create Responsive Display Ads
Campaign Automator now supports the creation of Responsive Display Ads.
Dig deeper into Analytics data with the Segment Explorer, our latest tool that lets you view performance metrics for all your connected Google Analytics accounts for multiple dimensions combined at once.
Google Analytics makes it difficult to view performance data for multiple audience segments at a time – like sessions from the US or male users via mobile.
Segment Explorer allows you to add different audience segments to your view data in a straightforward way.
Please note that not all combinations of segments (dimensions) are allowed through the API. Selecting an invalid combination will display an error message.
New in the Rule Engine
SA360 conversion data now supported in the Rule Engine
Search Ads 360 actions and transactions are available in the Rule Engine for linked Google Ads accounts. Use this to gain extra insight from SA360 actions/transactions to make informed decisions. Learn More
Find text anywhere in ads with the Rule Engine
We added the ‘Any headline/description/path’ to Rule Engine strategies for ads.
You can now easily search for specific text anywhere in your ad instead of creating separate conditions for headline, description or path. This new attribute looks for your selected text in all components at once.
New in PPC Investigator
Easily compare to same period of previous month in Optmyzr
Reporting widgets and PPC Investigator now support the “same period previous month” option to compare data sets.
If you now wish to compare performance data from August 1-6 with data from July 1-6, simply select this option instead of a custom date range.
New for Optimizing Ads
Filter by ad count when you use A/B Testing
You can now filter by ad count in the A/B Testing for Ads tool. View only those ad groups with fewer/more than a specific number of ads, or apply a range.
You no longer need to struggle to identify single keyword ad groups, or ones with a certain number of ads in them.
Find and label ads with low CTR
We added a new pre-built strategy in the Rule Engine to help you find ads that have a click-through rate lower than the ad group average.
Go to Rule Engine > Optimize Ads > Find Ads with Low CTR to identify and label these ads.
New for Optimizing Keywords
Pause keywords with low QS in Google Ads
A new Rule Engine strategy is available: Monitor Quality Score Components for Keywords.
This strategy suggests keywords with a low QS (<3) and/or low-ranked QS components, allowing you to pause them with a click. You can also add labels to these keywords to analyze and resolve issues.
See keywords on automated bidding that aren’t making the first page
The First Page Bridger now shows you keywords on automated bidding that aren’t making it to the first page. While you still can’t adjust bids for these keywords, you can use the information to make other decisions.
And because the list of keywords opens up in the Rule Engine, you can automate this check to occur as often as you need it to.
New for Optimizing Budgets
Impression Share metrics added for multi-platform budgets
Four new Impression Share metrics have been added to the Optimize Budgets Across Platforms tool:
Search IS lost (budget)
Search IS lost (rank)
Display IS lost (budget)
Display IS lost (rank)
See impression share lost due to rank when optimizing budgets
Recent IS Loss (Rank) has been added to the Optimize Budget tool, along with Recent IS Loss (Budget). View both and make informed decisions when optimizing your Google Ads budget.
More control to limit multi-platform overspending
Optimize Budgets Across Platforms now pauses the campaigns of a budget group if their shared monthly target is reached, and re-enables them on the 1st of the next month.
New for Managing Workflows
Contextual help to improve your PPC Audit grade
We’ve added additional contextual help to each widgets section when you review your PPC Audit report.
You’ll see a brief explanation of why we recommend certain fixes, additional context from Google Ads, and tips on which tool in Optmyzr can help you improve your audit grade.
Send audit reports in a click
There’s now a faster way to share reports from the PPC Audits tool. Just use the new ‘send email’ button without needing to schedule delivery.
New for Microsoft Ads
Changes to Broad Match Modifier support for Microsoft Ads
The addition of keywords using the Broad Match Modifier match type is longer supported for Microsoft Ads in the Keyword Lasso and Optmyzr Express tools.
Existing BMM keywords will continue to serve under the new Phrase Match behavior.
New in Campaign Automator
Bulk edits for Campaign Automator
You can now make the following bulk edits in Campaign Automator:
Replace a column header. If the column name in your source file has changed, use this option to change it in your CA template as well.
Replace text. IMPORTANT – this feature is case-sensitive and replaces any occurrence of the text, irrespective of spacing.
Replace “shoes” with “sneakers” will result in:
Buy shoes at the lowest price → Buy sneakers at the lowest price
Buy blackshoes now → Buy blacksneakers now
Buy running Shoes → no change
Apply campaign & ad group labels
You can now add static labels like ‘Test 1’ or ‘Optmyzr’, or use dynamic insertion to create labels like {Brand} or {Category}. Each variation will be added to the applicable entities.
Create Responsive Display Ads
Campaign Automator now supports the creation of Responsive Display Ads.
One of the most common bits of feedback we hear from people who use Optmyzr is how it puts them back in control — of PPC, of automation, and of their own destinies.
And when you’re in control of creating value for your brand or clients, the next step is to help your teams be better.
Control and efficiency are two of the things we help PPC pros improve, and it’s not just limited to time spent actively pulling levers in the system.
Which is why I like to tell people…
Optmyzr is built for the entire PPC life cycle
Unlike some tools that only help you optimize one aspect of paid search or stop doing much after your campaigns go live, Optmyzr has always been about start to finish.
Insights help you decide how to optimize and what to automate, which you can then report on in a variety of ways. Those results feed future insights, which lead to more optimized campaigns… it goes on.
Now with the introduction of Account Blueprints, we’re helping PPC teams make planning and onboarding easier too. And with all the new Alert types we’ve made available to our users, you can stay on top of campaigns even when your eyes aren’t on them.
Here’s what’s new for both of those features.
Account Blueprints: Build a PPC super team
Account Blueprints was released to all Optmyzr users in 2020 to help their PPC teams create a better experience for everyone — from account managers and strategists, to clients and new hires.
A Blueprint is a schedule for a series of recurring tasks in Optmyzr, like optimizations you make every week or insights you like to check often. You can also include tasks outside of our product, like meetings within your team or quarterly business reviews.
Each task has an owner (someone in your Optmyzr account), and each Blueprint can be set to run as frequently as you need it too.
• Keep client activities from falling through the cracks • Improve audits of newly-won accounts • Speed up onboarding of new PPC hires
New ways to build and scale processes with Blueprints
1. Convert any account workout (custom or pre-built) into a Blueprint to minimize buildout time.
2. Duplicate a Blueprint so you can make minor tweaks for similar accounts or goals.
3. Improve tracking by seeing tasks grouped by account/owner for a given week.
4. Bulk-assign start dates to make it easier when you apply a Blueprint to multiple accounts.
5. Add additional Optmyzr tools to a Blueprint, including Non-Converting Queries (Shopping and Search), Mobile App Exclusions, Audience Bid Adjustments, and more.
6. Create Blueprints in a paused state if you don’t want to activate them right away.
7. Pause an active Blueprint whenever you need to (seasonality, team out of office, etc).
8. Save progress on a Blueprint at any point while building it. Come back and finish anytime.
9. Download information about completed and active tasks (great for account and performance reviews).
Alerts: Effortless PPC oversight
Alerts are a cornerstone of how Optmyzr users retain full control over their PPC accounts.
In Optmyzr, you can build alerts to stay on top of virtually anything. Know when accounts start to overspend, when credit cards fail on a platform, know as soon as a given metric goes above or below a certain point, and more.
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that volatility can strike at any moment. The PPC pro who gets caught without oversight is going to take much longer to adapt, improvise, and overcome whatever crap the world throws their account’s way.
So we got busy building out plenty of new oversight tools to help you keep a sharper eye on PPC performance.
New ways to take greater control with Alerts
1. Multi-account budget alerts can now be owned by multiple users to democratize control.
2. Track by channel (search, shopping, etc) to know what’s working and what needs intervention.
3. Create alerts for your own custom metrics built in Google, Microsoft, and Amazon ad accounts.
4. Get notified when your Quality Score on Google drops below a certain threshold.
5. Expand oversight with alerts for Amazon or Facebook at the account or campaign levels.
6. Integrate your Optmyzr account with Slack to get alerts in everyone’s favorite work tool.
7. While not an alert, the URL Checker tool lets you identify landing pages with a 404 error or a piece of text that indicates a product is out of stock.
What to expect in the future
Our plan is simple: We’ll continue to keep an eye on the way PPC evolves, the changes ad platforms make, and the new challenges faced by our users and the PPC community.
And we’ll keep updating Account Blueprints, Alerts, and all our other features to keep delivering the best possible experience.
In the meantime, check out our most recent showcases for Blueprints and Alerts.
We also have even more options to help you keep a closer eye on PPC performance. If you like the convenience of scripts but don’t want to deal with coding, apply one of our Enhanced Scripts, such as Anomaly Detector or Flexible Budgets.
Have a specific alert that you’d like to see us build? Or an idea that’ll help PPC teams get even more out of Blueprints? Write to our support team and we’ll put your feature requests up for consideration.
2020 has been a turbulent year for search marketers, but Optmyzr still managed to be named ‘Best PPC Management Suite’ at the 2020 Global Search Awards.
Wins like this during times like these have made us even more grateful to be a part of such a vibrant, adaptive industry. While it’s rewarding and encouraging to see our efforts to empower search marketers have been recognized, this wouldn’t have been possible without our customers and the PPC community at large.
Our customers play an especially significant role in our success. We look to them to tell us what we’re doing right, what we can do better, and what else we can add to our platform. After all, we’re here to address their challenges. So while they’ve been battling to help their businesses and clients succeed, we’ve been busy equipping them with additional tools to get the job done more efficiently.
Through it all, our founding team has been at the heart of every discussion, bringing customer insights and their own experience to the table, helping our team consistently create value for our users.
Over the past year, we’ve increased the usability and performance of our tools. New features like Account Blueprints are aimed at not only improving the quality of PPC campaign output, but the experience of using Optmyzr as the keystone of a PPC tech stack.
“This year is proving to be one of the most unpredictable years ever, forcing marketers to adapt to wildly shifting dynamics,” said Frederick Vallaeys, co-founder and CEO, Optmyzr. “We’ve seen dramatic shifts in consumer internet search behaviors, spending patterns, product needs, and confidence. Our tools allow significant automation of search marketing while providing exceptional insight into search data and trends. We’ve worked hard to empower search marketers to become deep strategists, which has been even more crucial in 2020. The Global Search Awards recognition is humbling for our entire team.”
Team Optmyzr at a company off-site from a few years ago
GeetanjaliTyagi, co-founder, is keeping Optmyzr focused on educating users on best practices and tactics. “For the past few months, we’ve been conducting more training sessions, advising marketers on the best practices to become more efficient. Even if it’s a prospect, we try to understand their difficulties and then come up with solutions to tackle them.”
And it’s all backed by a development team that buys wholeheartedly into our customer-centric approach. “The industry is still moving ahead at a super-fast pace. The engines have continued launching their updates. Things like automation layering, optimizing Smart Bidding strategies, or how to have more granular control over targets is still our priority. So, we haven’t changed much from our focus area,” added ManasGarg, co-founder.
Beyond the product, we’ve also been busy creating a space for PPC and search marketing professionals to find solutions to new and everyday challenges. What began as a space to vent and figure out our chaotic new world, PPC Town Hall has evolved into a library for community solutions. At the time of writing this post, we’ve aired 21 episodes and hosted over 50 of PPC’s leading experts.
We see every day that PPC pros work in competitive, fast-paced, stressful environments. The pressure to deliver results is greater than ever. And so Optmyzr is readier than ever to enable search marketers to be marketing strategists, improve the financial health of the brands they work with, and succeed at every level.
Imagine if your bank let you transfer money to people but made it difficult to decide who receives your transfers. Pretty silly, right?
Despite the objections of every advertiser ever, it’s still not easy to tune many aspects of your campaigns in Google Ads. So it was pretty much second nature that we stepped up to make the experience better for our customers.
Bid adjustments — using audience analytics and insights to regulate ad performance — are invaluable. But you can’t overlook the time-consuming chore that is bid management through Google’s engine. The challenge is even greater when it comes to setting placements, especially the ever-popular ‘exclude all mobile apps’ preference.
Those are the two key areas of our recent Rule Engine updates designed to help account managers and PPC strategists speed things up. Let’s take a look at what’s new, where to find the updates, and how you can use them.
New in Geo Bid Adjustment and Placements
Simply put, these updates take the form of instant strategies in the Rule Engine, Optmyzr’s logic-driven rule builder that uses ‘if-then’ statements to get your account to take a specific action when certain conditions are met.
These new strategies are:
Find Expensive Cities: Reduce bid adjustments for cities that have a higher CPA than the campaign average, or that have no conversions despite having more clicks than are typically required for at least 1 conversion.
Find New Cities: Find out which cities are starting to direct traffic to your campaigns in the last 14 days (compared to the previous period).
Target Cost per Click: Set geo bid adjustments based on the target CPC you wish to achieve. Available at the country, region, and city levels.
Target Cost per Conversion: Set geo bid adjustments based on the target CPA you wish to achieve. Available at the country, region, and city levels.
Exclude Mobile Apps With Zero Conversions: Find all mobile apps with no conversions and exclude them as placements in bulk.
While our instant strategies come with recommended settings, they can be further customized and automated using your own preferences. If you’re familiar with how the Rule Engine works, you can create your own geo bid adjustment and placement strategies from scratch — all the components are there.
Other Geo Bid Adjustment and Placement features
The Geo Bid Adjustments tool analyzes campaign performance in different locations and makes recommendations for bid adjustments. You can implement adjustments at the country, region, city, and zip/pin code level. This tool also lets you discover new cities based on traffic and target them according to ROAS or CPA.
With Placements Exclusion, you can customize your strategy to prevent showcasing your ads at random in the Google Display Network. No more manually excluding apps one by one. Bypass the limits of Google Ads and remove your ads from showing via the entire mobile apps category.
Optmyzr Tip:Stop wasting money on bids and sites that don’t yield profit or returns. These tools give you more granular control over campaign behavior based on geolocations and ad placement. You can use a mix of custom and instant strategies in the Rule Engine to improve your ad performance or use these tools for research before you even build and run a campaign.
Use cases for Geo Bid Adjustments
1. Account for holidays or other closures
Depending on your industry and location, some events lead to virtually zero-sale days with customers focused on things other than shopping. With Geo Bid Adjustments, you can now mark those locations and lower your bid to account for those lulls in activity. Customize the bids to -90% to keep the campaign running but with reduced ad spend.
2. Track cities with wasted ad spend
Throughout your campaign, you might find some locations don’t provide enough conversions for the number of clicks they show for. These might be areas where the cost per conversion is higher than the campaign average, resulting in potentially wasted spend. Now you can just use the ‘Find Expensive Cities’ instant strategy in Rule Engine, and customize your initial campaign actions to exclude these cities or create bid adjustments for those locations. Or, you can use the strategy as an alert system to be notified of locations that put out a higher CPA.
3. Discover potential target locations
Due to erratic lockdowns and reopenings across the globe, businesses might start receiving traffic from newer locations where they didn’t drive sales in the past. You need a system to account for any possible new traffic. With the ‘Find New Cities’ strategy, you can find locations that showed traffic in the last 14 days but not before. Run this strategy twice a month to track any new traffic and find new areas of interest.
Use Cases for Display Placements
1. Target placements with a specific bid
While running a Display campaign without any targeted placements, you’ll see that the engine will automatically place you where it thinks your ad may perform best based on past data. With the Display Placements Exclusion tool, you can identify sites (or placements) where you’re doing well and customize your strategies to target these in future campaigns.
2. Bid lower for placements with bad ROAS or CPA
Most ad placements on mobile devices happen below the fold, and the chances that people scroll down to even see to your ads are extremely thin. Your placements might not have enough viewability and will therefore have poor ROAS or CPA. With this same tool, you can see suggestions for such weak placements and lower your bid on them to prevent spending on low-converting traffic.
3. Exclude placements on all apps or a specific operating system
While some apps are great to advertise on, others tend to have an audience who won’t benefit from your ad at all. With the Placements Exclusion instant strategy, you can stop your ads from showing on all mobile apps and even certain operating systems.
Conclusion
Between our new Rule Engine strategies and existing tools, Optmyzr allows you to truly control and optimize your campaigns beyond what Google’s automated rules will enable. This makes search marketers the final authority and allows you to layer multiple powerful automations to support your campaigns efficiently.
Analyze data based on preferred date ranges and other metrics to arrive at what’s best for your business, and focus your time on building excellent strategies rather than performing repetitive tasks.
Save time, save ad spend, and take control back from Google.
It’s oddly tough to celebrate good news in 2020. Let’s face it: It’s a truly challenging year for so many organizations.
Our team learned last week that we made the Inc. 5000 “Fastest Growing Private Companies in America” list for the third straight year. Typically, that’s reason to pop the champagne corks and celebrate. This year, however, it’s a remarkably humbling bit of news.
While we certainly welcome the recognition, it’s more apparent than ever that our success is truly dependent on the success of everyone who uses our software.
Our team comes to work every day with the goal to make life easier, better, more efficient, more productive — and yes, more profitable — for those who use Optmyzr to run their PPC programs.
By staying on top of the latest trends and offerings from Google, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook, we work to provide new tools, scripts, and resources to empower PPC pros to do great work.
In addition, the Optmyzr crew has been working hard to bring the PPC community together in 2020 through our regular PPC Town Hall series, bringing top industry pros together to further support search marketers.
Fueling great PPC campaigns is at the heart of everything we do. The fact that longtime customers stick with us and new customers are joining us daily is the best validation of all.
As we continue to grow, we’ll continue to innovate, automate, and streamline how PPC campaigns are created, managed, and reported.
Of course, we’re pleased to receive the Inc. 5000 validation, but perhaps the best outcome of this recognition is the fact we are driven even more to help PPC pros — at agencies and in-house teams alike — guide their respective organizations to a better place in 2020.
We humbly thank you for making it possible for us to enjoy some good news during this truly confounding year.
Some marketers fear automation, but Smart Bidding is a great example of how it actually helps.
Teeming with data and interactions, Smart Bidding uses machine learning to create optimal bid strategies. And because it saves both time and money, it’s quickly become an important part of PPC.
But there’s a (literally) dark side to it as well.
Smart Bidding means surrendering control to the black box of Google’s AI, with strategies that simply don’t allow you to tweak aspects of them to your specifications. Simply put, you input your goals and Google uses your account’s past behavior to produce results.
What do you do when you want the convenience of Smart Bidding but don’t want to give up control? You turn to a tool like Optmyzr.
Here are 10 ways Optmyzr customers use our platform to retain control when they use Smart Bidding.
Understanding how automated bidding works
The keystone of AI or machine learning is the data the system uses to make decisions and predictions. In the same vein, the success of automated bidding strategies depends on the quality of the performance data that system is able to collect. This in turn depends on how your account is set up.
The performance of badly structured campaigns cannot be improved by putting them on an automated bidding strategy.
A good account structure and the right attribution model are vital to the success of any automated bidding strategy. If you’re using last click attribution, either change to another attribution model or run manual bidding.
Campaigns that run on automated bidding strategies need to be optimized in order to have the right data to work with. In theory, the only thing Google takes care of is setting bids — only one aspect of managing an account.
The rest is still on you.
Automated bidding is not a ‘set it and forget it’ deal. However, with bidding out of the picture, you’ll have more time for other tasks — the kind of search queries you want to show for, or the messaging you want to use in your ads.
1. Search Query Management
Search queries are still the primary source of traffic for search campaigns, so it’s important to monitor the ones your ads show for so you can remove irrelevant ones (add them as negative keywords). It’s also a good idea to add high-performing search queries as keywords because you can write more specific ads for them.
Optimizing to increase Quality Score is one way to reduce your CPA and increase ROAS. Even though Google is automatically setting your bids in the auction, a high Quality Score requires a lower bid.
In other words, you pay less for each click.
Find keywords in your account with low Quality Score and move them to their own SKAGs with the more specific ads. Or, pause them if they have an irredeemable quality score of 1.
This isn’t about setting bid adjustments for different times of the week; your automated bidding strategy already does that. We’re talking about allocating campaign budgets to the more lucrative times of day by turning your ads off when they’re not profitable, making it something of a budget optimization.
Optmyzr Tools Used: Hour of Week Analysis, Hour of Week Bid Adjustments
4. Non-Converting Keywords
Pause keywords that have not converted in a long time but have accrued significant cost. This optimization should only be done if you aren’t running on last click attribution. Otherwise, you’ll pause top-of-funnel keywords and eventually reduce conversions.
You did budget optimizations before automated bidding, and you should continue to do them now. Reallocating budgets across campaigns based on performance helps improve overall account ROAS.
Check if high-performing campaigns are losing impression share due to budget, and increase their budget by giving them money from underperforming campaigns.
If you’re running on the standard automated bidding strategy (target CPA and target ROAS), you can tweak targets at the ad group level. There are two instances where I’d recommend doing this:
1. A sudden change in business or an upcoming event like a sale requires you to tweak targets. It’s a way of telling the system that you want more or less traffic when there’s a sudden change in patterns the system is unaware of. For example, if your business has a sale over the weekend and you want to drive more traffic to your campaigns, increase CPA targets over the weekend and then scale them back down once the sale is over.
2. Day-to day optimizations to increase conversions. Some common optimizations you can do are:
• Increase target CPA for ad groups that are converting but losing impression share due to ad rank. For campaigns running on target ROAS, reduce ROAS. This is the same as increasing bids for high-converting keywords when campaigns are on manual bidding. It enables Google to bid more to drive more conversions.
• Reduce target CPA or increase ROAS for ad groups whose actual CPA and ROAS are significantly better than the target and whose impression share is already more than 70%. This reduces the chances of Google buying very expensive traffic when the automated bidding system thinks there’s room to increase CPA and win more traffic.
7. A/B Testing Ads & Updating Messaging
Ad text automation is probably one of the last things that will happen in PPC — writing ads always involves subjectivity and creativity. Responsive Search Ads are a step in that direction, but they only combine headlines and description lines; you still have to write them.
This is why it’s important to continually A/B test ads — so you can remove underperforming ones and keep messaging fresh.
Optmyzr Tools Used: A/B Testing, Ad Text Optimization
8. Performance Monitoring & Alerts
Perhaps one of the most important things you can do is set up alerts to notify you of sudden changes in traffic, conversions, CPA, ROAS, or any other KPI that’s important to you.
This helps you stay on top of your campaigns, especially when something doesn’t go as expected. For example, if the CPA for a campaign suddenly shoots up, you’ll want to see why it happened and take appropriate action.
Optmyzr Tools Used: Alerts on the MCC dashboard, Rule Engine
9. Performance Audits of Automated Bid Strategies
Knowing when to pivot is critical to success, be it in PPC or any other business. It’s a good idea to regularly check on the performance of your campaigns’ bidding strategies to see if you need to pivot.
For example, if a campaign is running to maximize conversions, it might be time to move it to target CPA and ROAS. You can also see if certain campaigns on automated bidding strategies aren’t driving enough conversions and move them to manual bidding for a while.
Optmyzr Tools Used: PPC Audits, Rule Engine
10. Structural Account Audits
Regular account audits are so important for good structure. Check for things like too many keywords in an ad group, too few ads, campaigns with not enough negative keywords, or campaigns missing site links.
This ensures that campaigns in your account have a solid foundation on which automated bidding strategies can do what they’re capable of.
Optmyzr Tools Used: PPC Audits
Conclusion
We live in a world where competition is fierce and standards are demanding. PPC marketers rely on automated bidding more than ever to do more in less time. What automated bidding lacks intuition and human understanding, you can provide by optimizing your campaigns.
Help it help you.
There’s no one way to win with automated bidding, but Optmyzr offers several tools that allow you to layer your own automation over what the ad engines provide. If you don’t have Optmyzr, try our platform free for 14 days with access to all features.
As one of the cornerstones of digital marketing, PPC has become important to all businesses.
But executing complex tactics calls for multi-taskers who are organized and quick. PPC marketers constantly need to track, optimize, and scale their work. And the first step of any strategy: understanding its scope.
At Optmyzr, we realized that PPC marketers were lacking a purpose-built workflow management tool; one that understood their pain and experiences.
Blueprints allows you to organize and track your team’s tasks as a scheduled workflow. It helps you design entire PPC plans with a high degree of customizability, from setting frequencies to task owners.
You can schedule both one-time or recurring events, and assign them to your teammates to clarify who’s responsible for what. Optmyzr alerts teammates when they get new assignments or when an existing one is nearly due.
Now you can easily standardize processes for any and all accounts, right on the same platform that helps you optimize those very accounts.
Blueprints lets you schedule and assign specific optimizations within Optmyzr, but you can also include tasks outside of the Optmyzr environment, such as client meetings or designing creative assets.
Best of all, setting up a Blueprint is a one-time process. We’ll keep track of your preferences until you change them, though depending on your goals, you’ll likely need to create separate Blueprints for different processes or accounts.
Business Impact
Step 2: Set up your first task
With Blueprints, you can architect more powerful PPC programs. Avoid overrun deadlines and missed tasks by streamlining your project management, and focusing on testing and refinement.
For accounts with multiple stakeholders, it can be tough to know where responsibilities are demarcated. Now you can help individual team members track their own group of tasks. Blueprints offers a flexible, way to keep entire teams on track without anyone feeling like their toes have been stepped on.
Additionally, Blueprints lets you create multiple templates, so you can create plans specific to an industry or vertical, a client tier or type, a specific strategy or outcome, and even for contingencies like needing to quickly onboard a new hire.
Blueprints by Optmyzr also makes it easy to manage and re-assign tasks to help ensure all bases are covered when an employee is out sick, on vacation, leaves a team, or changes roles within your organization.
3 Blueprints Ideas to get you started
1. By industry
Step 3: Apply your Blueprint to one or more accounts
If your business only covers one account or caters to a specific client vertical, there’s a chance you perform many of the same tasks on a regular basis.
An example is an in-house team that only does PPC for their own sports apparel products, or an agency that specializes in e-commerce or hospitality. In this scenario, you can build Blueprints specific to different stages or exercises, including:
• New product launches • First 30 days for a new client • Seasonal bid adjustments
But this is not an indication of any limit; even an agency that caters to clients from all walks of business can leverage Blueprints to build specific plans for industry types. You could build one Blueprint to optimize the feeds of new e-commerce clients, and another to deliver on seasonal bid adjustments for hospitality clients.
2. By client tier
Step 4: Assign owners for each task and account
If you have multiple clients, there’s a high chance that many of them pay at different scales. This might correlate to their spend, or it might be based on the level of service you provide. Whatever the case, no agency wants to be accused of preferential treatment that isn’t justified by billables.
Blueprints can help you prevent that. Use Blueprints to keep track of value-added tasks that your top-tier clients pay for, while also delivering a baseline level of service to those on lower billing plans.
3. For new hires
Step 5: Apply changes immediately or set a start date
Onboarding new employees can be challenging, but it can make or break the success of your business like few other things. The whole process takes time, and the path to happy new hires is always dotted with mistakes and setbacks. In the midst of introducing your team and work culture, it’s easy to miss out on the day-to-day — or vice versa.
With Blueprints, you can create a single plan for any new employee in a specific position (we still recommend separate plans for different positions). Your new hires can follow these tasks to quickly get accustomed to the way you conduct business, and your current team can lend support in their own areas of expertise.
Conclusion
Even in a normal business landscape, Blueprints is the answer if you need (or simply want) a workflow management tool that dovetails with the actual software you use to study PPC insights and apply optimization changes.
But given the importance of remote teams for the foreseeable future, Blueprints can be your ticket to helping your people win a very big part of the ‘work from home’ battle: staying on top of their responsibilities.
Set up your first Blueprint using our wizard to keep your team on top of things — and at the top of their game. If you don’t see or cannot access Blueprints, please write to support@optmyzr.com.
DealerJazz, an AI-powered advertising platform for vehicle dealerships, has been custom-tuned to work elegantly with Optmyzr for greater efficiency and performance of their digital advertising campaigns.
With the help of Optmyzr’s enhanced automation, DealerJazz was able to deliver supercharged content, yielding more relevant ad copy and better performance.
Let’s read in detail how we empowered DealerJazz with the tools to improve the efficiency and clarity of their search campaigns.
The problem
Traditional Google Ads management tools are time-consuming and clunky. Rigid campaign structures prohibit efficient automation, while standard inventory content is not compatible with optimal SEM requirements, leading to poor PPC outcomes.
This resulted in greater cost to DealerJazz’s customers and substantially lowered their performance.
The solution: ACE
We helped DealerJazz pair perfectly with key ad channels like Google and Microsoft, and added significant automation to their PPC management process. The Automated Content Engine (ACE) from DealerJazz was layered on top of Optmyzr’s Campaign Automator to generate more relevant and accurate search ads on Google.
DealerJazz’s automated content engine (ACE) supplements and optimizes a dealer’s stock inventory data into more intelligent, usable content that better aligns with a PPC channel’s architecture.
This data provides a 15-35% gain across key tangibles by creating a smarter campaign structure composed of more relevant ad groups, ads, extensions, and keywords. Optmyzr ensures that these ACE campaigns are delivered with the utmost efficiency.
ACE is powered by a growing group of acceleration modules that play a key role in the data tuning process. This creates hundreds of content variations that can be easily mapped and configured with Optmyzr.
A new addition, the Beta DJ Bot module crawls specialized dealer search results for the most popular ad copy and integrates it with ACE content library.
Tuned Data Feeds
DealerJazz uses the raw inventory data with relevant and timely content from each ACE Acceleration Module to create tuned feeds mapped to Optmyzr. ACE analyzes and compares content, integrates time-sensitive and relevant monthly promotional content, and creates additional derived variables.
The combinations are unlimited and these new derived variables are designed to help dealer ads perform better.
Variable Template Structure
DealerJazz has created intuitive variable templates which pass 99% of all content through to Optmyzr. This allows for a more selective process in how the Campaign Automator templates are refined and built.
The content flowing through them is 100% unique to each dealer and can be managed and updated in minutes from the DealerJazz dashboard.
The DealerJazz tuned content is pushed via API to Google Sheets, and the feed data is mapped with appropriate Campaign Automator templates.
The key to their efficiency, accuracy and scalability is owed to the variable structure architecture, which is 100% interchangeable with all dealer accounts. No template contains dealer-specific account content.
The variables drive all aspects of campaign management (creation and modification) including ad groups, keywords, ads, and extensions all derived from 100% interchangeable content.
To refine and further secure each account specific template, DealerJazz includes key conditions before sending updated campaigns to Google and Microsoft ad channels. This two-factor formula ensures total security across dealer accounts.
The results
When DealerJazz ACE technology is paired with Optmyzr’s dynamic account technology, Campaign Automator, the results have proven to lower CPC and increase CTR. Since launching ACE for 8 dealers in January 2020, DealerJazz has experienced:
• 30% Lower Average Cost-Per-Click • 35% Higher Click-Through Rates • 20% Faster Analysis of Key Metrics • More relevant and engaging ads • Huge reduction in wasted spend • Better visibility
In other words, DealerJazz has helped level the playing field for smaller dealerships with limited budgets.
Conclusion
All things considered, DealerJazz has been able to provide 50% more digital exposure within the same budget, simply by preventing nearly 30% of the ad budget from being wasted on low-intent clicks from irrelevant keywords.
All thanks to their intelligent negative keyword library.
Optmyzr supports DealerJazz to help them work faster and more efficiently, eliminating traditional commissions that are a barrier to optimal dealer-agency relationships.
We all have repetitive PPC management tasks we wish we could automate and get off our daily to-do lists. Fortunately, there are several options for PPC advertisers to achieve this, like Google Ads’ Automated Rules, and Optmyzr’s Rule Engine.
In working with hundreds of customers in my two years at Optmyzr, I noticed many advertisers don’t explore our Rule Engine’s most powerful capabilities because they assume it’s just another interface to control Google’s Automated Rules.
Turns out there’s much more to it than that.
The Rule Engine actually enables our power users to do some of their most advanced optimizations that they wouldn’t have time for without this level of automation.
I talked to Fred, one of our founders who shared that the Rule Engine was initially built as a script for a customer whose bid management strategy took a full day of his time every week!
The script was useful but limited to that advertiser’s strategy. So our company built the Rule Engine to allow every advertiser to automate their most powerful strategies.
While we’re fans of Google Ads Automated Rules for their simple setup, that simplicity is limiting when you want to take your account to the next level with a more powerful strategy. That’s the gap we’re solving with our Rule Engine.
Let me share 6 useful things you can do with the Optmyzr Rule Engine that you cannot with Google Ads Automated Rules.
1. Combine multiple rules into layered strategies
Though in Google Ads you can add as many automated rules as you want, it’s not possible to combine them into a single optimization. In Optmyzr, this is possible with Rule Engine strategies.
In Optmyzr, a rule is a set of conditions and actions (if and then statements). Strategies let you combine multiple rules — in essence, letting you add the ‘else’ portion in an ‘if’, ‘then’, else’ rule.
For example, in just one strategy, you can consolidate all your search query management by adding one rule to add positive keywords and another rule to add negatives.
You can also have multiple actions applied to an entity. For example, you can add a label to the keywords your rule paused because they were found to be too expensive.
2. Use data from multiple/custom date ranges
Automated rules in Google Ads let you use a single date range for metrics. This makes it impossible to do relative comparisons, like to find ad groups that have a sudden spike in CPA for the past week compared to the last 30 days.
With our Rule Engine, you can bring in performance data from as many date ranges as you’d like, making relative comparisons very easy.
While using multiple date ranges is useful, it’s even better when you can customize those date ranges. Rather than just using default ones like the last 7/30/n days, you can build custom date ranges that are based on lookback windows.
For example, you can build a custom date range for 14 days ago to 8 days ago (week before last), and another for 7 days ago to 1 day ago (last week). This enables you to find search terms that have gained a lot of impressions in the past week compared to the week before, or ad groups that have seen a decline in CTR for a few weeks in a row.
3. Do relative comparisons of metrics across a hierarchical structure
With our Rule Engine, you’re able to compare, in just one condition, the performance of the same metric at different levels. This comes in handy when you want to do a relative comparison using expressions/formulas.
For example, compare the CPA of one keyword versus the CPA of the campaign in which the keyword is located. Now you could do things like find keywords that are 50% more expensive than average for the campaign.
In Google Ads automated rules, you can compare a metric against a static value but not against other elements. So you can only do things like find keywords whose CPA is higher than $20. That’s not helpful when you know that CPAs vary greatly between brand and non-brand campaigns, and even between campaigns that sell different services in different locations.
By using a relative comparison, you don’t need to set a static target for all your comparisons, and it becomes very easy to simply look for outliers.
Note: You can also use expressions as actions to calculate new bids and targets.
4. Use external data
What happens when you want to use data not available in Google Ads, but that is also important for your business and optimizations?
5. Set rules on autopilot or review them on demand
While automations help you save tons of time, you may not always want to give up full control; this is why we also let you use your Rule Engine strategies manually. We give you everything necessary to create your own optimization tools and then run them on demand.
Following this idea, even when your strategies are running automatically, we still let you decide if you want to review the changes before you apply them. This is a huge advantage when you want to test your optimization before giving all the control to the automation.
6. Exclude recent changes
You can avoid applying continuous changes to the same entity for a defined period of time to give them enough time to perform before it’s considered by the strategy again. This helps when you don’t want to stack bids or change the target CPA of an ad group that was already adjusted the day before.
This is particularly helpful in situations where you’re slowly changing things like bids until they meet your goal.
For example, if you automate bidding to set an ideal CPC based on the last 7 days’ conversion rate and your target CPA (new CPC = target CPA * conversion rate), you can run that rule as often as you want without worrying that your bids will get out of control.
However, the following is a riskier automation: new CPC = old CPC + $0.10 when last 7 days’ CPA is below CPA target.
It’s risky because if you run this rule 5 times per day, it will increase the bid 5 times even though the last 7 days’ CPA includes only a small portion of data since the last bid change.
With Optmyzr, you can remove this risk by excluding items that were already changed recently. Now every time the rule runs, it will only make suggestions for entities that were not already recently changed by the same rule.
The Rule Engine is my favorite, because you can tailor account rules to match what the individual client needs to be seeing for performance.
Larry C, Owner/Operator, 707 Marketing
Conclusion
If we have to sum up all of the above, it’s about two things: flexibility and more control. Which tool to use will depend on how much of your workflow you want to automate, and how much customization is required.
The Rule Engine definitely is a powerful tool that gives you much room to play with and is designed for both novice and advanced users.
Interested in learning more about it? Let support@optmyzr.com know, and we’ll be happy to help you!
Copywriting is one of the most versatile tools in a PPC marketer’s skill set for a reason. After all, words are the foundational building block of most channels, including paid search advertising.
But all the data in the world means precious little if you can’t craft messaging that drives conversions.
Today, we’re talking about our Ad Text Optimization tool and how it helps PPC marketers deliver ads with copy that works during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are five things it can help you achieve for your businesses and clients.
1. Let people know about operating changes.
This pandemic has forced businesses to rethink the way they operate. Government-enforced social distancing restrictions limit the number of people who can be in a store at once. On top of this, many employers have implemented new policies to limit their staff’s exposure to potential carriers of the virus.
With the Ad Text Optimization tool, you can make bulk edits to your ads that reflect any new operating conditions so that consumers know what to expect when they do business with you.
Use Cases
• Announce a full switch to curbside pickup for a big box retailer.
• Advertise a restaurant or cafe’s switch from dine-in to takeout only.
• Inform consumers of timings adjustments for stores normally open 24 hours.
2. Tell people about your new product experience.
For some verticals, there’s just no way around giving people a chance to see, touch, and feel the product. In other cases, the product is an experience. Either way, prevailing conditions demand that businesses get creative about providing this interaction in a safe environment.
The Ad Text Optimization Tool lets advertisers make sweeping changes to their campaigns to let consumers know about changes to methods of delivery, product experience, and more.
Use Cases
• Offer test drives at the customer’s doorstep instead of having to visit a dealership.
• Advertise mobile mini-shops with core hardware and home improvement SKUs.
• Announce a shift to virtual delivery for experiential services like yoga classes.
3. Keep up with implementation and easing of restrictions.
While much of the US, UK, and Europe are already sheltering in place, things are changing as we learn more about COVID-19. Local, state, and federal regulations are likely to be modified regularly as governments make new discoveries and observe medical data.
Whether you need to make regular updates, create new ads, or manage ads for multiple locations, the Ad Text Optimization tool gives you the power to create ads that are more likely to perform.
Use Cases
• Restart advertising for a non-essential business exiting regional lockdown.
• Publish in-store social distancing regulations for a barbershop.
• Announce geo-based store openings and closures for a franchise brand.
4. Be sensitive to prevailing conditions.
One of the biggest challenges for advertisers is making sure ads don’t come across as insensitive or tone deaf. Many phrases that are perfectly acceptable in a non-pandemic environment can be questionable when deployed today.
It can be difficult to manually track all these phrases across your campaigns and ads. The Ad Text Optimization Tool lets you search for and replace them in just a few clicks.
Use Cases
• Replace phrases like ‘go viral’ or ‘breathtaking’ when advertising your product.
• Avoid otherwise-appropriate words like ‘happy’ or ‘delighted’.
• Insert phraseology to discourage hoarding or advertise seniors-only windows.
5. Get new insights more quickly, and act on them.
It’s not just the markets that are volatile right now. Consumer sentiment is changing rapidly based on new developments — that includes search behavior. One of Google’s tips for account managers is to plan weekly, rather than monthly or quarterly.
To make weekly planning feasible, you need data on how your ad text influenced performance. The Ad Text Optimization tool lets you compare ads side by side with metrics including CTR, conversions, impressions, and more.
Use Cases
• Compare ads offering delivery and pickup to see which one performed better.
• Help a brick and mortar produce store quickly build accounts and start running ads.
• Scale the acquisition and application of new insights across multiple accounts.
Less time. Fewer mistakes. Better results.
The Ad Text Optimization tool significantly reduces the time and energy cost of making copy edits across your ads and campaigns. And it makes the exact same edit you want wherever it occurs — no gaps, no missed instances.
To learn more about this tool and its different features, check out our user guide. The Optmyzr team is also working from home, ready and available to help PPC professionals deliver value for their businesses and clients during this challenging time.
Paid search marketing has become even more challenging than usual, as PPC pros grapple with unforeseen challenges far beyond our normal existence. We’re all being tasked to re-think how we approach paid search and adapt to this time of crisis. Even without the COVID-19 crisis, our longstanding, baked-in challenges compound the pressures on even the best of PPC pros.
Among the entrenched challenges is the clear need to view PPC beyond the land of Google.
We love Google. It’s still the undisputed king of search. Yet now more than ever, Bing continues to steadily work its way up the market share ladder. Many estimates say the Bing properties now account for about a third of all search activity.
Remember, Bing includes Yahoo!, MSN, and more.
Fear not. We’re not introducing more challenges into your PPC life; we’re focused on easing your burden.
Whether you’ve already added Microsoft Ads to your PPC mix or are just realizing the opportunities in the evolving search landscape, the Optmyzr team continues to make it easy to work across platforms.
This week, our team releases the Rule Engine for Bing Ads. The new module is part of the core Optmyzr PPC Management Suite, makes it easier to craft deeper customization, and adds power to your Microsoft Ads campaigns.
Best of all, you can work in tandem, managing Google Ads and Microsoft Ads much more efficiently and effectively.
Closely adapted from our longstanding Rule Engine for Google Ads, the intuitive Rule Engine makes it easy to create custom PPC optimizations and execute bulk changes to Microsoft Advertising campaigns across the Bing universe.
Think of the Rule Engine as a way to create multiple rules in sequence, tapping into essential conditions within campaigns along with the corresponding actions.
What does that look like in real life? Based on conditions and parameters deep in campaign structures, the Rule Engine makes it easy to automate discovery and actions against critical aspects of PPC including:
Quickly uncovering expensive keywords
Identifying expensive product groups
Bidding to target CPA or target ROAS
Identifying anomalies with close variants
The Rule Engine Wizard makes it easy to find a strategy that fits your needs
The Rule Engine includes many pre-built strategies for critical needs that we’ve identified over the years — and that our users have also discovered. These pre-built strategies help you get started faster.
As PPC pros’ needs and skill evolve, the Rule Engine becomes even more powerful.
Start by selecting an objective and one of the Instant Strategies, or build your own
We’ve designed the tool to ease the time and steps required to build your own strategies. A new, intuitive setup wizard allows simple point-and-click rule creation, making it possible to launch new strategies in just minutes.
Several customers took part in the beta testing of the Rule Engine for Bing. One, in particular, was able to deploy the Rule Engine for innovative bid management and alerts.
Leverage Optmyzr’s machine intelligence or take full control of your strategy settings
That customer is Spain-based sporting goods retailer Sprinter. As part of a very competitive industry, the experienced team at Sprinter has to align keyword strategies with inventories, promotions, seasonality, economic dynamics, and other factors that impact revenue.
Sprinter’s senior paid social executive Manuel Vilella noted after beta testing, “We like to bid manually in our brand campaigns, as we prefer not using automated strategies to achieve the minimum CPC. As we have some dozens of brand keywords, we need a solution to adjust the bid according to the viewability. Rule Engine allows us to forget about implementing these changes, as it does this automatically.”
The Rule Engine lets you build unique strategies using if-then statements
We’re proud to bring this new capability to market at a critical time when once again, search marketing is being upended and re-invented before our eyes. Being an effective, strategic marketer during adverse times requires us all to take a much more holistic view of the market and have effective tools at our disposal to work efficiently and strategically across channels.
Best of all, whether the Rule Engine for Google Ads is a familiar tool or one you’ve never tried, we’ve focused on ease of use. So the Rule Engine for Bing can be incorporated into workflows quickly and effectively.
If you’re a current Optmyzr user, let us know how we can help you get the most out of the Rule Engine across Bing and Google. If you’re thinking about trying Optmyzr, contact us for a demo. You’ll see how Rule Engine fits into the full suite and can reduce tasks that previously would have taken hours (or even days) to minutes.
Our team is standing by. Let us know how we can help!
AI and machine learning-driven automations are responsible for big changes to how search marketers run their accounts. Make no mistake, smart marketers are those who leverage this new technology and operate at the forefront of where Google, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook are taking us.
Keeping control over PPC in an ever-more automated world is both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for PPC pros this year. Let me share how we’re going to help you make 2020 your best year yet.
Automation Layering
Automation within the search engines poses a couple of inherent risks for PPC pros:
Automation-fueled obsolescence for the PPC pro
Commoditized marketing for the brand
Think about it: If Google automates seemingly everything, will the PPC pro have anything to actually do? And if everyone is using the same automated setup/bid/execute models, is everyone operating on a playing field that is just far too level????
You’re not wrong to have those fears but the team at Optmyzr takes a different view of platform automations – one of opportunity versus threat.
We see a new era for PPC pros to become indispensable through a concept we call Automation Layering.
Frederick Vallaeys, Cofounding CEO, Optmyzr
Simply stated, the search engines are continually automating specific tasks and functions associated with PPC. Automation layering is about the human PPC pro using those automations to morph from being task oriented to becoming a strategic marketing leader.
Optmyzr CEO, Fred Vallaeys, explains automation layering at SMX East. Apologies for the scratchy audio.
Google and the others are aggressively automating the repetitive and tedious side of PPC. Innovative PPC pros crave reducing manual tasks, which allows them to redefine their role and rightfully claim the mantle of marketing strategist.
For the past year and through 2020 and beyond, we are focused on empowering PPC pros to make sense of the platform-level automations and turn those automations into PPC gold.
Let me add a real-life example to illustrate what we’re talking about. We used the Rule Engine to find expensive keywords. Surprise, surprise, we almost instantly found some keywords using automated bidding from Google, spending nearly $2,000 in the last 30 days with 0 conversions.
The ‘Reduce Bids‘ optimization, based on an Optmyzr Rule Engine strategy, can proactively identify and pause keywords where automated bidding by Google is wasting money.
To a big company like Google, this is peanuts and just a necessary part of teaching the machines how to do bidding. But to an advertiser, that is real money coming off their bottom-line that could have been better spent.
Bid automation is great because it saves advertisers a tremendous amount of time, but we have to use our own automations, like Optmyzr, to stay on top of the automations from the engines.
Data-Driven Ads
Saying a PPC campaign is data-driven is a bit like proclaiming that the sun rises in the east. It’s no surprise. PPC pros live in data all day, every day.
Reality is, data will continue to expand its already omnipresence in PPC pros’ lives. We see more structured data leading to more ads based on that structured data. From merchant feeds to inventory spreadsheets, product-level details get deeper and even MORE real-time than ever.
In 2020, we’ll focus much more intensely on the very powerful shopping ads in Google, Amazon, and Bing, in particular. Our expanding developer team will focus on many emerging advancements of shopping ads in 2020.
Search marketers operate in multiple search platforms with varying functions, control, and reporting capabilities. While automation at the platform level helps streamline many of the in-channel tasks, working across disparate platforms can be challenging. As such, we are focusing on improving usability for marketers:
Deciding where to even start. Let’s face it – from seasoned pros to those just starting their search marketing journey, we’ve gotten to a point there are so many options it can be paralyzing to get started. Our developers are refining how Optmyzr suggests what actions to take and highlight the most important things happening in your accounts.
Knowing what actions can or should be taken based on the mind-boggling amount of data at a marketer’s disposal. From the moment a user logs in to Optmyzr, smart suggestions will help you create and follow your own workflow. We’ll also guide users directly to the actions that will provide the most immediate results, essentially highlighting “this is the most broken thing that must be addressed NOW.”
Interacting with Optmyzr. Look for important user interface enhancements in the months ahead. We know that PPC pros spend a significant part of their day in the system, working their channels. Intuitive, customized – and customizable – workflows will help align the work being done to capture greater value in channel.
Staying on top of client needs and anticipating or adjusting to subtle changes deep within automated systems will be more critical than ever in 2020. Optmyzr Co-Founder Manas Garg summed this notion up eloquently in a recent discussion about automation and smart bidding. He noted
“While advertisers shift more and more to smart bidding, many will fall into a complacency trap with a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ mindset. Optmyzr must help them see the signals so they avoid falling months behind a trend or opportunity.”
Manas Garg, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
Software that helps advertisers stay in control of the myriad automations from the engines is the key to success. We see 2020 as an opportune time to further empower PPC pros with essential tools and prebuilt recipes that maximize the native automations within the big engines.
2020 can be a year of empowerment and unprecedented opportunity for smart PPC pros. Make it your best year yet. Optmyzr is with you.
Holiday shopping season has seemingly become a “winner take all” proposition in the world of PPC. Think of it as the Fall playoff season leading up to the big championship game in December. Brands are scrapping for every click, every lead, every conversion.
Mistakes can be devastating to the end goal. And with each passing day in November and December, opportunities lost are gone. There’s little chance at re-earning the sale.
Shopping Campaigns have become heavily automated at the platform level, so on the surface it would seem that Google is making it easy for every brand and every merchant to launch effective shopping campaigns. So why worry?
Therein lies the latest challenge for PPC pros with all the pressure on them to execute flawless Shopping Campaigns. EVERYONE has access to the same heavily automated foundational toolkit. So if everyone plays from that same playbook, nobody can truly be out front.
Layered Automation: Deeper control for PPC rockstars
The core automations from the search engines essentially help marketers get efficient with the foundational elements of good PPC across the various ad types typically deployed. Optmyzr provides what we call layered automation to make it possible for strategically-inclined marketers to stand out from that “good” pack. Our team spends a lot of time tracking all of the advancements at Google and Microsoft to create tools that help marketers better utilize a search engine platform’s automation and transform PPC pros into strategic marketers as opposed to being tacticians.
The latest development from the Optmyzr team is a fully revised version of Optmyzr Shopping Campaign Builder. This week we formally introduced Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0, which taps the latest platform automations and make it much easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads faster and with more power behind them.
Version 2.0 culminates months of intense work by our team, connecting Google Merchant Feed data to new automation tools to build the perfect structures for shopping ads. Doing so meant ensuring the new version works across virtually any ad structure methodology. Thinking through the various ways PPC pros need to structure, we address a multitude of specific campaign needs, for example:
Creating one campaign per brand
Creating one ad group per SKU or product ID
Establishing separate campaigns for each range of profit margins which enables varying tROAS targets
Building and managing unique smart shopping campaigns for each product
Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 makes it even easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads in record time. By maximizing the standard platform automations and layering in Optmyzr’s own automation protocols, it’s quite easy to build literally thousands of product groups in a matter of minutes as opposed to multiple days.
The essential linkage between the Google Merchant Feed and creation of product groups removes thousands of manual tasks. Within Campaign Builder, version 2.0 also includes enhanced capabilities within the Shopping Refresher module. Automations now extend to adding and removing campaigns as needed, acting on changes in data from the merchant feed. The earlier version had a simpler capability that was limited to working with a single campaign, requiring significant manual intervention (and time) to replicate across multiple campaigns.
Take, for example, the common approach of structuring campaigns based on similar products with similar profit margins. A good idea, which also allows for automated bidding to help maximize results. Such an approach, however, could box the marketer into a structure that isn’t nearly as dynamic as it could be. A marketer may decide it would be more beneficial to have one campaign for each product type. Shopping Refresher can now detect if a new product type suddenly appears in the feed and then automatically create a completely built out campaign with all product groups for that new product type.
The tool can also automatically detect the opposite – when a product is no longer available in the merchant feed. Campaign Refresher can automatically pause the campaign for that specific product and quickly cut off needless ad spend.
Move from tactical to strategic
Automations from Google, Bing and others can make things seem like doomsday for PPC pros in the long term. It’s understandable when considered purely at face value. However, the innovations that transformed other industries such as manufacturing over the last several decades have moved many smart professionals into much more strategic value-add roles.
Tightening bolts on the assembly line of yesteryear was an essential tactic/function many years ago. But repetitive action yielded the same core outcome while failing to tap the deeper thinking and intellect of the production line employee. In PPC, our value add as the human being running programs is not in managing repetitive actions. Our value add comes in the form of creativity and strategy – figuring out the intangibles and the if-this-then-that variables.
PPC pros who will lead the industry to greater relevance in the overall marketing mix will be the ones who layer powerful automation on top of the core automations from the search engines. The less time spent in the weeds of tactics will continue to elevate PPC pros from being “The Google Ads person” to being a strategic visionary with a much more essential role in the overall marketing hierarchy. Check out Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0. As always, contact us directly and we’ll gladly provide a 1:1 demo of how it can transform your PPC work day.
“Stacked bidding” or “Tiered Bidding” is a strategy in which the same keyword is added in multiple match types to better control costs. The closer a query is to a keyword, the higher the chance that it could lead to a conversion, hence the more an advertiser is willing to spend.
Looks simple… what’s the catch?
For this strategy to work, you need to keep the bids for each match type somewhat surrounding the same amount. For example, and as Frederick Vallaeys explained on this article from Search Engine Land, “if the exact match keyword’s max CPC is $1.00, the advertiser may want to bid 80 percent (or $0.80) for phrase match and 60 percent (or $0.60) for broad or modified broad match”.
The problems with tiered bidding usually result from when the bid is modified for one keyword, but not for its match type counterparts. This results in a confusing and very problematic issue, as the tiered bidding is no longer in place and you might end up with bids that you aren’t controlling, or which slip off your radar.
How to successfully manage tiered bids
At Optmyzr we’ve come up with a solution that puts together a custom recipe from our Rule Engine, its very own spreadsheet capability, an enhanced script, and automation, to create a hassle-free workflow for tiered bid management.
To get started, you’ll first need to use our Stacked Bids enhanced script, to define the ratio which you’d like to maintain between the different bids for the keywords in multiple match types. With this script, a spreadsheet will be generated with a list of keywords existing in multiple match types. By running this script regularly, you can find keywords in multiple match types with their current and expected bids.
After you’ve set this up, you can pull the same spreadsheet into the Rule Engine and create rules as shown below. These rules will let you set the bids for Phrase match and Broad match keywords to 80% and 60% of the Exact Match CPC respectively.
The output of this recipe will give you a list of suggestions of keywords added in multiple match types and the calculated new bids for them to maintain tiered bidding.
For example, you can find any Phrase match keyword which has its current bids higher than their Exact match type counterparts and set their bids to say 60% of the Exact Match keywords Max CPC (this will be automatically pulled in the spreadsheet).
With the Rule Engine’s automation capability, you can set this recipe to be run on a weekly basis and make sure your tiered bids are all set in place!
This custom solution was made using Optmyzr’s Rule Engine and Enhanced Scripts. If you need us to put this recipe in your account, please write to support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be more than happy to do so!
Running PPC programs used to be relatively simple, with essentially one major platform to consider. Those who mastered what was then called “AdWords” could focus nearly all of their attention on Google – maybe showing occasional love to tier-2 search platforms.
Seemingly overnight, others achieved “powerhouse” search marketing status, including Bing, Facebook, and now Amazon.
Over the past 5-10 years, these major players have gained significant share of the universe of commerce-related searches. All are now locked in fierce battle to connect people with the information and products they are seeking through billions of searches every day.
The Optmyzr team has worked hard to provide a platform that allows PPC pros to optimize ads in each of the leading platforms with ease and confidence. Today we’re excited to launch Amazon Ads Management within our PPC Management Suite. This new capability will help PPC pros tap into the expansive growth of Amazon’s presence in the search marketing landscape.
Amazon now ranks as the third-largest platform for share of net digital advertising revenue, and it’s gaining ground on Google and Facebook. Amazon is masterful at capturing high-intent search traffic – or even casual browsing traffic – and then driving customers down the funnel.
Optmyzr Rule Engine, which is a critical component of our full PPC Management Suite, sits at the heart of our foray into Amazon. Using Rule Engine, PPC pros can manage bids and keywords for Amazon Advertising campaigns, while being able to easily toggle ads on and off for rapid campaign response. Prebuilt recipes and one-click optimizations, which are inherent in our full system, are now able to be put to work against Amazon Ads, allowing PPC pros and agencies to broaden their portfolio of services, in-house and agency alike.
We sought to make a system that would allow PPC pros to turn existing optimization processes into scalable, automated workflows. The recipes noted above make it easy to:
Set bids to a recommended bid range
Set bids to meet a target ACOS goal
Add negative keywords for poor performing search terms
Add positive keywords to maximize performance for the terms that convert
Try Optmyzr’s Amazon Functionality – NO RISK
We want to make it easy for you to try Optmyzr’s new Amazon functionality. All you need to do is link your Amazon Advertising account to Optmyzr. We’ll enable access to our beta on a rolling basis.
We’re confident PPC pros and agencies can find great value in managing campaigns across multiple platforms from a common system. We continually look for ways to remove complexity and create opportunities for you to run campaigns like a PPC rockstar.
Amazon is clearly among the fastest-growing ad systems in the marketplace. The upcoming holiday shopping season (yes, it’s time to start thinking about the holidays) will be a make-or-break season as competition for online conversion will continue to escalate. Think of the depth and value you can bring to your stakeholders by optimizing all their digital marketing from a single workspace.
The Optmyzr team is excited to see our cofounding CEO, Fred Vallaeys, publish a new book: “Digital Marketing in an AI World”. It’s now out and available on Amazon for Kindle and in Paperback.
The book explores the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning – specifically how it is changing the world for PPC professionals. We see this book as a survive-and-THRIVE guide for PPC pros navigating a universe where some fear being automated right into obsolescence.
As Fred shares in his book, the new AI era is actually a time of unprecedented opportunity for PPC pros who aspire to be PPC rockstars. We’ve been saying for a long time that machines and AI are amazing and can do things humans cannot do. But machines PLUS humans makes an even more powerful force. Fred’s book is essential for PPC pros at agencies and in-house alike.
At the core, AI and machine learning certainly eliminate tasks and automate the tasks that should be automated. Smart PPC pros are the ones who use that automation to redirect their energy and attention to chart bold new strategies and spend more time on the strategic, human elements of marketing.
Fred’s book is out on Amazon today at special introductory pricing. Order between now and Friday, May 31, 2019, and get the Kindle version for an introductory price of $0.99. The Kindle price returns to full retail of only $9.99 on June 1, and the paperback version is available for $15.99.
If you are attending SMX in Seattle, Fred will host an advanced SEM clinic, which promises to be a don’t-miss session. He’ll have copies of the book with him available for purchase (and we think he’ll even sign those copies!).
PPC pros who want to up their game and turn uncertainty into opportunity as a PPC rockstar should invest in this book. It may very well have a transformational impact on your PPC career.
End-of-year puts PPC audits top-of-mind. While PPC pros dissect performance and report campaign results daily, weekly or monthly, deeper audits can fall by the wayside. Regular reporting gives great insight into campaign metrics, but audits dig into critical structural elements, such as having enough ad variations in ad groups, consistent use of ad extensions across campaigns, and many other foundational issues.
Audits pop back up as a priority as PPC pros answer the myriad year-end questions from stakeholders and get immersed planning for the upcoming year. Unfortunately, infrequent audits means critical insight can be left unknown for too long.
Let’s face it – auditing PPC programs can be a colossal, time-consuming pain. Even the best pay-per-click pros can put off audits until they absolutely must allocate scarce time to dig through spreadsheets and hunt for anomalies and root causes. Compounding the challenge, PPC data interdependencies run deep and it can be nearly impossible to do effective auditing manually.
Our PPC Policy & Audits Builder turns processes that would take days to complete into fast, executable activities that can yield great value. Putting off audits until year-end can result in those dreaded “I wish we knew that back in August” moments.
Audits also foster essential policy compliance when managing external agencies. For example, if an agency says it always does ad testing, but the audit shows ad groups only had one ad, you now have an accountability trail. In addition, audits help defend accounts from being poached by competitors by ensuring accounts are following best practices, making it difficult for competitors to claim accounts are being mismanaged.
Point & Click Ease
Policy & Audit Builder is simple and intuitive. Clicking “Create New Audit” launches the step-by-step process in which you can choose to audit Ad Groups, Ads, Campaigns, Search Campaigns, and Keywords.
As seen in the image below, each audit type allows the user to adjust the essential parameters to begin auditing by segment. Auditing Ad Groups, for example, allows the user to readily uncover anomalies in quality score, spend, number of ads, or number of keywords. The PPC pro can run audits based on all parameters or disable individual ones to focus in on specific attributes.
Clicking “Run” executes the high level audit and immediately issues a report card that provides letter grades of A+, A, B, and C. Just as with school grades, the report card shows the areas that are running well and calls out ones requiring further attention.
Clicking into the report card gives deeper insight into specific areas of interest. From this view alone, the PPC pro can begin to take corrective action or dig deeper into the data to analyze foundational issues and then resolve problems or out-of-policy actions.
Powerful and easy-to-execute audit capabilities empowers the PPC pro to quickly uncover otherwise hidden spikes or valleys that could be driving increases or decreases in overall performance. In addition, PPC campaigns have countless data interdependencies (sometimes making cause/effect analysis nearly impossible), so our audit tool taps the power of machine learning and AI to dig into relationships between various attributes to get to root causes more efficiently and accurately.
Overall, PPC pros can gain a much deeper understanding of the potential impact of issues to help drive excellent performance across all activities.
Audit’s Role Moving Forward
Streamlined audit processes mean PPC pros can add audit to their activities with greater frequency. If you currently only audit quarterly, semi-annually or annually – consider a monthly audit run to help uncover potential issues faster.
Be sure to close out 2018 with a deep audit and analysis of your holistic PPC program. Give Policy & Audit Builder a try to see just how fast and effective it can be at mining for information beyond the KPIs. Then craft a plan for 2019 that better taps the power of audits and moves them from being a must-do hassle to an area of great opportunity to boost PPC’s effectiveness in what is sure to be an even more competitive year ahead.
We are humbled and honored to be bringing back home this year’s award for Best PPC Management Software Suite, granted by the US Search Awards and announced this past October 17th.
This award couldn’t have been possible without the loyalty and dedication of our customers, who value the importance of efficiency when it comes to managing and improving their PPC campaigns. Our CEO Frederick Vallaeys was there to receive the award in Las Vegas.
Optmyzr focuses on reducing the time spent on those repetitive and sometimes tedious tasks, combining great optimizations with smart automation to create a unique and comprehensive experience. Our tools range from insights and analysis to optimization and automation (and just about everything else in between!) and are all created putting the interest of the PPC expert first.
We believe in the power of transparency and how that adds a unique worth to our software. For this reason, every final decision regarding changes to your account will always remain completely in your control.
To get to know a bit more about our tools, try our free 14-day trial. If you want to see the tools in a more 1:1 session, we’ll be more than happy to demo our product for you personally.
Resource for all the videos on our YouTube channel designed to help you get the most out of your Optmyzr account, with new videos being added regularly.
Read our in-depth piece in Search Engine Land that explores four key areas of PPC automation opportunity.
We greatly appreciate the ongoing trust our clients put in Optmyzr. It is through that trust and validation that Optmyzr continues to create great software for PPC experts.
PPC’s leading edge keeps crashing forward, typically faster than most PPC pros can keep up. The big search engines continually roll out new tools and capabilities to bolster everything from basic text-only ads to immersive showcase shopping ads. The inner workings of the PPC machinery get more and more advanced with AI- and machine learning-infused wizardry.
The pace of advancement is staggering.
The team at Optmyzr spends a huge chunk of our time analyzing what’s happening on the front line of innovation, staying on top of the latest from our friends at Google and Bing. We are there so you don’t have to be.
Over the last two years, we’ve added significant capabilities across our PPC Management Suite to automate campaign building, optimization and dozens of other actions across Google and Bing. New capabilities for Shopping Ads and even groundbreaking integration of Amazon Alexa into the mix has brought us truly to “full suite” status.
It’s exceedingly gratifying that Optmyzr was just recognized on the final night of Pubcon 2018 with the US Search Award for Best PPC Management Suite. This award has gone to giants in our space in recent years. It recognizes the best and most innovative offerings in PPC management today.
Receiving the award in Las Vegas alongside colleagues, clients and peers across the industry was another high point in the evolution of Optmyzr. It provided clear validation that our clients’ needs are being met and then some.
The award serves another purpose, though. Motivation. Such recognition doesn’t come easy and it means our team is right back in the trenches keeping up with what’s next in our space.
Optmyzr is made up of PPC practitioners. We geek out on PPC as much as anyone, so we love unpacking the latest innovations in search marketing. We will keep develop our own scripting, optimizations and automations to streamline processes for PPC pros and allow them to apply their thinking to higher level strategy vs in-the-weeds tactics. We’ll keep sharing our knowledge and insight to help you, the PPC pro, be even better at what you do every day.
If you want to see what you’ve been missing, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a free demo of our award-winning suite. Also, if you’ve been using Optmyzr for a while and not sure you’re using it to its fullest extent, check out our YouTube channel for great how-to videos and more. Also, check out our free scripts that layer added capabilities. Or just give us a call and let’s talk. We want to make sure Optmyzr is doing all it can for our amazing clients.
We thank you for your support in the evolution of our PPC Management Suite. Our US Search Award is as much a testament to our great clients as it is to our team that is working hard to help you be the best PPC pro you can be.
Pay-per-click is a hot place for pretty amazing automation. Some PPC pros may worry that they are being automated right out of a job. But in reality, the opposite is true – at least for those with advanced skills in the craft.
We just published an in-depth piece in Search Engine Land that explores four key areas of PPC automation opportunity. Check it out. We dig into advanced automations that go beyond what you can do via Google or Bing directly. While you are there, I encourage you to check it out other recent Search Engine Land columns by Optmyzr.
We’ve also been really busy in the Optmyzr studio crafting video demos and webinars that really dig into the specifics of automation. You can check those out on our YouTube channel. But here are three recent ones that are really timely.
Be sure to check out the all the other videos on our YouTube channel designed to help you get the most out of your Optmyzr account – with new videos being added regularly.
As always, if you want to see more 1:1, we’ll be more than happy to demo our product for you personally or try our free 14-day trial.
As longtime Search veterans ourselves, the Optmyzr team’s legacy generally comes from the Google universe. Yet we’ve always viewed Bing’s emergence as a true player in search as being a good thing for search marketers. More choice for users. A bigger pie overall. More opportunity for marketers to help brands reach the customers who are searching for what they sell.
Accurate market share stats are elusive, at best, but seem to range between 10-33% for Bing these days (in terms of search volume). While Google still rules the search universe, 10-33% of billions of searches conducted is massive – to say the very least.
Search is clearly the powerhouse way to reach customers because users tell the search engines specifically what they are seeking – “Men’s black dress shoes” or “trendy prom dresses” or “[brand name] camera lenses” or “family restaurants near me.” As Bing continues its steady growth in volume and its evolution to Google-like ad types, data and analytics, search marketers have found themselves working across platforms with greater frequency.
Trouble was, working in two platforms typically more than doubled the work for the PPC pro. Google automation and powerful tools like Optmyzr made it a snap to launch and manage Google Shopping Ads. Bing ads, though? Not so much. It’s been a much more manual and time-consuming prospect for PPC pros – until now.
The Optmyzr team is excited to introduce powerful new functionality that allows PPC pros to manage all critical aspects of Bing Shopping Ads from the same Optmyzr interface that manages Google Ads.
The new Bing-specific functionality greatly simplifies Bing Shopping Ads in much the same way it simplifies Google Shopping Ads. We set out to simplify core activities, including setting up advanced campaign structures, keeping campaigns synced with dynamic product inventory, and optimizing performance quickly and efficiently with AI-enabled decision support.
We’ve made it possible for PPC pros to tackle Bing Shopping Ads in minutes instead of hours. Many automated features speed things along, but Optmyzr also provides extensive manual intervention and optimization, so you can dig deep into your product data to improve performance.
A few of the most notable core features to highlight:
Optmyzr Campaign Builder: Set up your campaign structure for the most optimal deployment and management. Highly flexible in setup, much like what we’ve offered for Google Shopping Ads management.
Optmyzr Campaign Refresher: Keep your Bing ads in sync with a merchant feed.
Optmyzr Bid Management: Creates customizable reports that will help you identify commonalities affecting performance deep within campaigns. Commonalities might be brand, style, size, product type, price – any number of attributes essential to a successful campaign. You can act on the insight to drive better (more profitable!) bids.
As always, we focus much of our innovation on mid to advanced PPC pros, but the ease and flexibility of the system allows up-and-coming PPC managers to improve their abilities and execution.
One final important piece about the new Bing-specific functionality – you’ll still manage campaigns (setup to execution) individually for Bing and Google within Optmyzr. Each platform has its own unique structure and specific requirements. However, the time savings of deploying campaigns AND tracking metrics and reporting through the same system will undoubtedly help PPC pros work more efficiently and effectively. Optmyzr allows the PPC pro to access campaign metrics and reporting through the same interface, which allows more immediate comparison of performance in Google and Bing.
Best of all, you won’t be leaving millions – if not billions – of Bing searches to chance. As the overall search pie gets bigger and Bing continues to grow its share of search volume, it’s becoming more important than ever that search pros build their cross platform expertise and capability. If not, the competition might just run away with a huge percentage of previously untapped search traffic.
As PPC pros, we all know search is where it’s at if you want to ensure customers and prospects find YOUR business. Customer behaviors have shifted dramatically in recent years with Google and Bing being first-stop waypoints on the journey to purchase. It’s a challenge for PPC pros to stay on top of shifting behaviors and changes to Google and Bing.
We all know the drill. When the customer searches for “[brand name] camping tent” or “shoes to match black dress” or “human resources software system with employee scheduling” or “pizza near me” or any of the other 40,000+ searches that happen every second, someone is looking for what you sell. PPC is the new front line in sales and customer service.
We’re driven to help businesses make the connection when customers are out on Google or Bing. In doing so, we’ve seen pretty great growth as a company. So much so, we just made the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America ranking for the first time in our 5+ year existence.
Growth is great. It’s one important validation that our service is on the mark. Growth also allows us to re-invest more in the tools we provide to bring even more value longer-term. We have introduced several product enhancements over the last year, in particular. Without giving away too much too early, we encourage you to watch for many new things we have in the works – some coming out very soon.
Google and Bing continue to innovate with new functions and features to automate core aspects of PPC. Some of their innovations will make PPC pros’ jobs easier. Some bring new challenges. We continue to track the forefront of their ongoing development to support the entirety of your job. From campaign inception through reporting – across Google and Bing – we will continue to deploy machine learning and AI to help PPC pros be better, stronger and faster at what they do.
We appreciate the ongoing trust our clients put in Optmyzr. Being on the Inc. 5000 validates our partnership with clients – coupled with your trust – works for our mutual benefit. Watch for more great news coming through the second half of this year (and beyond)!
Optimizing your accounts with Optmyzr is pretty simple and straightforward. You get to work with performance analysis and optimization tools, reporting features and task automation, among others, while still maintaining complete control.
We want you to make the most out of your experience with Optmyzr, and show you how you can reach your business goals through the use of our tools. And in the spirit of easing the process of getting started with your account, we’ve created a first-month checklist to guide you along all our tools and make sure you aren’t missing out on anything.
This checklist works as a referential guideline for the first five weeks from when you link your Google Ads accounts to Optmyzr. It has different tasks for each week, starting off with recommendations that cover a more general and broad aspect of your account management, and which get more specific and advanced along the way.
Week 0 & Week 1
For the first two weeks, Week 0 and Week 1, you’ll be setting up alerts, analyzing your overall account and doing some simple optimizations. This will give you a great baseline for further account management. During Week 2 we’ll cover performance on networks, and by Week 3 and 4, you’ll be analyzing performance by location, optimizing ads and analyzing search queries for new keywords and negatives.
In this checklist, the first week to be taken into consideration begins once you create your Optmyzr account, and link your existing Google Ads accounts to it. You’ll start off by setting performance alerts, to make sure you are always aware of how your money is being spent. This creates a great baseline for any further optimization, as any unwanted performance won’t go by unnoticed.
During this initial phase, we recommend setting up automation to monitor account performance and landing pages for ads, as well as budget-related monitoring. These alerts and automations only need to be set up once, and will then on continue to work in the background.
Week 2 & Week 3
Moving forward, and for the upcoming week you’ll get recommendations for account analysis, and a few simple optimizations to begin with. Tools like the PPC Investigator will help you figure out how the key performance metrics on the account have changed and based on this data you can determine the optimizations you should do first.
You can also use tools such as the Spend Projection to get insights on whether your budget is overspending or underspending, and you can then use that information through the Optimize Budgets optimizations to reallocate those budgets across campaigns.
Week 4 & Week 5
As the checklist moves forward, you’ll be getting recommendations that dive deeper into analyzing performances, such as by network and location. We’ll guide you along tools to optimize the search queries that drive traffic to campaigns, manage your keyword bids based on performance by the hour of the week, and set bid adjustments by device and location, among others.
All throughout this checklist, you’ll also see some recommendations for prebuilt Account Workouts. The Account Workouts are a series of tasks that are put together to achieve a specific goal. They combine the different tools from Optmyzr in a logical order to create the right combination for optimizing your accounts.
All in all, this 5-week checklist is a great way to get familiarized with practices you can follow with Optmyzr, and though the steps here are just our recommendations, we think it will be of great use for you and your team. If you would like a customized checklist for your team, feel free to write to support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be happy to help you.
Optmyzr is proud to call out the latest accolades for our Co-Founder/CEO Frederick Vallaeys. He was named SEL Contributor of The Year at this year’s SMX West conference (Landy Awards). His articles on Search Engine Land (SEL) cover a variety of topics relating to PPC from analyzing how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world of PPC, to optimizing workflows for agencies.
Below you’ll find a recap of Fred’s top articles by topic – take a look!
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in PPC
Covering the know-hows of succeeding in an AI-first world, these articles go through how AI has evolved through time, the different levels of PPC automation and the technologies driving PPC intelligence. Here are some of his top AI-related posts:
When it comes to saving time in rather routine and sometimes tedious tasks, scripts are a great way to facilitate the process. From reporting to auditing scripts, these articles cover all you need to automate the process, and not get lost along the way!
Knowing what you are facing is by far the best way to prepare for success! On these related articles, you can find some insights on boosting Shopping ads, driving positive results with AMP sites and a review of the free PPC reporting solutions Google offers.
As one of the more prolific content contributors at Search Engine Land, Fred has authored dozens of columns to share his unique insights and expertise in PPC and search overall. You can find all of his articles at https://searchengineland.com/author/frederick-vallaeys
We hope you won’t mind a brief post with a bit of a self-congratulatory tone, but we’re a really proud bunch at Optmyzr. For the 4th year in a row, our Co-founding CEO Frederick Vallaeyshas been named to the annual PPC Hero “Top 25 Most influential PPC Experts” ranking. This year, Fred reached his highest ranking to date, coming in 2nd to Dan Gilbert, founder and CEO of Brainlabs.
What’s really cool about this particular recognition is the fact it’s based, in part, on a vote by thousands of PPC pros from around the world. PPC Hero has created this list every year since 2012. Once again, Fred is listed along with 24 peers from around the world, including execs from big players like Microsoft and Wordstream, along with leaders from top agencies, other platform providers, exciting startups, and terrific media folks like Ginny Marvin from Search Engine Land.
While some on the list are competitors, we view everyone included in this year’s top 25 as friends and peers – people for whom we hold deepest respect and admiration.
We congratulate Fred for making the list again, and we sincerely extend our best and continued friendship to everyone doing their part to elevate PPC as a hotbed of innovation and success in marketing.
The second half of 2018 promises to be an exciting time for our clients as we continue to drive more innovation and development from the team here at Optmyzr. We look forward to seeing what our friends and competitors have in store as we all work to make PPC as powerful as it can be.
As marketers, we all know that running successful PPC campaigns requires agility and speed when making crucial optimizations. You’ve likely noticed a new option within the Optmyzr PPC Management System – Optmyzr Express. This is our latest automated offering that suggests the most important optimization opportunities across your campaigns. We created Optmyzr Express to bring one-click simplicity to help PPC pros take immediate action on top opportunities for campaign optimizations.
Available immediately to all users of the full Optmyzr PPC Campaign Management Suite, Optmyzr Express is designed to help simplify and automate the top up-to-the-minute opportunities. The user can simply click to accept an automated optimization suggestion or they can access an intuitive dashboard to customize or modify suggested changes from a single screen.
The Express offering augments the full Optmyzr software system. Designed to allow you to crank out the top optimizations fast – perhaps over your first cup of coffee in the morning – Optmyzr Express will allow you to blast through those “quick-hit” opportunities right away. It allows you to then allocate more of your valuable time digging deep into advanced functionality within the suite to be more strategic overall.
Think about those fast opportunities we all seek for rapid optimization: from pausing low performing ads or adding new keywords to quick fixes for Quality Score and high performing keywords and more. Optmyzr Express facilitates smart, on-the-go campaign adjustments and creates a workflow for continuous improvement.
Initial user feedback has been excellent and has validated that Optmyzr Express is a real time-saver. It delivers fast insight, agility and power, which encourages more frequent optimizations. PPC pros have told us they want a workflow that helps them make immediate changes for the most pressing opportunities, while retaining the full suite functionality for deep dives into campaign performance improvement. Through client feedback, we also know that a workflow that appears similar to a high value to-do list across multiple accounts allows for greater efficiency for in-house and agency teams alike.
Other key features:
Inbox simplicity: Easy view into all accounts or favorite accounts
Snooze capability: Ability to set a quick reminder if you can’t take action right now
Single page view: Immediate optimizations can be managed from a single screen
We have more information available in a news release we just posted to announce Optmyzr Express. You can also see a quick overview in our new YouTube video.
Give Optmyzr Express a try and let us know your thoughts.
One of the things we do best at Optmyzr is to help PPC experts save time at the tasks they need to do to keep accounts healthy, and clients happy. Reusable templates in our reporting system are one of the ways our tools can help you save a ton of time. Unfortunately, I see a lot of customers who don’t take advantage of the full power of our templates so let me explain why we created our system this way and how you can benefit.
What is a PPC report template?
A template is a predefined layout into which content will be placed. For PPC reports, a template defines a few things:
• How to present the data, e.g. as a bar chart • Where the data comes from, e.g. all branded AdWords campaigns • What date range the data is for, e.g. year-to-date
So in a reporting tool, one template is usually created for every report that needs to be sent on a recurring basis. In the example above, the template defines what needs to go into the report. Then when our reporting engine generates the report at the start of every month, it knows what data to grab and how to present it, so a nice report comes out, and is automatically delivered to the client.
Maintaining individual reports for each account wastes time
We have many agency customers at Optmyzr and they all manage multiple clients. Many reporting tools require 1 template be created for each end client, even if they all need to receive a report based on the exact same layout and template.
Creating this many templates is a pain, and having to update all of them with the exact same change when AdWords adds a new reporting metric is an even bigger pain.
How Optmyzr report templates save time
Luckily agencies typically have several clients who are similar, for example a few may do lead-gen and some others ecommerce. Lead-gen advertisers usually track metrics like CPA, conversions, and conversion rate. Ecommerce advertisers normally care more about metrics like ROAS and conversion value.
In Optmyzr, we let agencies take advantage of those similarities by making it possible to create templates that can be used for multiple clients. So instead of creating one template per client, you can make one template per type of client. In our example, that means we can have 2 templates: one for lead-gen and one for ecommerce and all 10 clients can get their reports based on these two templates.
So now when an Optmyzr agency wants to add a new metric to all the reports for their ecommerce clients, they just update that in one place, and all their ecommerce clients immediately benefit from those changes. It’s a huge time saver for the agency, and a win for the client because their account manager can now focus on more strategic work rather than spend the whole day tweaking tons of templates.
How Optmyzr makes templated reports highly custom
Agency clients usually won’t be happy if you give them a report that is clearly off-the-shelf. Optmyzr templates can be customized with lots of data visualizations so every agency can include exactly the types of data their clients will benefit from. If you haven’t tried our reporting, you can get your first beautiful PPC report in less than 5 minutes by signing up for our 2-week free trial.
In addition to including the data that matters, Optmyzr’s templated reports are very custom because for every client you can include their name, logo, a custom footer, and different campaigns in the report.
So structurally the reports for all ecommerce clients will be the same, but the data and visuals are all custom for each client.
Now each client gets a report that is custom to their business but the agency spent a fraction of the time building and maintaining the underlying report templates. And to take customization another step further, the agency could now annotate each of the resulting reports with notes, take-aways and follow up action items for each client. The beauty is that because the report itself was easier to generate, the account managers and analysts will have more time to spend analyzing the data and strategizing about the account.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to save some time with a quick win, give templated reports in Optmyzr a try. By reducing the number of templates you have to maintain, you’ll make things simpler and you won’t lose any functionality. If you have ideas for how to make our reports better, please let us know.
Today Google announced the addition of seven new Quality Score (QS) fields in AdWords, including historical QS. It goes without saying that we’re big fans of giving advertisers access to this data. After all, Optmyzr’s first major tool was the historical QS tracker we launched in the summer of 2013. Ever since then we’ve tracked billions of points of data to help advertisers make more sense of their Quality Scores.
Is there a need to continue to use tools for QS tracking now that Google is providing the same functionality directly in AdWords?
Like Jacob from our friends at Hanapin says, it’s definitely nice that any advertiser can now get the data, without needing to resort to tools, or AdWords Scripts. But there are some significant benefits you get from using Optmyzr to track QS. Here are 5 things you can do with Quality Score in Optmyzr that you can’t in AdWords.
#1: Optmyzr helps you prioritize Quality Scores to fix
While AdWords now includes both the current and historical QS, it doesn’t have a column for letting you see the difference between these two numbers. That may seem trivial but when dealing with hundreds or thousands of keywords, it’s nice to have a simple way to find keywords with the biggest increase or decrease in QS.
Optmyzr’s Quality Score Tracker includes a column called QS Change. It shows the numerical difference between the QS on the start and end date of the selected range. By clicking on this column, it’s very easy to find keywords with the biggest drop in Quality Score. It’s a great tool to identify the keywords most in need of some attention.
The column “QS Change” makes it easy to see which items had the biggest change between 2 dates.
#2: Optmyzr shows aggregate QS and account QS
It’s easy to focus your attention in the wrong place if you’re not taking volume into consideration. For example, look at the screenshot in the last paragraph and notice that the keyword with the biggest decline in QS had 18 impressions. It might be possible to improve that keyword’s Quality Score, but how much will that really benefit the account?
That’s why Optmyzr has always provided aggregate QS in the form of an impression-weighted account-level quality score, as well as campaign-QS and ad group-QS.
This helps advertisers focus on making changes in the places that can have the biggest payoff. For example, here’s where the biggest QS improvements are in this account. Because it’s aggregated at the ad group level, there is more data, making the insights more meaningful.
See which ad groups had the biggest gains in Quality Score.
Optmyzr even recommends which ad groups would most benefit from optimization by doing a weighted sort on cost and low QS.
Optmyzr recommends ad groups to optimize for Quality Score based on the possible financial upside.
#3: Optmyzr visualizations make QS easier to understand
We’ve always believed that historical QS change is a useful metric to inform advertisers whether Google likes the optimizations they are doing or not. As a PPC optimization company, this is obviously an important criteria for us and our customers to think about.
In AdWords, you can now see historical QS by day by applying a daily segment to the keyword data. But in the resulting table it’s pretty difficult to see a pattern of change.
Optmyzr makes understanding and analyzing Quality Score data easier in several ways.
First, we provide a clean dashboard that shows the changes in QS between any 2 dates when the AdWords account was connected to Optmyzr. Here we have an example showing the account level Quality Score change between March 1, 2017 and May 13, 2017.
Quality Score dashboard gives quick insight into QS for an account or any of its campaigns or ad groups.
Next, unlike in AdWords where QS is not a value available for charts, Optmyzr does have time charts showing QS changes. This makes it really easy to see if QS changed during a particular date range.
See Quality Score changes visualized on a chart and instantly pick out important dates when changes happened.
#4: Optmyzr connects the dots on Quality Score impact
While the QS number 1 through 10 we see in accounts is based on position-normalized data, we can’t but wonder whether changes in bids, and the resulting changes in average position could have an impact on our QS. In Optmyzr, it’s very easy to investigate this question.
Optmyzr saves historical max CPC bids and lets you add this to a chart with Quality Score changes.
#5: Optmyzr includes Quality Score in automated reports
We could debate whether including AdWords jargon like QS in client reports is a good thing or not. However, we know that many advertisers like to include it in reports, and especially in reports used by consultants and agencies to audit prospective new clients.
Optmyzr lets you include Quality Score data in report templates. It can be shown either as a KPI value:
Or it can be shown as a time chart:
The time chart has several interesting settings. The curve can be smoothed by showing weekly or monthly data (in addition to the ability to show daily data).
Advertisers can even calculate the aggregate quality score for groups of campaigns by combining our campaign filters with campaign labels. For example, an advertiser can add a specific label to all their branded campaigns and then select this label in the report. There is no other way that we know of for advertisers to get quality score aggregation for portions of their accounts.
Change settings for how to include Quality Score in reports in Optmyzr’s report designer.
Conclusion
Optmyzr is excited that Quality Score is finally getting the treatment it deserves in the AdWords interface. With a renewed focus on QS, we hope advertisers will use Optmyzr’s unique capabilities related to QS to optimize their accounts.
It’s time to revamp your PPC reports with these cool new features from Optmyzr.
#1 New Chart Types – More Visualizations
We’ve added many new chart types that you can use in reports. These include doughnut charts, bar charts and area charts. You’ll find these options in the chart widgets in the report designer.
#2 New Widgets – More Data
Optimization History Widget
Include a summary of changes made through Optmyzr in your reports. You can include details like how many new keywords were added, how many bids were changed, and how many ad schedules were created. This widget also lets you show how much data you analyzed before applying optimizations.
Audit Widgets
Quickly find optimization opportunities at the ad group and campaign level. You can find campaigns with no sitelinks, few negative keywords or ad groups with too many keywords. For example: You can get a list of ad groups that don’t have enough Expanded Text Ads.
Ad Extensions Widget
Now you can include performance data for ad extensions like sitelinks, call extensions, app extensions and review extensions in reports.
#3 Report Themes, KPI Icons & More
KPI Icons You can now include icons in the KPI widget to represent the most important metrics. This helps draw attention and helps break the monotony.
Report Themes Customize reports by changing the color theme. You can choose from different themes like Blue, Orange, Green.
Cover Page and Footer You can now add your own cover page and footer to reports. These can be uploaded as images in the report designer and can be used across accounts. This helps customize and completely whitelabel reports.
#4 – New Report templates
We have a brand new Annual Report that you can use to instantly generate a year-end review. Go ahead and customize it or share it as is with your stakeholders to show them how awesome you are at PPC 🙂 Pro Tip: Duplicate the template and change the date range to last month to create a monthly report 🙂
When you set up an AdWords campaign you choose the locations you want to target based on where your prospective customers are located. However, it is not enough to just target locations especially when campaign targeting is set up at the country level. One way to make sure you’re optimizing campaigns for better ROI is to identify high performing and underperforming locations and setting bid adjustments for those.
For example, if you’re targeting the United States as a country, you’ll receive traffic from different states. California and Alaska may have completely different performance metrics but under the current structure you’re probably managing them in the same manner. This is why it is important to use geo bid adjustments to manage bids or if you want more granular control over budget, you can split them out into separate campaigns as well.
Setting bid adjustments for locations
Performance data at the country, city and region level is available in AdWords under the dimensions tab. However, taking that data and making it actionable can take hours. This is where the Geo Bid Adjustment One-Click Optimization™ can help. This optimization lets you see data at the country, region, city and postal code level. You can analyze performance, add locations as targets and set bid adjustments in a few minutes. This process can be done for multiple campaigns at the same time. In AdWords, it will take 3-4 steps to do this for each campaign. When you have to do it for multiple campaigns, you can easily spend a few hours doing it.
Why use the Geo Bid Adjustment One-Click Optimization™?
View geographic performance at any level (country, city, region). For example, if California is added as a target location, you can choose to view data at the city level and see how campaigns are performing across different cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles etc.
Automatically calculate bid adjustments based on goals. You can enter the target goal value for the account or campaign and the system will automatically recommend bid adjustments based on performance.
Set bid adjustments for locations that are not added as targets. If you choose to add a bid adjustment for a location that you’re not targeting, the system will automatically add it as a target location and set the bid adjustment.
Use aggregate data to set bid adjustments for campaigns that don’t have enough data. You can use the overall performance of a location to set geo bid adjustments for campaigns that don’t have enough data to make a decision.
According to Merriam-Webster, a game-changer is “a newly introduced element or factor that changes an existing situation or activity in a significant way.” And I can assure you, Optmyzr has been a game-changing force in my business life.
I manage AdWords campaigns for a living, and when I say I manage AdWords campaigns, I manage AdWords campaigns, and a lot of them. I’m in AdWords 60+ hours a week managing a large number of campaigns for a large number of clients. I’ve worked very hard to do a great job managing these campaigns for my clients, and I’ve worked very hard to build my reputation as an honest, hard-working, and professional operator. And it turns out that when you skillfully provide a trade or service, and do it in an honest and professional way, new business will stampede your way and you’ll quickly find yourself to be very busy.
And in June of 2016, that’s the situation I found myself in. I was very busy managing lots of AdWords campaigns, but I still had new clients wanting to hire me. Initially, this was a very stressful situation. I was just about out of working hours each week, but I still had people wanting to hire me. So I felt like I was leaving opportunities on the table. But at the same time, I wanted to keep my current clients happy and continue to provide great AdWords management services for them.
So what was a young, driven, (and some would say) good looking lad to do? There was only one answer.
Increase efficiency.
I knew that if I could get the same weekly AdWords management tasks done in a smaller amount of time each week, then I could keep doing a great job for my current clients while freeing up more time to bring on new clients and grow my business. So I knew that efficiency was the onlyway to grow my business.
Initially I thought hmmmmm, this will be easy. I’ll just use AdWords scripts and save myself a bunch of time. But then, after spending an hour or so trying to learn scripts, I was coldly reminded that I don’t really know anything about scripts or writing software, and that trying to learn that stuff would take a ton of time… and remember the problem in the first place… I HAD NO TIME LEFT IN MY WEEK!!!
Enter Optmyzr
Once I realized learning scripts and writing my own software was too big of a learning curve, I thought to myself, let’s look for an AdWords management software. I Googled “AdWords management software,” and that’s when I found Optmyzr. It was love at first sight.
Why I gave Optmyzr a try
I immediately liked two things about Optmyzr. The first thing I noticed is that two of the co-founders of Optmyzr had worked at Google. And that one of the co-founders, Frederick, had been one of the first 500 employees at Google and had spent “10 years building AdWords.” What more can you as for in terms of being credible? These guys were building AdWords when I was looking for a prom date.
And the second reason why I gave Optmyzr a try is because they made it easy for me to give them a try! They offer a free trial and you don’t have to enter a credit card. This made it very easy for me to say, okay let’s try it out.
Why Optmyzr works
Optmyzr works great for two reasons. One, it makes me more efficient at Google AdWords management. And two, it makes me better at Google AdWords management.
The reason I started looking for an AdWords management software is because I needed to free up more time each week so I could take on more clients, but I didn’t want to sacrifice management quality. So again, efficiency was the only answer.
And Optmyzr helps me be more efficient. I can do almost all of the weekly AdWords management tasks I like to do right from inside Optmyzr, and the efficiency is tremendous. I’ll cover a specific example below, but just so you know, with Optmyzr you can add new, relevant keywords from the search terms report, you can smartly manage bids, you can A/B test ads, and you can find negative keywords from the search terms report… and you can do this all from inside the Optmyzr dashboard. You can also do a ton of other stuff too, including quality score analysis, report generation, removing duplicate keywords, and on and on. There’s so much you can do inside of Optmyzr, and it’s so much faster than manually doing these tasks in AdWords. Optmyzr makes me a much more efficient AdWords manager.
The second reason why Optmyzr works so great is because not only does it make me a more efficient AdWords manager, it makes me a betterand more-effective AdWords manager. Optmyzr’s software helps me see things I can’t see with just the human eye.
For example, in the A/B testing tool for ads, it shows you clear winning and losing ads in Ad Groups where the confidence level is 90%, 95%, or 99% depending on your preference.
How do I know what the confidence level is when manually managing ads without Optmyzr? I don’t. I don’t have the statistical skill set or time to determine confidence levels when I judge ad performance manually. But Optmyzr’s software does. Optmyzr can examine the data, and find ad groups where the confidence level is high enough to warrant pausing a poor-performing ad. And it does this in an instant. Being able to access and analyze data that I could not realistically come up with on my own is why Optmyzr not only makes me a more efficient AdWords manager, but also a betterAdWords manager. And this A/B ad testing tool is just one of the many ways Optmyzr makes me better at my job.
And while we’re speaking about the A/B ad testing tool. Let me cover another game-changing feature of Optmyzr. In the A/B ad testing tool, not only can you find and pause poor-performing ads that need to be paused, you can also quickly create new ads to test the existing winning ad against. And when I say quickly, I mean quickly. Creating new test ads is one of the most important but also one of the most time-consuming aspects of AdWords management, but with Optmyzr’s fast copy the winning ad and edit this new test adtool it’s both fast and easy. And again, this is just one of the many great features of Optmyzr.
Excellent Customer Service
One of the coolest aspects of Optmyzr is the excellentcustomer service they provide. I have an issue, then fix it. I have a question, they answer it. Optmyzr’s people go above and beyond to not only answer questions about their software, but they actually will take customer feedback and make improvements to their software based on customer suggestions.
It’s clear that Optmyzr’s people getGoogle AdWords. They know what it’s like to manage Google AdWords campaigns and they make solutions that are perfect for AdWords managers. And beyond that, they deliver those solutions with some of the best customer service I’ve ever seen.
Good for one or many accounts
I think Optmyzr is a great solution for AdWords management, regardless of whether you’re just managing your company’s one AdWords account, or if you’re an AdWords management agency managing many client accounts.
The solutions Optmyzr offers will work great for one account and for many accounts.
I strongly encourage anyone managing an AdWords account to give Optmyzr a try. And if you’re managing many accounts, I think it’s a must-have.
Optmyzr is an ever-growing tool that has many cool features. A lot of Optmyzr’s tools are very intuitive if you’ve been managing AdWords campaigns, and you can start using them right off the bat. But I also encourage you to take some time to read through Optmyzr’s documentation to learn about allof the cool features they have because this tool really can do a ton of stuff, and I’m using more and more of its features every week.
Good Luck
Providing a service in the tech-advertising world can be a scary career choice. There is constantinnovation and change. If you don’t keep up, your business will die. A business dying is a very sad thing. And I try to avoid sad things.
Optmyzr has been a game-changer for me. It’s helped my business grow, innovate, and not only get more efficient, but also get better at providing AdWords management services.
As someone who lives in AdWords every week, I can stronglyrecommend Optmyzr for all AdWords advertisers. It will make you more efficient and help you get better performance.
Note from Optmyzr: Thanks Jason andRothman PPCfor sharing your story! If anyone else wants to share their success story about using Optmyzr and have it published on our blog, pleaseget in touch with us.
Many paid search marketers are familiar with Optmyzr as a great tool for time-saving scripts and one-click optimizations. But do you know that Optmyzr can also help you create better landing pages? It’s true. This post will show you three tools you can use within the interface to help you improve your landing pages and convert more customers!
1. Quality Score Tracker
In this view advertisers can get clear, visual snapshots of their account quality scores. The visuals are also color-coded to make it easier to see where you stand. (Red: QS 1-3, Yellow: QS 4-6, Light Green: QS 7-9, Dark Green: QS 10). In the example below, you can see this ad group is getting dinged on having a poor landing page experience. With simple, easy to find visuals, you’ll be able to see your faltering landing pages in no time.
You can also drill down to various levels (depending on if which view you start with) to compare changes in quality score data. All of the quality score components, including landing page experience, are included as default columns.
This report is easy to print which will give you the ability to share it with the right people in your teams to start making new landing pages!
2. Landing Page Analysis
The title of this tool is pretty straightforward, but extremely effective. There are three sections to this report…
• High Performer – High Conversion Rate + High CTR • High Potential – High Conversion Rate + Low CTR • Expensive (seen below) – Good CTR + Low Conversion Rate
You can see in the Expensive image above that these particular ad groups have ads with fairly good CTRs, but little to no conversions. The destination URLs all had good quality scores because they were relevant to my target keywords as well as my ads. While those URLs were relevant, they still weren’t converting and also spending lots of cost. This report will show you which landing pages need conversion rate improvements to get better ROI on the great work you’ve already done.
3. Non Converting Keywords
The Non Converting Keyword report will show you all of the keywords that had zero conversions in the date range you select. You can view these keywords from the account or campaign levels, and also pause any of the flagged keywords right within the Optmyzr interface.
Similar to the destination URLs reported in the Landing Page Analysis tool, you might see certain keywords that have high engagement but poor conversion rate. This data can give you some evidence to go back to your landing pages to see if any improvements can be made before you rule out these keywords completely.
Final Point
Optmyzr is a great tool to help PPC advertisers find and make adjustments within their AdWords and Bing accounts, but that’s not all it can do. The three tools we just went over will help you improve your landing page quality scores and performance. Take the time to dig in and make a concerted effort to make improvements to your landing pages. You can thank Optmyzr for the extra conversions later.
Optmyzr has launched One Click Optimizations™, Data Insights, and Reporting tools for Bing Ads. These tools make it easy to manage multiple Bing accounts by automating time-consuming and routine tasks performed by PPC experts. Read on to find out more.
One-Click Optimizations for Keywords, Bids and Ads
For Keywords
Keyword Lasso: Add high performing search terms as new keywords with the Keyword Lasso optimization. This helps increase conversions and drive good traffic to your site.
Non-Converting Keywords: Reduce cost per acquisition by pausing under performing keywords using this optimization. It helps pause keywords that drove clicks but did not convert.
Negative Keyword Finder: Add negative keywords to your account to reduce wasted spend. This optimization analyzes the search terms report to find irrelevant words that can be added as negatives.
For Bids
First Page Bridger: This optimization recommends increasing bids for high potential keywords. These are keywords with a high Quality Score that can be pushed to the first page of search results with a small bid increase. It helps make the most of the account budget.
For Ads
A/B Testing for Ads: This optimization identifies underperforming ads and enables you to pause them with a single click. This ensures that only the best performing ads remain active in each ad group. Suggestions are based on statistically significant data and losing ads can be determined based on CTR, Conversion Rate and Conversions/Impression.
Data Analysis Tools
Account Dashboard: The new dashboard for Bing gives a quick overview of how the account is performing across key metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, cost and more.
Performance Comparison: This tool compares performance for campaigns and ad groups across date ranges. It lets you aggregate performance for multiple campaigns and ad groups to compare as well.
PPC Investigator: This tool helps you investigate why a metric like clicks or conversions saw a change in performance. It lets you view a cause chart to analyze which elements of an account are affecting performance. The root cause analysis helps you go a step further to find the potential causality at keyword/ad group or campaign level.
Reporting
The Report Designer for Binglets you create and share customized account performance reports. You can include KPIs, daily metric charts, segment performance and more in the reports. In the Pro plan, you can also combine data from different AdWords, Bing and Analytics accounts in the same report.
You can select a Bing account from the Optmyzr dashboard and access the tools for Bing here. Let us know which other tool you would want to see for Bing Ads next, and we will work on it to help you optimize your Bing accounts quickly and efficiently. Till then happy optimizing!
Managing PPC budgets can get extremely tedious so we’ve recently introduced 4 new tools to help make life a little easier.
Spend Projection Tool
Our newest addition to Data Insights is our Spend Projection tool. It helps predict how much you will spend by a certain date and recommends how much budget you should allocate to reach a target level of spend.
See an estimate of how much your PPC campaigns will spend by the end of the month or any other date in the future.
As you can see in the example above, the projected spend ranges from $968 to $1,305 and is most likely going to come in at $1,202. The way we calculate the range is based on recent performance and we show that performance in the “recent trends” view shown below.
See how much your PPC has spent for the past few days and get a sense of how consistent your spend is from one week to the next.
You can enter a target spend and target date to get some further insights in this tool. Based on your actual performance we can tell you how you are pacing against your target. For example, if you should have spent $100 by today but your actual cost is only $90, then you are pacing at 90%, slightly behind where you should be.
See how your actual spend compares to the target and the amount you should have spent by today to reach that target.
The final insight this tool provides is how much you should spend for the remainder of the budget period in order to hit your target spend. The recommendation takes into account very recent performance trends since you may have already adjusted budgets recently based on how you were pacing.
Get a recommendation for how much to spend per day to reach your target PPC spend for the month.
With this recommendation, the next step is to change budgets to meet that recommendation. That brings us to our second new tool…
The Optimize Budgets One-Click Optimization™ is designed to help allocate budgets in the most efficient manner. Remember that AdWords operates with daily budgets at the campaign level or shared budgets that encompass one or more campaigns. This tool helps translate monthly budget targets that are commonly used by companies to daily budgets as required by AdWords.
As with all optimizations, using the most granular setting should produce the optimal results, so we recommend using individual budgets for every campaign. However this tool works equally well with shared budgets, or even a mix of shared budgets and individual campaign budgets.
By enabling the custom columns for the key performance indicators (KPIS) you care most about, you can quickly prioritize campaigns that should have their budgets changed.
Re-allocate budget between campaigns and shared budgets to optimize overall PPC account performance.
In the example above for a lead-gen focused advertiser, we have enabled the column “Cost / Conv” as well as “IS Lost (Budget)”. Now we can easily see if there are budgets with opportunity for increased spend that also have a great CPA. Advertisers could also use the data in this tool to reduce spend, or improve performance for branding or ecommerce focused accounts.
Advanced Budgets – Pause when things spend too much
The 3rd new tool is an Enhanced Script™ for AdWords and is one of 2 new scripts to give you the ultimate level of automation for budget management. In fact, most advertisers will want to use both of our new Enhanced Scripts™for budgets at the same time.
This one prevents you from spending more than intended. If you’ve been spending time manually checking budgets at the end of the month to make sure you’re not overshooting the target, this script will automatically do this for you every single hour.
Here’s how you’d set this one up to prevent an account from spending significantly more than $10,000 per month:
Don’t spend more than intended in an AdWords account using this Enhanced Script.
This script can be copied-and-pasted into AdWords (either at the MCC or individual account level) and scheduled to run automatically every hour. As soon as the script detects that the cost for the month exceeds the maximum, all active campaigns can be paused and labeled. The script can even re-enable all campaigns it had paused at the start of the next month.
While this script is very useful for automating monthly budget management, it can do a lot more. For example, you can apply budgets at any level of the AdWords hierarchy: account, campaign, ad group, keyword, or ad. You can set budgets to be monthly, weekly (Monday through Sunday), weekly (Sunday through Saturday) or daily. An example use case is to enforce a daily budget for a set of experimental keywords (which you have labeled) so that they are not taking up too much budget from old keywords you already know to be performing well.
The 4th and final new budget management tool is another Enhanced Script™ but this one updates daily budgets based on how much money is left to be spent for the month.
Just like clients don’t like it when you overspend their target budget, they also don’t like it when you don’t spend enough. When used in combination with the previous script, this one can help ensure you end the month as close as possible to the target spend without having to monitor and tweak it manually.
Use this script to automatically update daily budgets to help reach a target spend by the end of the month.
This script works with either campaign-level or shared budgets. You simply specify the name of the budget (or the campaign) and how much you’d like to spend for the month. Tell it what to do when the budget has been exceeded (normally I leave the budget as-is because the other script handles that situation) and how to divide the remaining spend over the days remaining in the month. You can either split it evenly, front-load or back-load it, or use our most sophisticated method which uses historical data to determine the typical spend on different weekdays and then allocates bigger budgets on days with a higher usual spend potential. For most advertisers, this setting would set a higher budget on Mondays than on Sundays because there are usually more searches and more clicks on Mondays than Sundays.
There are additional settings to tell the script how many weeks of data to use for determining day-of-week spend, and to allow the script to carry over unused budget from last month.
When you run this script using the verbose output mode (this is an advanced setting you can enable), you’ll see something like this:
When running the script you might see logs like these indicating that the daily budget has been adjusted to help meet the monthly target spend.
We hope you’ll give our new budget management tools and automations a try. We built these based on customer feedback and we’d love to hear more feedback about how else we can make these more useful, or what completely new methodologies you wish Optmyzr would build next.
Finding answers to frequent questions like why an account saw an increase/decrease in clicks or conversions is tedious. A drop in conversions or clicks can be attributed to multiple elements like keywords, placements, or an entire network, which makes answering such questions difficult and time consuming.
Optmyzr has automated this investigation process through its new PPC Investigator tool. If someday, your account experiences a sudden decrease in clicks, just ask PPC Investigator what brought on the change and you will get an answer within seconds.
How does it work?
As the performance of every metric depends on the performance of other underlying metrics, PPC Investigator uses the relationship between different metrics to show potential causality. Then it takes it to the next level and highlights exactly which element (keyword, ad group etc.) in the account caused performance to change. There are two levels at which the performance change can be investigated – Cause Chart and Root Cause Analysis
Cause Chart
The Cause Chart breaks down a metric’s performance into its underlying related metrics and highlights the metric that impacted performance in red. Analysis from the Cause Chart can help find those areas in an account that can benefit from a bid or ad optimization. For example, if conversions dropped and the underlying reason is identified to be an increase in impression share lost due to ad rank, a bid optimization will help. Subject to availability of budget, an account manager can choose to bid higher for better impression share, higher CTR and more conversions.
But wait! That’s not all! PPC Investigator also helps in examining and identifying the positive and negative top movers in an account. It shows the elements in an account (keywords, ad groups. campaigns) that were significant contributors to the change in the account over a period of time. This analysis is available under the Root Cause Analysis tab. Root Cause Analysis
PPC Investigator’s Root Cause Analysis evaluates the exact Campaigns/Ad groups/Product partition/Keywords etc. responsible for change in an account. The tool finds the top contributors by taking into consideration individual keywords/ad groups/network/device and even their combinations like keyword+device or network+ad group. You can view the top three positive and negative movers for a particular account which are further broken down to check sub-contributors. Here is a quick overview of the account insights the Root Cause Analysis can give:
Identify the pain points which impacted account performance to streamline workflows. You’ll know exactly which keyword or ad group caused the change and needs to be investigated.
Check the impact of paused campaigns/ad groups/keywords and make a decision on whether you would like to enable them or keep them paused. These are keywords or campaigns that shows a 90-100% drop.
Find optimization opportunities by viewing the networks or devices that might be pulling down the performance of an ad group or campaign.
Read more about the PPC Investigator here. You can try it out in your Optmyzr account under the Data Insights tools.
A good account structure is still one of the most important aspects of managing an AdWords account. It makes it easy to manage different types of bid adjustments and track performance.
Keyword grouping is essential to a good account structure because it affects ad relevance and in turn Quality Score. Over the years account managers have come up with different methodologies to structure AdWords accounts. All these methodologies target a stronger keyword-ad relevance and a higher Quality Score. One such methodology is SKAG or Single Keyword Ad Group that is probably the utopia of keyword grouping. As the name suggests, each keyword has it’s own ad group which makes it possible to achieve a very high keyword-ad relevance. However, this is not always easy to do.
Optmyzr has automated routine processes like adding new keywords, pausing non-converting keywords as well as adding negatives through One-Click Optimizations™. One such optimization is the Keyword Lasso where our system recommends adding high performing search terms as keywords. This enables users to manage them better by setting bids and writing relevant ad text. Suggestions from the search terms report also bring out new keyword themes that require keywords to be put in individual ad groups.
New Keyword Lasso – With SKAG support
In the new version of the Keyword Lasso One-Click Optimization™we’ve added a feature that lets you create new ad groups from within Optmyzr. This feature can create ad groups using a template which enables automating methodologies like SKAG. It’s as easy as selecting a list of search terms and clicking a button to move them into individual ad groups.
Also, the tool automatically copies over all the ads from the ad group that triggered the search term. If search terms across multiple ad groups are being combined, it selects all the ads from the best performing ad group and uploads them to the new ad groups. It also sets bids for the search terms that are being added to be the same as the keywords they matched to. You can read more about the new Keyword Lasso and SKAG feature here.
We’re a small agency in Milwaukee with big PPC experience. That experience comes from working for a combined 8 agencies, multiple in-house marketing teams (including Best Buy and Kohl’s), and even hiring a few agencies ourselves in our “previous lives”. With all of that comes a ton of hands-on experience and exposure to every PPC management tool under the sun. When we were looking at additional tools to add to our roster at Granular, Optmyzr came up multiple times during our search.
We approached Optmyzr with a high level of curiosity but also with a good amount of doubt. We’ve read plenty of feature lists before, we’ve seen “PPC celebrities” endorse products before, being around so many SEOs we knew what snake oil looked like (kidding guys!). You get it, we entered with caution.
Much to our delight, Optmyzr blew us away within 15 minutes of the free trial. We knew it was the real deal and could immediately tell that it was built by a true PPC expert. The features that it had were inherently different and it was as if someone built this by looking over our shoulders and watching us work for a year…then figuring out how to make our lives easier.
Check out some of our favorite features below:
White Label Reports
It’s refreshing to have true white label reporting. They don’t sneak in their logo or website address like some others on the market. It can take as little as 2 minutes to build and save a PDF or web-sharable report.
• No logo or watermarks • Insert Agency and Client Logos on cover page – looks custom • Insert custom data with screenshots • Include other channels from GA reports • Easily customize, Save and Schedule reports for each client
Quality Score Tracking
Who wouldn’t love this? We do, that’s for sure. With aggregate views and daily trended score tracking, it’s everything you need to thoroughly keep an eye on your quality scores.
• Overall QS gauge for your account, Campaign, or AdGroup level • Google doesn’t even have this feature in AdWords • Clients know about QS, so you should include it in reporting and conversations with them
Hour of week analysis and bidding
Want to look like an all-star to your clients or internal marketing team? Want to stop wasting money during off hours or want to capture more opportunity during profitable times? Then bid by hour of the week.
• It helps us “live our name”, Granular • Another feature hard to match with AdWords out of the box • Ultimate customization and tracking for your accounts • Find “waste hours” and move their budget towards “profit hours”
Automated…but not too automated
We don’t like full automation; most senior-level PPCers feel the same way. We want to get our hands dirty and execute certain optimizations after closely analyzing the data ourselves.
• We’ve used Marin, Acquisio, Kenshoo and Adobe which all serve their purpose for large accounts, but are still a little too hands-off for us
• Optmyzr found a nice middle-ground where we can automate general tasks, yet remain hands on for the more in-depth stuff.
Landing Page Analysis
Nice and quick insight into how well your PPC landing pages are working, based on search performance data.
• We find the “Good CTR but Low Conversion Rate” numbers helpful in identifying destination URLs that need improvement. It shows us when our ads in the ad group are engaging but not converting the relevant user.
• The High Performer section shows us pages with high conversion rate and high CTR. That allows us to apply what’s working for one page to other landing pages needing help.
Geo Heat Map
Everyone likes a good visual heat map. Optmyzr hit another triple with this feature which takes your geo data and visualizes it in a way that C-Level folks can digest during their morning elevator ride.
• Makes viewing location performance super easy • Region, city or country level • Lots of metric options to change views and get better insights • Quick way to set location bid adjustments, with visual reference • Sort and view by aggregate, campaign, or even by device and network breakout
Spend Projections
Have you ever gone over or under budget for a client with strict budget guidelines? It’s not fun. If you do it internally, it may be even worse because you can’t blame the agency. Here’s an easy solution for you.
• Quick, easy, and accurate way to stay on track for monthly budgets • Gives budget suggestions and handles the math for you • Saves you enough time to be a significant help
NEW PPC Investigator
This just mimicked what any good PPCer does on a daily basis when investigating why and how performance changed in a campaign or account. It’s truly amazing but simple at the same time.
• Example: Why did conversions drop over the last 7 days versus the previous period? • Look into impressions (less demand?) and CTR (is my ad less compelling?) • Ok, impressions were down. How is my impression share in search and display? • Ok, I lost a bunch of display share. Let’s look at what was changed and see if I can fix it. • This all happens with a few clicks and is displayed in a nice mind map or “cause chart”
Bonus
Almost all of the amazing reports and data insights can be exported in a CSV with a click of a button. This allows us to dive in even deeper and also blend it into some of our custom reports.
Studio 40 asked 21 PPC experts like Larry Kim, Chris Haleua, and John Gagnon what PPC tools they couldn’t live without. 43 tools were mentioned and I’m pleased to say that Optmyzr made the list.
Here are some of the other tools named Best PPC Tool alongside Optmyzr.
Microsoft Excel
Excel took the #1 spot, not surprising given its ability to help PPC managers crunch the numbers for large data sets. While you can’t use Optmyzr in a generic way like Excel, we have taken some of the most common data questions and turned them into Data Insight tools where we fetch the data from AdWords and Bing automatically, merge several datasets when necessary, handle the filtering and aggregation of the data, and present findings in a matter of seconds. Our Hour-of-Week analysis is a great example of how we can quickly help advertisers identify if they are missing opportunities at specific times of the week.
AdWords Editor
The AdWords Editor was the #2 tool and that makes me happy because I was on the team at Google that started the Editor project. There are some great engineers working on this tool at Google and it’s great to see that even after a decade this one still saves PPC account managers a tremendous amount of time. Saving time is also one of the core goals we have whenever we build new tools at Optmyzr because we know that good PPC professionals are in short supply so making them more efficient with their time is critical. We automate common optimization tasks through our One-Click Optimizations™, for example helping advertisers A/B test different variations of ad text, image ads, or dynamic search ads (DSA).
Google Analytics
#3 on the list is Google Analytics and I have a pretty close connection with that one too as I was on the team at Google that acquired a San Diego company that would become Google Analytics: Urchin. Wesley Chan, the Google PM who led the acquisition thought it was important to offer advertisers a better way to track the results they were getting from buying AdWords ads and analytics would help with that. Where AdWords tells advertisers how many conversions they got and how much they spent on those, Analytics gives insights into what people did on the site, helping to improve conversion rates which in turn lets advertisers bid more in AdWords.
AdWords Scripts
AdWords Scripts are #7 on the list, another one I’m very happy about as it was a big part of the reason Optmyzr got started. After leaving Google in 2012 I had been doing some AdWords consulting and I found myself short on time to do a lot of the AdWords management tasks I knew were critical to the health of accounts. One day I was having lunch with Mark Martel, a Product Marketing Manager from Google and he told me about a new technology called AdWords Scripts that hadn’t seen a lot of uptakes. I went home after lunch and started coding my first script. I then blogged about it for SearchEngineLand, was one of the first to cover the topic at a PPC conference (HeroConf Austin) and met my cofounders because they read about my script that checked for broken landing pages.
A special thanks to George Bates from Studio-40 for compiling the votes, and to Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media and Kirk Williams from ZATO Marketing for being some of our biggest supporters.
We’re excited to share that Optmyzr won the award for Best PPC Management Software at the US Search Awards in Las Vegas on October 7, 2015. Other nominees for this award were Marin Software, Adobe Media Optimizer and two time winner, Kenshoo so we’re extremely flattered to have been selected from this formidable group of solutions.
The award for best PPC Management Software was presented by our friend David Szetela, VP of Search Marketing Operations for Bruce Clay Inc. I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest on his podcast, PPC Rockstars many times.
Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys accepts the award for Best PPC Management tool from David Szetela at the 2015 US Search Awards in Las Vegas.
The judging panel for this award included 30 experts in the field of online marketing, PPC and SEO including long-time Optmyzr user Jim Banks who I had the pleasure of meeting at Pubcon last week. Jim has been doing PPC longer than almost any of us and started in 1999 and now heads up Biddable Media for Cheapflights. I find it really exciting that people who’ve been doing PPC for so long recognize there is room for innovation in the PPC management tool space.
I also have to give a special thanks to Larry Kim, founder of WordStream and Mobile Monkey for inviting us to attend the event as a guest at their table. Congrats to Larry on his well-deserved win of Search Personality of the Year.
With Larry Kim, Founder of WordStream at the US Search Awards and winner of Search Personality of the Year.
Congrats to our other friends who won at this event:
Steve Hammer, RankHammer – Best Small PPC Agency
Maddie Cary, PointIt – Young Search Professional
Marty Weintraub, AIMClear – Best Low Budget PPC Campaign & Best Use of Social Media in a Search Campaign
With Steve Hammer, winner of Best Small PPC Agency.
With Marty Weintraub, winner of several PPC awards, and Eric Enge, author of “The Art of SEO” and the guy who got Frederick to leave Google.
And congrats to the many people I know at these agencies for the wins their agencies scored:
EliteSEM – Best Large PPC Agency
MerkleRKG – Best Use of PR in a Search Campaign
PointIt – Best PPC Campaign
We are truly honored to receive this prestigious recognition for the tools we’ve created to help PPC account managers do more in less time. We had a lot of innovation in our second year and we will continue to build what our customers want so please let us know how we can make Optmyzr better!
My monthly post on PPCHero just went live this morning and I share the code for an AdWords Script you can use to pause your account if there is an issue with the site.
We already have a script that automatically checks for broken URLs and pauses the associated ads but the idea for this script is that it should also work for emergencies where the site may still be running, like when the payment processor is down and people can’t place orders. This script will help quickly stop and then resume any ad groups using the impacted domain.
If you want a free copy of the AdWords Script code, you can grab it here or you can use this tool through our Enhanced Scripts where it works on MCC accounts and where we provide ongoing support so that the script will work even when Google changes their APIs.
The way I have set up the Enhanced Script in our own AdWords account looks like this:
As you can see I took advantage of the ability to create multiple settings of any script. I created one setting that will pause ad groups when my site breaks and another to resume the ad groups as soon as the issue is resolved. I only have 1 of these active at any time!
Another important difference from most of our scripts is that I haven’t scheduled this one to run automatically. Instead, if the need arises, I will go into AdWords to manually run the script once. At that time, it will pause ad groups.
Then when the issue is resolved I will change the status of both settings so that the resume option becomes active and manually run the script again.
I hope nobody needs this script but it’s a good one to have at the ready in case a site issue happens, especially during the holidays when CPCs can skyrocket.
The Quality Score Tracker is one of our most popular tools and we’ve just given it a makeover! We’ve added several new capabilities that we’re sure you’ll love.
See historical QS at a glance
We improved how we show historical QS by including the data for the first and last date of the selected date range on all views. We now also include the highest and lowest QS values from the selected period, giving you a better understanding of how your current QS compares with historical data.
Find areas of opportunity
Our new Top Movers table shows the campaigns, ad groups, and keywords that saw the most significant change in Quality Score for the selected date range. This makes it easier to find items whose QS has slowly declined and needs to be fixed. It also shows items whose QS has improved which may provide insights about the types of optimizations that are delivering results.
Find ad texts to fix
We added the Keyword Ad Relevance subcomponent of QS to keywords and also aggregated it at the account, campaign, and ad group levels. This makes it easy to find instances where you can improve QS by improving the ad text using tools like our AB Ad Testing tool or the Ad Template Report Enhanced Script.
See only the data you need
We added a text search box so that you can quickly hone in on just the keywords, ad groups, and campaigns that contain specific text.
A big change that we made to the Quality Score Tracker was that we now include impressions from all devices (mobile, desktops, tablets) on Google search to calculate the weighted impression share. Earlier, we were only using impression data from desktops on Google search. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from mobile, you’ll may notice a change in the account, campaign and ad group level Quality Scores.
One of the features that makes Optmyzr’s tools effective is that they are data-driven. The suggestions that you see in the one-click optimizations are all based on data. While the data-driven methodology works very well for accounts that have a sizable amount of traffic, it may not show a lot of suggestions for accounts that are still growing. This is because accounts that are relatively small in size may never get enough traffic to make decisions based on statistically significant data. Keeping this in mind, we recently launched the Turbo Mode in our most popular optimizations.
What is Turbo Mode?
In the Turbo mode, our system lowers the traffic threshold required to show optimization suggestions and gives you access to a larger, less-refined data set. The idea is that you can view a larger number of suggestions and then implement your own optimization strategy on them through custom filters.
Which optimizations is the Turbo mode available in?
1. Keyword Lasso
Adding new keywords is critical to any AdWords account which is why the Keyword Lasso is probably one of our most important optimizations. When you enable the Turbo mode in this optimization, it shows you all the search terms that received traffic but are not present as keywords in your account. You can apply custom filters to these suggestions to find positive and negative keywords and then add them with a single click.
2. Non-converting keywords
Our system uses stringent parameters when recommending non-converting keywords that should be paused. We understand that many times you want to find non-converting keywords in your account early on and optimize or pause them. For this reason, we added the turbo mode to the non-converting keywords optimization. The turbo mode displays any keyword that received more than 20 clicks and did not convert during the selected date range. Some ways in which you can use the non-converting keywords optimization are mentioned below:
• Optimize or pause keywords that have not converted in the last three months and haven’t converted in the last 365 days.
• Investigate keywords that have a high CTR and high Bounce Rate because this means that the keyword is relevant to the ad but the landing page is probably not correct.
3. AB Testing for Ads
The AB Testing for ads optimization identifies winning and losing ads in each ad group. However, it requires data to be statistically significant before making a recommendation and only displays ad groups that have winning and losing ads. However, there are times when an account doesn’t have enough traffic to make a decision based on statistical significance. Or, you want to optimize your ads early on. To enable this, we launched the turbo mode in the AB Testing for Ads tool. This lets you see ads that have traffic in all ad groups and also create new ads in these ad groups.
We recently hosted a webinar about the recent changes in Quality Score with Convirza and they just posted the transcript of the Q&A we did at the end. Read it here…
If you’re interested in the topic of Quality Score and missed my 2 recent posts on this topic, here are the links:
One of the most common questions we get asked is how can Optmyzr help me or, what is Optmyzr? I’ve tried to answer these questions here.
At a high level, Optmyzr has API based Tools and Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords. This blog post gives a quick overview of the tools available to users when they sign up for an account. The tools fall under three broad categories based on which function of AdWords management they will help you with.
Data Insights
The tools under this section help you see trends and find optimization opportunities by converting rows of data into easy-to-understand visualizations. The tools that fall under this category are:
Dashboard: Quick snapshot of how your AdWords account is performing across devices and networks. Data can be aggregated by labels.
Hour of the Week: Find the best and worst-performing time-slots during the week for your AdWords campaigns.
Geo HeatMap: Find the best and worst-performing geographic areas for ads in terms of traffic, conversions and ROAS.
Performance Comparison: Compare performance of campaigns, ad groups, categories, devices and networks. Do quick post-optimization analysis.
Quality Score Tracker: Get the historical Quality Score of your account, campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Compare how Quality Score affects Avg. CPC. Get a list of ad groups that need to be optimized.
Landing Page Analysis: Find which Landing Pages in your AdWords account need to be worked on.
Search Terms Word Cloud: Get aggregate data for all the long-tail queries that get drive traffic to your AdWords account.
Spend Projection: Get an estimate of how much your account will spend using simple linear regression analysis.
One-Click Optimizations™
The tools under this section help you perform optimizations in your AdWords account with just one click. The system does all the data crunching to make intelligent recommendations. All you have to do is review and implement. The optimizations suggestions are made real-time.
One-Click Optimizations that help you optimize keywords:
Conversion Lasso: Add converting and high CTR search terms to your AdWords account. It doesn’t recommend search terms that are already present as keywords.
First Page Bridger: High-Quality Score keywords that are just below the first page bid.
Keyword De-Duper: Shows keywords that are absolute duplicates. Recommends which one to keep and pauses the rest.
Conversion Grabber: Finds high converting keywords that are losing impression share due to ad rank. Recommends selective bid increases for those keywords.
One-Word Keywords: Finds one-word keywords in broad and phrase match that are accruing cost and traffic.
Traffic Sculptor: Helps direct traffic to the right ads by recommending exact match negative keywords.
A/B Testing for Ads: Uses statistical analysis to identify the best and worst-performing ads in an ad group including image ads for display.
Display Placements Exclusion: Recommends placements to exclude based on your goal – Branding, Traffic or Conversions.
Non-converting Keywords: Identifies non-converting keywords that are driving up cost.
Hour of the Week Bidder: Set bid modifiers for different times of the week based on performance.
Shopping Bidder: Let’s you change bids for product groups in shopping campaigns with one-click. Product Groups can be selected based on ROAS.
Shopping Campaign Builder: This lets you create well-structured product groups from your Google Merchant Feed in minutes. You can manage bids and exclusions with just few clicks.
Reporting
This section has the Custom Report Designer and some other tools designed specifically for reporting on AdWords account performance. The tools under this section are:
Report Designer: This lets you create report templates for AdWords reports that can be used across accounts. You can whitelabel and schedule reports to be emailed automatically as PDF attachments. It gives you access to unique widgets like Hour of the Week, Quality Score Tracker and Geo HeatMap that are unique to Optmyzr reports. Don’t want to create a template from scratch? The section also has some pre-built templates that can be used. The icing on the cake is the ability to automatically schedule reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Instant Reports: Don’t have time to create a report template from scratch? You can use one of the instant report templates for AdWords or Google Analytics as is or customize them.
If you have questions or, need help getting started with Optmyzr, please feel free to write to us at support@optmyzr.com.
Both Google and Optmyzr launched updates to their MCC dashboards for AdWords today offering exciting new functionality. Here’s what’s new.
AdWords MCC changes
Here are the new capabilities launched in the AdWords MCC update:
Segment MCC data
Filter MCC data
Graph MCC data
See data further back than 90 days
Now you can segment the data the same way you already could in individual accounts, for example by day of week, network, device, click type, location on page (top or other), and conversion name. Here’s what that looks like when you segment the data by quarters:
You can also filter the data, for example to see just the accounts managed by a particular account manager or for a particular vertical. There are the same filters for metrics and conversion data we already know from individual AdWords accounts but here are the new filters associated with the MCC level:
You can now view any two metrics on a chart. This is cool because it works together with the filters so it’s easy to get a chart for accounts that meet particular criteria, like who is managing them.
The most subtle but possibly most important change is that you can now look at data further back than 90 days.
Optmyzr MCC changes
At Optmyzr, here’s what we updated today along with a few other recent changes to our MCC that you may have missed:
Filter data by network and device
Include Google Analytics data
Include account Quality Score data
Redesigned account picker
Birds eye view improvements
Enhanced account Cues
Faster access to the Optimizations Inbox
Before today’s updates we already offered a date range picker that can use any date range, date range comparisons, and the ability to filter data for different segments and networks. Here’s what our filters look like:
By linking your GA accounts to Optmyzr (a capability in our Pro plan), you can add goals, goal conversion rate, and e-commerce directly to the MCC dashboard where you can even use date range comparisons to get a quick view into how your results are changing.
We also offer a column that shows the account Quality Score, a metric we calculate from the keyword level QS numbers Google shows in their UI. It’s useful to track this number in the MCC dashboard to find out if all the optimization work you do is paying off in terms of improving relevancy.
Here’s the new account picker we launched. When you star accounts, you can see just those accounts in a separate view. Because every user gets to star their own accounts, this is particularly useful for teams where every person may be working on different accounts and wants to track those accounts most closely.
Our birds eye view has a new icon to make it easier to find. This view can be very useful when you quickly need to see if a change in performance is due to a one-day anomaly or part of a longer trend.
Our account Cues feature is still in whitelist beta (contact us for access) and it lets you compare each account’s recent performance against historical expectations for a set of typical KPIs that depend on the business model of each account. The cues look like red or green dots next to each account.
Here is the detail view you get when you click on the Cue:
Finally we’ve given our Optimizations Inbox a new home on the MCC dashboard. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s a great place to find out which optimizations have the most changes available for all your accounts.
We recently launched a more powerful version of the Optmyzr MCC dashboard. What makes this dashboard so powerful is that it lets you:
1. View and compare goal data from Google Analytics along with data from AdWords You can link your Google Analytics account to Optmyzr and view goal and e-commerce data alongside AdWords data. In the favorite accounts tab, you can compare this data to a different date range and see how performance has changed.
2. Add notes and labels to accounts With the Pro dashboard you can add labels and notes at the account level and these will be visible to your team members. The search box at the top will help you filter accounts by label.
3. Add more data fields like monthly budget, percentage of budget spent When managing multiple AdWords accounts it becomes difficult to see if all accounts are on track to spend the amount allocated for that period. With this feature you can specify a monthly budget for each account and then use the % Monthly Budget spent field to identify accounts that may not meet or may exceed the allocated budget. Even as a company if you’re managing multiple AdWords accounts, this feature will definitely come in handy.
4. Segment data by network and device at the account level This is one of the most powerful features of the Pro dashboard. You can use the filters on the left side of the dashboard to see how much each account is spending on a particular network and device. You can see how performance for all your accounts has changed on mobile phones.
This version of the dashboard is available to users on the Pro and Enterprise subscription plans
The two things people care most about when managing AdWords campaigns are reducing cost and increasing conversions. Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the most common questions we get asked at Optmyzr is “how can your tools help me reduce spend and increase conversions?” In this blog post, we want to highlight the top four tools in Optmyzr that can help you reduce wasted spend on AdWords instantly.
1. Non-Converting Keywords
This is a one-click optimization that finds keywords that have not converted in the last 30 days. It takes into account statistical significance of data and only recommends those keywords to be paused that have received enough traffic but haven’t converted yet. It lets you pause these keywords with a single click. To help you make an informed decision, the system includes assisted conversion data and data from Google Analytics like bounce rate and average time on site. (One-Click Optimizations -> Non-Converting Keywords)
2. Hour of the Week Bid Modifier
Scheduling your ad to not show or to run at a reduced bid during underperforming times of the week is another great way to reduce wasted spend. This methodology lets you allocate more budget to those times of the week that perform well. The Hour of the Week Bidder lets you set bid modifiers with a single click in your AdWords account. It also gives you the option to imitate a metric where you can set bid modifiers based on the trend line conversions follow during the week. (One-Click Optimization -> Hour of the Week Bid Modifier)
One good way to optimize your campaigns is to make sure you’re reaching users in the right geographic location. With the Geo HeatMap you can find locations that result in spend but no conversions and locations that have a low ROAS. (Data Insights -> Geo HeatMap)
There are two ways to use this data:
Exclude underperforming geographic locations
Split your campaigns by location and allocate more budget to better performing locations
Ads leading to 404 error pages always result in wasted spend and a bad user experience. It is difficult to keep track of landing pages that stop working. This Enhanced Script for AdWords automatically check landing pages for all active ads and automatically pauses them to stop money from being spent on wasted clicks. (Enhanced Scripts -> Check Destination URLs) Read more about how this script works
Figuring out whether an AdWords account is healthy or not can be a very time-consuming task, especially when managing multiple accounts. In the past, we added red and green arrows to show the directionality of key metrics to our MCC dashboard.
Optmyzr’s MCC dashboard shows changes in account performance using red and green arrows.
However, we found that this still didn’t help us quickly identify accounts that were in trouble because accounts with lots of green arrows could still be underperforming. So one of our engineers, Manu, got to work on figuring out how to roll up all the data into a single indicator of account health. Today we’re starting a whitelist preview of what we came up with: Account Cues.
Each account gets a color coded dot that indicates how the account is performing for its key metrics when comparing a recent period to the last 6 months of data:
Account Cues use a single color-coded dot to indicate whether an account is meeting or missing its main goals.
By clicking on the dot, you can see more data about the metrics that Cues is evaluating:
Account Cues analyzes the most important metrics for each account’s main goal.
There are five types of cues available for every account and they are based on the main goal which can be sales (conversions), leads (converted clicks), traffic (clicks), branding (impressions), or meeting a target for one metric of your choice.
For a goal like leads, we automatically analyze three related metrics: converted clicks, converted click rate, and cost per converted click. If any of these deviate more than 10% from the expected values based on six months of historical data, the account will be flagged with a red dot to draw attention to it.
Once you see that an account is not performing well, the next step is to investigate why. This can also be quite time-consuming so we tried to simplify this too with a new Data Insight called “Ask Optmyzr”. When you start with this tool you can ask a question about why key metric is either up or down for a certain date range:
Then we pull several reports in the background and present the results in an easy-to-read manner like with a cause tree:
Quickly identify the main reasons why certain AdWords metrics are changing.
The concept of this tool is that every metric depends on other underlying metrics and rather than randomly hunting in your account for things that are different we show potential causality. For example, if clicks are down like in the example above, we highlight that fact in red and show the underlying related metrics: impressions and CTR. In this case, CTR is not an issue (it’s green), so we look further down the tree to see that impressions are down because IS lost due to budget has increased dramatically. From this visualization, we can quickly determine that raising the budget and taking a look at the conversion rate of the landing pages should help restore conversions to this account.
We provide additional aggregated reporting for campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and queries to help you find the specific elements with the biggest change in the account. Finally, we combine all this data with segments like devices and networks to help you discover if any of these are contributing to the problem.
We’re excited to launch Account Health Cues and Ask Optmyzr in whitelist beta today and we can’t wait to hear your feedback about how we can improve this to make your lives easier when managing PPC accounts. If you want to try it out, just drop us a line through the support links.
I spend a lot of time talking and writing about the more humanistic elements of advertising; how to appeal to your audience in a unique and personal way, how to create a genuine connection with your visitors and so on and so forth. In our experience, there’s a lot to be said for these sorts of unquantifiable things that often get overlooked amongst the maelstrom of statistical analysis and data crunching.
Often times we need to make a judgment call that accounts for both our intuition and the immutable data our campaigns accrue.
That being said there are times when it’s important to sublimate our instinctual emotions and optimize our campaigns within the ruthlessly unforgiving framework of our historical data.
A/B split testing ad copy is one these instances.
Few, if any, of the standard optimization techniques we SEMs use will yield as consistent and predictable results as A/B split testing our ad copy. We can peel and stick keywords into new ad groups, restructure our account to work on our Quality Scores, readjust our custom bidding schedule with the hope of increasing our conversion rates – but they’re all inherently unpredictable to a certain extent. A/B split testing ad copy, when done right, will guarantee that your KPI of choice will increase (however incrementally) over time.
However, there are some important things to understand about A/B split testing ad copy that will spell the difference between your tests’ success or failure.
Setting yourself up for success in Adwords
Optmyzr provides by far the most advanced and efficient A/B split testing tools available to agencies and individual advertisers, but you need to make sure your AdWords campaigns are configured in a way that will help you run your split tests appropriately from within the Optmyzr dashboard.
By default, AdWords will optimize your ad rotation based on the ads expected to get the most clicks. This is great – if you’re lazy 🙂
If Google rotates your ads based on the ads expected to get the most clicks, you’ll generally see one or two of the ads in a given ad group getting the lion’s share of impressions and clicks. Naturally.
A/B split testing is all about getting statistically significant data across all the ads involved in any given test, so the first thing you need to do is change the ad rotation settings to rotate evenly. AdWords offers the option to rotate evenly for 90 days and then optimize, but since we’re going to be A/B split testing long after 90 days (right!?) we want to choose the “rotate indefinitely” option.
You can change this setting in the campaign setting tab. Keep in mind, since this is a setting modified at the campaign level, it will apply the rotation setting to all the ad groups in the campaign.
Developing your A/B Split Tests
Now that we’ve configured our ads to rotate evenly, we need to figure out what to test and how to test it. Based on how much data your account is generating you’re going to have to decide what type of split test you want to run.
People often confuse technical terminology, so we’ll begin by defining the difference between a multivariate (full factorial) test and an A/B test.
A/B split tests are the easiest to run and unless your landing pages are getting high volumes of daily traffic, an A/B split test is the method of choice (in my opinion at least). While many people think that A/B split testing is strictly for testing one individual variable, that’s not really the case. You can run 2 completely different ads against each other (or 3 or 4 for that matter), with different headlines, description text and display URLs, and still call it an A/B split test.
If you’re just measuring which ad performed the best, and not which individual variable performed the best, it’s an A/B test.
A multivariate test is when you seek to learn which individual variable performed the best. In other words, if you were testing 4 different variables (headline, description line 1, description line 2 and display URL), you would need to write 16 different ads (all possible combinations) in order to see which combination of variables worked the best. For most accounts, multivariate tests sound great in theory but don’t work so effectively in practice. In order to determine a winning ad, you need statistically significant data. Most accounts aren’t getting the kind of volume to make multivariate tests worth the time and effort.
So for our sake, let’s go back and talk a little more about A/B split tests.
I strongly recommend running single variable A/B split tests whenever possible (and let’s face it … it’s always possible). When you run 2 ads alongside each other testing just one variable, you know what element in the ad accounted for the better (or worse) performance.
For example, say you decided to run an A/B test on 2 different ad headline ideas. You’re a high end self-publishing company and you thought it may be a good idea to include your minimum order price in your ad headline to help dissuade people looking for cheap solutions from clicking on your ad. So you write two identical ads and only change the ad headline in one of them to include your minimum order price. When the statistically significant (more on that soon) results are in, you’ll know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was the change in the ad headline that accounted for the difference in performance.
If for example you also changed the description lines of the ad to something other than the identical copy of the other ad in the ad group, you won’t know if it was the headline or the description or a combination of the two that accounted for the difference in performance.
Like we said, that would still be considered a valid A/B split test since we know one of the ads statistically outperformed the other ad, but we won’t know exactly which element of the ad should get the credit.
That being said, there are times a multivariable A/B split test is really useful. If you’re running a new ad group and you have two completely separate ideas that are thematically dissimilar, running two completely separate ads in an A/B test to determine which direction you should take for future tests could be a really useful strategy to use.
Let’s go back to our previous example of your high-end self-publishing company. You’re not sure whether highlighting the speed and quality of your service or the professionalism and experience of your editorial staff would make for a better ad. These are two separate ideas, and with the allotted ad space you can’t cover both aspects of the business. In this case, it may be a good idea to run a multivariable A/B test with one ad focusing primarily on the speed and quality and another ad focusing primarily on the editorial staff. You’re not testing any one variable like a headline, but rather a concept as a whole. Once your test determines which ad is more appealing (based on the KPI you choose to measure by – more on that soon) you can then dive into single variable A/B tests to further refine your copy and consistently increase performance.
For the sake of not getting stuck in a rut of stagnation and complacency, it’s always a good idea to periodically test new multivariable “concept” ads to try and find new ideas that you haven’t explored in the past.
Now that we know the sort of test we want to run, what do we actually test? You’ll probably get five different answers to this question if you ask five different people, so I’ll just tell you what we’ve found from the hundreds of accounts we’ve managed over the past few years.
Start with A/B testing ad headlines. When testing one variable like a headline, I generally aim to write four variations – which of course would give us four separate ads in an ad group. If you’re getting fewer than 75-100 clicks daily for any given ad group, consider writing 2-3 ads instead.
Your headline is not only the first element of your ad read by a user; it is often the only part of the ad that gets attention. If someone sees an ad headline they really like, they’ll often click the ad without reading the rest of what you have to say for yourself. Conversely, if the headline turns them off or isn’t precisely what they’re looking for, they’ll likely pass you on and move to the next ad on the page.
There’s a lot of information to swallow on a search engine results page, and people just don’t have the time or mental fortitude to read and analyze every line of every ad and organic result. It’s not something we advertisers like (after putting so much work into every character of our precious ads) but it’s the cold reality we have to eventually come to terms with. So in fewer words, test your headlines first. I hope most people would agree with that.
Following our logic, test your description lines of text next. Whether you test one line at a time or both lines of description text in one shot depends on your preference and the type of ad you’re writing (is there a distinct thought on each line or are both lines one long message?).
It’s a good idea to test your display URLs since the historical CTR of your display URLs plays a role in your Quality Score. Don’t expect to see dramatic results from an A/B test on display URLs (if there’s one part of your ad someone won’t read, it is the display URL), but test them anyway for the sake of Quality Score and for the sake of doing your job right.
What specifically to test is a longer discussion for another time but I try to always think of the products and services we’re advertising more in the context of their emotional benefits to the customer and less in the context of their features. Nobody buys a vacuum because they want a vacuum; they buy a vacuum because they want a clean room. We’ve seen some extraordinary A/B test results testing features VS. benefits (“bag-less and compact!” VS. “a home as clean as you after a long hot shower!”), and in almost every case, highlighting benefits and emotional payoffs always produce better results.
Also consider the idea of what I like to call qualifiers. Qualifying your clicks by including prices in your ads is one way of dissuading undesirable clicks from people whose traffic you don’t want to pay for.
A/B testing landing pages is also something that is highly effective, but with the advent of complex A/B landing page tools and software it has become an industry unto itself and need not conflict with your ad copy A/B split tests.
I’d be remiss to not mention the idea of testing your call to action. Of course, you have a call to action (right!?), and it’s a great idea to test different CTA’s to see which ones capture the attention of your audience the most effectively.
Now that we know how and what to test, let’s take a look at how we measure and define the results of our tests.
Statistical significance
If we didn’t have a tool like Optmyzr, the next few paragraphs would probably (definitely) bore you half to death. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather watch paint dry than talk, write or listen to anything that had to do with coefficients, correlations and the holy grail of statistical measurements – p values.
Luckily for all of us, Optmyzr does all that work for us. But just for the sake of our intellectual well-being, a quick word on p values.
In a statistical test, a p value tells us how significant, or scientifically interesting, our results are. We may find that headline A had a higher CTR than headline B, but how confident can we be that we’d see the same results if we ran the same test again? And again after that?
Our p values (also referred to as our confidence interval) tell us how confident we can be that we’d see the same results repeated, or in other words how reliable our findings were. A p value is just a number outputted by the statistical equations used to calculate the correlation between our variables, and depending on the field of study, different p values represent different thresholds of acceptability.
In the medical profession, when the results of a test can quite literally inform a surgeon on a life and death decision, a p value of less than .01 is required to determine reliability. For AdWords, a slightly less precarious area of study, we could assume that a p value of less than .05 is perfectly acceptable. In fact, in the social sciences p<.05 is the benchmark for reliability.
At this point you’re probably thinking if you never hear the words p value again it would be too soon. Amen to that, brother. I promise, it’s going to be lots of colorful pictures from here on out.
Since this isn’t a beginner’s Optmyzr tutorial, I’m going to assume basic working knowledge of the Optmyzr dashboard.
So we’ve configured and launched our split test, and now we want to see if we have enough statistically significant data to pick our winners.
Navigate over to the A/B testing for ads under the one click optimizations dropdown in Optmyzr.
Before we analyze our results, we’ll want to take a look at the settings Optmyzr allows us to configure.
Remember p values? That’s what OPTMYZR is referring to with Required Confidence. By default it’s set to 95% (p<.05) and that’s a good place for it to stay. You can also filter your results by Ad Type, Network, Minimum Impressions Per Ad and the Date Range.
The important option to look at here is the Parameter options list. As you can see from the first image, Optmyzr sets our parameter to CTR by default. This means that the statistical analysis will look at CTR as our key performance indicator of choice to determine the winning ad. As you can see from the green and red highlights in the CTR column, CTR is the metric being “studied” in this test.
You can also choose to run the A/B test results using conversion rate and conversions per impression as your metric of choice.
In order to determine which parameter you should use depends on the strategy behind the ad groups you’re testing ads in. If you’re running a broader, loosely targeted campaign to drive traffic to your site so you could build your remarketing audiences or your brand awareness, CTR may very well be the metric of choice for you. If your campaign is designed to drive profit and a positive ROI, then you may want to analyze your ad performance in the context of conversion rate.
Because the campaign we’re looking at here is a branding campaign, I care primarily about visitors to the site – so I’ll keep CTR as our metric of choice.
So for this A/B test we’re testing two different headlines. Based on a confidence level of 95%, Optmyzr outputs a winning ad using CTR as our metric of choice.
But can you spot something wrong?
The winning ad has a much higher volume of clicks and impressions as the losing ad. This is because the ads in this ad group were not set to rotate indefinitely and Google was giving preference to the ad expected to get more clicks. While the test results are still statistically significant, we want our data to be more equal when it comes to the volume of clicks and impressions.
Let’s hop over to another account to see what a proper A/B test should look like.
In this example, we ran a multivariable A/B test on two different overall ad concepts. Even though the winning ad still has quite a few more clicks than the loser, the losing ad has enough volume to lend real validity to the results of this test.
Notice another thing. Even though my parameter of choice over here is still CTR, Optmyzr graciously lets us know if another one of the metrics also matches up with statistical significance at our desired confidence interval. In this example, the winning ad also has a statistically significant higher Conversion per Impression rate than the losing ad. Good to know!
If you run into instances when one ad wins on CTR but loses on conversion rate, you need to seriously think about the campaign strategy and decide which metric to base your optimizations off of.
If you haven’t fallen in love with Optmyzr, you will now!
Not only does Optmyzr make it incredibly easy (and a little fun) to run AB split tests results across an entire account in one shot, Optmyzr also allows you to pause the losing ads from each split test with the click of a button.
By default, Optmyzr selects all the losing ads across all the ad groups and A/B tests that had statistically significant results within your defined parameters.
If you’re satisfied with the results, you can click the blue “Pause Selected Ads” button in the upper right hand corner and the losing ads will be paused inside your live AdWords account. Seriously, how cool is that?
But now that you’ve paused one of the ads, you want to write a new ad in its place so you could run another A/B test. Optmyzr has another incredibly useful tool that allows you to do just that without leaving the dashboard.
By clicking the “Create Ad” button in the upper right hand corner of an ad group’s section, Optmyzr presents you with a dialogue box that will allow you write a new ad and publish it live in the ad group you selected. Even cooler, Optmyzr gives you suggestions for each element of the text ad based on results from historical data and previous A/B tests run in the account.
As you can see, OPTMYZR offers a completely thorough solution to do A/B split testing in an easy, aesthetically simple and intuitive way.
The best way to get a sense of how it works is to just go in there and mess around with the different parameters. Once you get the hang of it, running what would otherwise have been complex analysis will take you a couple minutes.
Conclusion
A/B split testing ad copy gets overlooked even though it’s one of the most reliable and effective forms of optimization. Because of its inherent complexities and ambiguities, we sort of just gloss over it picking and choosing winning ad copy based more on our intuition than on statistically sound results.
Optmyzr’s A/B split testing tool really changes that for a lot of people by simplifying a complex task and making it incredibly easy and hassle-free to perform regularly and effectively.
Even though we rely heavily on statistical evidence with A/B tests, it’s crucial to express your creative voice and use your intuitive sense to determine what, where and how to test. By combining your unique personality and some good statistical analysis, you’ll be A/B testing like a pro.
Again, it’s easy to get complacent in a certain holding pattern with A/B tests, so remind yourself once every couple months (or weeks) to go back to the drawing board and test some new “concept” ads.
If you have any interesting data on A/B tests you’ve run in the past, I’d love to hear about them. Of course, any comments or questions are more than welcome (leave them below), and I’ll be sure to get back to you.
If you’ve made it all the way down here, I really appreciate you taking the time to read this post. Looking forward to next time …
Happy Testing!
Learn more about how I manage AdWords accounts at Adventure PPC.
With 2014 now well behind us, I wanted to give a quick round-up of Optmyzr’s most popular media coverage. A lot of these are evergreen content that should be helpful for anyone looking to learn a bit more about how to be more effective at managing AdWords.
I used BuzzSumo to discover the most shared content on the internet related to AdWords last year and that showed that one of our articles on SEL was the 13th most shared post of the year, not bad considering it’s competing with Google’s own product announcement blog. These 10 Analytics Reports Will Improve Your AdWords Results. I also delivered this content during a Google Partners Hangout On Air: Use Google Analytics to Improve AdWords Performance.
We also picked up some coverage related to the ever-popular topic of Quality Score. According to BuzzSumo, it was only the 50th most shared AdWords content, but it’s a good read if you’re trying to make sense of how Quality Score works: Quality Score’s Impact on Ad Rank and CPC.
Our product launches got some nice mentions in various publications, but we’re always happy to see them mentioned by dedicated SEM practitioners like here:
We recently launched a lot of new features to make Optmyzr’s reporting platform even more powerful.
Report Navigator
We added the Report Navigator feature to the report view. This lets you click on any section of the report and scroll to it instantly. The names of the sections are the title widgets that are used in the report. With this feature, the interactive reports have become even more powerful. Try it out and let us know what you think!
Image Widget
Now you can insert images up to 1 MB in size in your report templates. These images can be charts or screenshots that you would like to share as part of the report. The widget accepts image file formats like jpeg and png.
We recently added more functionality to the logo feature in the Report Designer that makes the report templates easier to use across accounts. You can now save logos separately at the AdWords account and report template level. If there is a logo at the account level, it will override the default template logo if any. For example, as an agency, you can save your company’s logo at the template level and the customer logo at the AdWords account level.
The Keyword Lasso one-click optimization is one of the most used optimizations in our suite of tools. It analyzes the AdWords search terms report and makes recommendations on which search terms should be added as keywords based on performance. We’ve added a lot of new features to this optimization to make it even more powerful. Details below:
Adding search terms as negative or positive keywords
Now you can add search terms from the Keyword Lasso as either negative or positive keywords to your AdWords account. If you find a search term that you don’t want to show on, add it as a negative. When the match type for a keyword is set to negative, the row is highlighted in red to help you separate the negative keywords from the positive keywords visually. When you click on ‘Add Selected Keywords to Account’ the system adds both the negative and positive keywords together.
Broad Match Modifier as a match type
In AdWords, to add a keyword as a broad match modifier (BMM) you need to manually type in the ‘+’ symbol in front of each word. In the Keyword Lasso it is present as a different match type and selecting it will automaticaly insert ‘+’ symbols in the keyword. You can see and edit the keyword before adding it as well.
In-line editing of search terms
Sometimes you want to edit search terms before adding them to your AdWords account. This is especially true when you’re adding negative keywords. Now when you click on the search term in Keyword Lasso, it becomes an editable text box. Also, you can see all edited keywords highlighted in Yellow in the Optmyzr interface.
Add search terms to different campaigns and ad groups
When you’re following a specific account structure you may not want to add the suggested search terms in the ad group they were triggered in. The ‘Advanced Mode’ in Keyword Lasso lets you do this. You can switch to the advanced mode by clicking the ‘Toggle Advanced Mode’ button at the top right corner in Keyword Lasso. This will show you additional options to pick the campaign and ad group you want to add the search terms to and clicking ‘Move’ will show you the search term under the new campaign and ad group in the interface. When you click ‘Add selected keywords to account’ it will add them to your AdWords account.
Keyword Notes
The search terms report also gives you ideas for new ad group themes and negative keywords. Now you can make a note of search terms that can be themes for new ad groups or negative keywords by clicking on the icon displayed when you hover over the search term. After you’re done, export the list as a csv.
Removing underperforming ads is one part of testing ad text in an AdWords account. The other part of the process is to create new ads so you can continue testing new ad copy. Optmyzr’s AB Testing For Ads optimization already lets you remove underperforming ads with one click. Creating ads in this optimization was a long standing request from our users and we’re happy to announce that this feature is now available!
You can now instantly create ads in ad groups from which you remove underperforming ads. What takes this feature to the next level is that the system automatically recommends high performing headlines, description lines and display URLs to choose from. This makes creating new ads efficient and easy.
Step 1
In the AB Testing for ads optimization, all ad groups that have underperforming ads are displayed. There is a button above the results to create ads in each ad group.
Step 2
Clicking on ‘Create Ad’ will open up an easy-to-use interface that will let you create ads in the ad group. When you click on each component (headline, description lines) of the ad, the system automatically shows you the best performing options. You can either choose from the options displayed or write your own text.
Step 3
Clicking on ‘Create Ad’ in the ad creation window will upload the ad instantly to your AdWords account. You’ll see a message that it has been successfully uploaded at the bottom of the window. In case there is an error and AdWords rejects the ad, the system will let you know that the ad was not uploaded. You can continue to create additional ad variations in the same window and upload the ads in your AdWords account.
Try out this feature in the AB Testing for Ads Optimization here.
In 2013, Optmyzr was one of the first companies to create AdWords Scripts for advertisers who were looking for more efficient ways to manage their accounts. As the capabilities of AdWords Scripts grew and advertisers started using them in more accounts, we saw some interesting ways they could be made easier to use for the average non-technical marketer.
Today, I am very excited to launch what the team and I have built: Enhanced Scripts™, a whole new way to use AdWords Scripts without ever touching a single line of code. Here are some of the key features:
Maintain Script settings on the Optmyzr website instead of in the code.
Enhanced Scripts for AdWords make it easy for non-programmers to use powerful AdWords reports and automations using AdWords Scripts.
Get all Script output directly in Optmyzr
Get all the output from AdWords Scripts directly in your Optmyzr account with Enhanced Scripts.
Copy-and-paste the code once and never touch it again.
Copy-and-paste the code once. After that it never changes but you can still modify what the script does by changing the settings in Optmyzr.
Demo video
Script example: Create Ads from a Google Spreadsheet
To showcase the capabilities of Enhanced Scripts™, we took our most popular regular script and turned it into an Enhanced Script™. This script creates ads from a Google spreadsheet, making it easy to maintain a large account where the ad groups, ads, and keywords are constantly changing based on inventory.
Here’s a video that illustrates how this specific Enhanced Script™ works.
Static AdWords reports limit the amount of information you can include or, you run the risk of including so much data that the reports become overwhelming. We recently launched a new way to share reports that makes them interactive. You can now generate a link to the report and share it with users.
The report is no longer static as in a PDF and you can hover over charts and graphs to see data points. For example, if you notice a sudden drop in clicks on a particular day you can hover over that particular point and see the exact number without having to log in to your AdWords account.
Instant data gratification: Hover over charts to see actual data at different points without having to log in to your AdWords account Get more granular data: Zoom in to widgets to go a level deeper. For example, if the Geo HeatMap in your report is at the country level, this format will let you zoom in and see data at the city level without having to generate another report.
Steps to generate a link for the report:
Click on the report you want to generate a link for on this page in your Optmyzr account.
In the report, select Create Link from the Report Actions drop down.
Copy and share the link.
Tip: You can use the Share a Link option with the new commenting feature we launched. Using the two features together will let you share a link to the report with your comments.
After creating AdWords reports, account managers spend a lot of time adding observations that help their customers make sense of the data. We understand that the commentary that goes with the reports is as important as the reports themselves. To make this easy for our users, we’ve added a comment feature to reports. You can now add comments to reports after they have been generated and then download the report as a PDF, email it or share a link with the comments intact.
How is this feature different from the text widget in the report designer?
The text widget lets you add text while creating the report in the report designer. This works when you want to include text that will remain consistent each time the report is generated. To record observations that are specific to a particular month or week, the comments feature is more useful because the comments don’t become part of the report template. They are specific to that report and you don’t have to edit the template each time.
To use this feature, follow these steps:
1. Click on the report you want to add comments to on this page in your Optmyzr account
2. In the report, hover on top of any widget and it’ll show you a highlighted box to add comments
3. After adding comments, download the report as a PDF, email it as a PDF or, share a link to the report
We’re adding a feature that will let you save the reports with comments in your Optmyzr account. You can edit the comments later or, maintain a history of your observations for future reference.
This feature is available in the Pro and Enterprise plans. Also, available on the old Gold plan.
It can be quite tedious to manage multiple AdWords accounts and stay on top of them all the time. In this post we want to highlight features and tools in Optmyzr that are designed to help you manage multiple AdWords accounts more efficiently.
MCC account dashboard
In your MCC account in AdWords, you can get a list of accounts and can see metrics over a given period of time. However, figuring out which account needs your attention is entirely up to you. The new MCC account dashboard from Optmyzr helps with this. It lets you see how the performance of your favorite AdWords accounts has changed over two periods of time. This instantly tells you which accounts had the biggest drops and need immediate investigation. You can also compare performance to the same period last year to see if it is a seasonal trend.
Add accounts to favorites by clicking on the star next to the account name
Select which metrics you want to see from ‘Choose Columns’
Select the date range to compare
Hover over the account name to see a birds eye view of performance
Optimization inbox
Don’t know which AdWords accounts to start optimizing? The Optimization Inbox gives a quick snapshot of the number of optimization suggestions available in each AdWords account. You can filter and sort data by account name, the type of optimization (keywords or bids), number of suggestions and the last time an optimization was implemented in the account. A great way to prioritize your work week and save time.
Favorite report templates
You can favorite the most frequently used report templates for each AdWords account in Optmyzr. The advantage is that they show up at the top under favorite templates and you can get to them without sifting through a huge list. Also, the rest of the templates are available at the bottom of the page in case you need to use or replicate one for an account. You can schedule weekly/monthly reports to be emailed automatically, download a PDF or, share a link to an interactive report.
One of the first tools built by Optmyzr was a Quality Score Tracker that lets you to see your account level quality score, and track historical quality scores of individual keywords.
One of the more recent tools that we built, and one that I was specifically responsible for, is the multi-client center (MCC) dashboard, where advertisers can get a quick view of all of their accounts, including recent stats as well as trends.
I’m excited to announce that we’ve just merged these two capabilities: now you can see account level quality score directly on the MCC dashboard. Not only can you see the current quality score for the account, but you can also see how it has changed from one period to the next.
See the account-level Quality Score for all the AdWords accounts you manage on a single page
See the percent change of the account-level Quality Scores for all your accounts on one screen.
One of the highlights of Optmyzr’s report designer is that you have the option to include multiple date ranges in the same report. For example, when creating a monthly performance report you can include a graph to show how account performance has changed over the last six months. In the same report, you can include data broken down by day for the month.
To make it easier to show data for long periods of time, we updated the Time-wise trends chart (earlier daily trends chart) to include an option to specify the time interval. Now you can choose the level at which you want to show the data in the chart – daily, monthly, weekly.
Sometimes data at the daily level can be too noisy to show trends or performance over a longer period of time like three or six months. In this case choosing the option to show data at weekly or monthly level helps.
This is how the different intervals will show up on the chart
If you’ve read any of my blog posts about AdWords Quality Score (QS) or seen any of my presentations at SMX, SES, or PubCon, you should already be familiar with the importance of the AdWords account-level QS. It’s Google’s measure of how relevant the keywords in an account typically are and it’s a major factor in determining how much an advertiser has to pay to get new keywords started in their account.
An account with great account-level QS has to pay a lower CPC than if it had poor QS to get the same ad rank for a new keyword. As soon as the new keyword has enough CTR data to establish its relevance, the account-level QS factor becomes far less important.
The thing is that Google has never disclosed what the account’s QS is… until now! I just received a booklet from the Google Partners team with data for a few accounts that are under my MCC and while it’s so subtle I originally didn’t notice it, there is an account Quality Score published for each account!
So I immediately went to our Optmyzr Quality Score Tracker to see how Google’s numbers compare to the ones we’ve been calculating and reporting to our customers for nearly a year now. The good news is that they match up very closely. We are somewhat limited in how we can calculate the QS number but it seems our formula is pretty close to the one Google uses and for all accounts I checked, we were within 1 point of what Google said. Because Google rounds to an integer and their number is for the entire quarter, that’s as close as I think we could get.
Google Partners started to report the account Quality Score in a booklet they send agencies.
Doing an AdWords account audit essentially means using data to get a quick snapshot of where the account stands and what are the optimization opportunities. In this blog post, we’ll give you an account audit checklist that you can follow using Optmyzr’s tools.
Use Cases for an Account Audit
Taking on a new customer: As an agency when you’re taking on a new account it helps to know how much work the account requires. It is also a great way to give that extra piece of information that shows that you’ve gone the extra mile to analyze the account.
Keeping existing clients happy: While it’s important to get new clients on board it is equally important to keep existing clients happy. Account audits help keep a tab on account performance as well as create a road map for the next few months.
Quarterly audits: As an advertiser, it is important to know how your AdWords account is performing and which parts of an AdWords account need to be worked on. It helps isolate and prioritize which areas of an account need to be optimized.
Audit Checklist – The questions to ask
Step 1: Is the account using all the latest features and best practices?
Network targeting – Does it have separate campaigns for search and display? If not, splitting out the campaigns is a good optimization suggestion.
Account structure – Does it have too many keywords per ad group? Having too many keywords in an ad group makes the ads in the ad group less relevant to each of the keywords. It dilutes the keyword-ad text relevance which affects Quality Score.
Conversion Tracking – Does the account have conversion tracking set up? If the sales and leads in an AdWords account are not being tracked you can’t accurately measure ROI.
Remarketing – Does the account have remarketing lists? If yes, does it have at least one campaign targeting those lists?
Is the Quality Score of the account good?
The Quality Score Tracker gives you the current Quality Score of the account. Since this is weighted by impressions it will give you an idea of the general QS of the keywords that get the most traffic.
Also, look at the distribution of keywords by Quality Score. If most keywords have a QS of less than five, the account can benefit from a Quality Score optimization. This also lists the number of keywords that are getting traffic giving you an idea of the size of the account.
In the Quality Score Tracker, the list of ad groups to optimize tells you which ad groups need immediate QS optimization.
Step 2: Are the keywords in the account well structured?
Tools used: Optimization Dashboard
A quick view at the Optimization dashboard will give you an idea of the kind of optimizations the keywords in the account require. For example, the keyword de-duper tell you if there are duplicate keywords in the account that are competing against each other?
You don’t need to run the optimizations as the approximate number of suggestions are mentioned next to each optimization technique. This gives an idea of the opportunity in the account.
Step 3: Segmentation Analysis – Get more granular with the data
Are there day-parting opportunities?
Tools used: Hour of the Week
Different times of the day work for different products. The Hour of the Week tool tells you which time slots are not driving conversions or leads and it would be better to schedule your ads to not run during that time.
You can also compare Search Impression Share and Conversion Rate to find the best converting time slots and increase bids during the time that has low impression share but high conversion rate.
Are bid modifiers set up correctly? Tools Used: Dashboard
With enhanced campaigns becoming the norm ads show on all devices – desktops, tablets and mobile. One way to optimize for devices is to set bid modifiers. You can segment data and see how the account is performing on mobile vs. desktops to decide whether bid modifiers will help improve performance. For example, on the dashboard compare the percentage of spend on mobile with the percentage of conversions to get an idea of the cost/conversion on mobile.
Are there opportunities to optimize by geography? Tools used: Geo HeatMap
In the Geo HeatMap, take a look at the return on ad spend (ROAS) data broken down by city to find cities that have a higher return on investment. Based on this, you can recommend increasing bids for geographies that have a higher ROAS. Even having this insight into how campaigns are performing by location is beneficial.
Also, make sure that the account is getting data from the right geographies. For example, if you notice a lot of clicks coming from a country/city that has zero conversions then it may be a good idea to either exclude that geography or, create a separate campaign and optimize for it.
Step 4: Trends
Is the account headed in the right direction? Tools used: Performance Comparison
Doing a quick before and after comparison of data for the last 30 days or quarter can tell you if the account is growing or not. You can also go into details and see which metrics are growing and which ones are dropping. For example, if conversions have dropped and clicks have increased then it may be a good idea to see if the landing page or conversion process has changed.
Are the different segments and networks trending in the right direction? Tools used: Performance Comparison
You can also see which segment or device has had the maximum change in traffic and conversions using the Performance Comparison Tool. For example, it is possible that conversion on desktops actually increased but the overall number is showing a drop because conversions on mobile dropped drastically.
These comparisons can be done with one-click in a single report using the pre-built audit templates in your Optmyzr account.
Don’t have time to read the entire post? Watch Frederick Vallaeys walk you through this audit process in here.
One-Click Optimizations are automated, time-saving and easy to implement. When things are automated and don’t take much time, we sometimes tend to do overdo them 🙂
In this post, we’ve given suggestions on how often should you run each of the One-Click Optimizations. The time interval between optimizations may vary for different accounts depending on size and traffic. The suggested times are only directional.
Keyword Lasso
This optimization suggests adding search queries that converted/performed well as keywords to your account. The Keyword Lasso does take into account traffic when suggesting search terms that should be added to an AdWords account. Should you be running this everyday? Probably not. Traffic from just one day is not enough to make a decision on whether you should add a search term as a keyword even if the search term converted. You could end up adding a lot of keywords that just converted once.
Suggested time interval: 7 – 14 days.
The time interval also depends on how much traffic you get on average. You could be getting 100K impressions a day or, just 100 impressions.
Keyword De-duper
This optimization removes keywords that are absolute duplicates (same match type, same targeting etc.) and compete against each other. This is particularly useful when adding keywords in bulk.
Suggested time interval: 14 days (If you add keywords every day, then run it more often.)
First Page Bridger
This optimization finds keywords with a good Quality Score that have bids that are just below the first-page bid and can benefit from a slight bid increase. There is no point running this optimization every day because it will keep increasing bids unnecessarily for the same keywords. Wait for at least 7 days after a bid increase to see performance.
Suggested time interval: 7 -14 days
Keyword Sculptor
This optimization ensures that the right ad shows for each search query by adding exact match negative keywords at the ad group level. Google sometimes broad or phrase matches search queries to keywords in an account even though the search query exists as a keyword in the account. You can run this report as often as you want but you may not get results if you run it every day.
Suggested time interval: At least once in 30 days
Have questions? Write to us at support@optmyzr.com, we’d love to hear from you!
This optimization automatically suggests converting/high-performing search terms that should be added as keywords in the account. This helps drive more sales and relevant traffic by pairing the search terms with the right ads and bids in the form of keywords.
It is difficult to add all possible keyword variations to a campaign when it is built out. The search terms report is a good way to find new keywords to add to your account because they are already validated. You can see how the search term is performing before adding it. The advantage of adding search terms as keywords is that you have more control over the ad with which it shows, and you can set a different bid than the keyword that triggered it. The probability that your ad will show more often for that search term increases when it is added as a keyword.
How does the Conversion Lasso help?
Optmyzr’s Conversion Lasso analyzes the search terms report from AdWords to suggest new keywords that should be added to your account. We go through the entire list of search terms, do the number crunching, apply logic and only suggest the search terms we think would be good to add as keywords. These are search terms that have good conversion or clickthrough rate (CTR) statistics. By default, the match type in which the search term will be added is set to phrase but you can change it to broad or exact as well.
When keywords don’t appear on the first page of search results, you’re losing out on a lot of potential traffic. The First Page Bridger identifies keywords that are just shy of making the first page with your current bids. With just a small increase in the bid, they’ll catch the train to more impressions rather than fall in the gap where they’ll be relegated to second-page oblivion.
Google assigns the first-page bid to each keyword. This bid is an estimate of the amount you need to bid to show up on the first page. It is not the same for all keywords or, even for the same keyword across accounts. It is calculated based on Quality Score and competition. The required first-page bid is relatively low for keywords with a good Quality Score. However, in competitive and saturated markets, you’ll find high first page bids for keywords with good Quality Scores (7- 10) as well.
The first-page bid is directional. It is the minimum required bid to show on the first page of search results. It doesn’t guarantee a high position.
Why is it important to show on the first page of search results?
Ad space on the first page of search results is prime real estate as most users don’t go beyond the first page when they are looking for something. Keywords showing on the first page of search results always get more traffic.
How to decide which keywords should be above the first-page bid?
This really depends on your budget and how important a keyword is to your business. If you have the budget, you can keep all your keywords above the first-page bid. However, if you have to choose, we recommend segmenting keywords into three sections based on impact and the required bid increase to meet the first page requirements. The easiest way to create these segments is by using tangible data. We recommend increasing bids for the first section of keywords.
Minimum increase, maximum impact: Keywords with a high Quality Score (7 – 10) and current bid just slightly (10 – 20%) below the first-page bid.
Medium increase, high impact: Keywords with a Quality Score between 5 to 6 and current bid 20 – 40% below the first page bid.
Maximum increase least impact: Keywords with a Quality Score lower than 5 and current bid 40%+ below the first-page bid.
How does Optmyzr help?
Our system analyzes performance data for each keyword and gives you a list of keywords that will have the highest impact with a minimum bid increase. You can choose to increase the bid to the first-page bid or, to a % slightly higher than the first-page bid for these keywords. The keywords the system recommends already have a good Quality Score and just need a little push in terms of bids. Increasing bids for these keywords gives them a chance to perform and can help get more traffic and sales. It is sometimes difficult to spot these keywords because they get ‘buried’ in the list of keywords that have bids below the required first-page bid. You can review and implement bid changes with just a click from within the Optmyzr interface.
Duplicate keywords in an AdWords account compete with each other and traffic gets divided. Optmyzr’s Keyword De-duper finds duplicate keywords in your account, analyzes their performance and suggests which keywords should remain active and which ones should be paused.
What is a duplicate keyword?
A keyword that is present more than once in an AdWords account with the exact same targeting settings (network and geography) and the same match type is a duplicate keyword. If you have the same keyword targeting different countries/regions, it is not a duplicate because they don’t compete.
Why should you remove duplicate keywords?
Duplicate keywords in an AdWords account end up competing with each other. At a given point in time, the AdWords system will choose one keyword from the duplicate keywords to enter in the ad auction. The system makes the choice based on bids, relevancy, Quality Score etc. The traffic between duplicate keywords gets divided which affects performance and you may not have substantial data for one keyword. Sometimes none of the keywords get enough data to determine whether they are performing well or not.
How to find duplicate keywords?
You can use AdWords Editor to find duplicate keywords. However, in AdWords Editor, you’ll just get a list of duplicates and you have to manually check if they are actually duplicates. Even keywords in campaigns targeting different countries and networks will figure in this list. Also, you’ll have to do the analysis to choose which one is performing better and which duplicate keyword should be kept.
Optmyzr Smart Select for duplicate keywords
This feature in Optmyzr ensures that only keywords that are absolute duplicates – same network targeting and same match type are reviewed. It automatically selects the best performing keyword based on a number of factors like conversions, CTR, Quality Score and traffic. All you need to do is review the list and implement the changes.
Traffic Sculptor ensures that the right ads show for each search query in an AdWords account.
Sometimes Google shows an ad that is less closely related to the query because it preferred to match to a keyword that has a higher rank, usually because of a high bid. This is undesirable because there is a better ad in your account for this query so we use traffic sculpting techniques to make sure we show the best ad for the search query every time.
For example, as shown below, there are two keywords with different ads in two different ad groups in an AdWords account.
Ad Group1/Keyword 1: Women’s Black Shoes
Ad 1: Women’s Black Shoes. Great Collection Starts At $30. Get 5% Cash Back. Order Today! www.abcbuy.com/BlackShoes
AdGroup2/Keyword 2: Buy Shoes
Ad 2: Buy Shoes & Bags Great Collection Of Leather Bags & Shoes. Free Shipping. Order Today! www.abcbuy.com
Search Query: Buy Women’s Black Shoes
In the above example, even though the first keyword and ad text are more relevant to the search query, Google can choose to match the search query to the second keyword and show the less relevant ad text because the ad rank due to the keyword bid may be higher for the second keyword.
The Traffic Sculptor ensures that traffic gets directed to the right ads by adding exact match negative keywords at the ad group level.
The negative keyword suggestions you see in the Traffic Sculptor look very relevant for your account. So why do we recommend these as negative keywords? That’s because you already have these keywords in your ad groups but Google has not always used these when a user searched for one of these keywords. Rather than showing the ad you want, they display another ad from your account because it has a better ad rank (often because it has a higher bid). By adding these keywords as negative exact matches, it forces Google to show the ads you want rather than the ones that rank higher but are potentially less relevant.
One of the core skills for PPC marketers is reporting. The ability to beautifully visualize data and draw insights from it is a big factor in optimizing your ad campaigns.
At Optmyzr, we’ve built several tools for reporting to help you make understanding your campaign performance easier. In this article, you’ll learn about our top reporting features that will simplify reporting.
1. Add multiple date range options to your report.
Most reporting tools only give you the option to add one or two date range options in your reports. With Optmyzr’s report designer, you can include as many date range options as you want in a single report. These can be absolute or relative date ranges so you can automatically schedule reports.
For example, you can have data for the last month, the month before the last, or last year in the same report. In widgets providing comparison data, you’ll also find previous period date ranges for easy month-on-month or year-on-year analysis.
2. Measure performance at the account, campaign, and label levels in the same report.
We understand that if you’re using labels in ad platforms, you want to be able to report on them. In the report designer, you get the option to report at the account, campaign, and label levels. What makes this feature really cool is that you can have all three levels in the same report.
For example, you can compare the performance of your branded and non-branded campaigns, or one category of products with another in the same report. Also, if you want to use labels for reporting but don’t want to create them in the ad platform, you can use Optmyzr labels.
Another great addition to this feature is the ability to report on a specific campaign type or bid strategy. If you’re preparing a report on automated bidding campaigns, you can just select the respective bid strategies and include only those campaigns that work on automated bidding.
3. Preview your report while configuring.
Preview your report simultaneously while configuring different settings for multiple widgets. This streamlines the report creation process and eliminates the need to constantly switch between the settings and preview pages.
You can make real-time adjustments to your report widgets, such as data selection, filters, and visualizations, all while observing the immediate impact on your report’s appearance. This not only saves you time but also ensures that you can fine-tune your reports with precision.
4. Create up-to-date reporting dashboards.
You can share links to reports, schedule them, or update them on a schedule. This helps you create a reporting dashboard that can be updated on a schedule (every day, every week, or every month).
5. Schedule your reports based on rules.
This feature provides a highly customizable way to automate your report deliveries. Using this option, you can set specific conditions that determine when you should and shouldn’t send reports, based on the KPI values you set.
You define a specific condition around the deciding metric(for example, impressions). If the metric doesn’t meet the condition, the report won’t be sent to any of the designated recipients.
In essence, this feature gives you precise control over when and to whom your reports should be automatically delivered.
6. Add instant tables and charts from Google Analytics 4.
In Google Analytics 4, we’ve introduced a time-saving feature: instant tables and charts. These widgets are set up with the ideal combination of dimensions and metrics, aiming to instantly provide answers to your most critical questions about website traffic.
With these pre-configured widgets, you can conveniently access essential insights without the need for manual setup, ensuring a faster and more efficient experience while analyzing your web data. It’s all about simplicity and speed, so you can focus on what matters most – understanding your online traffic.
7. Insert date ranges dynamically.
If you’re scheduling reports, it is essential to be able to automatically insert the correct date. You can automatically insert dates using the date range insertion feature in any text box in the report. What makes this feature so useful is that you can insert the date in any format.
For example, you can choose to display dates like September 1 – September 30, 2015, or just September 2023.
8. Get text-based explanations for changes in your key performance metrics.
The PPC Narrator widget goes beyond raw data and gives you text-based explanations for changes in your key performance metrics. It offers valuable context on how these fluctuations impact your business, shedding light on critical factors such as reduced visibility or variations in revenue.
The insights are intelligently tailored to the chosen ‘sentiment,’ whether it’s Positive or Critical, providing you with a deeper understanding of the underlying dynamics within your data.
This empowers you to make informed decisions with confidence, leveraging the full potential of your reports.
The AI-powered summary is available in a PDF format and live report links.
To make sure you can include data from different sources, we have the Image Box widget, Custom text box widget, Spreadsheet data import widget, and Spreadsheet chart widget that lets you insert screenshots, tables, or offline data. You can take a screenshot of the particular view you would like to include in the report and insert it in the template.
10. Mark up for cost-related data.
This feature lets you mark up the cost-related data in a report by a certain percentage. This feature is available in Optmyzr’s Report Designer and can be selectively enabled in accounts.
Please feel free to send us an email at support@optmyzr.com if you would like to enable it on your account.
Improving your reporting helps draw better insights from your efforts ultimately leading to better campaign performance. If you’re looking to save time and get the most out of your reports, try these 10 features.
Not an Optmyzr customer yet? Thousands of advertisers — from small agencies to big brands — around the world use these tools to manage over $4 billion in ad spend every year.
Sign up for our 14-day free trial today to give Optmyzr a try. You will also get the resources you need to get started and more. Our team will also be on hand to answer questions and provide any support we can.
Weather often impacts the behavior of consumers. For example, rainy weather would lead to an increase in demand for cab and shuttle services. And, a heat wave compels people to stay indoors which leads to an increase in demand for air conditioning and similar services.
Not only the buying of products, but weather can also impact the moods of consumers. They might be interested in watching romcoms or sitcoms when the weather is pleasant. On dark cold nights, some may prefer fantasy while others may love watching horror movies. Similarly, during the summer or spring break, you’d see an increased interest in social activities for both kids and adults.
Now, suppose you are someone with a business that sells services or products that can be impacted by weather changes, like, cab services, cosmetics, apparel, streaming platforms, etc. You always want to reduce wasted ad spend. In that case, you know how important it is to stay on top of these changes and target the right audience for your ads.
In this article, you’ll learn:
How weather-based campaigns work
The benefits of running weather-based campaigns and
How to do weather-based advertising
How does weather-based advertising work?
Let’s say you are a cafe owner and you have your specials of the day out on the display. On a rainy day, you’d put hot cocoa. And on a sunny day, you’d prefer to put peach iced tea as your special to attract customers.
Once they are in your cafe, they can order anything from the menu. The important thing here is to attract customers and make them want to enter your cafe, which you do by posting special, relevant messages on the display.
Similarly, when advertising, you can choose to manage campaigns based on weather. For example, you can have one campaign with cold beverages and another for hot beverages. And then on sunny days, you advertise the campaign with cold beverages.
The 3 levers you need to do weather-based advertising
Target the right set of locations
Have conditional changes in the campaign based on the weather for those locations
Have a way to automate this process
3 benefits of weather-based advertising
1. Personalized campaigns
Weather-based advertising can help localize and personalize your ads according to your customer’s location and weather.
2. Relevant messaging
Weather-based campaign management can make sure that the end-user of your product or service sees a relevant ad that resonates with their mood.
3. Enhanced ad ROI
Personalized ads and relevant messaging can lead to an increase in leads, engagement, and then conversions.
Examples across industries
There are several industries that can benefit from weather-based advertising, and use this strategy to boost their campaign performance. Here are some examples.
Retail or ecommerce
Advertisers all around the world can use weather forecasting to show the right kind of ads at a particular location.
For example: showing ads for umbrellas on the days when the forecasts say it’s going to rain in 2 days. Or, showing ads for seasonal products like sunscreen around the time summer is about to start.
Apparel
Similar to the ecommerce industry, apparel stores — online or offline — need timely advertising based on the current weather conditions.
For example: showing ads for pullovers or sweaters for a colder week and pausing campaigns selling windcheaters for the weeks with no cold waves or rains in winter.
Cab services
In cities or places with unreliable public transport, a lot of people use third-party services to book cabs for commute. So, with the business knowledge of how the population of a certain area uses your services and the understanding of the current or future weather conditions you can manage your campaigns profitably. And you can also choose to target the right locations and set budgets for those campaigns based on demand and weather.
How to do weather-based advertising?
You can use the OpenWeather API to get weather updates for the locations of your choice and then add them to your campaigns as targets or exclusions.
However, manually doing that would be very time-consuming and also exhausting, as you’ll always need one or more team members to check the weather conditions and then make relevant changes to the campaigns.
There are some workarounds though, like using scripts. But then you need to maintain them and have your own API key for the OpenWeather API or, another very popular one from Optmyzr.
However, these are not simple and straightforward to implement. But if you’re an Optmyzr customer, we’ve made things easier for you with the ‘Optimize Campaigns by Weather’ tool.
Optmyzr Weather-based Campaigns
But why use day-to-day weather forecasting when seasons change over months?
Weather conditions can be added to work with the change in seasons by using automation to check the weather of upcoming days and accordingly adjust the target locations, campaign status, targets, etc.
There is one other reason why you should leverage weather-based advertising. With evolving global climates, there are some locations where the traditional summers now look like pre-monsoon seasons. As climates get warmer, it would make sense to look at the day-to-day weather conditions and then plan your strategy. That’s where weather-based advertising can help you.
There are even more applications for using weather forecasting conditions in PPC campaigns. But the important thing is to understand how it can be used as leverage for your campaigns.
We hope the ‘Optimize Campaigns by Weather’ tool helps you smartly execute your campaigns. But if you’d like to know more about it, please reach out to our support team at support@optmyzr.com. Or if you’re not a customer already, and would like to try it out, sign up for a 14-day free trial today.
Location targeting is a way for advertisers to clearly specify the location they want their ads to show. It is a crucial aspect for any ad campaign.
Advertisers can choose different content for their ads based on geographic locations. Many advertisers, however, stumble in setting it up due to its non-intuitive UI, or they incorrectly estimate the reach of their campaign budget.
It’s important to honor the rules of engagement for different ad network location targeting. Applying the same strategies across all networks may not yield the best results.
In this article, we’ll dissect the major ad networks’ location targeting options and offer some general rules on how to approach location targeting. Our goal is to provide a framework to guide you rather than specific instructions to follow.
Basics of location targeting
When selecting a location to target, you can choose:
To target the exact location
A radius around it
Nearby/related locations.
You can target specific elements like ZIP codes, cities, DMAs (Designated Market Areas), or countries. County or DMA targeting may have overlaps depending on how they are defined.
If you manage campaigns for multiple locations with designated budgets, consider using ZIP code exclusions while using county or DMA targets. Adding a location to a campaign provides a focus for the campaign. However, including too many locations in a single campaign can hinder budget efficiency.
It is generally recommended to target no more than five major locations and preferably avoid multiple time zones within a single campaign. If your campaign targets the entire United States, ensure your budget covers the entire country and that your creative aligns with various regions to avoid message translation issues.
Why is adding exclusions important?
Exclusions work in the same way as targeting; they allow you to exclude specific spots or radii. The most effective practice is to identify specific exclusions within a radius or set overlapping exclusions to protect a specific location.
Let’s say you’re managing several locations on a single ad account and need to ensure each location receives its individual budget. In this case, you’d want to avoid budget overlaps that might divert leads meant for one location to another. This is where exclusions prove invaluable.
What location metrics should you monitor?
When setting your locations, you’ll also have access to metrics per location. If a particular location is not getting sufficient exposure or if the cost per engagement is too high, it might be time to reassess whether that location deserves your budget.
Optmyzr’s geo-mapping and value based bidding rules can help assess and action these insights.
The main metrics to consider in location targeting are:
Average CPC: competitiveness as well as cost of living
CTR: are you speaking in the language of your prospects by location?
Conversion Rate: is a location a prime location for your prospects?
Location targeting rules of engagement for different ad platforms
Now, let’s dive into the specific rules of engagement for each major ad network. It’s worth noting that this post was written based on the current rules of each platform, and we will update it if any changes occur.
Google
Google Ads’ location targeting functions at the campaign level. Thus, you should treat each location as a campaign objective. When combining multiple locations in a single campaign, consider the search patterns, auction price, and customer profitability in those areas. One crucial point is that Google Ads operates based on the account’s time zone, not the user’s. Hence, consider this when structuring your ad schedules and optimizing campaigns.
Microsoft
Microsoft’s location targeting is similar to Google’s but with a few crucial differences. Location targeting can be set at an ad group level, which can simplify your campaign structure. Also, since ads serve in the user’s time zone, scheduling can be more precisely aligned with your target audience’s habits. These factors make Microsoft Ads potentially more effective for advertisers struggling with budget and servability issues on Google.
With Facebook, the most specific campaign settings, including location targeting, operate at the ad set level. However, Facebook’s robust audience network offers more flexibility and specificity when it comes to location-based targeting. Remember, though, that targeting too small a location may result in your ads not being served, due to privacy-first web considerations.
Amazon
Amazon differs slightly as it allows anyone, anywhere to purchase from your product line, making location targeting less important. However, if there are areas where you don’t want your ads to be served, exclusions are available.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s location targeting rules mirror those of Facebook, with the ad set being more important than the campaign. However, given the types of ads that LinkedIn runs, it’s crucial to carefully consider the type of campaign and creative you intend to use.
Final Takeaways
In conclusion, effective location targeting can be complex but it’s an essential component of successful ad campaigns. We hope this guide helps you navigate the unique location targeting settings across these major ad networks.
We are thrilled to share one of the more exciting product updates: Smart Shopping Campaign through Optmyzr.
What is Optmyzr’s Smart Shopping Campaign?
Optmyzr’s Smart Shopping Campaign is a campaign type for e-commerce that offers a perfect blend of automation and control.
This is a game-changer in the world of online advertising. It combines the automation benefits of smart bidding (TROAS or target return on ad spend) with the control and precision of manual campaign management.
Why we built the Smart Shopping Campaign?
Traditionally, advertisers faced a dilemma when choosing between standard campaigns and Performance Max campaigns. While standard campaigns offered better cost control and alignment with margins, they often struggled on visibility and ranking. On the other hand, Performance Max campaigns provided extensive reach but compromised on product selection and placement.
To address this challenge, we developed the Smart Shopping Campaign through Optmyzr. Through the power of automation layering, it enabled advertisers to get the benefits of smart shopping campaigns in standard ones; all while bypassing the need for Performance Max creative and fully surrendering to black box AI.
What are the advantages of Optmyzr’s Smart Shopping Campaign?
The key advantage of Smart Shopping with Optmyzr is that it retains the controls found in standard campaigns. This means you can structure your campaign according to your business requirements. Gone are the days of lumping all products into a single product group. Instead, you can now segment and bid appropriately for each product.
Furthermore, our Optmyzr’s customer value rules empower you to leverage value-based bidding, providing intelligent data that fuels the system.
If your focus is on shopping campaigns and you don’t intend to run video or display campaigns, Smart Shopping through Optmyzr is the ideal choice. It empowers advertisers to harness all the benefits typically reserved for Performance Max campaigns while retaining a high level of control. By running product listing ads exclusively, you can avoid placements that may not be profitable, and focus on lower funnel transactional intent.
However, it’s important to acknowledge the effectiveness of Performance Max campaigns. When properly set up, they can deliver excellent return on investment by enabling advertisers to speak to all parts of the buying funnel and across different creative. Nevertheless, it is crucial to monitor your budget allocation.
Our Performance Max widget on the dashboard and the feed auditing tool help you track and optimize your spending. By ensuring there are no duplicates in your product titles, you can fine-tune your campaigns for optimal performance.
Smart Shopping through Optmyzr has recently launched this quarter and is available for all Optmyzr Core+ subscriptions. We continuously update the tool’s logic based on performance comparisons with other campaign types.
Not an Optmyzr customer yet? This is the best time to sign up for a full functionality trial and unlevel your marketing!
March was a great month for us at Optmyzr. From our biggest-yet product release to our first annual Digital Marketing Shero awards, there’s a lot we want to share with you.
Recently our product team went through a sprint cycle and launched some powerful new tools while also upgrading the existing product usability, to ensure you have the best workflow to manage your PPC campaigns across all your marketing channels (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon).
We’re always excited to share what’s new and exciting at Optmyzr, but last month’s product releases presented a unique opportunity to celebrate the amazing women in our product team of which 80% of them were women. They deserve a shout-out for their tireless efforts to keep Optmyzr a customer-focused solution.
But for us, it’s not just about celebrating and encouraging our own teams. We also try to support other digital marketers in the industry and give them a platform to shine and showcase their skills.
The winners of the 2023 Optmyzr Digital Marketing Sheroes Campaign
So in March, International Women’s Month, we initiated a campaign to recognize and celebrate the unsung women in digital marketing who deserve to be recognized for their excellence.
We reached out to our online community and asked them to nominate someone they knew who fit the bill, and the nominations blew us away. We got entries for so many women with a range of marketing superpowers and expertise. After reviewing all the nominations, we found our top 10 including the winner.
So without further ado, let us introduce you to the woman of the hour, the winner of our first annual Digital Marketing Sheroes Award — Krystal Taing!
Krystal Taing
With exceptional skills in strategic engagement, SEO best practices, and clear communication, Krystal has set a high bar for excellence in digital marketing. But it’s not just her expertise that sets her apart. She is known for her positive leadership supporting her team and everyone around her.
We’re proud to recognize Krystal as an incredible digital marketing leader and can’t wait to see more of her in the future.
Also worthy of special mention are the 9 finalists of this year’s Digital Marketing Shero Awards. Here they are in no particular order.
Ashley McCarnan
Meet Ashley McCarnan, known for her talent for contextualizing data to provide meaningful solutions for her clients. She’s a natural leader passionate about empowering her team to bring their authentic selves to every project.
Our next shero is Charu Gupta, an expert in creating authentic brand personas that resonate with audiences. She encourages optimistic and problem-solving approaches in her teams and has mentored over 40 professionals in her career, many of whom are now in leadership roles.
We’re thrilled to introduce our next shero, Emma Glover, a specialist in social media strategy and account-based marketing. She focuses on building honest and strategic partnerships with her clients and also runs a female-first agency where her teams have the support and opportunities to thrive and grow.
Meet our next shero, the amazing Natalia Ramirez, an expert in optimizing digital content to improve online user experience. She has a passion for technology and entrepreneurship and thrives in roles that require adaptability, creativity, and strategic thinking.
The next shero on our list is Pavithra Sekar. She specializes in improving brand recognition with positive online conversations. She is known for her superb organization and networking skills and knack for building long-term relationships with the audience.
Meet the incredible Sarah Carling, an expert in SEO, PPC, analytics, email marketing, product development, CRO, and more. As Buoy Health’s Growth team leader, she has driven traffic to new heights in all channels while balancing motherhood and her professional growth with sharp organizational skills.
Next, we have Stephanie Wallace, a data-driven marketer with expertise in SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, influencer, and PR. She’s a strong leader in the industry and an inspiration for volunteering her professional services to support causes like PAWS Atlanta, no-kill animal shelters, etc.
Introducing our next shero, Thuha Wright. She specializes in PPC and consults businesses to help them grow and develop their in-house teams. She has years of experience in the travel industry and has honed her expertise in digital marketing channels as growth drivers.
Finally, we have Veronica Ruiz, a multi-faceted consultant with expertise in various areas of digital marketing. She takes a performance-focused approach, specializing in paid search and social. Veronica also volunteers as a digital strategist for charities and non-profit organizations.
Congratulations to all of them for showcasing exceptional innovation and leadership in this ever-changing digital landscape. Their expertise in various fields of digital marketing is truly impressive, and we’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to recognize their achievements and contributions through this campaign.
Shero-Special PPC Town Hall: Insights from the All-Women Expert Panel
As part of the Digital Marketing Shero campaign, we also produced a special episode of PPC Town Hall. In line with our initiative to recognize talented women in the industry, we brought on an all-women expert panel with Navah Hopkins as the host and guest speakers Motoko Hunt, Andrea Cruz, and Sarah Stemen.
These industry pros shared profound knowledge, actionable tips and advice, and many moments of light-hearted humor.
We’ve cherry-picked some quotable moments from each speaker so you can get a glimpse of their awesome conversation.
Let’s jump right into it and see what these phenomenal women had to say.
Get actionable PPC tips, strategies, and tactics from industry experts twice a month.
Know Your Marketing Superpowers
Sarah explained that she turns to online search for everything, even when Yahoo was the popular search engine. This puts her in a great position to understand searchers and their behavior.
Motoko Hunt, on the other hand, shared her global understanding as her marketing superpower. She said that Google is dominant worldwide, but local search engines may have an advantage in understanding customer behavior in specific industries and countries.
For instance, Bing’s growing market share in Asia and the availability of smaller local search engines for advertising provide additional opportunities for reaching audiences beyond Google.
Andrea added by highlighting the importance of efficiency in today’s marketing landscape. She emphasized the need to identify new platforms and channels that can help maximize resources. She advised marketers to look for such opportunities constantly and be mindful of how metrics may differ in different regions.
As actionable advice, here are great ways to stand out as a strong digital marketer:
Staying up-to-date on the latest trends
Understanding global and regional markets
Identifying new opportunities to optimize your marketing strategies
Networking Helps Staying Inspired and Motivated
Staying motivated can be challenging, especially in the post-pandemic world where remote work has become the norm. So what keeps marketing professionals motivated?
Andrea shared her secret, saying that conferences always make her feel energized. Interacting with people and learning from their experiences allows her to incorporate new learnings into her work.
So, whether attending conferences, taking courses, or seeking inspiration from others, finding what keeps you motivated is essential to success in the marketing world.
Andrea’s actionable advice on this:
Finding a marketing club nearby, taking online courses, or simply taking a moment to step back and look at things from another perspective. So many great people are doing great work out there that can inspire and motivate you.
Prioritize Self-Care for Work-Life Balance
Balancing work and personal life has always been tricky, especially in today’s fast-paced world. Our speakers shared great suggestions to achieve this balance in this exciting Town Hall episode.
Navah especially highlighted the importance of prioritizing self-care by blocking off time on your calendar for yourself. She stressed that we need to give the same level of commitment to ourselves as we do to our work. This means setting boundaries, protecting your time, and not being afraid to say no.
They also discussed the importance of leaning on others for support, both personally and professionally. As Navah mentioned, we need to be easy on ourselves and not expect to do everything all by ourselves.
Here’s the takeaway.
Managing work-life balance requires intentional effort, self-care, and setting boundaries. It’s essential to prioritize personal time, seek support when needed, and be gentle with ourselves in the process.
A Strategy to Increase Your Earning Potential
In a conversation about the infamous wage gap, Motoko raised another critical issue — the confidence gap. She said that women tend to stay silent and don’t even think about asking for more. So it’s crucial to build confidence and take actionable steps to justify your ask, be it more pay, benefits, flexibility, etc.
She offered a key tip to keep track of your performance and achievements. This can be a powerful negotiating tool, as you can clearly show your value to the company.
Andrea also added that documenting positive feedback or accomplishments is important to use as leverage in future negotiations.
Ultimately, the key takeaway is:
Recognize your worth, advocate for yourself, and be confident to ask for what you deserve.
Drawing the Curtain on Digital Marketing Shero Campaign
Our amazing panelists of the Shero Special Town Hall deserve special thanks for collaborating with us on this campaign to support our sheroes.
And as we wrap up our first annual Digital Marketing Shero campaign, we look forward to many more initiatives celebrating digital marketers who deserve a platform to showcase their achievements.
For now, thank you all for your support and nominations.
One of the many reasons I joined the Optmyzr team is the laser focus on delighting customers through pragmatic innovation.
We’ve been busy building some really powerful tools at Optmyzr, and this month we have one of the biggest product launch announcements in our 10-year history. Given how many new features we’re launching, we want to give you a handy cheat sheet on the following:
What They Are
What They Do
Why You Care
Here’s the complete list of features launched (you can use the links to jump to that section of the post):
Performance Max Updates
Competitive Analysis
Change History Annotation
Analytics Metrics
Improved Rule Engine
Optmyzr Express Innovations
While some of these innovations are a long time coming, others are proactive innovations to ensure you are equipped with the best workflow to manage your PPC campaigns across all your marketing channels (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon).
We are passionate about our customers achieving profit and happiness and love suggestions and feedback, so at the end of this post, we’ll share how to make feature requests.
Performance Max Updates
Our Performance Max insight module on the dashboard bakes in the Mike Rhodes script, which segments traffic sources for Google channels (thank you for letting us build upon your work, Mike!).
Where this module goes above and beyond implementing the script yourself is a clear view of important metrics for your stakeholders, as well as the ability to check different moments in time.
We believe Performance Max can be very powerful when implemented correctly and want to ensure you have the best-in-class tools to manage this campaign type. One of the keys to a successful Performance Max campaign is including audience signals to help kickstart the learning.
E-commerce is at the heart of Performance Max, and we delight in enabling our customers to win. That’s why we introduced the Create Assets For Performance Max for Retail tool.
Knowing what your competitors are up to is a powerful way to ensure your campaigns stay ahead. While native solutions like auction insights can give you a piece of the picture, the data is limited to search impression share stats.
Enter Optmyzr’s Competitive Analysis tool, which gives you insights into:
Which competitors are competing with you?
When did they start competing with you?
On how many entities are they competing with you?
While the Auction Insights show results at the account level, the Top Competitors from Optmyzr (using proprietary technology) show results at the keyword, ad group, and campaign levels.
This tool is a step above native auction insights because it gives you a more comprehensive view of which brands are competing with you over time. Having this understanding will help you understand:
Fluctuations in the auction price.
Changes in conversion rates.
Who might be worth actively going after with a competitor campaign?
This tool sheds light on competitors at the following Google Ads entity levels:
Campaign
Ad group
Keyword
Change History Annotation
One of the most exciting workflow updates is our change history annotation. You’ll be able to see the full change history of your connected accounts and make notes along the way!
This will enable you to:
Maintain a record of what you did and why across networks.
Hold your team/yourself accountable for actions taken (or not taken) in the accounts.
PPC Investigator has always enabled you to understand what has been happening in your account. This added layer of insight will enable you to understand exactly which actions caused changes in performance (good or bad).
We believe you shouldn’t have to leave Optmyzr to get access to these valuable insights and are delighted to empower you to understand what happened when (and why).
At the moment the Root Cause Analysis in the PPC Investigator is for Google Ads only. But the Cause Chart supports Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Reporting and Analytics
PPC doesn’t live in a vacuum, and bringing in analytics metrics so we can position results in context with other marketing channels helps everyone win. With the depreciation of universal analytics, having the means to gracefully transition to GA4 while keeping SEO empathy at the forefront of PPC.
We support the following metrics:
Additionally, we now support analytics metrics in Rule Engine so that you can take a more collaborative approach to your marketing.
When reviewing data, it’s important to be able to see the full breakdown of performance. This is why we introduced segmentation across campaign, ad group, and keyword levels (upgrading previous functionality that just looked at account-level segmentation). You can find this data in the performance comparison widget.
Reports also allow for bulk entity (account, campaign, ad group, keyword, etc.) selection so you can quickly set up templates and identify performance changes across your book of business.
Improvements To Rule Engine
Rule Engine is at the heart of Optmyzr. It’s what enables us to bring API-specific optimizations to brands who may not have coding resources or don’t have the time to code a custom solution.
The main Rule Engine updates include:
Bulk Entity Selection: we now empower you to capture multiple entities in a single keyboard shortcut.
Percent Rules Across All Optmyzr Supported Channels: we love Google and its ability to empower marketers to win. We also love Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Yahoo Japan. You now can set rules for all our supported channels based on top percent entities.
Product Scope For All Campaign Types: e-commerce lives and dies by product data quality. Optmyzr customers can now get product-level data to empower their Google and Performance Max shopping campaigns.
Standard Shopping With Smart Bidding: not every brand will be able to justify the additional assets for Performance Max, and it’s not reasonable to ask them to forfeit all the value of smart bidding. Our tool now empowers brands to access smart bidding (TROAS) while maintaining a standard shopping campaign.
Optmyzr Express Innovations
One of the biggest ways we empower our customers is through time savings. Optmyzr Express enabled marketers to achieve big wins in their accounts with limited effort. We added the following updates to Optmyzr Express:
DSA (dynamic search ad) Sculpture: this tool allows marketers to identify and exclude search terms triggered by their DSA campaigns/ad groups. Beyond ensuring the traffic is of quality, this also helps identify and end potential cannibalization.
Fix Ads: we’ll highlight ads with poor ad strength and/or few headlines and descriptions. You’ll then get creative suggestions powered by historically well-performing ads and our intelligent suggestion system.
Missing Ads: we’ll highlight ad groups without RSAs (responsive search ads) and give you suggestions for creative.
Exclude Placements: we’re beyond excited about this tool’s ability to help with Performance Max and traditional display/video campaigns! Our tool will help you remove unwanted placements (mobile apps, websites, and youtube videos) at the campaign or account level. This tool focuses on high-cost relative to your other placements that have zero conversions.
Solving for Impression Share: whether you need to fix impression share lost due to budget (we’ll help with stand-alone and shared budgets) or you need to increase the impression share of a converting smart bidding campaign (maximize conversions with a CPA goal or maximize conversion value with a ROAS goal), this tool can help!
Testing Smart Bidding: it can be scary to opt into a bidding strategy that may not have served you well in the past. This is where our Express optimization can help - we’ll enable an experiment for a given TCPA or TROAS.
Enable Converting Keywords: life happens and sometimes a converting keyword gets removed. So while we can’t get the original keyword back, we can get a new version of it going on the match type it was on.
Remove Negative Keyword Conflicts: negative keywords are powerful ways to shape budget allocation - yet sometimes they get added accidentally. This tool will give you the option to remove the negative OR pause the conflicting keyword.
If you’re not already using Optmyzr Express, we strongly suggest you connect with your customer success hero to schedule training on leveraging it. You also can check out this tutorial.
Final Takeaways
Innovation is only useful if it makes life better for those it’s attempting to help. We believe the areas we’re focusing on continue our mission of democratizing high-value automation and account management across accounts of all sizes. The greatest gift you can give us is feedback on where you want us to focus next and what problems you’re facing.
Every single one of these optimizations came from a customer conversation and how we could help them achieve more out of their ad spend/with their team.
Thanks to YOU (our customers, industry peers, and sources of inspiration) for enabling our product roadmap and our brilliant and fearless women-powered product and innovation team.
And while the rest of us were celebrating Women’s Month, our product team, made up of 80% women, was busy with their latest sprint cycle to give our PPC community more tools and capabilities for success.
We’re always excited to share what’s new and exciting at Optmyzr, but this month’s releases represent a special opportunity to shine the spotlight on our amazing women in product development and engineering.
Not an Optmyzr customer yet? This is the best time to sign up for a full functionality trial and unlevel your marketing!
Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor, and 2022 was anything but smooth. From Google’s automation updates and several tech migrations, there was much to get used to.
Well done on getting through a choppy year, and to the start of a new opportunity.
For us, things haven’t changed in 2023. Not really.
Amidst the uncertainty in the PPC world, you can always count on Optmyzr to do what’s right for you. Our capabilities may evolve with the ad platforms, but fundamentally we’ll always be what PPC marketers need.
In 2022, our product roadmap restored some of the control and visibility you lost when Google made the shift to responsive search ads and Performance Max.
Behind the scenes, our team worked tirelessly on the migration to the new Google Ads API to make sure we didn’t abandon you when you need us most.
So when we say that our customers are priority #1, we mean it. Optmyzr wouldn’t be where we are — celebrating our 10th year in business — without you.
This year, we have a lot of exciting things already in progress: added capabilities for platforms beyond Google, integrations with other marketing tools, new layers of automation, and more.
But first, let’s look at the biggest updates of 2022.
Here’s a quick look at our top products for the year 2022 and a sneak peek into this year’s roadmap.
Top Updates of 2022
Optimization Updates
Stay on top of broken URLs in Google Ads
The URL Checker utility has been upgraded with an improved workflow, making it easier to create and manage settings. You can now pause ads and keywords linking to broken URLs, and re-enable these entities in a future run if the issues are fixed.
Get PMax listing groups data in ‘Top Product & Listing Groups’ widget
We’ve updated the Top Product & Listing Groups Widget for Google Ads to include top listing groups data from your Performance Max campaigns. It makes your Shopping product groups and Performance Max listing groups accessible under one interface.
As a reminder, you could see data earlier for both Standard and Smart Shopping campaigns. Performance Max has taken the place of Smart Shopping.
Campaign data for Sponsored Brand videos is now included in dashboards and reports for your Amazon PPC accounts. This removes the inconsistency in data for this campaign type.
Audits and Analysis Updates
Perform root cause analysis for Microsoft Ads
PPC Investigator now has more capabilities to analyze Microsoft Ads accounts.
After picking a metric to investigate, Root Cause Analysis can now highlight specific campaigns, ad groups, product partitions, keywords, and other elements responsible for the change in performance.
In the Keyword Lasso tool, you can now select ‘Keyword Planner’ as a source of new keywords using the drop-down menu at the top of the page. Read more about it in our help documentation.
Evaluate Performance Max campaigns with 8 new audits
We’ve added 8 new audits to help maintain and improve the quality of your Performance Max campaigns. With these, you can easily identify gaps in asset groups and individual assets in terms of their structure and performance.
For example, now you can start using Performance Labels to assess various PMax assets and find asset groups with insufficient headlines, descriptions, images, and more.
Regularly audit and get quick, actionable insights on MS account health
Use the PPC Policy and Audits tool under the Insights section to identify different problem areas in your Microsoft Ads accounts, as well as to find optimization opportunities for your ads, campaigns, keywords, and more.
Visualize your Google Ads performance with funnel charts
For Google Ads accounts, the funnel chart feature is accessible in both single and multi-account reports.
Starting with impressions at the top of the funnel, clicks in the middle, and working your way down to conversions, you can easily visualize the performance at different stages of the ad journey.
Make sure all your ad groups have responsive search ads, even after the July deprecation of expanded text ads.
Our new script builds a bulk sheet with new RSAs for your entire account. It pulls text from existing ads and adds them as assets to suggested new RSAs.
Simply taking existing text from ETAs and adding them to new RSAs in existing ad groups can boost conversions by up to 7% at a similar CPA or ROAS.
Our popular Ad Text Optimization tool now has a version for responsive search ads.
As a hybrid insight and optimization tool, it’ll allow you to both review RSA performance data and modify text components (like headlines and descriptions), individually or in bulk.
Preview and add Google RSAs and RDAs directly from audits
If you’ve previously run an audit to find out which ad groups have fewer than two responsive search ads, clicking on the ad group name renders a preview of existing ads and their performance.
You’ll also be able to create new responsive search ads, call ads, responsive display ads, or expanded dynamic search ads (depending on campaign type).
Better your Google Ads performance with 10 new RSA audits
Easily spot gaps and inconsistencies in your RSA assets, and make changes wherever needed. We’ve got 10 new audits to help you identify and resolve potential issues.
Get new headline and description suggestions for Google and Microsoft responsive search ads.
When selecting this option, you’ll get top suggestions for ad assets from Open AI, allowing for greater variety and more choice when creating your ads.
Build Campaigns and keep them in sync with your Shopping Merchant Feed
Optmyzr now supports Performance Max retail campaigns in the following ways:
Create them in Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0
Keep them in sync with changes to your Merchant Feed using Shopping Campaign Refresher 2.0
Retail advertisers will find it easier to build Performance Max campaigns at scale, and automate sync with products entering and leaving a feed in near real time.
These updates require a Campaign Automator subscription to view.Go to the toolor contact support@optmyzr.com if you’d like to discuss getting access.
Organize ads with templates
Creating labels for different ads is now easier when you use Campaign Automator templates. Get added flexibility to manage and optimize all your ads.
Take bulk actions or customize your approach. For instance, run select ad labels on certain days, or get reports only for a particular set of labels.
Create new ads in paused state
You can now create new ads in a paused state and turn them on later via our Rule Engine or in Google Ads.
Please note that you can only create new ads in a paused state for the first template run. They will be automatically enabled in subsequent runs.
Expand your target group with broader URL targeting
Add broader targets for Dynamic Search Ad Groups using rules in PPC Policy and Audits.
For example, target URLs that contain the keyword “Optmyzr” instead of exact URLs. This lets you reach a broader audience, leading to more traffic.
You still have the option to use exact URLs for targeting anytime.
Learn With Optmyzr: The New Reports Experience
Our latest Learn With Optmyzr video shows you how quick and easy it is to create them with our new report designer.
Build report templates for single accounts, and set them up across your Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts without creating a new template for each account.
Or create comprehensive reports for clients who advertise across multiple platforms, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, and Google Analytics.
12 tools used and loved by over 10K Optmyzr customers
With an eventful year coming to a close, our customer and analytics teams identified the most used and talked about features of 2022.
Here are the 12 Optmyzr tools that our 10,000+ users made integral to their PPC management and optimization workflows.
We’re thrilled you loved and used so many of our new capabilities in 2022, and we’re ready to step it up in 2023. There will be many new updates and features, but the goal is still the same: to help you better manage your PPC accounts.
What to Expect in 2023
New features and capabilities to better manage ad platform automation such as Performance Max, Smart Bidding, and RSAs
Better integrate your business data easily, both to enhance ad platform decision-making and to run experiments
Support for the transition to Google Analytics 4 and changes in audience targeting
New Rule Engine strategies, audits, alert types, scripts and script support, and more automation layering
According to a recent benchmark study, Google Ads cost per lead has surged in 91% of sectors in 2022 compared to 2021. And, a recent report by PPCsurvey says that 98% of participants reported using Google Ads, compared to Facebook with 76% and Instagram with 64%.
This suggests that competition is higher in Google Ads, resulting in higher bids for fewer clicks per advertiser.
Microsoft, on the other hand, appeals to a particular niche. More people use Bing to search on their PCs, typically at work. So, on desktops, Bing has 36% of the US search market, while 11 billion searches are conducted on Bing each month globally.
Interestingly, Bing shopping campaigns have a 45% higher average ad click-through rate than Google, and Bing’s average cost per click on shopping ads is 30% lower.
Why should you care? With a challenging economy up ahead, it’s more crucial than ever to be competitive and watchful of your campaigns, especially this holiday shopping season.
And recently, we at Optmyzr have built some new tools and capabilities for your Google and Microsoft Responsive Search Ads. We also have a tool to convert your Microsoft Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) to Responsive Search Ads (RSAs).
Here’s a roundup of all of them.
Easily improve your RSAs with Ad Text Optimization (RSA)
You can now easily identify Google and Microsoft RSAs with ‘poor’ ad strength and tweak them for improved performance. You can also refer to your existing RSAs that have performed well when making the changes.
Additionally, you can find RSAs with fewer headlines or descriptions and add more to fill out all available asset spaces. And, you can filter and sort them based on performance metrics and make bulk modifications to various assets.
This tool is available for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Convert your Microsoft ETAs to RSAs using Ad Text Optimization (ETA)
This tool makes the job of turning your Microsoft ETAs to RSAs easier so that you don’t have to manually create RSAs from scratch.
It lets you download a CSV of all your existing ETAs in your account. You can then edit them, change their headlines and descriptions, and upload them back to your Microsoft Ads account with a single click.
This is launched only for Microsoft Ads at the moment. However, for Google ads, you can use this ETAs to RSAs script, developed by our CEO, Frederick Vallaeys.
Get specific suggestions in Responsive Search Ads utility
This dedicated RSA utility tool helps you identify ad groups with no RSAs or poor-quality ones. It also gives specific suggestions based on best-performing ad components in existing ETAs.
This tool is available for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Create ads directly from the side tray in PPC Policy and Audits
We now support creating various ads like Call Ads, Responsive Search Ads, Responsive Display Ads, and Dynamic Search Ads through the PPC Policy and Audits interface.
Suppose you identify an ad group with insufficient RSAs. You can create an RSA directly from the Audit Results page using this tool.
This is only available for Google Ads. However, PPC Policy and Audits for Microsoft Ads was recently launched, which supports a list of audits for your Ads.
Open AI gives ad asset suggestions in A/B Testing for Ads
When you create a new RSA while pausing one after A/B Testing, open AI will give ad asset suggestions based on high-performing ones, giving you a wide range of options for making ad creatives.
For now, this is only available for RSA headlines and descriptions.
This tool is available for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Better your Google Ads performance with 10 new RSA audits
We’ve got 10 new audits to help identify and resolve potential issues with your Google RSAs.
You can easily spot gaps and inconsistencies in your RSA assets and make changes wherever needed.
For example, the headline and description assets are too few and short, or there are some duplicate and underperforming assets. You can quickly make these changes to boost Google’s ability to create unique ad combinations.
Continuing its prominent role from this year, PPC automation is predicted to be a major industry trend in 2023. With the uncertainty of upcoming quarters, you’ll want to stay up-to-date with PPC automation to mitigate any negative market effects.
We got an early start on next year’s work to meet your needs in an evolving market.
The past month’s updates include quick audits to manage, optimize, and control the quality of your RSA campaigns; one-click optimizations with prebuilt Rule Engine strategies; and much more.
Here’s everything we updated in November 2022.
Audits and Insights
Evaluate Performance Max campaigns with 8 new audits
We’ve added 8 new audits to help maintain and improve the quality of your Performance Max campaigns. With these, you can quickly identify gaps in asset groups and individual assets in structure and performance.
For example, you can now use Performance Labels to assess various PMax assets and find asset groups with insufficient headlines, descriptions, images, and more.
PPC Policy and Audits are available for Amazon Ads (under Insights) to provide a more in-depth evaluation at various levels of your account.
Each audit has an individual grade; hover over the result, and more specific information will be displayed. This allows you to make periodic adjustments to achieve better results.
Better your Google Ads performance with 10 new RSA audits
We’ve got 10 new audits to help identify and resolve potential issues with your Google RSAs.
You can easily spot gaps and inconsistencies in your RSA assets and make changes wherever needed.
For example, the headline and description assets are too few and short, or there are some duplicate and underperforming assets. You can quickly make these changes to boost Google’s ability to create unique ad combinations.
Visualize your Google Ads performance with funnel charts
For Google Ads accounts, the funnel chart feature is accessible in both single and multi-account reports.
Starting with impressions at the top of the funnel, clicks in the middle, and working your way down to conversions, you can easily visualize the performance at different stages of the ad journey.
To help maintain control of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, including your Google and Microsoft Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), we at Optmyzr recently developed several powerful tools and features.
Here’s a blog post that summarizes all of them, with some useful links to jump right to the updates and tools.
A toolkit to supercharge your Amazon PPC campaigns
Despite an unsteady economy, Amazon is still the most popular online retailer in the United States. Even though people are cutting back on spending because of the recession, Amazon still attracts sellers and is preparing for another busy year.
So, whether you’re looking to refine a current strategy or start from scratch, we have the tools to help you manage your Amazon Ads effectively.
It feels like we’ve turned a corner on PPC automation.
Our customer success and sales teams now have more conversations about how to build and use automation, or how to make Google’s automation make better decisions for the accounts people manage.
Strong resistance from just a few months ago has given way to acceptance that we do indeed play in Google’s garden and, more importantly, confidence that there are still ways to get great PPC results.
Our own evolution at Optmyzr is similarly encouraging. We’re increasing our support for platforms outside Google, starting with Microsoft and Meta. This month, you’ll also see multiple updates aimed at helping ecommerce advertisers contend with the demands of the holiday season.
Here’s everything we updated in October 2022.
Responsive Search Ads
Create responsive display ads from the Audits tool
Actionable audits now let you create Responsive Display Ads without going to another tool. This is only compatible with Google Ads accounts.
For Google Ads, ‘Conversion By Time’ metrics have been added to the following scopes:
Account/Customer
Campaign
Ad group
Ad
Keywords
Ad group audience
These metrics make sure that conversions are attributed to the date on which it happened, rather than when the ad was clicked. Learn more about these metrics from Google.
You now have the option to choose which audit template you want to determine Google Ads audit scores.
From the account dashboard, move your cursor to the PPC Audit Score card on the right to reveal a gear icon. Click it to change your audit template for a single account or all the accounts you manage.
It’s remarkable how quickly we’ve all had to adjust to the new realities of advertising with Google and other ad platforms.
You can’t have a conversation about PPC these days without automation coming up. We hear about it every time we record a PPC Town Hall, in every call and chat with customers, and all over social media. Performance Max, Responsive Search Ads, and Smart Bidding with Target ROAS tend to come up most frequently.
Everyone at Optmyzr is working as hard as we can to make sure you’re able to use our tools to run great campaigns that meet the demands of modern PPC.
We’ve got some exciting updates for you this month, including support for Performance Max in two of our most popular shopping tools and an announcement on how we support Google’s new scripts experience.
Here’s everything we updated in September 2022.
Performance Max
Support for Performance Max retail campaigns
Optmyzr now supports Performance Max retail campaigns in the following ways:
Retail advertisers will find it easier to build Performance Max campaigns at scale, and automate sync with products entering and leaving a feed in near real time.
For campaign groups created using Optmyzr, we categorize the results in three ways:
Fully Upgraded: All campaigns in the campaign group were upgraded to Performance Max. We bring the new PMax campaigns back into the campaign group and refresh them as a PMax campaign group.
Partially Upgraded: If only some campaigns were upgraded and others are still Smart Shopping, we only refresh the Smart Shopping campaigns and do not give suggestions for new campaigns. You can refresh PMax campaigns using the “refresh existing campaign” option but will not be able to automate these.
Not Upgraded: A normal Smart Shopping campaign group.
For existing campaigns created outside Optmyzr:
If there is no automation, we will pick up the PMax campaign and allow refreshing and setting up automation.
If there’s any automation running for existing Smart Shopping campaigns and these are upgraded to PMax, we’ll map the old Smart Shopping campaign to the new PMax campaign and refresh this new one.
Ad labels have been added as a filter option in the Ad Text Optimization tool for responsive search ads. This helps limit the data you see to ads with a specific label.
Works with both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts.
If you’ve previously run an audit to find out which ad groups have fewer than two responsive search ads, clicking on the ad group name renders a preview of existing ads and their performance.
You’ll also be able to create new responsive search ads, call ads, or expanded dynamic search ads (depending on campaign type).
When editing a headline or description for a Responsive Search Ad in Optmyzr (Google or Microsoft Ads), you now have the option to create it as a new asset in the existing ad.
For example, you can turn the headline “Product X is available in three vibrant new colors” into a new one (such as “Product X now in red, blue, and orange”), adding it to any existing RSAs with at least one more open headline slot.
Both headlines will exist in your selected ads, and you can opt to remove either asset at a later time.
The attribute “network type” is now available in the campaign scope of the Rule Engine. This makes it easier to view search terms coming from the Search Partners network.
The attribute “ad group type” is now available in the ad group scope of the Rule Engine. This makes it easier to exclude search terms from Dynamic Search Ad ad groups.
If you use Google’s automatic migration tool to upgrade from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you’ll notice that it doesn’t migrate your goals in the process.
This makes the data in GA4 much less helpful in optimizing your ads.
The URL Checker utility has been upgraded with an improved workflow, making it easier to create and manage settings. You can now pause ads and keywords linking to broken URLs, and re-enable these entities in a future run if the issues are fixed.
This tool is only available for customers on current subscriptions. If you’re on a legacy plan, write to your account manager to discuss a solution.
Optmyzr now supports these seven Enhanced Scripts:
Flexible Budgets
Reach Target Monthly Spend
Check Destination URLs
Check Sitelinks URLs
Anomaly Detector
Hourly Campaign Level Dayparts
Report Hourly Stats
All of these have been updated to work with both new and old experiences.
If you were an Optmyzr customer before June 14, 2022, you will see a ‘Deprecated’ tag next to older scripts that we no longer support.
Get suggestions for Target ROAS/CPA adjustments
Get a new suggested Target ROAS value for campaigns running on the Maximize Conversion Value bidding strategy. You can then perform any of the following actions:
Apply suggested changes directly
View the strategy and add it to your list of Rule Engine strategies where you can
More widgets have been added for Microsoft Ads to help you better audit ads, ad groups, performance, and other levels e.g. “ad groups with too few Responsive Search Ads”.
You can now add search terms to a negative keywords list via an action in the search terms scope of the Rule Engine. This list can be created and edited with rules.
Ad platforms have been busy rolling out automation updates over the past couple of months. That’s kept the pressure on us to make sure our software is up-to-date with the latest advancements in PPC land.
August at Optmyzr HQ was all about translating those updates into features and capabilities. We’re happy to share that our team has more than delivered.
For example, with Responsive Search Ads becoming the default in Google and gaining priority in Microsoft, it was important for us to support them in our testing and optimization tools.
Here’s everything we updated in July and August 2022.
When editing a headline or description for a Responsive Search Ad in Optmyzr (Google or Microsoft Ads), you now have the option to create it as a new asset in the existing ad.
For example, you can turn the headline “Product X is available in three vibrant new colors” into a new one (such as “Product X now in red, blue, and orange”), adding it to any existing RSAs with at least one more open headline slot.
Both headlines will exist in your selected ads, and you can opt to remove either asset at a later time.
Our A/B Testing for Ads tool lets you make sure only the best ad copy is active. You can now select Responsive Search Ads in Microsoft to analyze, test, modify, and pause.
The Ad Text Optimization for Responsive Search Ads is an optimization and insight tool that breaks down and reviews your ad performance data by its components. It also allows you to make changes in bulk to different ad components.
This tools is now available for use with Microsoft Ads accounts.
Use the PPC Policy and Audits tool under the insights section to identify different problem areas in your Microsoft Ads accounts, as well as to find optimization opportunities for your ads, campaigns, keywords and more.
PPC Investigator now has more capabilities to analyze Microsoft Ads accounts.
After picking a metric to investigate, Root Cause Analysis can now highlight specific campaigns, ad groups, product partitions, keywords, and other elements responsible for the change in performance.
The ‘Find Negative Keywords’ tool now has a faster way to review suggestions. You can now archive or change match types in bulk for both Google and Microsoft Ads.
Some audit results will show a link to more details (as seen in this screenshot below for Extensions). This is available for campaigns (campaign settings, ad groups, extensions) and ad groups (ad group settings, keywords, ads).
Clicking the link will open a sidebar with more information related to that entry.
Configure widgets with ease, preview while editing settings, and add account/campaign selectors from within the widget settings.
Schedule quarterly reports
Report scheduling now includes the option to select specific months of the year.
Schedule reports for delivery in Slack
Select this option in the schedule window to deliver reports to mentioned recipients via Slack.
Note: This requires your Optmyzr and Slack accounts to be connected.
Include campaign names in reports
Just like accounts, dynamic insertion of campaign names is now supported using {CS1} where the number reflects the chosen campaign selector.
Additional metrics in Google Ads reporting
The following metrics have been added to the KPI, Summary, Top Campaigns and Performance Comparison widgets in our report builder:
Unadjusted conversion value
Conversion value adjustment
If you adjust Conversion Value Rules to optimize the conversion value of your budget, these metrics allow you to see the base conversion value as well as the adjustment made to it.
While WordStream was announcing they would deprecate the software part of their business, our product and engineering teams were migrating Optmyzr fully to the new Google Ads API.
We’re delighted to announce that not only is that migration effectively complete, but we’ve also managed to release several new capabilities during the same period. Here’s everything we updated from April–June 2022.
Optimize the ROI of your ad spend
Google’s ‘Maximize Conversion Value’ bid strategy with a target ROAS has two major advantages: it recognizes that not all conversions are equally valuable, and it allows you to use that to get the best possible return on investment.
As with any ad platform automation, this strategy is only as good as the data it runs on. So you’ll want to use our recent capabilities to structure that business data in a way that Smart Bidding can understand.
Once Google knows what drives results for your business, you can reap benefits such as:
• Higher quality conversions for the same budget
• Less junk and more leads that turn into paying customers
• More sales to profitable customers and fewer returned orders
Create training data for Google’s Smart Bidding algorithms
Optimizing for ROI or conversion value takes your ad budget as far as it can go. The first step is identifying segments (like location, audience, or device type) that tend to correlate with higher quality conversions.
We’ll show you a list of segments and ask you to score them from 1–5, with 1 meaning you want to see fewer conversions like that and 5 meaning you want to see many more.
Remember: Don’t base your scores on Google data (like CTR and bounce rate). Instead, work with business teams to identify the correlation between segments and insights such as:
Average order value
Lifetime value
Lead-to-sale conversion rate
Or any other model that matters to your profitability.
Because the people with access to this knowledge aren’t always on PPC teams, we’ve created a spreadsheet template you can give them. Once they rate different audience segments in bulk, just feed it back into the Segment Scorer.
Turn business insights into bid modifiers for Smart Bidding
Once you’ve scored enough segments, we’ll turn those ratings into a format Google Ads can understand: Conversion Value Rules. These values tell Smart Bidding how much higher or lower to adjust its CPC bid for that particular segment e.g. United States, repeat customers, mobile.
After you apply recommended changes to Google, Target ROAS and Maximize Conversion Value bid strategies will automatically start working to get you more of the conversions you value the most.
When it comes to applying Value Rules or any ROI optimization strategy, you can create several safeguards to both prevent unwanted behavior and maximize effectiveness. We’ve put together two guides to help you manage these processes.
Track your Performance Max campaigns in more Optmyzr tools
Performance Max is the biggest thing in Google Ads at the moment. A major shift in automation balance, it will absorb Smart Shopping campaigns in the next few months. Here’s where our product currently supports Performance Max data.
Shopping Analysis: This update provides an easy way to analyze product-level performance data for Performance Max campaigns (with Merchant Feed). There is no change from how you use this tool for Smart or standard shopping.
Spend Projection: Performance Max campaigns are now visible in the Spend Projection tool, allowing you to gauge how those campaigns will pace/exhaust an assigned budget.
Optimize Budgets: You can now meet spend targets and maximize return on investment for Performance Max campaigns, and reallocate budgets based on performance. Also available for multi-account budgets.
An easier transition to Responsive Search Ads
With Expanded Text Ads now not so expansive after their sunset on June 30, our support for search ad optimization will focus solely on Responsive Search Ads. Here are our updates for managing RSAs from the last three months.
Optimize your RSA ad copy
Our popular Ad Text Optimization tool now has a version for Responsive Search Ads.
As a hybrid insight and optimization tool, it’ll allow you to both review RSA performance data and modify text components (like headlines and descriptions), individually or in bulk.
Make sure all your ad groups have Responsive Search Ads before Google disables Expanded Text Ad use in July.
Our new script builds a bulk sheet with new RSAs for your entire account. It pulls text from existing ads and adds them as assets to suggested new RSAs.
Simply taking existing text from ETAs and adding them to new RSAs in existing ad groups can boost conversions by up to 7% at a similar CPA or ROAS.
Campaign Automator now supports bulk creation of Responsive Search Ads using existing Expanded Text Ads.
With ETAs no longer available for creation or editing as of today, this could benefit you if your campaigns still haven’t migrated to RSAs.
Watch the video below for more details and remember — you can still pause and enable existing ETAs both manually and via Campaign Automator:
Building a better Optmyzr experience
Everything we do begins and ends with making sure our customers aren’t just satisfied using Optmyzr, but happy to recommend it to other PPC marketers. These next updates were centered around improving that experience.
UI improvements to alert settings
We’ve released a friendlier interface for our Alert Settings page that includes capabilities such as:
Create alerts in bulk more easily
Select all the accounts you want at once
Support for monthly budget alerts for Amazon and Facebook accounts
Easier way to create and edit multi-account budget alerts
See campaign placement data on the account dashboard
The Campaign Placements table on the Account Dashboard shows and sorts performance data for all your campaign placements. With this, you can easily see which placements are working for any given campaign type.
People know us as Google Ads experts, but we’re keen to support advertisers and agencies managing other platforms as well. These updates for our support of Amazon Ads campaigns are a step in that direction.
Cut wasteful spend on Amazon Ads
We now provide suggestions for non-converting and costly product targets in Amazon Advertising campaigns. This is intended to help you reduce wasted spend and focus on better-performing targets.
Campaign data for Sponsored Brand Videos is now included in dashboards and reports for your Amazon PPC accounts. This removes the inconsistency in data we had earlier for this campaign type.
Monthly budget targets for FB & Amazon now on the Dashboard
Specify your monthly budget targets for Facebook & Amazon on the MCC Dashboard to get insights on how you’ve spent the budget and how it is pacing.
The Budget Pacing column indicates what percentage you’ve spent relative to what you should have spent as a share of the month (linear spending).
Click on the ‘bulk edit account details’ option to start entering your budgets for Facebook and Amazon ads accounts.
New UI with added functionalities for Automation Schedules
Quickly find what you’re looking for using the ‘Search’ bar and other filters like Account, Platform, Users, and more.
Bulk edit option modify frequency, recipients or pause/enable and even delete for multiple automation schedules at a time.
Shortcuts to access the relevant settings directly in the respective tools.
Use the right-side tray to edit or review the details associated with each schedule.
Express the value of your conversions better with the new Optimize Value Rules tool
Setting up Conversion Value Rules helps in optimizing an account’s performance by teaching Google’s automations (like those that handle Smart Bidding to optimize Target ROAS, Maximize conversion value, and Smart Shopping campaigns) more about your business.
The ‘Optimize Value Rules’ tool suggests conversion value rules that you can set up in your Google Ads account. These suggestions are based on data from the segments you score in Segment Scorer.
You can also see what’s in store for the coming months and suggest feature requests on the Optmyzr Roadmap.
It doesn’t matter how well your Google Ads accounts are performing – great marketers and agencies always want to do better. But there’s a perception among some marketers that it takes months to see meaningful improvements from your PPC campaigns.
This isn’t true.
With a tool like Optmyzr at your disposal and this playbook, you can start to see improvements in your Google search and shopping campaigns in 2 weeks – the same amount of time our free trial lasts.
So whether you’re just starting out with Optmyzr, thinking of giving us a shot, or want to onboard another client, here’s how we can help set your accounts up for success in just two weeks.
Note: We refer to Google Ads by default, but many of these capabilities can be applied to your Microsoft Ads campaigns as well.
Google Search Ads
Day 1: Set up alerts to monitor accounts and track budgets.
Set up Account Alerts to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like CPA and ROAS.
Set monthly budgets on the MCC dashboard and get notified when an account is underspending or overspending.
Install the Flexible Budgets enhanced script to make sure the account doesn’t overspend.
Install the Check Destination URLs enhanced script to stop traffic from going to broken landing pages.
Day 3: Analyze account performance and start optimizing.
In PPC Policy and Audits, run ‘Sample Policy’ to find areas of improvement in the account and customize policies based on your strategy.
Customize a weekly report from available Instant Report templates. Automate it to be emailed every Monday morning.
Run Optmyzr Express and do quick optimization tasks like testing new ads, adding new keywords, and winning more traffic for converting keywords.
Run PPC Investigator to see how and why conversions in your account changed in the last 30 days.
Day 5: Analyze search queries to add new keywords and negatives to your account.
Run Keyword Lasso to add new keywords from ‘Top Suggestions’ or use a custom filter to find suggestions.
Run Negative Keyword Finder to find account-level negatives and add them to shared negative lists.
Run Search Terms N-Grams to analyze the highest-traffic search terms in a word cloud to identify trends and new ad group themes, and to add negatives.
Pro Tip: Combine these optimizations into a single workflow usingBlueprints.
Day 6: Manage bids.
Manual Bidding
Run Conversion Grabber to acquire more traffic for converting keywords losing impression share.
Run First Page Bridger to push keywords with high Quality Scores to the first page of search results.
Run Reduce Bids on keywords that have zero conversions and high cost/CPA.
Automated and Smart Bidding
Run Optimize Target CPA and Optimize Target ROAS optimizations to change ad group-level targets for better performance when using Google Smart Bidding.
Pro Tip: Combine these optimizations into a single Workflow using Blueprints.
Day 7: Improve Quality Score and manage budgets.
Run Analyze and Optimize Budget to reallocate budgets to campaigns that are converting but losing impression share.
Use the Quality Score Tracker to analyze ad groups with low Quality Scores.
Run Quick Optimizations from the Quality Score Tracker to pause and SKAG keywords with low Quality Scores.
Day 9: A/B test and create new ads.
Use A/B Testing For Ads to pause underperforming ads and create new ones.
Test your ad components and make bulk edits (if necessary) using Ad Text Optimization.
Create new responsive search ads using the Responsive Search Ads tool to ensure all your ad groups have at least one responsive search ad.
Day 11: Set hourly bid adjustments and build custom optimizations.
Use the Hour of Week Bid Adjustment to set bid adjustments for different times of the week based on your optimization goal.
Try out Instant Strategies in the Rule Engine.
Bonus: Experiment with a custom strategy in the Rule Engine.
Day 13: Set bid adjustments for locations and demographics based on performance.
Use the Geo-Bid Adjustment to target and set bid adjustments for locations based on performance.
Run Optmyzr Express and perform quick optimization tasks like setting bid adjustments for age and gender.
Day 14: Create your own workflows and implement automation.
Create your own optimization workflow by building a Blueprint.
Automate your favorite optimization strategies using the Rule Engine.
Google Shopping Ads
Day 1: Set up merchant feed and monitor budget.
Link your merchant feeds to Optmyzr.
Install the Flexible Budget enhanced script to make sure standard shopping campaigns don’t overspend.
Pro Tip: Enhanced scripts can be installed at the MCC level. Read more about installing scripts.
Day 2: Filter out irrelevant shopping queries by managing negatives.
Use Shopping Negatives to identify competing and underperforming queries, and add them as negatives.
Try out the Instant Strategy ‘Non-Converting Search Queries(Shopping)’ via the Rule Engine to add negatives.
Pro Tip: Combine these optimizations into a single Workflow using Blueprints.
Day 4: Analyze feed and resync campaign structure.
Re-sync your campaigns with your merchant feed using Shopping Campaign Refresher 2.0.
Review attribute coverage for products using Merchant Feed Analysis.
Try out the Shopping Campaign Analysis tool to:
Identify the distribution of products for important feed attributes
Analyze performance by price, ROAS, product type, or category
Day 6: Manage bids.
Manual Bidding
Increase bids for product groups with high ROAS using Shopping Bidder.
Increase bids for converting product groups losing impression share with Optmyzr Express.
Reduce Bids for expensive product groups using Rule Engine (available under Instant Strategies).
Use Attribute Bidder to identify products with price points that have high ROAS, and to increase bids for such products if you have a GRIP structure.
Automated & Smart Bidding
Run Optimize Target CPA & ROAS to change ad group-level targets when running Google Smart Bidding for better performance.
Day 8: Create custom optimizations.
Use Rule Engine to convert your PPC strategies into optimizations for:
Managing Negatives: Create recipes to manage underperforming search terms in shopping campaigns
Managing Bids & Target ROAS: Create recipes for setting bids and target ROAS based on in-house strategies
Pro Tip:Watch this videofor ideas on how to use the Rule Engine to set up custom optimizations.
Day 10: Create your own workflows and implement automation.
Create your own optimization workflow by building a Blueprint.
Set up automation on your favorite optimizations.
Too good to be true? Try it for yourself.
Our mission at Optmyzr is to develop not just the tools that PPC marketers need today, but ones they can use to safeguard their true roles as digital marketing strategists.
That’s why everything in this onboarding guide has one eye on long-term results, and why we don’t gate any of our features to trial users.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial to experience for yourself how Optmyzr makes PPC management faster and your contributions more value-oriented. Use our roadmap and you’ll start to see improvements before the end of the trial period.
Campaign Automator: First Optmyzr tool to be moved to the new Google Ads API
As was already mentioned, Optmyzr is in the process of moving to the new Google Ads API, allowing customers to continue optimizing their accounts hassle-free.
We’ve moved our first tool, Campaign Automator to the new API and customers now have access to the following new features:
1. Review applied changes in Campaign Automator
Users no longer have to go through the process of downloading logs and csv files to review changes made to the tool. You can now easily identify which campaign was paused or which new ad was added recently. The changes can be reviewed under “Apply details” in the Optimization History.
3. Call Extensions at campaign and ad group levels
4. Choose where your ads appear
While creating Search campaigns, users can choose between Search Partner Network and Display Network.
5. Configure advanced location options
Users can choose from three advanced location options to target or exclude people based on their physical presence or areas of interest:
Target/Exclude based on presence or interest
Target/Exclude based on presence
Target based on search interest
Read the full guide to Campaign Automator capabilities.
Improvements to Segment Scorer
We have two new updates to the Segment Scorer that allow users to:
1. Toggle between viewing only segments that they’ve scored or viewing all segments, including ones that aren’t scored.
2. Search for a particular Segment Name or Segment Value using the Search bar.
Access more tools through Account Blueprints
Account Blueprints help users get started with goal-oriented tasks. When creating a Blueprint, users can create a custom task to choose from various Optmyzr tasks.
We’ve added more Optmyzr tools and options to schedule recurring tasks under Blueprints.
Users can now create tasks for the following tools:
Shopping Campaign Restructure
Create GRIP Structure
URL Checker
Bulk IP Exclusion
Customer Match List Updates
Optmyzr Express
Saved Reports
Manage Clients
Save and edit reports
Covid-19 PPC Analysis
Segment Scorer
Shopping Analysis
See what else is in store for the coming months and suggest feature requests on the Optmyzr Roadmap.
Our engineers are on track with rewriting our code and Optmyzr will continue to support advertisers with great PPC tools.
With much of our efforts focused on the migration, our updates in the month of January included improvements in Microsoft Ads management and getting templates for 2021 Annual Reports ready.
Here’s a roundup of all the key changes to Optmyzr from January 2022.
2021 Annual Report Templates
Are you still spending hours collating data and compiling your 2021 reports? Stop now and take a look at our Annual Report templates. You can get your executive and detailed annual reports for 2021 from the Reports menu.
As always, you can choose a report template that works best for you, and use it as it is or customize it to suit your needs better.
Microsoft Ads Management made easier
For all our Microsoft Ads managers out there, we have a new and improved Account Dashboard UI.
Get a bird’s eye view of how your account is performing, instantly preview and schedule your reports, and filter your data in just a few clicks.
What if there was a voice that reminded us of our past errors and told us when we’re about to make a bad decision that’ll end badly for us?
The Potential Wasted Spend metric does just that. The new addition to the Account Level Placement Exclusion Optimization tool tells you how much you’re potentially wasting by having non-converting placements on your account.
2021 was an eventful year for Optmyzr. From launching new capabilities and tools to improving existing ones, we’ve been doing everything we can to help make advertisers’ lives easier.
We’re thankful to everybody that has been a part of this journey, and we hope that you continue to choose us to improve your PPC management experience.
Here are the major updates across 12 months.
New tools/features -
Segment Explorer
In the Google Analytics interface, it is difficult to view performance data for multiple segments at a time - say number of sessions coming from California from Males using a mobile device.
The Segment Explorer lets you view performance metrics for all your connected Google Analytics accounts for multiple dimensions combined at once.
The new Segment Scorer allows you to score your segments based on how well they perform once you get a conversion from them. You can assign a number between 1 (lowest) and 5 (highest).
Once we get enough scores from your team, we’ll use that data to suggest Conversion Value Rules that will help optimize your account’s performance by teaching Google’s automations (like those that handle bidding) more about what’s valuable to your business.
With Campaign Experiments, you can analyze the performance of active experiments across all your Google Ads accounts in one place. Find winning and losing experiments, and apply or end them in a single click.
Optmyzr compares your experiment and its original campaign based on statistically significant data to highlight whether the experiment is winning.
Utility Tools: New Auctions Insights Visualizer
The new Auction Insights Visualizer enables you to generate charts using the Google Ads auction insights data. As Auction Insights data is currently not available via the API, you can drop data files into the tool and use the data.
We’ve also added a chart visualization of the auction insights to help users understand how their competitors are performing.
Our senior Engineer, Shashank Tiwari, who built the tool, was also featured in a Search Engine Journal article highlighting the utility of the tool.
Create well-structured Shopping campaigns and get more control over how they re-sync.
You can now create Standard or Smart shopping campaigns based on ROAS or Price points using the Shopping Builder. The system will also help you keep them up to date by moving the products from one campaign to another, depending on their ROAS/Price points, every time the Refresher is run. Read more about this feature here
You will now be able to view Facebook data along with other platforms supported by Optmyzr. You can:
1. See live data for all platforms in one place.
2. Mark as favorite, add notes, tags, and calculated metrics to help you monitor the performance of your Facebook accounts on the MCC Dashboard.
Campaign Projected Gain in AB Testing tool for Google & Microsoft
The Campaign Projected Gain feature gives you the projected gain for a selected metric, using the ‘Find winners by’ filter. This is Optmyzr’s estimation if an ad copy is optimized as per the suggestions shown in the tool. For example, if you are searching for winner ads by CTR, Optmyzr will show you how many clicks you can gain by pausing the loser ads.
Rule Engine updates
Account Level Placement Exclusion in one click
One-click optimization for Account Level Placement Exclusion is now available under the Placements section.
If you’re running smart campaigns, this update is especially useful as these campaigns respect only account-level placement exclusions. You can identify non-converting placements and exclude them from your account in one click.
You can also create your customized strategies in Rule Engine to get a report of or exclude placements at the account level.
Bid adjustment changes - ad group and campaign level
At the ad group level, users can create customized rules to analyze performance at the device, demographic, and audience level and change bid adjustments based on performance. Read on for more details.
At the campaign level, you can apply bid adjustments by devices. Adjust Bids by Device.
SA360 conversion data supported in the Rule Engine
Search Ads 360 actions and transactions are available in the Rule Engine for linked Google Ads accounts. Use this to gain extra insight from SA360 actions/transactions to make informed decisions.
Optimize Budgets Across Platforms now pauses the campaigns of a budget group if their shared monthly target is reached, and re-enable them on the 1st of the next month.
This helps make sure your accounts do not overspend across Facebook, Google, and Microsoft Ads.
New Budget management Features for Microsoft Ads
Spend Projection: We’ve added a new tool to help you see spend projections for your accounts. The system analyzes spend data, historical seasonality, and recent performance to predict how much an account is likely to spend within a selected time period.
Optimize Budget: Another new tool added for Microsoft Ads is Optimize Budgets. Use this to analyze spend data and reallocate budgets to campaigns based on performance, impression share, or to reach a monthly target.
Campaign Automator is a standalone Optmyzr product that lets you build scalable, automated, and inventory-driven PPC campaigns.
Watch this webinar to know more about Campaign Automator capabilities.
Users can also create Responsive display ads for Display campaigns using Campaign Automator. Here’s how.
New UI for Account Dashboard Google ads:
Including new widgets and functionalities
Easy access to Pre Built Templates
View Quality Score data
Analyze PPC Investigator Chart
See your Audit Score and access full PPC audit report
Review your tasks due and overdue
Workflows
More control over Account Blueprints
We now support both scheduled (paused or active) and on-demand Account Blueprints. You can create a Blueprint without scheduling tasks and run them on demand. Also, now you can choose to pause a scheduled Blueprint to not create new task alerts.
Zapier Integration: Send blueprint tasks or alerts to your project management system
With Zapier you can integrate Optmyzr with almost anything. For example: You can now send tasks created by blueprints to your own CRM or project management system (like Salesforce, Asana, Basecamp, Trello, etc.).
Learn how you can integrate Blueprints or Alerts with Zapier. You can also watch one of our YouTube tutorials.
Alerts
New alerts for Facebook, Amazon, Quality Score
New alert types for additional platforms, functionalities, and metrics. These include:
Alerts for Amazon and Facebook
Alerts for Quality Score in Google Ads
Alerts for custom calculated metrics available via your MCC Dashboard
Support to get Rule Engine alerts on the Triggered alerts page on all platforms
You can now get alerts on the Triggered Alerts page based on Rule Engine suggestions, allowing you to see all alerts in one place.
Get alert notifications directly in Microsoft Teams
Apart from Slack, your team can now be notified directly in their Microsoft team account. Whenever an alert is triggered, your team will be notified on Microsoft Teams as part of the chat for the Optmyzr app.
Search terms (specifically ASINs) can now be added as Product Targets or Negative Product Targets using the Search Terms scope of Rule Engine for Amazon.
This new action allows for more granular filtering based on performance and lets you add ASIN search terms as positive or negative product targets accordingly.
Optmyzr Express for Amazon
Optmyzr Express is designed to work as a to-do list and lets you breeze through multiple optimization tasks in minutes! It shows you optimization suggestions across accounts based on predefined algorithms.
A new scope, Campaign Placements has been added in Rule Engine for Amazon Ads. It allows you to see your Amazon Ads performance based on campaign placements and adjust bids (by %) for the corresponding placements.
This improvement helps you adjust bids by placements in a more granular way than the Amazon Ads interface, as our Rule Engine lets you filter by any condition that suits your needs.
Yahoo! Japan
We have added support for Yahoo! Japan Ads across multiple tools:
Rule Engine (scopes - keywords, campaigns, ad groups, and device bid adjustments)
Hour of Week Bid Adjustments
Pause Non-Converting keywords
Negative Keyword Finder
Keyword lasso
URL Checker
Optmyzr also has its very own roadmap now, where users can view upcoming updates and suggest feature requests of their own.
View the Optmyzr product roadmap & make feature requests
Optmyzr now has our own Roadmap page where users can:
If you work in search marketing or PPC, change being the only constant is no cliché; it’s a way of life.
Few changes in recent memory top the news that PPC stalwarts WordStream will sunset their PPC management and optimization tool, WordStream Advisor. Free trials and registrations are longer available to new users, and current subscribers will lose access once the AdWords API is deprecated in April 2022.
WordStream users are now faced with two options – either sign up for managed services with WordStream’s sister brand LOCALiQ, or find a new PPC software provider. The first one isn’t viable for many agencies – it’s like paying someone else to do what you excel at – and the second is challenging for anyone.
We’ve welcomed dozens of former WordStream users to the Optmyzr community, both in recent weeks and throughout the past. With their help, we’ve identified some of the reasons you might want to consider Optmyzr as your next PPC software partner – including functionalities you relied on in WordStream and having a proven onboarding process.
Why Optmyzr Is The Ideal WordStream Replacement
Optmyzr’s PPC optimization and management software has been recognized by customers and awards judges for its track record of helping search marketers stay in control of campaigns, maximize the value of ad spend, and recover time spent on repetitive tasks.
If any of these describe you or your team, Optmyzr might be the right fit for your business:
Search marketers who aren’t satisfied with results that are “good enough”
Agencies, brands, consultants, or enterprise teams managing multiple ad accounts
Responsible for a monthly ad spend of at least $10,000
Growing businesses, marketing generalists seeking high-level PPC recommendations, and anyone managing budgets under five figures should consider our free tool.
Optmyzr Capabilities You Miss(ed) With WordStream
Complete support for all major ad types (search, shopping, display) on Google and Microsoft Ads
Reporting, budget, and alerts support for Facebook Ads with additional capabilities in development
High-level insights and alerts for budget management across all ad platforms
Fully customizable reports with automated delivery options
Third-party integrations for Zoho, Slack, Zapier, Microsoft Teams, and more
To help you make the right decision, we’ve weighed up the offerings from Optmyzr and WordStream.
WordStream vs. Optmyzr: Your Favorite Capabilities, Enhanced
We get it – WordStream was a fantastic software provider, and you relied on their array of tools and capabilities. Changing software is always tough, but we’ve made sure that you’ll be able to enjoy the same outcomes.
Here are two of the most popular ones loved by other customers who migrated from WordStream:
20-Minute Work Week & Optmyzr Express
One of the best-loved WordStream functionalities is the 20-Minute Work Week tool. You can replicate any workflows you currently run using Optmyzr Express, which is designed to help you complete key optimizations in minutes.
Optmyzr Express is designed as a to-do list for your PPC accounts, letting you breeze through the most impactful tasks over a cup of coffee (or tea). Using Optmyzr Express is a lot like going through your email every morning, except it’s less stressful to actually make progress.
View all optimizations available under Optmyzr Express, or watch a 2-minute walkthrough of how it works for ad optimization:
Query Stream & Keyword Lasso
Another important tool from WordStream Advisor that’s popular with our customers is Query Stream.
Optmyzr’s solution to help you discover new keyword opportunities is called Keyword Lasso, and it looks at your search terms report to find queries that convert well or have a high click-through rate.
Check out this YouTube playlist to learn about some of our other capabilities to help you optimize keywords and search terms.
WordSteam Users Stop “Pulling Out Their Hair” When They Join Optmyzr
David McElligott from McElligott Digital Marketing LLC is one of several customers who signed up for Optmyzr following the sunset announcement from WordStream. In his words, here’s why he has no regrets:
“We’re definitely liking Optmyzr as a whole thus far; the difference from WordStream feels like night and day. Optmyzr gives me insights faster and easier, and I feel like we can really dive deeper into our client accounts without pulling out our hair.
“I was initially concerned about the leap in price between the two platforms, but since WordStream decided to abandon all its DIY users and only offer their own management, they tied my hands. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. The insights and the time saved are worth the ticket price.”
You Can Do More With Optmyzr, We Can Help
Switching software providers in the middle of active campaigns can be tiresome, but if you decide that Optmyzr is the right replacement for WordStream Advisor, we have a proven system to help new customers feel at home quickly.
Support for Onboarding And Beyond
We know the value of great customer support, which is why our team will be there to help you navigate the transition to our product. With Optmyzr, you’ll always have:
Complete control of your ad accounts
Dedicated, customized onboarding calls
Support and assistance in hours, not days or weeks
Stress-free assurance for ongoing API support
Ability to integrate any custom business data
Contract-free subscription with the option to cancel anytime
Additionally, you’ll get access to our goal-based onboarding guides that show you what tools in Optmyzr to focus on, and product tours and video walkthroughs to reduce the amount of time you need to be comfortable with our tools.
Having already had customers move from WordStream to Optmyzr, we understand the anxieties and requirements of a user who’s making a switch. Some of the first steps include:
If you still have questions or want to see a demo, write to our support team or drop us a message via our contact form. Like we said, we’ve got your back.
Despite its many iterations, the nature of search advertising remains the same: spend money to get your ads seen by the people most likely to click on them and give you a sale. But what happens when you don’t target the right keywords or audiences, or when you get plenty of clicks but they don’t convert at a good rate?
Budget bleeding is one of the most common PPC problems, affecting even the most seasoned account managers and strategists. While no account can realistically hit 100% efficiency, you can take steps to create as little wastage as possible.
Best Practices to Reduce Costs
Wastage in paid search can be broken down into two major categories:
Going beyond your prescribed budget: When you spend more than you or your client have allocated, there’s a chance it doesn’t go to the right places.
Serving ads that get clicks but not conversions: When your ads get clicks without converting, you’re giving platforms money while getting nothing in return.
In either scenario, the advertiser is investing money that doesn’t generate the returns it should.
Some of the common causes of overspending and low-converting ads include:
Not having an alert system for budgets
Managing multi-platform budgets separately
Failing to filter out irrelevant traffic (high clicks, no conversions)
Universal bid strategy with no adjustments
Low-quality or broken landing page experience
Tracking Your Progress
As with any outcome, it’s important to use performance indicators both in and beyond the ad platforms to see how much progress you’re making.
We recommend tracking the following metrics at different stages of your cost reduction effort.
Beginner Metrics
Click-through Rate
Conversion Rate
Beginner metrics are for when you want an initial lift. Use these as indicators of progress while you pause or reduce bids for keywords generating clicks without conversions, exclude placements leading to wasted spend, add negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic, and improve your landing pages.
Track these intermediate metrics after achieving some degree of growth. They will show you whether your efforts to optimize ad text/creatives and pause underperforming ads are working.
Advanced Metrics
Cost Per Acquisition
Customer Acquisition Cost
Last but not least, our recommended advanced metrics help you better understand if your bid adjustments are resulting in more efficient overall spend. Track these metrics when your campaign is running like a well-oiled machine.
Display campaigns in pay-per-click advertising are some of the most eye-catching ads you can run (when they’re done right). The Google Display Network (GDN) is a series of placements across Google properties and the web that helps you promote your business by showing creatives as people browse, watch YouTube videos, check their Gmail, or use their mobile devices and apps.
Google Display Network is designed to help you find the right audience, with targeting options that let you show your message to potential customers in the right place and at the right time. Use audience targeting or remarketing audience lists to find new prospects, or work with automated targeting.
Some of the ad subtypes you can run on Google Display Network include:
Responsive Display Ads: A combination of ad text, images, and logos. Google uses a machine learning model to determine the optimal combination of assets for each ad slot based on predictions built from your performance history.
Uploaded Image Ads: You can upload ads as images in different sizes or HTML5, for more control.
Engagement Ads: Run engaging image and video ads on YouTube and across the Display Network.
Gmail Ads: Show expandable ads on the top tabs of people’s inboxes.
Types of Display Campaigns
Display campaigns are a great way to expand the reach of your Search ads to other parts of the web. They also allow you to follow up with remarketing ads to new and existing customers.
Standard Display: You get full control over targeting the right audience, bids and budgets for your display campaigns, and ad creation. However, the time investment for setup and monitoring is significantly higher.
Smart Display: You don’t have to set up targeting for Smart Display campaigns, which automatically optimize your targeting, based on the campaign goal. Automated targeting uses website visitors, landing page insights, and your search campaigns’ best performing keywords to automatically target customers across the web.
Targeting for Standard Display Campaigns
Google Display Network’s targeting helps show ads to your preferred audience types – people who you think will be interested in your business or products. You can set targeting for your ad groups to show your ads to a certain type of people e.g. US residents aged 21-30 or female residents of the European Union (read more).
Different ways of targeting include:
Audience Targeting is for when you want your ads to be seen by a particular audience. This can be achieved using remarketing or customer match lists, affinity audience, or demographic targeting.
Contextual targeting is for when you wish to target a certain type of content. You can target keywords or topics in your ad groups.
To increase the impact of a particular targeting setting, bid higher on them. For example, if you’d like to make sure that your ads are shown to females of age 25-34 more, you can bid higher on this targeting option.
About Optimized Targeting
Optimized Targeting helps your campaign explore customers who have the highest likelihood to convert based on your campaign goal – sales, leads, brand awareness, etc. If you set up targeting for your ad groups, these targets are used by Google to find similar criteria to serve your ads on.
1. Set the right goal. Your goal will help you determine what topic or which audience you should target. Display campaigns can help you:
Promote your brand
Generate product awareness
Increase sales
Get more leads
2. Target the right audience (Standard Display). Connecting to customers at the right place and right time boosts visibility and the likelihood of getting conversions. Show relevant ads to customers by setting up contextual targets or using placements. Control the appearance of your ads by optimizing for demographics, locations, and schedules.
3. Use both Responsive Display Ads and Image Ads. These get the best results, rather than Image Ads alone. Best practice recommends that advertisers follow these guidelines while creating:
4. Set bids and budgets. Display campaigns can be set to run on manual bid adjustments or Smart Bidding strategies, depending on their goal. If you want to focus on impressions, consider Viewable CPM bidding. To get more clicks, consider Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks bidding. Aiming for conversions? Run your campaigns with Target CPA or Target ROAS. Display campaigns support custom bids for a particular target in each ad group.
5. Adjust bids for targets (Standard Display). You can set bid adjustments when your campaigns are running the Manual/Enhanced CPC or Viewable CPM bidding strategies. Bid adjustments can be set at the campaign level (for devices, times, days, and locations) and can also be used to bid more competitively for specific targeting methods (keywords, audiences, demographics, topics, or placements) in your ad groups.
13 Tips & A Checklist for Better Display Campaigns with Optmyzr
1. Create Responsive Display Adsfor Smart and standard display campaigns. You can create Display campaigns with responsive display ads in Google Ads account using Campaign Automator - a stand-alone tool by Optmyzr. Campaign Automator helps you to dynamically create, edit or pause ads based on your input source file. Check out this video about Campaign Automator.
2. Tweak campaign-level targets for Smart and standard display campaigns. Rule Engine can help you increase, decrease or set targets at the campaign level, based on the performance of your campaigns. If your campaigns are running on Portfolio strategies then Rule Engine will not make any change to the campaign level tCPA or tROAS.
3. Tweak ad group-level targets for Smart and standard display campaigns. You can set up Rule Engine strategies and automate them to run on fixed intervals and make changes to the ad group targets based on the performance. If the campaign is running on Target CPA or Target ROAS Portfolio strategy, you can still tweak the ad group targets using Rule Engine.
4. Modify CPC and CPM bids at the ad group level for standard display campaigns. You can create Rule Engine strategies to make changes to the ad group level bids based on the performance data.
5. Optimize your budgets. You can analyze how much the budgets linked to your display campaigns are going to spend by the end of a selected time period, using Spend Projection. At the same time, you can use Optimize Budgets to reallocate budgets across campaigns in order to meet the target budget. You can also set up a Flexible Budget script to make sure your display campaigns do not overspend, and at the same time use Reach Target Monthly Spend script to ensure you reach the target budget.
6. Update dayparts and apply bid adjustments for standard display campaigns. You can use Hour of Week Analysis to analyze the performance of display campaigns for a given time period and find out which day of the week and hour of the day gets you the most conversions or highest traffic. You can then use this information to make bid adjustments and edit dayparts using Hour of Week Bid Adjustments
7. Exclude locations and apply bid adjustments for standard display campaigns.Geo HeatMap offers a quick visualization of how much traffic do different cities, regions, countries drive for your campaigns. You can also choose to apply bid adjustments based on the bid modifier recommendations on Geo Bid Adjustments tool. You can also use Rule Engine to apply bid adjustments or exclude locations from the campaign.
8. Adjust bids by audience and device for standard display campaigns. Audience bid adjustments can be applied to both targeted and observed audiences, using the bid modifier recommendations from the Audience Bid adjustment. And, device bid modifications can be applied using Device bid adjustment tool. You can also use Rule Engine to create a strategy and apply changes. In order to exclude a device, you can apply a bid adjustment of -100% using Rule Engine. These bid adjustments also apply only to standard display campaigns.
9. Apply bid adjustment to age range and gender for standard display campaigns. You can create your strategy using Rule Engine to apply bid adjustments for gender and age range at the ad group level. We do not support the exclusion of demographics in the tool.
10. Manage placements for Smart and standard display campaigns.Display Placement Exclusion is a simple and quick way to identify your non-performing placements and exclude them from standard display campaigns. We also have optimizations to help you exclude placements at the account level – essentially the only way you can manage placements for Smart Display campaigns. You can also create custom optimizations using Rule Engine.
11. Set mobile app exclusions for display campaigns. You can quickly identify all mobile apps that are not converting for you and exclude them from the ad groups in standard display campaigns. You can even customize the Rule Engine strategy based on your requirements. You can create a similar strategy and run it at the account level to exclude mobile apps from all your campaigns; including smart display campaigns.
12. Manage bids for placementsin standard display campaigns. If you want to manage bids for your added placements, you can enable custom bid for the placements in an ad group (in Google Ads) and then add placements to the ad group with the required CPC bid using Rule Engine. This will update the bids for the existing placements, only if the campaign runs on the CPC bid.
13. Manage bids for display keywords in standard display campaigns. Display campaigns support custom bid for targeting methods, users can choose to support custom bid for one type of targeting method in an ad group. If you choose to allow custom bids for keywords, you can then use Rule Engine to change the bids for your keywords based on the performance data. This is applicable for campaigns running on eCPC and vCPM.
Manage Display Campaigns: A Handy Checklist
Using our PPC project management tool Account Blueprints, you can create and save a plan to help manage display campaigns. You can see a sample approach below, and the Blueprint is available in our account as “Optimize Display Campaigns in Optmyzr”.
Watch a brief walkthrough to build your own Blueprints for display campaign management (or anything else).
So much of our progress in November was centered on making Black Friday Cyber Monday more fruitful for our users. We added new controls for placements with Smart Shopping, included more Facebook Ads data, and provided the first step to better Conversion Value Rules suggestions.
Here’s a roundup of all the key changes to Optmyzr and Campaign Automator during November 2021.
Make account-level placement exclusions.
You can now exclude placements at the account level using Rule Engine. Use this for Smart Shopping and Smart Display campaigns which only respect account-level exclusions.
In the Rule Engine, add a new strategy and navigate to Optimize Placements > Exclude non-converting placements from account.
Apart from Slack, your team can now be notified directly in Microsoft Teams. Whenever one of your alerts is triggered, your team will be notified there as part of the chat for the Optmyzr app.
You can now view campaign performance for Facebook Ads in the Optimize Budgets Across Platforms tool, and use conversion data to decide if you’d like to change campaign budgets. Remember, you need to set up a client group before you can use this tool.
You’re also able to view all your platforms, including Facebook Ads, at once in the MCC:
1. See live data for all platforms together
2. Star, add notes, tags, and calculated metrics to help you monitor the performance of select Facebook Ads accounts
Get aggregate performance data for identical ads.
The ads widget in our Reporting tool will now show summarized data for an ad in different ad groups or campaigns. Analyze the performance of an ad while looking at a single row, rather than searching across campaigns or ad groups.
Auto-skip to next Blueprints task if no suggestions are available.
If there are no suggestions available in Account Blueprints during a particular task, you can choose to skip to the next one. The task will be marked as complete, and will respect all other tool settings in any Blueprint.
BONUS: Score audience segments to get Conversion Value Rules suggestions.
Our new Segment Scorer allows you to rate Segments based on how well they perform when you get a conversion from them. You do this by assigning a number between 1 (lowest) and 5 (highest).
Once we get enough scores from your team, we’ll use that data to suggest Conversion Value Rules that will help optimize your account’s performance by teaching Google’s automations (like those that handle bidding) more about what’s valuable to your business.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
Classic paid search was about controlling levers. New age PPC is about monitoring automation.
Google Ads is increasingly moving to automate many parts of its complex machine. Bidding, targeting, and even parts of the ad text experience are either fully or partly automated.
Smart Shopping is one of the more popular automations Google currently offers, and takes the bidding and micromanagement out of shopping ads. On the flip side, advertisers who think they can hand things over to Google once and get the results they want will be in for a shock.
While you may not control the bid strategy and adjustments with Smart Shopping, you can (and should) optimize many other parts of it: your campaign structure, merchant feed, and budgets are all still within your control.
Let’s take a look at how to work with Smart Shopping to drive the results you need while enjoying the convenience you want.
Best Practices to Optimize Smart Shopping
From our experience working with hundreds of advertisers as well as expert teams from the ad platforms, we’ve compiled a list of 14 recommendations for account managers and strategists new to Smart Shopping:
Get 20-30 manual conversions over the past 45 days across existing shopping campaigns and an audience list of at least 100 users before deploying Smart Shopping. The more historical conversion data you start with, the easier it will be to work with this automation.
Enable dynamic remarketing on your website.
Enable conversion tracking and assign values for transactions.
Try to regain as much control as possible with the tools that are available.
Never adopt a ‘set-and-forget’ approach to Smart Shopping campaigns. Use alerts to know when intervention is needed and optimize periodically as you acquire new data.
Make sure your feed is in good shape. Polish your product titles, make sure product descriptions are robust, and carefully select images. Google uses this information to build your ads.
Use multiple campaigns to club together products of similar characteristics or performance. For instance, create separate Smart Shopping campaigns for different:
prices or ROAS targets to avoid Google from exhausting the campaign budget on easy, low-value conversions
stages of the product life-cycle
product margins to include real business goals in planning
Alternately, follow Google’s recommendation to include all products in one campaign and keep tracking their performance to understand which products are being advertised on. As always, testing and close observation are highly recommended.
Be cautious about advertising the same products in multiple campaigns, as Smart Shopping will be prioritized over standard ones.
Keep an eye on the campaign-level Target ROAS and the actual ROAS. If you’re new to shopping campaigns altogether, consider defining a Target ROAS after 30-45 days at the earliest to avoid limiting initial data collection. Setting up a target that cannot be reached, results in your ads not being shown in the first place.
Exclude low-performing, high-cost product groups to steer resources towards better-performing product groups.
Be hawkish with budgets. This is one of the few things you can actually fully control on Smart Shopping, so take advantage.
Test, tweak targets, and compare performance to previously run standard shopping campaigns (if you have any).
Make seasonality adjustments to avoid sudden spikes in cost.
Tracking Your Progress
As with any outcome, it’s important to use performance indicators both in and beyond the ad platforms to see how much progress you’re making. Optmyzr recommends tracking the following metrics at different stages of your efforts to optimize Smart Shopping.
Beginner metrics
Beginner metrics are for when you want an initial lift.
Impression, Impression Share & Total Eligible Impressions: Know whether your ads are showing.
Conversions & Conversion Tracking: Make sure you’re feeding the algorithm the most accurate data possible. Beware of tracking multiple conversion actions as separate conversions e.g., ‘add to cart’ and ‘purchase.’
Click Share: Know how many clicks your campaign received out of all the clicks it was eligible to receive.
Click-through Rate: A low CTR may be an indicator of an unoptimized feed. Actual ROAS/Conversion Value: Understand how your products are performing and set a realistic Target ROAS.
Intermediate Metrics
You want to start tracking these intermediate metrics after achieving some degree of growth.
Daily Ad Spend vs. Target ROAS: Make sure scaling happens in a sustainable way.
Make sure your campaigns aren’t underspending and settling for achieving the set target.
Reinvest some of the ROAS in your campaigns at the scaling stage. As your campaign reaches its Target ROAS, simply increasing your budget doesn’t lead to scale.
Actual ROAS/Conversion Value: View these numbers by campaign, product group, or product to identify low-ROAS products.
Advanced metrics are for when your campaign is running like a well-oiled machine.
Cost Per Acquisition: Determine whether the cost of your conversions is within an acceptable range.
Target ROAS & Actual ROAS: Keep your target and actual figures close to each other and scale them bit by bit for sustained growth, rather than bursts of performance.
Click-through Rate & Conversion Rate: Monitor these during remarketing to pursue website visitors. Both numbers should increase.
Conclusion
In August 2021, Google Ads introduced Value Rules, giving advertisers better control over their Smart Shopping campaigns. While this isn’t and should not be used as a complete replacement of bid adjustments, it still allows for more control by allowing you to adjust conversion values. You can read all about Value Rules and how to use it here.
If you’re still not convinced about using Smart Shopping over Standard Shopping, you can read about different use cases to help you better understand which campaign type works best for your needs.
Our Q4 kickoff revolved around one core objective: making life less stressful and more manageable for PPC experts.
Here’s a roundup of all the key changes to Optmyzr and Campaign Automator during October 2021.
More actionable Slack notifications
A few months ago, we made it so you could receive alert notifications in Slack. Today, those notifications also include:
More information on current and target values
Links to Optmyzr tools that help you fix the issue or investigate further.
BONUS: You can also opt to receive notifications in Microsoft Teams. Here’s how.
Set conditions to stop automated report delivery.
Report automation makes sure your clients and stakeholders get timely performance updates. But sometimes, performance can be unusual and warrant further context.
To prevent misunderstandings instead of needing to clear them up, you can now set thresholds where an automated report will not be sent as previously scheduled.
If these conditions are met (e.g. conversions < 1,000), the report will be sent only to the schedule owner on your team. If they are not met, the report will be sent as usual to all recipients.
Use this feature to prevent reports from going out when additional context is required for unusual performance.
Visit the Report Schedule page, then select ‘Edit Schedule’ from the vertical bar next to any scheduled report. Conditions will be at the bottom and are set to none by default.
Monitor alerts for conversion metrics in Facebook.
Facebook and Apple might be at loggerheads, but you shouldn’t get caught in the crossfire. To give you sharper eyes your Facebook Ads campaigns, you can set up custom alerts at the account or campaign level for the following KPIs:
Conversions
Conversion Value
Conv. Value/Click
Conv. Value/Cost
You can also choose to notify multiple team members or redirect your own notifications to avoid clutter.
Get more control over how Shopping campaigns re-sync.
You can now change the Price/ROAS ranges and conversion thresholds for shopping campaigns created in Optmyzr via the Shopping Refresher tool or in automation schedules. There are some limitations and extensions to this update:
1. You can adjust ROAS ranges but not the number of campaigns.
2. Conversion thresholds can be changed in ROAS build-outs.
3. Price ranges can be changed in Price build-outs.
Search advertising is typically easier when you have deep pockets. But even small and growing businesses can and do compete by making smart, calculated decisions that give them the most value from their ad spend.
One of the easiest ways to measure whether your decisions are providing the desired financial outcomes is ROAS – return on ad spend. This metric is calculated by ad platforms as your total Conversion Value divided by how much you spent on Ads.
The Best Way to Improve Your ROAS
You can improve your ROAS in two ways:
Increase conversion value
Decrease costs
But it’s not really an either/or situation. Here’s why: Increasing conversion value without any real reason just creates an artificially high ROAS. And while you can do things to decrease costs – like spend most of your budget on profitable campaigns – lowering your ad spend or CPC bids too much leads to your ads being seen less frequently.
So the best practice in optimizing to improve ROAS is a combination of keeping costs in check while also making sure your ad is seen as often as possible by the right audiences. And it starts with the profit margin on the products being advertised.
Trying to unearth and piece together different data sets to identify key problem areas can be a long and tedious process. But you can find out why your ROAS is trending in the wrong direction in just a few minutes using the Optmyzr PPC Investigator. The tool displays a ‘Cause Chart’ indicating exact areas of wasted spend, overinvestment, and other underlying causes of lower-than-ideal ROAS.
Calculating your breakeven ROAS
Once you have a number for your profit margin, the next step is to figure out your break-even ROAS.
This is usually calculated as 1 divided by the profit margin in percentage form. So a 50% profit margin would yield a break-even ROAS of 200%:
You make $50 in profit on a $100 conversion
At a ROAS of 200%, you spend $50 on ads to make a $100 sale
All of your $50 margin goes towards the cost of advertising
As you spend less per conversion and your ROAS goes up, more of your margin stays in the bank instead of going to Google or Facebook. In the same example, a ROAS of 400% means only $25 of your margin goes to ad spend.
So while a 200% ROAS might look profitable on paper, it doesn’t necessarily mean your business is making money.
Maximizing Profits with Optimal ROAS Target
Finding the optimal ROAS target to maximize profits involves a series of cost-reduction optimizations including:
Limiting or eliminating overspending
Prioritizing profitable campaigns
Grouping products with similar margins together
Adding expensive, non-converting terms as negative keywords
Fine-tuning targeting or bid adjustments
Remember, there’s usually a tradeoff between ROAS and volumes. Generally, it’s difficult to achieve high numbers for both, so high-volume conversions tend to have a lower ROAS and vice versa.
Tracking Your ROAS Improvement
As with any outcome, it’s important to use performance indicators both in and beyond the ad platforms to see how much progress you’re making.
We recommend tracking the following metrics at different stages of your ROAS-improving effort.
Beginner Stage
Beginner metrics are for when you want an initial lift. At this stage, you want to track Conversions, Click-through Rate, Conversion Rate, and Quality Score.
These beginner metrics give you an idea of whether your conversions are growing as you optimize at a stage where reducing ad spend is rarely an option.
Intermediate Stage
These are the metrics you want to start tracking after achieving some degree of growth: Cost, Views, Clicks, Impressions, Cost Per Acquisition, Cost Per Click, Cost Per View.
Tracking these intermediate metrics is ideal for when you start to look at your account performance at a more granular level and begin the process of reducing how much you spend on each user.
Advanced Stage
Finally, when your campaign is running like a well-oiled machine you want to track Lifetime Value, Conversion Rate by Channel, Absolute TopImpression Share.
The advanced metrics help you better understand PPC’s contribution to the business on a level that goes beyond advertising, and help you optimize when factors like brand awareness and loyalty are relevant.
More on Managing ROAS
When your PPC account is performing well and receives a significant financial boost, it can be difficult to maintain returns. Here’s what you can do.
We at Optmyzr also have various tools including our pre-built Rule Engine strategy to manage bids to a target ROAS. Get in touch with our customer support team and we’d be happy to help!
Going beyond ROAS
ROAS is an important metric, but at the end of the day it is a metric set by Google and it might not always correspond with your bigger business goals. Take a look at what industry experts have to say about this here.
The behavior of your PPC budget is crucial to getting your strategy right, and the new Budget Report in Google Ads helps. With it, you can view daily spend, monthly spend limit for your campaigns, monthly spend forecast, cost to date, and any changes you may have made in between.
Optmyzr goes a step ahead with our Spend Projection Tool by analyzing your spend data, historical seasonality, and recent performance to predict how much an account is likely to spend by the end of a selected time period.
Here are some of the advantages our tool provides over Google’s Budget Report.
Adjust Target Budgets Based on Performance Insights
With Optmyzr, you can set up an account-level target through the Pro Dashboard, and then analyze and update daily budgets for campaigns. You can then select one or more campaigns in the Spend Projection tool to see how much more you need to spend in order to reach that target.
Being able to set target budgets based on these insights is advantageous because the projection is not limited by the budget you set for a campaign on Google. You can set any target and then push your daily budget to achieve it.
Reach a Target Budget with the Optimize Budgets Tool
Spend Projection isn’t just the only tool we have that helps users get their budgets working exactly how they want. The Optimize Budgets Tool, which helps you actually achieve targets, identifies campaigns that are losing out on Impression Share due to budget constraints. With that information, you can choose how aggressively you wish to spend. You can also reallocate your budget to high-performing campaigns, allowing you to get the most value out of your PPC dollars.
Spend Projection and Optimize Budgets together allow you to not just view spend behavior, but set target budgets and also meet them to maximize your performance. All very handy when budgets will be significantly impacted due to prevailing issues with the global supply chain.
Get Insights Based on Historical Performance
Spend Projection uses both trends and historical data. These are the factors that are included:
1. Day of the Week
Optmyzr studies day-by-day spend behavior when calculating your spend projection. So if you have a pattern of not showing ads on Saturdays or Sundays, the tool takes that into consideration.
2. Weekly and Yearly Seasonality
Weekly and yearly seasonality are considered in two ways: consistency over the past few years or since the account has been active, whichever is earlier.
For yearly projection, we take into consideration multiple years of spend data.
For Microsoft Ads, we look at the latest trends for individual campaigns instead of past years’ historical data at the account level.
Previous years’ data will be considered only if a common trend is identified, such as a sharp increase at the start of November ahead of BFCM.
3. Seasonality and Spend Patterns
Spend Projection doesn’t consider ad schedules, or bids by demographics and devices, except seasonality and spend patterns.
If there is no correlation or if your account has insufficient data, we will consider data from the past several weeks to predict spend.
All this information can help run better Campaign Experiments – also the name of our latest tool that now makes it possible for PPC managers to keep track of experimental campaigns as they’re being tested.
Get More Control of Budgets & Spending
Spend Projection and Optimize Budgets help thousands of PPC agencies and end advertisers understand how their budgets impact account- and campaign-level spend behavior, and then give them the tools to put money in the right places at the right pace.
Start a 2-week free trial of Optmyzr and you’ll also get the tools you need to bring in better traffic by optimizing keywords, ad text, display placements, and more.
Google Ads experiments are a great way to test ideas, hypotheses, and changes before applying them to existing Search and Display campaigns. But there are some issues with managing campaign experiments via the Google Ads interface:
If you’re an agency running experiments for multiple accounts, you have to remember which client you were running a particular experiment for. You have to go to the right account and sort out the one you were looking for from the multiple experiments you’re running for them.
Google only tells you that a particular campaign has an experiment running. There’s no way to know which experiment it was or what changes you had made.
Google doesn’t warn you when you make any changes to a campaign that has an experiment running. Say you want to run an experiment on Smart Bidding; you pick a campaign and set up the experiment, but your control campaign still lives in the ads interface. Now, if you put in a new keyword, a negative keyword, new geo-targeting, etc., in the control campaign, it all happens in isolation from the experiment. Google doesn’t warn you that this might pollute your experiment.
For now, Optmyzr serves to fix things from an MCC perspective. So if you’re an agency, you can see all the experiments you’re running for multiple accounts in one place. The tool gives you better insights into the experiments you’re running, what’s complete and what’s not.
What our Campaign Experiments tool does
With the Campaign Experiments tool, you can view and analyze the performance of your Google Ads experiments across all your Google Ads accounts and use the comparative information to decide between either keeping the campaign experiment(s) or ending them.
Campaign Experiments Capabilities
1. Sorting
Once you’ve selected the accounts and experiments you want to see, you can see if your Campaign Experiment is trending in the right direction. You can also sort the table to view the highest performing experiment or check out which experiments are getting you the highest lift in CTR.
2. Expand the Experiment Row for More Details
You can expand the experiment row for more details by clicking on the account name. You’ll see the original campaign on which the experiment is running, check out all the performance metrics, and see the confidence level regarding how successful the experiment is, if at all.
Performance Details
The metrics show you how they are performing as compared to the original campaign. The value under a metric is the current performance of the experiment for the given date range, and below it is the difference between the original campaign performance and the experiment’s performance in number and percentage.
Confidence Level Based on Performance
The confidence levels in green suggest a positive trend, in red as negative and no color being neutral, which means there is no clear indication of the experiment being successful yet.
The confidence level is calculated by comparing experiments against their original campaigns. Based on statistically significant data, it is determined if the experiment has a better chance of being a successful campaign, based on the metrics like CTR, Conversion Rate, Conversion Impression, Revenue Impression, Revenue Cost, or CPA.
3. Applying Changes to Google Ads
With the “Apply to Google Ads” button, you’ll have three options:
Update original campaign: Selecting this would make changes to your original campaign to reflect the changes made in the campaign experiment.
Convert to a new campaign: This will add your experiment to a new Google Ads campaign with the same budget as your original campaign.
End experiment: If the experiment is not successful, you can end it using this option.
Run Winning Experiments with Optmyzr Processes
With Google rolling out new automations every other week, getting experiments to run smoothly has become paramount. Instead of monitoring individual performance metrics, you can manage all the experiments across accounts in one place.
An iterative process like the Campaign Experiments tool helps you set the process in place and run things smoothly.
See for yourself how easy it is to track your Google Ads experiments. Get access to Campaign Experiments and all our other tools by starting your 14-day free trial now!
It’s been a busy quarter for us at Optmyzr, building PPC tools that help save time and hassle. From keeping up with keyword match type updates to capabilities that will serve you well in the years to come, we’ve got plenty to share.
So here are all the major updates to Optmyzr from the past 3 months. Let’s look at some of the big ticket items from this past quarter, and you can find the full list of other fixes and improvements below that. Just click the menu items on the left side to navigate easily!
Track your testing easily with Campaign Experiments.
Tracking your PPC experiments through Google Ads can be annoying. The interface doesn’t allow you to easily track test campaigns, their changes, or even remind you that you have any running.
Campaign Experiments in Optmyzr goes a long way in solving those challenges, and we’re only getting started with it.
Now you can analyze the performance of active experiments across all your Google Ads accounts. Find winning and losing experiments, and apply or end them in a single click.
Optmyzr compares your experiment and its original campaign based on statistically significant data to highlight whether the experiment is winning.
This feature is now live for all subscribers on one of our currently listed plans. If you’re on one of our older plans, contact support to find out how to get access.
Dig deeper into Analytics data with the Segment Explorer.
Google Analytics makes it difficult to view performance data for multiple audience segments at a time – like sessions from male users via mobile in the US.
Introducing the Segment Explorer, our latest tool that lets you view performance metrics for all your connected Google Analytics accounts for multiple dimensions combined at once. Segment Explorer allows you to add different audience segments to your view data in a straightforward way.
Please note that not all combinations of segments (dimensions) are allowed through the API. Selecting an invalid combination will display an error message.
Get involved with our product on the Optmyzr Roadmap.
Optmyzr now has our own Roadmap page to further align our plans for our software with what PPC managers and strategists actually want. On this page, you can:
View our product roadmap
Make feature requests
View other people’s requests
Vote and comment on items
Go there now to make a request, vote on what others have asked for, and to see what’s made the cut to become part of our plans!
Updates from September 2021
1. New-look account dashboard
Introducing a brand new design and functionalities on the Account Dashboard for better and faster visualization. New capabilities include:
See changes in account PPC audit score and get info on grades for different levels (campaign, keywords, etc)
See data based on campaign type, bid strategy, or campaign groups; select any of these new filters in the left-side menu
Top elements get extended into a full table to see all data for more metrics
View and run Blueprints tasks that are due and overdue for your account
2. Download white-label PDFs of Quality Score Tracker data.
This new feature allows you to easily download and share all information available in the Quality Score Tracker. Click the download icon on the top right, and select ‘Save PDF’.
3. Edit the schedule owner for your reports
You can now change the owners for report schedules for Google Ads, Amazon Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads – either one at a time or in bulk.
This feature is only available if you are the owner of your team’s account.
4. See difference in performance in KPI Widgets
You can now see the total numeric difference between two periods being compared in KPI widgets. Change value is indicated with corresponding arrow signs.
This is available for use with Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Amazon Ads, and Facebook Ads accounts.
5. Pick multiple values in the Rule Engine
The Rule Engine now supports multiple values when applying the “contains”, “does not contain” and “ignore case” conditions.
Search for multiple values of an attribute rather than creating separate conditions for each one.
6. Adjust bids by campaign placement for Amazon Ads
You can now see Amazon Ads performance based on placements and adjust bids (by %) for corresponding placements.
For Sponsored Products, adjustments can be made for Top of Search and Product Pages placements.
For Sponsored Brands, adjustments can be made for All Placements below Top of Search.
This improvement helps you adjust bids by placements in a more granular way than the Amazon Ads interface, as our Rule Engine lets you filter by any condition that suits your needs.
Updates from July & August 2021
New in the Rule Engine
1. SA360 conversion data now supported in the Rule Engine
Search Ads 360 actions and transactions are available in the Rule Engine for linked Google Ads accounts. Use this to gain extra insight from SA360 actions/transactions to make informed decisions. Learn More
2. Find text anywhere in ads with the Rule Engine
We added the ‘Any headline/description/path’ to Rule Engine strategies for ads.
You can now easily search for specific text anywhere in your ad instead of creating separate conditions for headline, description or path. This new attribute looks for your selected text in all components at once.
3. Add multiple values to Rule Engine conditions
We’ve added the operators ‘In’ and ‘Not In’ to the Rule Engine. This lets you create or modify rules without having to create multiple conditions using ‘Is’ or ‘Is Not’.
4. Quickly find restricted keywords in Rule Engine
We added the Serving Status attribute to the Rule Engine to help you easily identify keywords in your account with low search query volume.
New in PPC Investigator
1. Easily compare to same period of previous month in Optmyzr
Reporting widgets and PPC Investigator now support the “same period previous month” option to compare data sets.
If you now wish to compare performance data from August 1-6 with data from July 1-6, simply select this option instead of a custom date range.
New for Optimizing Ads
1. Filter by ad count when you use A/B Testing
You can now filter by ad count in the A/B Testing for Ads tool. View only those ad groups with fewer/more than a specific number of ads, or apply a range.
You no longer need to struggle to identify single keyword ad groups, or ones with a certain number of ads in them.
2. Find and label ads with low CTR
We added a new pre-built strategy in the Rule Engine to help you find ads that have a click-through rate lower than the ad group average.
Go to Rule Engine > Optimize Ads > Find Ads with Low CTR to identify and label these ads.
New for Optimizing Keywords
1. Pause keywords with low QS in Google Ads
A new Rule Engine strategy is available: Monitor Quality Score Components for Keywords.
This strategy suggests keywords with a low QS (<3) and/or low-ranked QS components, allowing you to pause them with a click. You can also add labels to these keywords to analyze and resolve issues.
2. See keywords on automated bidding that aren’t making the first page
The First Page Bridger now shows you keywords on automated bidding that aren’t making it to the first page. While you still can’t adjust bids for these keywords, you can use the information to make other decisions.
And because the list of keywords opens up in the Rule Engine, you can automate this check to occur as often as you need it to.
New for Optimizing Budgets
1. Impression Share metrics added for multi-platform budgets
Four new Impression Share metrics have been added to the Optimize Budgets Across Platforms tool:
Search IS lost (budget)
Search IS lost (rank)
Display IS lost (budget)
Display IS lost (rank)
2. See impression share lost due to rank when optimizing budgets
Recent IS Loss (Rank) has been added to the Optimize Budget tool, along with Recent IS Loss (Budget). View both and make informed decisions when optimizing your Google Ads budget.
3. More control to limit multi-platform overspending
Optimize Budgets Across Platforms now pauses the campaigns of a budget group if their shared monthly target is reached, and re-enables them on the 1st of the next month.
New for Managing Workflows
1. Contextual help to improve your PPC Audit grade
We’ve added additional contextual help to each widget section when you review your PPC Audit report.
You’ll see a brief explanation of why we recommend certain fixes, additional context from Google Ads, and tips on which tool in Optmyzr can help you improve your audit grade.
2. Send audit reports in a click
There’s now a faster way to share reports from the PPC Audits tool. Just use the new ‘send email’ button without needing to schedule delivery.
3. Snooze tasks that aren’t a priority
Getting suggestions you don’t want to see? You can now snooze tasks in the suggestions sidebar on the MCC dashboard for a day, a week, a month, or a year.
The task will no longer show or be counted toward the total suggestions for that account. It will still be available in-tool, in Optmyzr Express, and for other users in the team.
4. Get Slack alerts for Rule Engine strategies
If you have Slack integration enabled, you can now set up alerts when your Rule Engine strategies have new suggestions.
New in Account Blueprints
1. Easily manage team roles for Blueprints
You can now manage Account Blueprints roles for all your team members. Assign roles in bulk, create new ones, and change someone’s role without needing to enter the Blueprint wizard.
2. More control over how you build Blueprints
We now support both scheduled (paused or active) and on-demand Account Blueprints. You can create a Blueprint without scheduling tasks and run them on demand. New options include:
Create Blueprints in either format (scheduled and on-demand)
Add pre-built Blueprints to your account in either format
Assign multiple tasks to a role in scheduled Blueprints
Select tasks in bulk and assign them a frequency in scheduled Blueprints.
Convert scheduled Blueprints to on-demand and vice-versa
Search for Blueprints by name
Filter Blueprints by format/type
New for Microsoft Ads
1. Changes to Broad Match Modifier support for Microsoft Ads
The addition of keywords using the Broad Match Modifier match type is longer supported for Microsoft Ads in the Keyword Lasso and Optmyzr Express tools.
Existing BMM keywords will continue to serve under the new Phrase Match behavior.
2. Greater control for search terms and spend in Microsoft Ads
We’ve added two new pre-built strategies to the Rule Engine for Microsoft Ads:
New and Declining Search Queries Report to monitor significant changes in the performance of a search query
Pause Low Quality Score Keywords to avoid spending on keywords with low QS and no conversions
3. New metrics for Microsoft Ads
In line with a recent Microsoft Ads update, Average Position has been removed and 6 new metrics have been added in its place:
Top impression share
Top impression share lost to rank
Top impression share lost to budget
Absolute top impression share
Absolute top impression share lost to rank
Absolute top impression share lost to budget
You can now see the new metrics in Rule Engine and create custom strategies with them.
New in Campaign Automator
1. Broad Match Modified removed from Campaign Automator
The Broad Match Modified match type option for keywords is grayed out in all Campaign Automator templates.
You can also bulk-edit keyword match type from BMM to Phrase Match for as many Campaign Automator templates as you need to.
Keywords already operating under BMM still show, but no new keywords can be added under BMM.
2. Bulk edits for Campaign Automator
You can now make the following bulk edits in Campaign Automator:
Replace a column header. If the column name in your source file has changed, use this option to change it in your CA template as well.
Replace text. IMPORTANT – this feature is case-sensitive and replaces any occurrence of the text, irrespective of spacing. So replacing “shoes” with “sneakers” will result in:
Buy shoes at the lowest price → Buy sneakers at the lowest price
Buy blackshoes now → Buy blacksneakers now
Buy running Shoes → no change
3. Apply campaign & ad group labels
You can now add static labels like ‘Test 1’ or ‘Optmyzr’, or use dynamic insertion to create labels like {Brand} or {Category}. Each variation will be added to the applicable entities.
4. Create Responsive Display Ads
Campaign Automator now supports the creation of Responsive Display Ads.
Dig deeper into Analytics data with the Segment Explorer, our latest tool that lets you view performance metrics for all your connected Google Analytics accounts for multiple dimensions combined at once.
Google Analytics makes it difficult to view performance data for multiple audience segments at a time – like sessions from the US or male users via mobile.
Segment Explorer allows you to add different audience segments to your view data in a straightforward way.
Please note that not all combinations of segments (dimensions) are allowed through the API. Selecting an invalid combination will display an error message.
New in the Rule Engine
SA360 conversion data now supported in the Rule Engine
Search Ads 360 actions and transactions are available in the Rule Engine for linked Google Ads accounts. Use this to gain extra insight from SA360 actions/transactions to make informed decisions. Learn More
Find text anywhere in ads with the Rule Engine
We added the ‘Any headline/description/path’ to Rule Engine strategies for ads.
You can now easily search for specific text anywhere in your ad instead of creating separate conditions for headline, description or path. This new attribute looks for your selected text in all components at once.
New in PPC Investigator
Easily compare to same period of previous month in Optmyzr
Reporting widgets and PPC Investigator now support the “same period previous month” option to compare data sets.
If you now wish to compare performance data from August 1-6 with data from July 1-6, simply select this option instead of a custom date range.
New for Optimizing Ads
Filter by ad count when you use A/B Testing
You can now filter by ad count in the A/B Testing for Ads tool. View only those ad groups with fewer/more than a specific number of ads, or apply a range.
You no longer need to struggle to identify single keyword ad groups, or ones with a certain number of ads in them.
Find and label ads with low CTR
We added a new pre-built strategy in the Rule Engine to help you find ads that have a click-through rate lower than the ad group average.
Go to Rule Engine > Optimize Ads > Find Ads with Low CTR to identify and label these ads.
New for Optimizing Keywords
Pause keywords with low QS in Google Ads
A new Rule Engine strategy is available: Monitor Quality Score Components for Keywords.
This strategy suggests keywords with a low QS (<3) and/or low-ranked QS components, allowing you to pause them with a click. You can also add labels to these keywords to analyze and resolve issues.
See keywords on automated bidding that aren’t making the first page
The First Page Bridger now shows you keywords on automated bidding that aren’t making it to the first page. While you still can’t adjust bids for these keywords, you can use the information to make other decisions.
And because the list of keywords opens up in the Rule Engine, you can automate this check to occur as often as you need it to.
New for Optimizing Budgets
Impression Share metrics added for multi-platform budgets
Four new Impression Share metrics have been added to the Optimize Budgets Across Platforms tool:
Search IS lost (budget)
Search IS lost (rank)
Display IS lost (budget)
Display IS lost (rank)
See impression share lost due to rank when optimizing budgets
Recent IS Loss (Rank) has been added to the Optimize Budget tool, along with Recent IS Loss (Budget). View both and make informed decisions when optimizing your Google Ads budget.
More control to limit multi-platform overspending
Optimize Budgets Across Platforms now pauses the campaigns of a budget group if their shared monthly target is reached, and re-enables them on the 1st of the next month.
New for Managing Workflows
Contextual help to improve your PPC Audit grade
We’ve added additional contextual help to each widgets section when you review your PPC Audit report.
You’ll see a brief explanation of why we recommend certain fixes, additional context from Google Ads, and tips on which tool in Optmyzr can help you improve your audit grade.
Send audit reports in a click
There’s now a faster way to share reports from the PPC Audits tool. Just use the new ‘send email’ button without needing to schedule delivery.
New for Microsoft Ads
Changes to Broad Match Modifier support for Microsoft Ads
The addition of keywords using the Broad Match Modifier match type is longer supported for Microsoft Ads in the Keyword Lasso and Optmyzr Express tools.
Existing BMM keywords will continue to serve under the new Phrase Match behavior.
New in Campaign Automator
Bulk edits for Campaign Automator
You can now make the following bulk edits in Campaign Automator:
Replace a column header. If the column name in your source file has changed, use this option to change it in your CA template as well.
Replace text. IMPORTANT – this feature is case-sensitive and replaces any occurrence of the text, irrespective of spacing.
Replace “shoes” with “sneakers” will result in:
Buy shoes at the lowest price → Buy sneakers at the lowest price
Buy blackshoes now → Buy blacksneakers now
Buy running Shoes → no change
Apply campaign & ad group labels
You can now add static labels like ‘Test 1’ or ‘Optmyzr’, or use dynamic insertion to create labels like {Brand} or {Category}. Each variation will be added to the applicable entities.
Create Responsive Display Ads
Campaign Automator now supports the creation of Responsive Display Ads.
One of the most common bits of feedback we hear from people who use Optmyzr is how it puts them back in control — of PPC, of automation, and of their own destinies.
And when you’re in control of creating value for your brand or clients, the next step is to help your teams be better.
Control and efficiency are two of the things we help PPC pros improve, and it’s not just limited to time spent actively pulling levers in the system.
Which is why I like to tell people…
Optmyzr is built for the entire PPC life cycle
Unlike some tools that only help you optimize one aspect of paid search or stop doing much after your campaigns go live, Optmyzr has always been about start to finish.
Insights help you decide how to optimize and what to automate, which you can then report on in a variety of ways. Those results feed future insights, which lead to more optimized campaigns… it goes on.
Now with the introduction of Account Blueprints, we’re helping PPC teams make planning and onboarding easier too. And with all the new Alert types we’ve made available to our users, you can stay on top of campaigns even when your eyes aren’t on them.
Here’s what’s new for both of those features.
Account Blueprints: Build a PPC super team
Account Blueprints was released to all Optmyzr users in 2020 to help their PPC teams create a better experience for everyone — from account managers and strategists, to clients and new hires.
A Blueprint is a schedule for a series of recurring tasks in Optmyzr, like optimizations you make every week or insights you like to check often. You can also include tasks outside of our product, like meetings within your team or quarterly business reviews.
Each task has an owner (someone in your Optmyzr account), and each Blueprint can be set to run as frequently as you need it too.
• Keep client activities from falling through the cracks • Improve audits of newly-won accounts • Speed up onboarding of new PPC hires
New ways to build and scale processes with Blueprints
1. Convert any account workout (custom or pre-built) into a Blueprint to minimize buildout time.
2. Duplicate a Blueprint so you can make minor tweaks for similar accounts or goals.
3. Improve tracking by seeing tasks grouped by account/owner for a given week.
4. Bulk-assign start dates to make it easier when you apply a Blueprint to multiple accounts.
5. Add additional Optmyzr tools to a Blueprint, including Non-Converting Queries (Shopping and Search), Mobile App Exclusions, Audience Bid Adjustments, and more.
6. Create Blueprints in a paused state if you don’t want to activate them right away.
7. Pause an active Blueprint whenever you need to (seasonality, team out of office, etc).
8. Save progress on a Blueprint at any point while building it. Come back and finish anytime.
9. Download information about completed and active tasks (great for account and performance reviews).
Alerts: Effortless PPC oversight
Alerts are a cornerstone of how Optmyzr users retain full control over their PPC accounts.
In Optmyzr, you can build alerts to stay on top of virtually anything. Know when accounts start to overspend, when credit cards fail on a platform, know as soon as a given metric goes above or below a certain point, and more.
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that volatility can strike at any moment. The PPC pro who gets caught without oversight is going to take much longer to adapt, improvise, and overcome whatever crap the world throws their account’s way.
So we got busy building out plenty of new oversight tools to help you keep a sharper eye on PPC performance.
New ways to take greater control with Alerts
1. Multi-account budget alerts can now be owned by multiple users to democratize control.
2. Track by channel (search, shopping, etc) to know what’s working and what needs intervention.
3. Create alerts for your own custom metrics built in Google, Microsoft, and Amazon ad accounts.
4. Get notified when your Quality Score on Google drops below a certain threshold.
5. Expand oversight with alerts for Amazon or Facebook at the account or campaign levels.
6. Integrate your Optmyzr account with Slack to get alerts in everyone’s favorite work tool.
7. While not an alert, the URL Checker tool lets you identify landing pages with a 404 error or a piece of text that indicates a product is out of stock.
What to expect in the future
Our plan is simple: We’ll continue to keep an eye on the way PPC evolves, the changes ad platforms make, and the new challenges faced by our users and the PPC community.
And we’ll keep updating Account Blueprints, Alerts, and all our other features to keep delivering the best possible experience.
In the meantime, check out our most recent showcases for Blueprints and Alerts.
We also have even more options to help you keep a closer eye on PPC performance. If you like the convenience of scripts but don’t want to deal with coding, apply one of our Enhanced Scripts, such as Anomaly Detector or Flexible Budgets.
Have a specific alert that you’d like to see us build? Or an idea that’ll help PPC teams get even more out of Blueprints? Write to our support team and we’ll put your feature requests up for consideration.
2020 has been a turbulent year for search marketers, but Optmyzr still managed to be named ‘Best PPC Management Suite’ at the 2020 Global Search Awards.
Wins like this during times like these have made us even more grateful to be a part of such a vibrant, adaptive industry. While it’s rewarding and encouraging to see our efforts to empower search marketers have been recognized, this wouldn’t have been possible without our customers and the PPC community at large.
Our customers play an especially significant role in our success. We look to them to tell us what we’re doing right, what we can do better, and what else we can add to our platform. After all, we’re here to address their challenges. So while they’ve been battling to help their businesses and clients succeed, we’ve been busy equipping them with additional tools to get the job done more efficiently.
Through it all, our founding team has been at the heart of every discussion, bringing customer insights and their own experience to the table, helping our team consistently create value for our users.
Over the past year, we’ve increased the usability and performance of our tools. New features like Account Blueprints are aimed at not only improving the quality of PPC campaign output, but the experience of using Optmyzr as the keystone of a PPC tech stack.
“This year is proving to be one of the most unpredictable years ever, forcing marketers to adapt to wildly shifting dynamics,” said Frederick Vallaeys, co-founder and CEO, Optmyzr. “We’ve seen dramatic shifts in consumer internet search behaviors, spending patterns, product needs, and confidence. Our tools allow significant automation of search marketing while providing exceptional insight into search data and trends. We’ve worked hard to empower search marketers to become deep strategists, which has been even more crucial in 2020. The Global Search Awards recognition is humbling for our entire team.”
Team Optmyzr at a company off-site from a few years ago
GeetanjaliTyagi, co-founder, is keeping Optmyzr focused on educating users on best practices and tactics. “For the past few months, we’ve been conducting more training sessions, advising marketers on the best practices to become more efficient. Even if it’s a prospect, we try to understand their difficulties and then come up with solutions to tackle them.”
And it’s all backed by a development team that buys wholeheartedly into our customer-centric approach. “The industry is still moving ahead at a super-fast pace. The engines have continued launching their updates. Things like automation layering, optimizing Smart Bidding strategies, or how to have more granular control over targets is still our priority. So, we haven’t changed much from our focus area,” added ManasGarg, co-founder.
Beyond the product, we’ve also been busy creating a space for PPC and search marketing professionals to find solutions to new and everyday challenges. What began as a space to vent and figure out our chaotic new world, PPC Town Hall has evolved into a library for community solutions. At the time of writing this post, we’ve aired 21 episodes and hosted over 50 of PPC’s leading experts.
We see every day that PPC pros work in competitive, fast-paced, stressful environments. The pressure to deliver results is greater than ever. And so Optmyzr is readier than ever to enable search marketers to be marketing strategists, improve the financial health of the brands they work with, and succeed at every level.
Imagine if your bank let you transfer money to people but made it difficult to decide who receives your transfers. Pretty silly, right?
Despite the objections of every advertiser ever, it’s still not easy to tune many aspects of your campaigns in Google Ads. So it was pretty much second nature that we stepped up to make the experience better for our customers.
Bid adjustments — using audience analytics and insights to regulate ad performance — are invaluable. But you can’t overlook the time-consuming chore that is bid management through Google’s engine. The challenge is even greater when it comes to setting placements, especially the ever-popular ‘exclude all mobile apps’ preference.
Those are the two key areas of our recent Rule Engine updates designed to help account managers and PPC strategists speed things up. Let’s take a look at what’s new, where to find the updates, and how you can use them.
New in Geo Bid Adjustment and Placements
Simply put, these updates take the form of instant strategies in the Rule Engine, Optmyzr’s logic-driven rule builder that uses ‘if-then’ statements to get your account to take a specific action when certain conditions are met.
These new strategies are:
Find Expensive Cities: Reduce bid adjustments for cities that have a higher CPA than the campaign average, or that have no conversions despite having more clicks than are typically required for at least 1 conversion.
Find New Cities: Find out which cities are starting to direct traffic to your campaigns in the last 14 days (compared to the previous period).
Target Cost per Click: Set geo bid adjustments based on the target CPC you wish to achieve. Available at the country, region, and city levels.
Target Cost per Conversion: Set geo bid adjustments based on the target CPA you wish to achieve. Available at the country, region, and city levels.
Exclude Mobile Apps With Zero Conversions: Find all mobile apps with no conversions and exclude them as placements in bulk.
While our instant strategies come with recommended settings, they can be further customized and automated using your own preferences. If you’re familiar with how the Rule Engine works, you can create your own geo bid adjustment and placement strategies from scratch — all the components are there.
Other Geo Bid Adjustment and Placement features
The Geo Bid Adjustments tool analyzes campaign performance in different locations and makes recommendations for bid adjustments. You can implement adjustments at the country, region, city, and zip/pin code level. This tool also lets you discover new cities based on traffic and target them according to ROAS or CPA.
With Placements Exclusion, you can customize your strategy to prevent showcasing your ads at random in the Google Display Network. No more manually excluding apps one by one. Bypass the limits of Google Ads and remove your ads from showing via the entire mobile apps category.
Optmyzr Tip:Stop wasting money on bids and sites that don’t yield profit or returns. These tools give you more granular control over campaign behavior based on geolocations and ad placement. You can use a mix of custom and instant strategies in the Rule Engine to improve your ad performance or use these tools for research before you even build and run a campaign.
Use cases for Geo Bid Adjustments
1. Account for holidays or other closures
Depending on your industry and location, some events lead to virtually zero-sale days with customers focused on things other than shopping. With Geo Bid Adjustments, you can now mark those locations and lower your bid to account for those lulls in activity. Customize the bids to -90% to keep the campaign running but with reduced ad spend.
2. Track cities with wasted ad spend
Throughout your campaign, you might find some locations don’t provide enough conversions for the number of clicks they show for. These might be areas where the cost per conversion is higher than the campaign average, resulting in potentially wasted spend. Now you can just use the ‘Find Expensive Cities’ instant strategy in Rule Engine, and customize your initial campaign actions to exclude these cities or create bid adjustments for those locations. Or, you can use the strategy as an alert system to be notified of locations that put out a higher CPA.
3. Discover potential target locations
Due to erratic lockdowns and reopenings across the globe, businesses might start receiving traffic from newer locations where they didn’t drive sales in the past. You need a system to account for any possible new traffic. With the ‘Find New Cities’ strategy, you can find locations that showed traffic in the last 14 days but not before. Run this strategy twice a month to track any new traffic and find new areas of interest.
Use Cases for Display Placements
1. Target placements with a specific bid
While running a Display campaign without any targeted placements, you’ll see that the engine will automatically place you where it thinks your ad may perform best based on past data. With the Display Placements Exclusion tool, you can identify sites (or placements) where you’re doing well and customize your strategies to target these in future campaigns.
2. Bid lower for placements with bad ROAS or CPA
Most ad placements on mobile devices happen below the fold, and the chances that people scroll down to even see to your ads are extremely thin. Your placements might not have enough viewability and will therefore have poor ROAS or CPA. With this same tool, you can see suggestions for such weak placements and lower your bid on them to prevent spending on low-converting traffic.
3. Exclude placements on all apps or a specific operating system
While some apps are great to advertise on, others tend to have an audience who won’t benefit from your ad at all. With the Placements Exclusion instant strategy, you can stop your ads from showing on all mobile apps and even certain operating systems.
Conclusion
Between our new Rule Engine strategies and existing tools, Optmyzr allows you to truly control and optimize your campaigns beyond what Google’s automated rules will enable. This makes search marketers the final authority and allows you to layer multiple powerful automations to support your campaigns efficiently.
Analyze data based on preferred date ranges and other metrics to arrive at what’s best for your business, and focus your time on building excellent strategies rather than performing repetitive tasks.
Save time, save ad spend, and take control back from Google.
It’s oddly tough to celebrate good news in 2020. Let’s face it: It’s a truly challenging year for so many organizations.
Our team learned last week that we made the Inc. 5000 “Fastest Growing Private Companies in America” list for the third straight year. Typically, that’s reason to pop the champagne corks and celebrate. This year, however, it’s a remarkably humbling bit of news.
While we certainly welcome the recognition, it’s more apparent than ever that our success is truly dependent on the success of everyone who uses our software.
Our team comes to work every day with the goal to make life easier, better, more efficient, more productive — and yes, more profitable — for those who use Optmyzr to run their PPC programs.
By staying on top of the latest trends and offerings from Google, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook, we work to provide new tools, scripts, and resources to empower PPC pros to do great work.
In addition, the Optmyzr crew has been working hard to bring the PPC community together in 2020 through our regular PPC Town Hall series, bringing top industry pros together to further support search marketers.
Fueling great PPC campaigns is at the heart of everything we do. The fact that longtime customers stick with us and new customers are joining us daily is the best validation of all.
As we continue to grow, we’ll continue to innovate, automate, and streamline how PPC campaigns are created, managed, and reported.
Of course, we’re pleased to receive the Inc. 5000 validation, but perhaps the best outcome of this recognition is the fact we are driven even more to help PPC pros — at agencies and in-house teams alike — guide their respective organizations to a better place in 2020.
We humbly thank you for making it possible for us to enjoy some good news during this truly confounding year.
Some marketers fear automation, but Smart Bidding is a great example of how it actually helps.
Teeming with data and interactions, Smart Bidding uses machine learning to create optimal bid strategies. And because it saves both time and money, it’s quickly become an important part of PPC.
But there’s a (literally) dark side to it as well.
Smart Bidding means surrendering control to the black box of Google’s AI, with strategies that simply don’t allow you to tweak aspects of them to your specifications. Simply put, you input your goals and Google uses your account’s past behavior to produce results.
What do you do when you want the convenience of Smart Bidding but don’t want to give up control? You turn to a tool like Optmyzr.
Here are 10 ways Optmyzr customers use our platform to retain control when they use Smart Bidding.
Understanding how automated bidding works
The keystone of AI or machine learning is the data the system uses to make decisions and predictions. In the same vein, the success of automated bidding strategies depends on the quality of the performance data that system is able to collect. This in turn depends on how your account is set up.
The performance of badly structured campaigns cannot be improved by putting them on an automated bidding strategy.
A good account structure and the right attribution model are vital to the success of any automated bidding strategy. If you’re using last click attribution, either change to another attribution model or run manual bidding.
Campaigns that run on automated bidding strategies need to be optimized in order to have the right data to work with. In theory, the only thing Google takes care of is setting bids — only one aspect of managing an account.
The rest is still on you.
Automated bidding is not a ‘set it and forget it’ deal. However, with bidding out of the picture, you’ll have more time for other tasks — the kind of search queries you want to show for, or the messaging you want to use in your ads.
1. Search Query Management
Search queries are still the primary source of traffic for search campaigns, so it’s important to monitor the ones your ads show for so you can remove irrelevant ones (add them as negative keywords). It’s also a good idea to add high-performing search queries as keywords because you can write more specific ads for them.
Optimizing to increase Quality Score is one way to reduce your CPA and increase ROAS. Even though Google is automatically setting your bids in the auction, a high Quality Score requires a lower bid.
In other words, you pay less for each click.
Find keywords in your account with low Quality Score and move them to their own SKAGs with the more specific ads. Or, pause them if they have an irredeemable quality score of 1.
This isn’t about setting bid adjustments for different times of the week; your automated bidding strategy already does that. We’re talking about allocating campaign budgets to the more lucrative times of day by turning your ads off when they’re not profitable, making it something of a budget optimization.
Optmyzr Tools Used: Hour of Week Analysis, Hour of Week Bid Adjustments
4. Non-Converting Keywords
Pause keywords that have not converted in a long time but have accrued significant cost. This optimization should only be done if you aren’t running on last click attribution. Otherwise, you’ll pause top-of-funnel keywords and eventually reduce conversions.
You did budget optimizations before automated bidding, and you should continue to do them now. Reallocating budgets across campaigns based on performance helps improve overall account ROAS.
Check if high-performing campaigns are losing impression share due to budget, and increase their budget by giving them money from underperforming campaigns.
If you’re running on the standard automated bidding strategy (target CPA and target ROAS), you can tweak targets at the ad group level. There are two instances where I’d recommend doing this:
1. A sudden change in business or an upcoming event like a sale requires you to tweak targets. It’s a way of telling the system that you want more or less traffic when there’s a sudden change in patterns the system is unaware of. For example, if your business has a sale over the weekend and you want to drive more traffic to your campaigns, increase CPA targets over the weekend and then scale them back down once the sale is over.
2. Day-to day optimizations to increase conversions. Some common optimizations you can do are:
• Increase target CPA for ad groups that are converting but losing impression share due to ad rank. For campaigns running on target ROAS, reduce ROAS. This is the same as increasing bids for high-converting keywords when campaigns are on manual bidding. It enables Google to bid more to drive more conversions.
• Reduce target CPA or increase ROAS for ad groups whose actual CPA and ROAS are significantly better than the target and whose impression share is already more than 70%. This reduces the chances of Google buying very expensive traffic when the automated bidding system thinks there’s room to increase CPA and win more traffic.
7. A/B Testing Ads & Updating Messaging
Ad text automation is probably one of the last things that will happen in PPC — writing ads always involves subjectivity and creativity. Responsive Search Ads are a step in that direction, but they only combine headlines and description lines; you still have to write them.
This is why it’s important to continually A/B test ads — so you can remove underperforming ones and keep messaging fresh.
Optmyzr Tools Used: A/B Testing, Ad Text Optimization
8. Performance Monitoring & Alerts
Perhaps one of the most important things you can do is set up alerts to notify you of sudden changes in traffic, conversions, CPA, ROAS, or any other KPI that’s important to you.
This helps you stay on top of your campaigns, especially when something doesn’t go as expected. For example, if the CPA for a campaign suddenly shoots up, you’ll want to see why it happened and take appropriate action.
Optmyzr Tools Used: Alerts on the MCC dashboard, Rule Engine
9. Performance Audits of Automated Bid Strategies
Knowing when to pivot is critical to success, be it in PPC or any other business. It’s a good idea to regularly check on the performance of your campaigns’ bidding strategies to see if you need to pivot.
For example, if a campaign is running to maximize conversions, it might be time to move it to target CPA and ROAS. You can also see if certain campaigns on automated bidding strategies aren’t driving enough conversions and move them to manual bidding for a while.
Optmyzr Tools Used: PPC Audits, Rule Engine
10. Structural Account Audits
Regular account audits are so important for good structure. Check for things like too many keywords in an ad group, too few ads, campaigns with not enough negative keywords, or campaigns missing site links.
This ensures that campaigns in your account have a solid foundation on which automated bidding strategies can do what they’re capable of.
Optmyzr Tools Used: PPC Audits
Conclusion
We live in a world where competition is fierce and standards are demanding. PPC marketers rely on automated bidding more than ever to do more in less time. What automated bidding lacks intuition and human understanding, you can provide by optimizing your campaigns.
Help it help you.
There’s no one way to win with automated bidding, but Optmyzr offers several tools that allow you to layer your own automation over what the ad engines provide. If you don’t have Optmyzr, try our platform free for 14 days with access to all features.
As one of the cornerstones of digital marketing, PPC has become important to all businesses.
But executing complex tactics calls for multi-taskers who are organized and quick. PPC marketers constantly need to track, optimize, and scale their work. And the first step of any strategy: understanding its scope.
At Optmyzr, we realized that PPC marketers were lacking a purpose-built workflow management tool; one that understood their pain and experiences.
Blueprints allows you to organize and track your team’s tasks as a scheduled workflow. It helps you design entire PPC plans with a high degree of customizability, from setting frequencies to task owners.
You can schedule both one-time or recurring events, and assign them to your teammates to clarify who’s responsible for what. Optmyzr alerts teammates when they get new assignments or when an existing one is nearly due.
Now you can easily standardize processes for any and all accounts, right on the same platform that helps you optimize those very accounts.
Blueprints lets you schedule and assign specific optimizations within Optmyzr, but you can also include tasks outside of the Optmyzr environment, such as client meetings or designing creative assets.
Best of all, setting up a Blueprint is a one-time process. We’ll keep track of your preferences until you change them, though depending on your goals, you’ll likely need to create separate Blueprints for different processes or accounts.
Business Impact
Step 2: Set up your first task
With Blueprints, you can architect more powerful PPC programs. Avoid overrun deadlines and missed tasks by streamlining your project management, and focusing on testing and refinement.
For accounts with multiple stakeholders, it can be tough to know where responsibilities are demarcated. Now you can help individual team members track their own group of tasks. Blueprints offers a flexible, way to keep entire teams on track without anyone feeling like their toes have been stepped on.
Additionally, Blueprints lets you create multiple templates, so you can create plans specific to an industry or vertical, a client tier or type, a specific strategy or outcome, and even for contingencies like needing to quickly onboard a new hire.
Blueprints by Optmyzr also makes it easy to manage and re-assign tasks to help ensure all bases are covered when an employee is out sick, on vacation, leaves a team, or changes roles within your organization.
3 Blueprints Ideas to get you started
1. By industry
Step 3: Apply your Blueprint to one or more accounts
If your business only covers one account or caters to a specific client vertical, there’s a chance you perform many of the same tasks on a regular basis.
An example is an in-house team that only does PPC for their own sports apparel products, or an agency that specializes in e-commerce or hospitality. In this scenario, you can build Blueprints specific to different stages or exercises, including:
• New product launches • First 30 days for a new client • Seasonal bid adjustments
But this is not an indication of any limit; even an agency that caters to clients from all walks of business can leverage Blueprints to build specific plans for industry types. You could build one Blueprint to optimize the feeds of new e-commerce clients, and another to deliver on seasonal bid adjustments for hospitality clients.
2. By client tier
Step 4: Assign owners for each task and account
If you have multiple clients, there’s a high chance that many of them pay at different scales. This might correlate to their spend, or it might be based on the level of service you provide. Whatever the case, no agency wants to be accused of preferential treatment that isn’t justified by billables.
Blueprints can help you prevent that. Use Blueprints to keep track of value-added tasks that your top-tier clients pay for, while also delivering a baseline level of service to those on lower billing plans.
3. For new hires
Step 5: Apply changes immediately or set a start date
Onboarding new employees can be challenging, but it can make or break the success of your business like few other things. The whole process takes time, and the path to happy new hires is always dotted with mistakes and setbacks. In the midst of introducing your team and work culture, it’s easy to miss out on the day-to-day — or vice versa.
With Blueprints, you can create a single plan for any new employee in a specific position (we still recommend separate plans for different positions). Your new hires can follow these tasks to quickly get accustomed to the way you conduct business, and your current team can lend support in their own areas of expertise.
Conclusion
Even in a normal business landscape, Blueprints is the answer if you need (or simply want) a workflow management tool that dovetails with the actual software you use to study PPC insights and apply optimization changes.
But given the importance of remote teams for the foreseeable future, Blueprints can be your ticket to helping your people win a very big part of the ‘work from home’ battle: staying on top of their responsibilities.
Set up your first Blueprint using our wizard to keep your team on top of things — and at the top of their game. If you don’t see or cannot access Blueprints, please write to support@optmyzr.com.
DealerJazz, an AI-powered advertising platform for vehicle dealerships, has been custom-tuned to work elegantly with Optmyzr for greater efficiency and performance of their digital advertising campaigns.
With the help of Optmyzr’s enhanced automation, DealerJazz was able to deliver supercharged content, yielding more relevant ad copy and better performance.
Let’s read in detail how we empowered DealerJazz with the tools to improve the efficiency and clarity of their search campaigns.
The problem
Traditional Google Ads management tools are time-consuming and clunky. Rigid campaign structures prohibit efficient automation, while standard inventory content is not compatible with optimal SEM requirements, leading to poor PPC outcomes.
This resulted in greater cost to DealerJazz’s customers and substantially lowered their performance.
The solution: ACE
We helped DealerJazz pair perfectly with key ad channels like Google and Microsoft, and added significant automation to their PPC management process. The Automated Content Engine (ACE) from DealerJazz was layered on top of Optmyzr’s Campaign Automator to generate more relevant and accurate search ads on Google.
DealerJazz’s automated content engine (ACE) supplements and optimizes a dealer’s stock inventory data into more intelligent, usable content that better aligns with a PPC channel’s architecture.
This data provides a 15-35% gain across key tangibles by creating a smarter campaign structure composed of more relevant ad groups, ads, extensions, and keywords. Optmyzr ensures that these ACE campaigns are delivered with the utmost efficiency.
ACE is powered by a growing group of acceleration modules that play a key role in the data tuning process. This creates hundreds of content variations that can be easily mapped and configured with Optmyzr.
A new addition, the Beta DJ Bot module crawls specialized dealer search results for the most popular ad copy and integrates it with ACE content library.
Tuned Data Feeds
DealerJazz uses the raw inventory data with relevant and timely content from each ACE Acceleration Module to create tuned feeds mapped to Optmyzr. ACE analyzes and compares content, integrates time-sensitive and relevant monthly promotional content, and creates additional derived variables.
The combinations are unlimited and these new derived variables are designed to help dealer ads perform better.
Variable Template Structure
DealerJazz has created intuitive variable templates which pass 99% of all content through to Optmyzr. This allows for a more selective process in how the Campaign Automator templates are refined and built.
The content flowing through them is 100% unique to each dealer and can be managed and updated in minutes from the DealerJazz dashboard.
The DealerJazz tuned content is pushed via API to Google Sheets, and the feed data is mapped with appropriate Campaign Automator templates.
The key to their efficiency, accuracy and scalability is owed to the variable structure architecture, which is 100% interchangeable with all dealer accounts. No template contains dealer-specific account content.
The variables drive all aspects of campaign management (creation and modification) including ad groups, keywords, ads, and extensions all derived from 100% interchangeable content.
To refine and further secure each account specific template, DealerJazz includes key conditions before sending updated campaigns to Google and Microsoft ad channels. This two-factor formula ensures total security across dealer accounts.
The results
When DealerJazz ACE technology is paired with Optmyzr’s dynamic account technology, Campaign Automator, the results have proven to lower CPC and increase CTR. Since launching ACE for 8 dealers in January 2020, DealerJazz has experienced:
• 30% Lower Average Cost-Per-Click • 35% Higher Click-Through Rates • 20% Faster Analysis of Key Metrics • More relevant and engaging ads • Huge reduction in wasted spend • Better visibility
In other words, DealerJazz has helped level the playing field for smaller dealerships with limited budgets.
Conclusion
All things considered, DealerJazz has been able to provide 50% more digital exposure within the same budget, simply by preventing nearly 30% of the ad budget from being wasted on low-intent clicks from irrelevant keywords.
All thanks to their intelligent negative keyword library.
Optmyzr supports DealerJazz to help them work faster and more efficiently, eliminating traditional commissions that are a barrier to optimal dealer-agency relationships.
We all have repetitive PPC management tasks we wish we could automate and get off our daily to-do lists. Fortunately, there are several options for PPC advertisers to achieve this, like Google Ads’ Automated Rules, and Optmyzr’s Rule Engine.
In working with hundreds of customers in my two years at Optmyzr, I noticed many advertisers don’t explore our Rule Engine’s most powerful capabilities because they assume it’s just another interface to control Google’s Automated Rules.
Turns out there’s much more to it than that.
The Rule Engine actually enables our power users to do some of their most advanced optimizations that they wouldn’t have time for without this level of automation.
I talked to Fred, one of our founders who shared that the Rule Engine was initially built as a script for a customer whose bid management strategy took a full day of his time every week!
The script was useful but limited to that advertiser’s strategy. So our company built the Rule Engine to allow every advertiser to automate their most powerful strategies.
While we’re fans of Google Ads Automated Rules for their simple setup, that simplicity is limiting when you want to take your account to the next level with a more powerful strategy. That’s the gap we’re solving with our Rule Engine.
Let me share 6 useful things you can do with the Optmyzr Rule Engine that you cannot with Google Ads Automated Rules.
1. Combine multiple rules into layered strategies
Though in Google Ads you can add as many automated rules as you want, it’s not possible to combine them into a single optimization. In Optmyzr, this is possible with Rule Engine strategies.
In Optmyzr, a rule is a set of conditions and actions (if and then statements). Strategies let you combine multiple rules — in essence, letting you add the ‘else’ portion in an ‘if’, ‘then’, else’ rule.
For example, in just one strategy, you can consolidate all your search query management by adding one rule to add positive keywords and another rule to add negatives.
You can also have multiple actions applied to an entity. For example, you can add a label to the keywords your rule paused because they were found to be too expensive.
2. Use data from multiple/custom date ranges
Automated rules in Google Ads let you use a single date range for metrics. This makes it impossible to do relative comparisons, like to find ad groups that have a sudden spike in CPA for the past week compared to the last 30 days.
With our Rule Engine, you can bring in performance data from as many date ranges as you’d like, making relative comparisons very easy.
While using multiple date ranges is useful, it’s even better when you can customize those date ranges. Rather than just using default ones like the last 7/30/n days, you can build custom date ranges that are based on lookback windows.
For example, you can build a custom date range for 14 days ago to 8 days ago (week before last), and another for 7 days ago to 1 day ago (last week). This enables you to find search terms that have gained a lot of impressions in the past week compared to the week before, or ad groups that have seen a decline in CTR for a few weeks in a row.
3. Do relative comparisons of metrics across a hierarchical structure
With our Rule Engine, you’re able to compare, in just one condition, the performance of the same metric at different levels. This comes in handy when you want to do a relative comparison using expressions/formulas.
For example, compare the CPA of one keyword versus the CPA of the campaign in which the keyword is located. Now you could do things like find keywords that are 50% more expensive than average for the campaign.
In Google Ads automated rules, you can compare a metric against a static value but not against other elements. So you can only do things like find keywords whose CPA is higher than $20. That’s not helpful when you know that CPAs vary greatly between brand and non-brand campaigns, and even between campaigns that sell different services in different locations.
By using a relative comparison, you don’t need to set a static target for all your comparisons, and it becomes very easy to simply look for outliers.
Note: You can also use expressions as actions to calculate new bids and targets.
4. Use external data
What happens when you want to use data not available in Google Ads, but that is also important for your business and optimizations?
5. Set rules on autopilot or review them on demand
While automations help you save tons of time, you may not always want to give up full control; this is why we also let you use your Rule Engine strategies manually. We give you everything necessary to create your own optimization tools and then run them on demand.
Following this idea, even when your strategies are running automatically, we still let you decide if you want to review the changes before you apply them. This is a huge advantage when you want to test your optimization before giving all the control to the automation.
6. Exclude recent changes
You can avoid applying continuous changes to the same entity for a defined period of time to give them enough time to perform before it’s considered by the strategy again. This helps when you don’t want to stack bids or change the target CPA of an ad group that was already adjusted the day before.
This is particularly helpful in situations where you’re slowly changing things like bids until they meet your goal.
For example, if you automate bidding to set an ideal CPC based on the last 7 days’ conversion rate and your target CPA (new CPC = target CPA * conversion rate), you can run that rule as often as you want without worrying that your bids will get out of control.
However, the following is a riskier automation: new CPC = old CPC + $0.10 when last 7 days’ CPA is below CPA target.
It’s risky because if you run this rule 5 times per day, it will increase the bid 5 times even though the last 7 days’ CPA includes only a small portion of data since the last bid change.
With Optmyzr, you can remove this risk by excluding items that were already changed recently. Now every time the rule runs, it will only make suggestions for entities that were not already recently changed by the same rule.
The Rule Engine is my favorite, because you can tailor account rules to match what the individual client needs to be seeing for performance.
Larry C, Owner/Operator, 707 Marketing
Conclusion
If we have to sum up all of the above, it’s about two things: flexibility and more control. Which tool to use will depend on how much of your workflow you want to automate, and how much customization is required.
The Rule Engine definitely is a powerful tool that gives you much room to play with and is designed for both novice and advanced users.
Interested in learning more about it? Let support@optmyzr.com know, and we’ll be happy to help you!
Copywriting is one of the most versatile tools in a PPC marketer’s skill set for a reason. After all, words are the foundational building block of most channels, including paid search advertising.
But all the data in the world means precious little if you can’t craft messaging that drives conversions.
Today, we’re talking about our Ad Text Optimization tool and how it helps PPC marketers deliver ads with copy that works during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are five things it can help you achieve for your businesses and clients.
1. Let people know about operating changes.
This pandemic has forced businesses to rethink the way they operate. Government-enforced social distancing restrictions limit the number of people who can be in a store at once. On top of this, many employers have implemented new policies to limit their staff’s exposure to potential carriers of the virus.
With the Ad Text Optimization tool, you can make bulk edits to your ads that reflect any new operating conditions so that consumers know what to expect when they do business with you.
Use Cases
• Announce a full switch to curbside pickup for a big box retailer.
• Advertise a restaurant or cafe’s switch from dine-in to takeout only.
• Inform consumers of timings adjustments for stores normally open 24 hours.
2. Tell people about your new product experience.
For some verticals, there’s just no way around giving people a chance to see, touch, and feel the product. In other cases, the product is an experience. Either way, prevailing conditions demand that businesses get creative about providing this interaction in a safe environment.
The Ad Text Optimization Tool lets advertisers make sweeping changes to their campaigns to let consumers know about changes to methods of delivery, product experience, and more.
Use Cases
• Offer test drives at the customer’s doorstep instead of having to visit a dealership.
• Advertise mobile mini-shops with core hardware and home improvement SKUs.
• Announce a shift to virtual delivery for experiential services like yoga classes.
3. Keep up with implementation and easing of restrictions.
While much of the US, UK, and Europe are already sheltering in place, things are changing as we learn more about COVID-19. Local, state, and federal regulations are likely to be modified regularly as governments make new discoveries and observe medical data.
Whether you need to make regular updates, create new ads, or manage ads for multiple locations, the Ad Text Optimization tool gives you the power to create ads that are more likely to perform.
Use Cases
• Restart advertising for a non-essential business exiting regional lockdown.
• Publish in-store social distancing regulations for a barbershop.
• Announce geo-based store openings and closures for a franchise brand.
4. Be sensitive to prevailing conditions.
One of the biggest challenges for advertisers is making sure ads don’t come across as insensitive or tone deaf. Many phrases that are perfectly acceptable in a non-pandemic environment can be questionable when deployed today.
It can be difficult to manually track all these phrases across your campaigns and ads. The Ad Text Optimization Tool lets you search for and replace them in just a few clicks.
Use Cases
• Replace phrases like ‘go viral’ or ‘breathtaking’ when advertising your product.
• Avoid otherwise-appropriate words like ‘happy’ or ‘delighted’.
• Insert phraseology to discourage hoarding or advertise seniors-only windows.
5. Get new insights more quickly, and act on them.
It’s not just the markets that are volatile right now. Consumer sentiment is changing rapidly based on new developments — that includes search behavior. One of Google’s tips for account managers is to plan weekly, rather than monthly or quarterly.
To make weekly planning feasible, you need data on how your ad text influenced performance. The Ad Text Optimization tool lets you compare ads side by side with metrics including CTR, conversions, impressions, and more.
Use Cases
• Compare ads offering delivery and pickup to see which one performed better.
• Help a brick and mortar produce store quickly build accounts and start running ads.
• Scale the acquisition and application of new insights across multiple accounts.
Less time. Fewer mistakes. Better results.
The Ad Text Optimization tool significantly reduces the time and energy cost of making copy edits across your ads and campaigns. And it makes the exact same edit you want wherever it occurs — no gaps, no missed instances.
To learn more about this tool and its different features, check out our user guide. The Optmyzr team is also working from home, ready and available to help PPC professionals deliver value for their businesses and clients during this challenging time.
Paid search marketing has become even more challenging than usual, as PPC pros grapple with unforeseen challenges far beyond our normal existence. We’re all being tasked to re-think how we approach paid search and adapt to this time of crisis. Even without the COVID-19 crisis, our longstanding, baked-in challenges compound the pressures on even the best of PPC pros.
Among the entrenched challenges is the clear need to view PPC beyond the land of Google.
We love Google. It’s still the undisputed king of search. Yet now more than ever, Bing continues to steadily work its way up the market share ladder. Many estimates say the Bing properties now account for about a third of all search activity.
Remember, Bing includes Yahoo!, MSN, and more.
Fear not. We’re not introducing more challenges into your PPC life; we’re focused on easing your burden.
Whether you’ve already added Microsoft Ads to your PPC mix or are just realizing the opportunities in the evolving search landscape, the Optmyzr team continues to make it easy to work across platforms.
This week, our team releases the Rule Engine for Bing Ads. The new module is part of the core Optmyzr PPC Management Suite, makes it easier to craft deeper customization, and adds power to your Microsoft Ads campaigns.
Best of all, you can work in tandem, managing Google Ads and Microsoft Ads much more efficiently and effectively.
Closely adapted from our longstanding Rule Engine for Google Ads, the intuitive Rule Engine makes it easy to create custom PPC optimizations and execute bulk changes to Microsoft Advertising campaigns across the Bing universe.
Think of the Rule Engine as a way to create multiple rules in sequence, tapping into essential conditions within campaigns along with the corresponding actions.
What does that look like in real life? Based on conditions and parameters deep in campaign structures, the Rule Engine makes it easy to automate discovery and actions against critical aspects of PPC including:
Quickly uncovering expensive keywords
Identifying expensive product groups
Bidding to target CPA or target ROAS
Identifying anomalies with close variants
The Rule Engine Wizard makes it easy to find a strategy that fits your needs
The Rule Engine includes many pre-built strategies for critical needs that we’ve identified over the years — and that our users have also discovered. These pre-built strategies help you get started faster.
As PPC pros’ needs and skill evolve, the Rule Engine becomes even more powerful.
Start by selecting an objective and one of the Instant Strategies, or build your own
We’ve designed the tool to ease the time and steps required to build your own strategies. A new, intuitive setup wizard allows simple point-and-click rule creation, making it possible to launch new strategies in just minutes.
Several customers took part in the beta testing of the Rule Engine for Bing. One, in particular, was able to deploy the Rule Engine for innovative bid management and alerts.
Leverage Optmyzr’s machine intelligence or take full control of your strategy settings
That customer is Spain-based sporting goods retailer Sprinter. As part of a very competitive industry, the experienced team at Sprinter has to align keyword strategies with inventories, promotions, seasonality, economic dynamics, and other factors that impact revenue.
Sprinter’s senior paid social executive Manuel Vilella noted after beta testing, “We like to bid manually in our brand campaigns, as we prefer not using automated strategies to achieve the minimum CPC. As we have some dozens of brand keywords, we need a solution to adjust the bid according to the viewability. Rule Engine allows us to forget about implementing these changes, as it does this automatically.”
The Rule Engine lets you build unique strategies using if-then statements
We’re proud to bring this new capability to market at a critical time when once again, search marketing is being upended and re-invented before our eyes. Being an effective, strategic marketer during adverse times requires us all to take a much more holistic view of the market and have effective tools at our disposal to work efficiently and strategically across channels.
Best of all, whether the Rule Engine for Google Ads is a familiar tool or one you’ve never tried, we’ve focused on ease of use. So the Rule Engine for Bing can be incorporated into workflows quickly and effectively.
If you’re a current Optmyzr user, let us know how we can help you get the most out of the Rule Engine across Bing and Google. If you’re thinking about trying Optmyzr, contact us for a demo. You’ll see how Rule Engine fits into the full suite and can reduce tasks that previously would have taken hours (or even days) to minutes.
Our team is standing by. Let us know how we can help!
AI and machine learning-driven automations are responsible for big changes to how search marketers run their accounts. Make no mistake, smart marketers are those who leverage this new technology and operate at the forefront of where Google, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook are taking us.
Keeping control over PPC in an ever-more automated world is both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for PPC pros this year. Let me share how we’re going to help you make 2020 your best year yet.
Automation Layering
Automation within the search engines poses a couple of inherent risks for PPC pros:
Automation-fueled obsolescence for the PPC pro
Commoditized marketing for the brand
Think about it: If Google automates seemingly everything, will the PPC pro have anything to actually do? And if everyone is using the same automated setup/bid/execute models, is everyone operating on a playing field that is just far too level????
You’re not wrong to have those fears but the team at Optmyzr takes a different view of platform automations – one of opportunity versus threat.
We see a new era for PPC pros to become indispensable through a concept we call Automation Layering.
Frederick Vallaeys, Cofounding CEO, Optmyzr
Simply stated, the search engines are continually automating specific tasks and functions associated with PPC. Automation layering is about the human PPC pro using those automations to morph from being task oriented to becoming a strategic marketing leader.
Optmyzr CEO, Fred Vallaeys, explains automation layering at SMX East. Apologies for the scratchy audio.
Google and the others are aggressively automating the repetitive and tedious side of PPC. Innovative PPC pros crave reducing manual tasks, which allows them to redefine their role and rightfully claim the mantle of marketing strategist.
For the past year and through 2020 and beyond, we are focused on empowering PPC pros to make sense of the platform-level automations and turn those automations into PPC gold.
Let me add a real-life example to illustrate what we’re talking about. We used the Rule Engine to find expensive keywords. Surprise, surprise, we almost instantly found some keywords using automated bidding from Google, spending nearly $2,000 in the last 30 days with 0 conversions.
The ‘Reduce Bids‘ optimization, based on an Optmyzr Rule Engine strategy, can proactively identify and pause keywords where automated bidding by Google is wasting money.
To a big company like Google, this is peanuts and just a necessary part of teaching the machines how to do bidding. But to an advertiser, that is real money coming off their bottom-line that could have been better spent.
Bid automation is great because it saves advertisers a tremendous amount of time, but we have to use our own automations, like Optmyzr, to stay on top of the automations from the engines.
Data-Driven Ads
Saying a PPC campaign is data-driven is a bit like proclaiming that the sun rises in the east. It’s no surprise. PPC pros live in data all day, every day.
Reality is, data will continue to expand its already omnipresence in PPC pros’ lives. We see more structured data leading to more ads based on that structured data. From merchant feeds to inventory spreadsheets, product-level details get deeper and even MORE real-time than ever.
In 2020, we’ll focus much more intensely on the very powerful shopping ads in Google, Amazon, and Bing, in particular. Our expanding developer team will focus on many emerging advancements of shopping ads in 2020.
Search marketers operate in multiple search platforms with varying functions, control, and reporting capabilities. While automation at the platform level helps streamline many of the in-channel tasks, working across disparate platforms can be challenging. As such, we are focusing on improving usability for marketers:
Deciding where to even start. Let’s face it – from seasoned pros to those just starting their search marketing journey, we’ve gotten to a point there are so many options it can be paralyzing to get started. Our developers are refining how Optmyzr suggests what actions to take and highlight the most important things happening in your accounts.
Knowing what actions can or should be taken based on the mind-boggling amount of data at a marketer’s disposal. From the moment a user logs in to Optmyzr, smart suggestions will help you create and follow your own workflow. We’ll also guide users directly to the actions that will provide the most immediate results, essentially highlighting “this is the most broken thing that must be addressed NOW.”
Interacting with Optmyzr. Look for important user interface enhancements in the months ahead. We know that PPC pros spend a significant part of their day in the system, working their channels. Intuitive, customized – and customizable – workflows will help align the work being done to capture greater value in channel.
Staying on top of client needs and anticipating or adjusting to subtle changes deep within automated systems will be more critical than ever in 2020. Optmyzr Co-Founder Manas Garg summed this notion up eloquently in a recent discussion about automation and smart bidding. He noted
“While advertisers shift more and more to smart bidding, many will fall into a complacency trap with a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ mindset. Optmyzr must help them see the signals so they avoid falling months behind a trend or opportunity.”
Manas Garg, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
Software that helps advertisers stay in control of the myriad automations from the engines is the key to success. We see 2020 as an opportune time to further empower PPC pros with essential tools and prebuilt recipes that maximize the native automations within the big engines.
2020 can be a year of empowerment and unprecedented opportunity for smart PPC pros. Make it your best year yet. Optmyzr is with you.
Holiday shopping season has seemingly become a “winner take all” proposition in the world of PPC. Think of it as the Fall playoff season leading up to the big championship game in December. Brands are scrapping for every click, every lead, every conversion.
Mistakes can be devastating to the end goal. And with each passing day in November and December, opportunities lost are gone. There’s little chance at re-earning the sale.
Shopping Campaigns have become heavily automated at the platform level, so on the surface it would seem that Google is making it easy for every brand and every merchant to launch effective shopping campaigns. So why worry?
Therein lies the latest challenge for PPC pros with all the pressure on them to execute flawless Shopping Campaigns. EVERYONE has access to the same heavily automated foundational toolkit. So if everyone plays from that same playbook, nobody can truly be out front.
Layered Automation: Deeper control for PPC rockstars
The core automations from the search engines essentially help marketers get efficient with the foundational elements of good PPC across the various ad types typically deployed. Optmyzr provides what we call layered automation to make it possible for strategically-inclined marketers to stand out from that “good” pack. Our team spends a lot of time tracking all of the advancements at Google and Microsoft to create tools that help marketers better utilize a search engine platform’s automation and transform PPC pros into strategic marketers as opposed to being tacticians.
The latest development from the Optmyzr team is a fully revised version of Optmyzr Shopping Campaign Builder. This week we formally introduced Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0, which taps the latest platform automations and make it much easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads faster and with more power behind them.
Version 2.0 culminates months of intense work by our team, connecting Google Merchant Feed data to new automation tools to build the perfect structures for shopping ads. Doing so meant ensuring the new version works across virtually any ad structure methodology. Thinking through the various ways PPC pros need to structure, we address a multitude of specific campaign needs, for example:
Creating one campaign per brand
Creating one ad group per SKU or product ID
Establishing separate campaigns for each range of profit margins which enables varying tROAS targets
Building and managing unique smart shopping campaigns for each product
Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 makes it even easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads in record time. By maximizing the standard platform automations and layering in Optmyzr’s own automation protocols, it’s quite easy to build literally thousands of product groups in a matter of minutes as opposed to multiple days.
The essential linkage between the Google Merchant Feed and creation of product groups removes thousands of manual tasks. Within Campaign Builder, version 2.0 also includes enhanced capabilities within the Shopping Refresher module. Automations now extend to adding and removing campaigns as needed, acting on changes in data from the merchant feed. The earlier version had a simpler capability that was limited to working with a single campaign, requiring significant manual intervention (and time) to replicate across multiple campaigns.
Take, for example, the common approach of structuring campaigns based on similar products with similar profit margins. A good idea, which also allows for automated bidding to help maximize results. Such an approach, however, could box the marketer into a structure that isn’t nearly as dynamic as it could be. A marketer may decide it would be more beneficial to have one campaign for each product type. Shopping Refresher can now detect if a new product type suddenly appears in the feed and then automatically create a completely built out campaign with all product groups for that new product type.
The tool can also automatically detect the opposite – when a product is no longer available in the merchant feed. Campaign Refresher can automatically pause the campaign for that specific product and quickly cut off needless ad spend.
Move from tactical to strategic
Automations from Google, Bing and others can make things seem like doomsday for PPC pros in the long term. It’s understandable when considered purely at face value. However, the innovations that transformed other industries such as manufacturing over the last several decades have moved many smart professionals into much more strategic value-add roles.
Tightening bolts on the assembly line of yesteryear was an essential tactic/function many years ago. But repetitive action yielded the same core outcome while failing to tap the deeper thinking and intellect of the production line employee. In PPC, our value add as the human being running programs is not in managing repetitive actions. Our value add comes in the form of creativity and strategy – figuring out the intangibles and the if-this-then-that variables.
PPC pros who will lead the industry to greater relevance in the overall marketing mix will be the ones who layer powerful automation on top of the core automations from the search engines. The less time spent in the weeds of tactics will continue to elevate PPC pros from being “The Google Ads person” to being a strategic visionary with a much more essential role in the overall marketing hierarchy. Check out Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0. As always, contact us directly and we’ll gladly provide a 1:1 demo of how it can transform your PPC work day.
“Stacked bidding” or “Tiered Bidding” is a strategy in which the same keyword is added in multiple match types to better control costs. The closer a query is to a keyword, the higher the chance that it could lead to a conversion, hence the more an advertiser is willing to spend.
Looks simple… what’s the catch?
For this strategy to work, you need to keep the bids for each match type somewhat surrounding the same amount. For example, and as Frederick Vallaeys explained on this article from Search Engine Land, “if the exact match keyword’s max CPC is $1.00, the advertiser may want to bid 80 percent (or $0.80) for phrase match and 60 percent (or $0.60) for broad or modified broad match”.
The problems with tiered bidding usually result from when the bid is modified for one keyword, but not for its match type counterparts. This results in a confusing and very problematic issue, as the tiered bidding is no longer in place and you might end up with bids that you aren’t controlling, or which slip off your radar.
How to successfully manage tiered bids
At Optmyzr we’ve come up with a solution that puts together a custom recipe from our Rule Engine, its very own spreadsheet capability, an enhanced script, and automation, to create a hassle-free workflow for tiered bid management.
To get started, you’ll first need to use our Stacked Bids enhanced script, to define the ratio which you’d like to maintain between the different bids for the keywords in multiple match types. With this script, a spreadsheet will be generated with a list of keywords existing in multiple match types. By running this script regularly, you can find keywords in multiple match types with their current and expected bids.
After you’ve set this up, you can pull the same spreadsheet into the Rule Engine and create rules as shown below. These rules will let you set the bids for Phrase match and Broad match keywords to 80% and 60% of the Exact Match CPC respectively.
The output of this recipe will give you a list of suggestions of keywords added in multiple match types and the calculated new bids for them to maintain tiered bidding.
For example, you can find any Phrase match keyword which has its current bids higher than their Exact match type counterparts and set their bids to say 60% of the Exact Match keywords Max CPC (this will be automatically pulled in the spreadsheet).
With the Rule Engine’s automation capability, you can set this recipe to be run on a weekly basis and make sure your tiered bids are all set in place!
This custom solution was made using Optmyzr’s Rule Engine and Enhanced Scripts. If you need us to put this recipe in your account, please write to support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be more than happy to do so!
Running PPC programs used to be relatively simple, with essentially one major platform to consider. Those who mastered what was then called “AdWords” could focus nearly all of their attention on Google – maybe showing occasional love to tier-2 search platforms.
Seemingly overnight, others achieved “powerhouse” search marketing status, including Bing, Facebook, and now Amazon.
Over the past 5-10 years, these major players have gained significant share of the universe of commerce-related searches. All are now locked in fierce battle to connect people with the information and products they are seeking through billions of searches every day.
The Optmyzr team has worked hard to provide a platform that allows PPC pros to optimize ads in each of the leading platforms with ease and confidence. Today we’re excited to launch Amazon Ads Management within our PPC Management Suite. This new capability will help PPC pros tap into the expansive growth of Amazon’s presence in the search marketing landscape.
Amazon now ranks as the third-largest platform for share of net digital advertising revenue, and it’s gaining ground on Google and Facebook. Amazon is masterful at capturing high-intent search traffic – or even casual browsing traffic – and then driving customers down the funnel.
Optmyzr Rule Engine, which is a critical component of our full PPC Management Suite, sits at the heart of our foray into Amazon. Using Rule Engine, PPC pros can manage bids and keywords for Amazon Advertising campaigns, while being able to easily toggle ads on and off for rapid campaign response. Prebuilt recipes and one-click optimizations, which are inherent in our full system, are now able to be put to work against Amazon Ads, allowing PPC pros and agencies to broaden their portfolio of services, in-house and agency alike.
We sought to make a system that would allow PPC pros to turn existing optimization processes into scalable, automated workflows. The recipes noted above make it easy to:
Set bids to a recommended bid range
Set bids to meet a target ACOS goal
Add negative keywords for poor performing search terms
Add positive keywords to maximize performance for the terms that convert
Try Optmyzr’s Amazon Functionality – NO RISK
We want to make it easy for you to try Optmyzr’s new Amazon functionality. All you need to do is link your Amazon Advertising account to Optmyzr. We’ll enable access to our beta on a rolling basis.
We’re confident PPC pros and agencies can find great value in managing campaigns across multiple platforms from a common system. We continually look for ways to remove complexity and create opportunities for you to run campaigns like a PPC rockstar.
Amazon is clearly among the fastest-growing ad systems in the marketplace. The upcoming holiday shopping season (yes, it’s time to start thinking about the holidays) will be a make-or-break season as competition for online conversion will continue to escalate. Think of the depth and value you can bring to your stakeholders by optimizing all their digital marketing from a single workspace.
The Optmyzr team is excited to see our cofounding CEO, Fred Vallaeys, publish a new book: “Digital Marketing in an AI World”. It’s now out and available on Amazon for Kindle and in Paperback.
The book explores the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning – specifically how it is changing the world for PPC professionals. We see this book as a survive-and-THRIVE guide for PPC pros navigating a universe where some fear being automated right into obsolescence.
As Fred shares in his book, the new AI era is actually a time of unprecedented opportunity for PPC pros who aspire to be PPC rockstars. We’ve been saying for a long time that machines and AI are amazing and can do things humans cannot do. But machines PLUS humans makes an even more powerful force. Fred’s book is essential for PPC pros at agencies and in-house alike.
At the core, AI and machine learning certainly eliminate tasks and automate the tasks that should be automated. Smart PPC pros are the ones who use that automation to redirect their energy and attention to chart bold new strategies and spend more time on the strategic, human elements of marketing.
Fred’s book is out on Amazon today at special introductory pricing. Order between now and Friday, May 31, 2019, and get the Kindle version for an introductory price of $0.99. The Kindle price returns to full retail of only $9.99 on June 1, and the paperback version is available for $15.99.
If you are attending SMX in Seattle, Fred will host an advanced SEM clinic, which promises to be a don’t-miss session. He’ll have copies of the book with him available for purchase (and we think he’ll even sign those copies!).
PPC pros who want to up their game and turn uncertainty into opportunity as a PPC rockstar should invest in this book. It may very well have a transformational impact on your PPC career.
End-of-year puts PPC audits top-of-mind. While PPC pros dissect performance and report campaign results daily, weekly or monthly, deeper audits can fall by the wayside. Regular reporting gives great insight into campaign metrics, but audits dig into critical structural elements, such as having enough ad variations in ad groups, consistent use of ad extensions across campaigns, and many other foundational issues.
Audits pop back up as a priority as PPC pros answer the myriad year-end questions from stakeholders and get immersed planning for the upcoming year. Unfortunately, infrequent audits means critical insight can be left unknown for too long.
Let’s face it – auditing PPC programs can be a colossal, time-consuming pain. Even the best pay-per-click pros can put off audits until they absolutely must allocate scarce time to dig through spreadsheets and hunt for anomalies and root causes. Compounding the challenge, PPC data interdependencies run deep and it can be nearly impossible to do effective auditing manually.
Our PPC Policy & Audits Builder turns processes that would take days to complete into fast, executable activities that can yield great value. Putting off audits until year-end can result in those dreaded “I wish we knew that back in August” moments.
Audits also foster essential policy compliance when managing external agencies. For example, if an agency says it always does ad testing, but the audit shows ad groups only had one ad, you now have an accountability trail. In addition, audits help defend accounts from being poached by competitors by ensuring accounts are following best practices, making it difficult for competitors to claim accounts are being mismanaged.
Point & Click Ease
Policy & Audit Builder is simple and intuitive. Clicking “Create New Audit” launches the step-by-step process in which you can choose to audit Ad Groups, Ads, Campaigns, Search Campaigns, and Keywords.
As seen in the image below, each audit type allows the user to adjust the essential parameters to begin auditing by segment. Auditing Ad Groups, for example, allows the user to readily uncover anomalies in quality score, spend, number of ads, or number of keywords. The PPC pro can run audits based on all parameters or disable individual ones to focus in on specific attributes.
Clicking “Run” executes the high level audit and immediately issues a report card that provides letter grades of A+, A, B, and C. Just as with school grades, the report card shows the areas that are running well and calls out ones requiring further attention.
Clicking into the report card gives deeper insight into specific areas of interest. From this view alone, the PPC pro can begin to take corrective action or dig deeper into the data to analyze foundational issues and then resolve problems or out-of-policy actions.
Powerful and easy-to-execute audit capabilities empowers the PPC pro to quickly uncover otherwise hidden spikes or valleys that could be driving increases or decreases in overall performance. In addition, PPC campaigns have countless data interdependencies (sometimes making cause/effect analysis nearly impossible), so our audit tool taps the power of machine learning and AI to dig into relationships between various attributes to get to root causes more efficiently and accurately.
Overall, PPC pros can gain a much deeper understanding of the potential impact of issues to help drive excellent performance across all activities.
Audit’s Role Moving Forward
Streamlined audit processes mean PPC pros can add audit to their activities with greater frequency. If you currently only audit quarterly, semi-annually or annually – consider a monthly audit run to help uncover potential issues faster.
Be sure to close out 2018 with a deep audit and analysis of your holistic PPC program. Give Policy & Audit Builder a try to see just how fast and effective it can be at mining for information beyond the KPIs. Then craft a plan for 2019 that better taps the power of audits and moves them from being a must-do hassle to an area of great opportunity to boost PPC’s effectiveness in what is sure to be an even more competitive year ahead.
We are humbled and honored to be bringing back home this year’s award for Best PPC Management Software Suite, granted by the US Search Awards and announced this past October 17th.
This award couldn’t have been possible without the loyalty and dedication of our customers, who value the importance of efficiency when it comes to managing and improving their PPC campaigns. Our CEO Frederick Vallaeys was there to receive the award in Las Vegas.
Optmyzr focuses on reducing the time spent on those repetitive and sometimes tedious tasks, combining great optimizations with smart automation to create a unique and comprehensive experience. Our tools range from insights and analysis to optimization and automation (and just about everything else in between!) and are all created putting the interest of the PPC expert first.
We believe in the power of transparency and how that adds a unique worth to our software. For this reason, every final decision regarding changes to your account will always remain completely in your control.
To get to know a bit more about our tools, try our free 14-day trial. If you want to see the tools in a more 1:1 session, we’ll be more than happy to demo our product for you personally.
Resource for all the videos on our YouTube channel designed to help you get the most out of your Optmyzr account, with new videos being added regularly.
Read our in-depth piece in Search Engine Land that explores four key areas of PPC automation opportunity.
We greatly appreciate the ongoing trust our clients put in Optmyzr. It is through that trust and validation that Optmyzr continues to create great software for PPC experts.
PPC’s leading edge keeps crashing forward, typically faster than most PPC pros can keep up. The big search engines continually roll out new tools and capabilities to bolster everything from basic text-only ads to immersive showcase shopping ads. The inner workings of the PPC machinery get more and more advanced with AI- and machine learning-infused wizardry.
The pace of advancement is staggering.
The team at Optmyzr spends a huge chunk of our time analyzing what’s happening on the front line of innovation, staying on top of the latest from our friends at Google and Bing. We are there so you don’t have to be.
Over the last two years, we’ve added significant capabilities across our PPC Management Suite to automate campaign building, optimization and dozens of other actions across Google and Bing. New capabilities for Shopping Ads and even groundbreaking integration of Amazon Alexa into the mix has brought us truly to “full suite” status.
It’s exceedingly gratifying that Optmyzr was just recognized on the final night of Pubcon 2018 with the US Search Award for Best PPC Management Suite. This award has gone to giants in our space in recent years. It recognizes the best and most innovative offerings in PPC management today.
Receiving the award in Las Vegas alongside colleagues, clients and peers across the industry was another high point in the evolution of Optmyzr. It provided clear validation that our clients’ needs are being met and then some.
The award serves another purpose, though. Motivation. Such recognition doesn’t come easy and it means our team is right back in the trenches keeping up with what’s next in our space.
Optmyzr is made up of PPC practitioners. We geek out on PPC as much as anyone, so we love unpacking the latest innovations in search marketing. We will keep develop our own scripting, optimizations and automations to streamline processes for PPC pros and allow them to apply their thinking to higher level strategy vs in-the-weeds tactics. We’ll keep sharing our knowledge and insight to help you, the PPC pro, be even better at what you do every day.
If you want to see what you’ve been missing, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a free demo of our award-winning suite. Also, if you’ve been using Optmyzr for a while and not sure you’re using it to its fullest extent, check out our YouTube channel for great how-to videos and more. Also, check out our free scripts that layer added capabilities. Or just give us a call and let’s talk. We want to make sure Optmyzr is doing all it can for our amazing clients.
We thank you for your support in the evolution of our PPC Management Suite. Our US Search Award is as much a testament to our great clients as it is to our team that is working hard to help you be the best PPC pro you can be.
Pay-per-click is a hot place for pretty amazing automation. Some PPC pros may worry that they are being automated right out of a job. But in reality, the opposite is true – at least for those with advanced skills in the craft.
We just published an in-depth piece in Search Engine Land that explores four key areas of PPC automation opportunity. Check it out. We dig into advanced automations that go beyond what you can do via Google or Bing directly. While you are there, I encourage you to check it out other recent Search Engine Land columns by Optmyzr.
We’ve also been really busy in the Optmyzr studio crafting video demos and webinars that really dig into the specifics of automation. You can check those out on our YouTube channel. But here are three recent ones that are really timely.
Be sure to check out the all the other videos on our YouTube channel designed to help you get the most out of your Optmyzr account – with new videos being added regularly.
As always, if you want to see more 1:1, we’ll be more than happy to demo our product for you personally or try our free 14-day trial.
As longtime Search veterans ourselves, the Optmyzr team’s legacy generally comes from the Google universe. Yet we’ve always viewed Bing’s emergence as a true player in search as being a good thing for search marketers. More choice for users. A bigger pie overall. More opportunity for marketers to help brands reach the customers who are searching for what they sell.
Accurate market share stats are elusive, at best, but seem to range between 10-33% for Bing these days (in terms of search volume). While Google still rules the search universe, 10-33% of billions of searches conducted is massive – to say the very least.
Search is clearly the powerhouse way to reach customers because users tell the search engines specifically what they are seeking – “Men’s black dress shoes” or “trendy prom dresses” or “[brand name] camera lenses” or “family restaurants near me.” As Bing continues its steady growth in volume and its evolution to Google-like ad types, data and analytics, search marketers have found themselves working across platforms with greater frequency.
Trouble was, working in two platforms typically more than doubled the work for the PPC pro. Google automation and powerful tools like Optmyzr made it a snap to launch and manage Google Shopping Ads. Bing ads, though? Not so much. It’s been a much more manual and time-consuming prospect for PPC pros – until now.
The Optmyzr team is excited to introduce powerful new functionality that allows PPC pros to manage all critical aspects of Bing Shopping Ads from the same Optmyzr interface that manages Google Ads.
The new Bing-specific functionality greatly simplifies Bing Shopping Ads in much the same way it simplifies Google Shopping Ads. We set out to simplify core activities, including setting up advanced campaign structures, keeping campaigns synced with dynamic product inventory, and optimizing performance quickly and efficiently with AI-enabled decision support.
We’ve made it possible for PPC pros to tackle Bing Shopping Ads in minutes instead of hours. Many automated features speed things along, but Optmyzr also provides extensive manual intervention and optimization, so you can dig deep into your product data to improve performance.
A few of the most notable core features to highlight:
Optmyzr Campaign Builder: Set up your campaign structure for the most optimal deployment and management. Highly flexible in setup, much like what we’ve offered for Google Shopping Ads management.
Optmyzr Campaign Refresher: Keep your Bing ads in sync with a merchant feed.
Optmyzr Bid Management: Creates customizable reports that will help you identify commonalities affecting performance deep within campaigns. Commonalities might be brand, style, size, product type, price – any number of attributes essential to a successful campaign. You can act on the insight to drive better (more profitable!) bids.
As always, we focus much of our innovation on mid to advanced PPC pros, but the ease and flexibility of the system allows up-and-coming PPC managers to improve their abilities and execution.
One final important piece about the new Bing-specific functionality – you’ll still manage campaigns (setup to execution) individually for Bing and Google within Optmyzr. Each platform has its own unique structure and specific requirements. However, the time savings of deploying campaigns AND tracking metrics and reporting through the same system will undoubtedly help PPC pros work more efficiently and effectively. Optmyzr allows the PPC pro to access campaign metrics and reporting through the same interface, which allows more immediate comparison of performance in Google and Bing.
Best of all, you won’t be leaving millions – if not billions – of Bing searches to chance. As the overall search pie gets bigger and Bing continues to grow its share of search volume, it’s becoming more important than ever that search pros build their cross platform expertise and capability. If not, the competition might just run away with a huge percentage of previously untapped search traffic.
As PPC pros, we all know search is where it’s at if you want to ensure customers and prospects find YOUR business. Customer behaviors have shifted dramatically in recent years with Google and Bing being first-stop waypoints on the journey to purchase. It’s a challenge for PPC pros to stay on top of shifting behaviors and changes to Google and Bing.
We all know the drill. When the customer searches for “[brand name] camping tent” or “shoes to match black dress” or “human resources software system with employee scheduling” or “pizza near me” or any of the other 40,000+ searches that happen every second, someone is looking for what you sell. PPC is the new front line in sales and customer service.
We’re driven to help businesses make the connection when customers are out on Google or Bing. In doing so, we’ve seen pretty great growth as a company. So much so, we just made the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America ranking for the first time in our 5+ year existence.
Growth is great. It’s one important validation that our service is on the mark. Growth also allows us to re-invest more in the tools we provide to bring even more value longer-term. We have introduced several product enhancements over the last year, in particular. Without giving away too much too early, we encourage you to watch for many new things we have in the works – some coming out very soon.
Google and Bing continue to innovate with new functions and features to automate core aspects of PPC. Some of their innovations will make PPC pros’ jobs easier. Some bring new challenges. We continue to track the forefront of their ongoing development to support the entirety of your job. From campaign inception through reporting – across Google and Bing – we will continue to deploy machine learning and AI to help PPC pros be better, stronger and faster at what they do.
We appreciate the ongoing trust our clients put in Optmyzr. Being on the Inc. 5000 validates our partnership with clients – coupled with your trust – works for our mutual benefit. Watch for more great news coming through the second half of this year (and beyond)!
Optimizing your accounts with Optmyzr is pretty simple and straightforward. You get to work with performance analysis and optimization tools, reporting features and task automation, among others, while still maintaining complete control.
We want you to make the most out of your experience with Optmyzr, and show you how you can reach your business goals through the use of our tools. And in the spirit of easing the process of getting started with your account, we’ve created a first-month checklist to guide you along all our tools and make sure you aren’t missing out on anything.
This checklist works as a referential guideline for the first five weeks from when you link your Google Ads accounts to Optmyzr. It has different tasks for each week, starting off with recommendations that cover a more general and broad aspect of your account management, and which get more specific and advanced along the way.
Week 0 & Week 1
For the first two weeks, Week 0 and Week 1, you’ll be setting up alerts, analyzing your overall account and doing some simple optimizations. This will give you a great baseline for further account management. During Week 2 we’ll cover performance on networks, and by Week 3 and 4, you’ll be analyzing performance by location, optimizing ads and analyzing search queries for new keywords and negatives.
In this checklist, the first week to be taken into consideration begins once you create your Optmyzr account, and link your existing Google Ads accounts to it. You’ll start off by setting performance alerts, to make sure you are always aware of how your money is being spent. This creates a great baseline for any further optimization, as any unwanted performance won’t go by unnoticed.
During this initial phase, we recommend setting up automation to monitor account performance and landing pages for ads, as well as budget-related monitoring. These alerts and automations only need to be set up once, and will then on continue to work in the background.
Week 2 & Week 3
Moving forward, and for the upcoming week you’ll get recommendations for account analysis, and a few simple optimizations to begin with. Tools like the PPC Investigator will help you figure out how the key performance metrics on the account have changed and based on this data you can determine the optimizations you should do first.
You can also use tools such as the Spend Projection to get insights on whether your budget is overspending or underspending, and you can then use that information through the Optimize Budgets optimizations to reallocate those budgets across campaigns.
Week 4 & Week 5
As the checklist moves forward, you’ll be getting recommendations that dive deeper into analyzing performances, such as by network and location. We’ll guide you along tools to optimize the search queries that drive traffic to campaigns, manage your keyword bids based on performance by the hour of the week, and set bid adjustments by device and location, among others.
All throughout this checklist, you’ll also see some recommendations for prebuilt Account Workouts. The Account Workouts are a series of tasks that are put together to achieve a specific goal. They combine the different tools from Optmyzr in a logical order to create the right combination for optimizing your accounts.
All in all, this 5-week checklist is a great way to get familiarized with practices you can follow with Optmyzr, and though the steps here are just our recommendations, we think it will be of great use for you and your team. If you would like a customized checklist for your team, feel free to write to support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be happy to help you.
Optmyzr is proud to call out the latest accolades for our Co-Founder/CEO Frederick Vallaeys. He was named SEL Contributor of The Year at this year’s SMX West conference (Landy Awards). His articles on Search Engine Land (SEL) cover a variety of topics relating to PPC from analyzing how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world of PPC, to optimizing workflows for agencies.
Below you’ll find a recap of Fred’s top articles by topic – take a look!
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning in PPC
Covering the know-hows of succeeding in an AI-first world, these articles go through how AI has evolved through time, the different levels of PPC automation and the technologies driving PPC intelligence. Here are some of his top AI-related posts:
When it comes to saving time in rather routine and sometimes tedious tasks, scripts are a great way to facilitate the process. From reporting to auditing scripts, these articles cover all you need to automate the process, and not get lost along the way!
Knowing what you are facing is by far the best way to prepare for success! On these related articles, you can find some insights on boosting Shopping ads, driving positive results with AMP sites and a review of the free PPC reporting solutions Google offers.
As one of the more prolific content contributors at Search Engine Land, Fred has authored dozens of columns to share his unique insights and expertise in PPC and search overall. You can find all of his articles at https://searchengineland.com/author/frederick-vallaeys
We hope you won’t mind a brief post with a bit of a self-congratulatory tone, but we’re a really proud bunch at Optmyzr. For the 4th year in a row, our Co-founding CEO Frederick Vallaeyshas been named to the annual PPC Hero “Top 25 Most influential PPC Experts” ranking. This year, Fred reached his highest ranking to date, coming in 2nd to Dan Gilbert, founder and CEO of Brainlabs.
What’s really cool about this particular recognition is the fact it’s based, in part, on a vote by thousands of PPC pros from around the world. PPC Hero has created this list every year since 2012. Once again, Fred is listed along with 24 peers from around the world, including execs from big players like Microsoft and Wordstream, along with leaders from top agencies, other platform providers, exciting startups, and terrific media folks like Ginny Marvin from Search Engine Land.
While some on the list are competitors, we view everyone included in this year’s top 25 as friends and peers – people for whom we hold deepest respect and admiration.
We congratulate Fred for making the list again, and we sincerely extend our best and continued friendship to everyone doing their part to elevate PPC as a hotbed of innovation and success in marketing.
The second half of 2018 promises to be an exciting time for our clients as we continue to drive more innovation and development from the team here at Optmyzr. We look forward to seeing what our friends and competitors have in store as we all work to make PPC as powerful as it can be.
As marketers, we all know that running successful PPC campaigns requires agility and speed when making crucial optimizations. You’ve likely noticed a new option within the Optmyzr PPC Management System – Optmyzr Express. This is our latest automated offering that suggests the most important optimization opportunities across your campaigns. We created Optmyzr Express to bring one-click simplicity to help PPC pros take immediate action on top opportunities for campaign optimizations.
Available immediately to all users of the full Optmyzr PPC Campaign Management Suite, Optmyzr Express is designed to help simplify and automate the top up-to-the-minute opportunities. The user can simply click to accept an automated optimization suggestion or they can access an intuitive dashboard to customize or modify suggested changes from a single screen.
The Express offering augments the full Optmyzr software system. Designed to allow you to crank out the top optimizations fast – perhaps over your first cup of coffee in the morning – Optmyzr Express will allow you to blast through those “quick-hit” opportunities right away. It allows you to then allocate more of your valuable time digging deep into advanced functionality within the suite to be more strategic overall.
Think about those fast opportunities we all seek for rapid optimization: from pausing low performing ads or adding new keywords to quick fixes for Quality Score and high performing keywords and more. Optmyzr Express facilitates smart, on-the-go campaign adjustments and creates a workflow for continuous improvement.
Initial user feedback has been excellent and has validated that Optmyzr Express is a real time-saver. It delivers fast insight, agility and power, which encourages more frequent optimizations. PPC pros have told us they want a workflow that helps them make immediate changes for the most pressing opportunities, while retaining the full suite functionality for deep dives into campaign performance improvement. Through client feedback, we also know that a workflow that appears similar to a high value to-do list across multiple accounts allows for greater efficiency for in-house and agency teams alike.
Other key features:
Inbox simplicity: Easy view into all accounts or favorite accounts
Snooze capability: Ability to set a quick reminder if you can’t take action right now
Single page view: Immediate optimizations can be managed from a single screen
We have more information available in a news release we just posted to announce Optmyzr Express. You can also see a quick overview in our new YouTube video.
Give Optmyzr Express a try and let us know your thoughts.
One of the things we do best at Optmyzr is to help PPC experts save time at the tasks they need to do to keep accounts healthy, and clients happy. Reusable templates in our reporting system are one of the ways our tools can help you save a ton of time. Unfortunately, I see a lot of customers who don’t take advantage of the full power of our templates so let me explain why we created our system this way and how you can benefit.
What is a PPC report template?
A template is a predefined layout into which content will be placed. For PPC reports, a template defines a few things:
• How to present the data, e.g. as a bar chart • Where the data comes from, e.g. all branded AdWords campaigns • What date range the data is for, e.g. year-to-date
So in a reporting tool, one template is usually created for every report that needs to be sent on a recurring basis. In the example above, the template defines what needs to go into the report. Then when our reporting engine generates the report at the start of every month, it knows what data to grab and how to present it, so a nice report comes out, and is automatically delivered to the client.
Maintaining individual reports for each account wastes time
We have many agency customers at Optmyzr and they all manage multiple clients. Many reporting tools require 1 template be created for each end client, even if they all need to receive a report based on the exact same layout and template.
Creating this many templates is a pain, and having to update all of them with the exact same change when AdWords adds a new reporting metric is an even bigger pain.
How Optmyzr report templates save time
Luckily agencies typically have several clients who are similar, for example a few may do lead-gen and some others ecommerce. Lead-gen advertisers usually track metrics like CPA, conversions, and conversion rate. Ecommerce advertisers normally care more about metrics like ROAS and conversion value.
In Optmyzr, we let agencies take advantage of those similarities by making it possible to create templates that can be used for multiple clients. So instead of creating one template per client, you can make one template per type of client. In our example, that means we can have 2 templates: one for lead-gen and one for ecommerce and all 10 clients can get their reports based on these two templates.
So now when an Optmyzr agency wants to add a new metric to all the reports for their ecommerce clients, they just update that in one place, and all their ecommerce clients immediately benefit from those changes. It’s a huge time saver for the agency, and a win for the client because their account manager can now focus on more strategic work rather than spend the whole day tweaking tons of templates.
How Optmyzr makes templated reports highly custom
Agency clients usually won’t be happy if you give them a report that is clearly off-the-shelf. Optmyzr templates can be customized with lots of data visualizations so every agency can include exactly the types of data their clients will benefit from. If you haven’t tried our reporting, you can get your first beautiful PPC report in less than 5 minutes by signing up for our 2-week free trial.
In addition to including the data that matters, Optmyzr’s templated reports are very custom because for every client you can include their name, logo, a custom footer, and different campaigns in the report.
So structurally the reports for all ecommerce clients will be the same, but the data and visuals are all custom for each client.
Now each client gets a report that is custom to their business but the agency spent a fraction of the time building and maintaining the underlying report templates. And to take customization another step further, the agency could now annotate each of the resulting reports with notes, take-aways and follow up action items for each client. The beauty is that because the report itself was easier to generate, the account managers and analysts will have more time to spend analyzing the data and strategizing about the account.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to save some time with a quick win, give templated reports in Optmyzr a try. By reducing the number of templates you have to maintain, you’ll make things simpler and you won’t lose any functionality. If you have ideas for how to make our reports better, please let us know.
Today Google announced the addition of seven new Quality Score (QS) fields in AdWords, including historical QS. It goes without saying that we’re big fans of giving advertisers access to this data. After all, Optmyzr’s first major tool was the historical QS tracker we launched in the summer of 2013. Ever since then we’ve tracked billions of points of data to help advertisers make more sense of their Quality Scores.
Is there a need to continue to use tools for QS tracking now that Google is providing the same functionality directly in AdWords?
Like Jacob from our friends at Hanapin says, it’s definitely nice that any advertiser can now get the data, without needing to resort to tools, or AdWords Scripts. But there are some significant benefits you get from using Optmyzr to track QS. Here are 5 things you can do with Quality Score in Optmyzr that you can’t in AdWords.
#1: Optmyzr helps you prioritize Quality Scores to fix
While AdWords now includes both the current and historical QS, it doesn’t have a column for letting you see the difference between these two numbers. That may seem trivial but when dealing with hundreds or thousands of keywords, it’s nice to have a simple way to find keywords with the biggest increase or decrease in QS.
Optmyzr’s Quality Score Tracker includes a column called QS Change. It shows the numerical difference between the QS on the start and end date of the selected range. By clicking on this column, it’s very easy to find keywords with the biggest drop in Quality Score. It’s a great tool to identify the keywords most in need of some attention.
The column “QS Change” makes it easy to see which items had the biggest change between 2 dates.
#2: Optmyzr shows aggregate QS and account QS
It’s easy to focus your attention in the wrong place if you’re not taking volume into consideration. For example, look at the screenshot in the last paragraph and notice that the keyword with the biggest decline in QS had 18 impressions. It might be possible to improve that keyword’s Quality Score, but how much will that really benefit the account?
That’s why Optmyzr has always provided aggregate QS in the form of an impression-weighted account-level quality score, as well as campaign-QS and ad group-QS.
This helps advertisers focus on making changes in the places that can have the biggest payoff. For example, here’s where the biggest QS improvements are in this account. Because it’s aggregated at the ad group level, there is more data, making the insights more meaningful.
See which ad groups had the biggest gains in Quality Score.
Optmyzr even recommends which ad groups would most benefit from optimization by doing a weighted sort on cost and low QS.
Optmyzr recommends ad groups to optimize for Quality Score based on the possible financial upside.
#3: Optmyzr visualizations make QS easier to understand
We’ve always believed that historical QS change is a useful metric to inform advertisers whether Google likes the optimizations they are doing or not. As a PPC optimization company, this is obviously an important criteria for us and our customers to think about.
In AdWords, you can now see historical QS by day by applying a daily segment to the keyword data. But in the resulting table it’s pretty difficult to see a pattern of change.
Optmyzr makes understanding and analyzing Quality Score data easier in several ways.
First, we provide a clean dashboard that shows the changes in QS between any 2 dates when the AdWords account was connected to Optmyzr. Here we have an example showing the account level Quality Score change between March 1, 2017 and May 13, 2017.
Quality Score dashboard gives quick insight into QS for an account or any of its campaigns or ad groups.
Next, unlike in AdWords where QS is not a value available for charts, Optmyzr does have time charts showing QS changes. This makes it really easy to see if QS changed during a particular date range.
See Quality Score changes visualized on a chart and instantly pick out important dates when changes happened.
#4: Optmyzr connects the dots on Quality Score impact
While the QS number 1 through 10 we see in accounts is based on position-normalized data, we can’t but wonder whether changes in bids, and the resulting changes in average position could have an impact on our QS. In Optmyzr, it’s very easy to investigate this question.
Optmyzr saves historical max CPC bids and lets you add this to a chart with Quality Score changes.
#5: Optmyzr includes Quality Score in automated reports
We could debate whether including AdWords jargon like QS in client reports is a good thing or not. However, we know that many advertisers like to include it in reports, and especially in reports used by consultants and agencies to audit prospective new clients.
Optmyzr lets you include Quality Score data in report templates. It can be shown either as a KPI value:
Or it can be shown as a time chart:
The time chart has several interesting settings. The curve can be smoothed by showing weekly or monthly data (in addition to the ability to show daily data).
Advertisers can even calculate the aggregate quality score for groups of campaigns by combining our campaign filters with campaign labels. For example, an advertiser can add a specific label to all their branded campaigns and then select this label in the report. There is no other way that we know of for advertisers to get quality score aggregation for portions of their accounts.
Change settings for how to include Quality Score in reports in Optmyzr’s report designer.
Conclusion
Optmyzr is excited that Quality Score is finally getting the treatment it deserves in the AdWords interface. With a renewed focus on QS, we hope advertisers will use Optmyzr’s unique capabilities related to QS to optimize their accounts.
It’s time to revamp your PPC reports with these cool new features from Optmyzr.
#1 New Chart Types – More Visualizations
We’ve added many new chart types that you can use in reports. These include doughnut charts, bar charts and area charts. You’ll find these options in the chart widgets in the report designer.
#2 New Widgets – More Data
Optimization History Widget
Include a summary of changes made through Optmyzr in your reports. You can include details like how many new keywords were added, how many bids were changed, and how many ad schedules were created. This widget also lets you show how much data you analyzed before applying optimizations.
Audit Widgets
Quickly find optimization opportunities at the ad group and campaign level. You can find campaigns with no sitelinks, few negative keywords or ad groups with too many keywords. For example: You can get a list of ad groups that don’t have enough Expanded Text Ads.
Ad Extensions Widget
Now you can include performance data for ad extensions like sitelinks, call extensions, app extensions and review extensions in reports.
#3 Report Themes, KPI Icons & More
KPI Icons You can now include icons in the KPI widget to represent the most important metrics. This helps draw attention and helps break the monotony.
Report Themes Customize reports by changing the color theme. You can choose from different themes like Blue, Orange, Green.
Cover Page and Footer You can now add your own cover page and footer to reports. These can be uploaded as images in the report designer and can be used across accounts. This helps customize and completely whitelabel reports.
#4 – New Report templates
We have a brand new Annual Report that you can use to instantly generate a year-end review. Go ahead and customize it or share it as is with your stakeholders to show them how awesome you are at PPC 🙂 Pro Tip: Duplicate the template and change the date range to last month to create a monthly report 🙂
When you set up an AdWords campaign you choose the locations you want to target based on where your prospective customers are located. However, it is not enough to just target locations especially when campaign targeting is set up at the country level. One way to make sure you’re optimizing campaigns for better ROI is to identify high performing and underperforming locations and setting bid adjustments for those.
For example, if you’re targeting the United States as a country, you’ll receive traffic from different states. California and Alaska may have completely different performance metrics but under the current structure you’re probably managing them in the same manner. This is why it is important to use geo bid adjustments to manage bids or if you want more granular control over budget, you can split them out into separate campaigns as well.
Setting bid adjustments for locations
Performance data at the country, city and region level is available in AdWords under the dimensions tab. However, taking that data and making it actionable can take hours. This is where the Geo Bid Adjustment One-Click Optimization™ can help. This optimization lets you see data at the country, region, city and postal code level. You can analyze performance, add locations as targets and set bid adjustments in a few minutes. This process can be done for multiple campaigns at the same time. In AdWords, it will take 3-4 steps to do this for each campaign. When you have to do it for multiple campaigns, you can easily spend a few hours doing it.
Why use the Geo Bid Adjustment One-Click Optimization™?
View geographic performance at any level (country, city, region). For example, if California is added as a target location, you can choose to view data at the city level and see how campaigns are performing across different cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles etc.
Automatically calculate bid adjustments based on goals. You can enter the target goal value for the account or campaign and the system will automatically recommend bid adjustments based on performance.
Set bid adjustments for locations that are not added as targets. If you choose to add a bid adjustment for a location that you’re not targeting, the system will automatically add it as a target location and set the bid adjustment.
Use aggregate data to set bid adjustments for campaigns that don’t have enough data. You can use the overall performance of a location to set geo bid adjustments for campaigns that don’t have enough data to make a decision.
According to Merriam-Webster, a game-changer is “a newly introduced element or factor that changes an existing situation or activity in a significant way.” And I can assure you, Optmyzr has been a game-changing force in my business life.
I manage AdWords campaigns for a living, and when I say I manage AdWords campaigns, I manage AdWords campaigns, and a lot of them. I’m in AdWords 60+ hours a week managing a large number of campaigns for a large number of clients. I’ve worked very hard to do a great job managing these campaigns for my clients, and I’ve worked very hard to build my reputation as an honest, hard-working, and professional operator. And it turns out that when you skillfully provide a trade or service, and do it in an honest and professional way, new business will stampede your way and you’ll quickly find yourself to be very busy.
And in June of 2016, that’s the situation I found myself in. I was very busy managing lots of AdWords campaigns, but I still had new clients wanting to hire me. Initially, this was a very stressful situation. I was just about out of working hours each week, but I still had people wanting to hire me. So I felt like I was leaving opportunities on the table. But at the same time, I wanted to keep my current clients happy and continue to provide great AdWords management services for them.
So what was a young, driven, (and some would say) good looking lad to do? There was only one answer.
Increase efficiency.
I knew that if I could get the same weekly AdWords management tasks done in a smaller amount of time each week, then I could keep doing a great job for my current clients while freeing up more time to bring on new clients and grow my business. So I knew that efficiency was the onlyway to grow my business.
Initially I thought hmmmmm, this will be easy. I’ll just use AdWords scripts and save myself a bunch of time. But then, after spending an hour or so trying to learn scripts, I was coldly reminded that I don’t really know anything about scripts or writing software, and that trying to learn that stuff would take a ton of time… and remember the problem in the first place… I HAD NO TIME LEFT IN MY WEEK!!!
Enter Optmyzr
Once I realized learning scripts and writing my own software was too big of a learning curve, I thought to myself, let’s look for an AdWords management software. I Googled “AdWords management software,” and that’s when I found Optmyzr. It was love at first sight.
Why I gave Optmyzr a try
I immediately liked two things about Optmyzr. The first thing I noticed is that two of the co-founders of Optmyzr had worked at Google. And that one of the co-founders, Frederick, had been one of the first 500 employees at Google and had spent “10 years building AdWords.” What more can you as for in terms of being credible? These guys were building AdWords when I was looking for a prom date.
And the second reason why I gave Optmyzr a try is because they made it easy for me to give them a try! They offer a free trial and you don’t have to enter a credit card. This made it very easy for me to say, okay let’s try it out.
Why Optmyzr works
Optmyzr works great for two reasons. One, it makes me more efficient at Google AdWords management. And two, it makes me better at Google AdWords management.
The reason I started looking for an AdWords management software is because I needed to free up more time each week so I could take on more clients, but I didn’t want to sacrifice management quality. So again, efficiency was the only answer.
And Optmyzr helps me be more efficient. I can do almost all of the weekly AdWords management tasks I like to do right from inside Optmyzr, and the efficiency is tremendous. I’ll cover a specific example below, but just so you know, with Optmyzr you can add new, relevant keywords from the search terms report, you can smartly manage bids, you can A/B test ads, and you can find negative keywords from the search terms report… and you can do this all from inside the Optmyzr dashboard. You can also do a ton of other stuff too, including quality score analysis, report generation, removing duplicate keywords, and on and on. There’s so much you can do inside of Optmyzr, and it’s so much faster than manually doing these tasks in AdWords. Optmyzr makes me a much more efficient AdWords manager.
The second reason why Optmyzr works so great is because not only does it make me a more efficient AdWords manager, it makes me a betterand more-effective AdWords manager. Optmyzr’s software helps me see things I can’t see with just the human eye.
For example, in the A/B testing tool for ads, it shows you clear winning and losing ads in Ad Groups where the confidence level is 90%, 95%, or 99% depending on your preference.
How do I know what the confidence level is when manually managing ads without Optmyzr? I don’t. I don’t have the statistical skill set or time to determine confidence levels when I judge ad performance manually. But Optmyzr’s software does. Optmyzr can examine the data, and find ad groups where the confidence level is high enough to warrant pausing a poor-performing ad. And it does this in an instant. Being able to access and analyze data that I could not realistically come up with on my own is why Optmyzr not only makes me a more efficient AdWords manager, but also a betterAdWords manager. And this A/B ad testing tool is just one of the many ways Optmyzr makes me better at my job.
And while we’re speaking about the A/B ad testing tool. Let me cover another game-changing feature of Optmyzr. In the A/B ad testing tool, not only can you find and pause poor-performing ads that need to be paused, you can also quickly create new ads to test the existing winning ad against. And when I say quickly, I mean quickly. Creating new test ads is one of the most important but also one of the most time-consuming aspects of AdWords management, but with Optmyzr’s fast copy the winning ad and edit this new test adtool it’s both fast and easy. And again, this is just one of the many great features of Optmyzr.
Excellent Customer Service
One of the coolest aspects of Optmyzr is the excellentcustomer service they provide. I have an issue, then fix it. I have a question, they answer it. Optmyzr’s people go above and beyond to not only answer questions about their software, but they actually will take customer feedback and make improvements to their software based on customer suggestions.
It’s clear that Optmyzr’s people getGoogle AdWords. They know what it’s like to manage Google AdWords campaigns and they make solutions that are perfect for AdWords managers. And beyond that, they deliver those solutions with some of the best customer service I’ve ever seen.
Good for one or many accounts
I think Optmyzr is a great solution for AdWords management, regardless of whether you’re just managing your company’s one AdWords account, or if you’re an AdWords management agency managing many client accounts.
The solutions Optmyzr offers will work great for one account and for many accounts.
I strongly encourage anyone managing an AdWords account to give Optmyzr a try. And if you’re managing many accounts, I think it’s a must-have.
Optmyzr is an ever-growing tool that has many cool features. A lot of Optmyzr’s tools are very intuitive if you’ve been managing AdWords campaigns, and you can start using them right off the bat. But I also encourage you to take some time to read through Optmyzr’s documentation to learn about allof the cool features they have because this tool really can do a ton of stuff, and I’m using more and more of its features every week.
Good Luck
Providing a service in the tech-advertising world can be a scary career choice. There is constantinnovation and change. If you don’t keep up, your business will die. A business dying is a very sad thing. And I try to avoid sad things.
Optmyzr has been a game-changer for me. It’s helped my business grow, innovate, and not only get more efficient, but also get better at providing AdWords management services.
As someone who lives in AdWords every week, I can stronglyrecommend Optmyzr for all AdWords advertisers. It will make you more efficient and help you get better performance.
Note from Optmyzr: Thanks Jason andRothman PPCfor sharing your story! If anyone else wants to share their success story about using Optmyzr and have it published on our blog, pleaseget in touch with us.
Many paid search marketers are familiar with Optmyzr as a great tool for time-saving scripts and one-click optimizations. But do you know that Optmyzr can also help you create better landing pages? It’s true. This post will show you three tools you can use within the interface to help you improve your landing pages and convert more customers!
1. Quality Score Tracker
In this view advertisers can get clear, visual snapshots of their account quality scores. The visuals are also color-coded to make it easier to see where you stand. (Red: QS 1-3, Yellow: QS 4-6, Light Green: QS 7-9, Dark Green: QS 10). In the example below, you can see this ad group is getting dinged on having a poor landing page experience. With simple, easy to find visuals, you’ll be able to see your faltering landing pages in no time.
You can also drill down to various levels (depending on if which view you start with) to compare changes in quality score data. All of the quality score components, including landing page experience, are included as default columns.
This report is easy to print which will give you the ability to share it with the right people in your teams to start making new landing pages!
2. Landing Page Analysis
The title of this tool is pretty straightforward, but extremely effective. There are three sections to this report…
• High Performer – High Conversion Rate + High CTR • High Potential – High Conversion Rate + Low CTR • Expensive (seen below) – Good CTR + Low Conversion Rate
You can see in the Expensive image above that these particular ad groups have ads with fairly good CTRs, but little to no conversions. The destination URLs all had good quality scores because they were relevant to my target keywords as well as my ads. While those URLs were relevant, they still weren’t converting and also spending lots of cost. This report will show you which landing pages need conversion rate improvements to get better ROI on the great work you’ve already done.
3. Non Converting Keywords
The Non Converting Keyword report will show you all of the keywords that had zero conversions in the date range you select. You can view these keywords from the account or campaign levels, and also pause any of the flagged keywords right within the Optmyzr interface.
Similar to the destination URLs reported in the Landing Page Analysis tool, you might see certain keywords that have high engagement but poor conversion rate. This data can give you some evidence to go back to your landing pages to see if any improvements can be made before you rule out these keywords completely.
Final Point
Optmyzr is a great tool to help PPC advertisers find and make adjustments within their AdWords and Bing accounts, but that’s not all it can do. The three tools we just went over will help you improve your landing page quality scores and performance. Take the time to dig in and make a concerted effort to make improvements to your landing pages. You can thank Optmyzr for the extra conversions later.
Optmyzr has launched One Click Optimizations™, Data Insights, and Reporting tools for Bing Ads. These tools make it easy to manage multiple Bing accounts by automating time-consuming and routine tasks performed by PPC experts. Read on to find out more.
One-Click Optimizations for Keywords, Bids and Ads
For Keywords
Keyword Lasso: Add high performing search terms as new keywords with the Keyword Lasso optimization. This helps increase conversions and drive good traffic to your site.
Non-Converting Keywords: Reduce cost per acquisition by pausing under performing keywords using this optimization. It helps pause keywords that drove clicks but did not convert.
Negative Keyword Finder: Add negative keywords to your account to reduce wasted spend. This optimization analyzes the search terms report to find irrelevant words that can be added as negatives.
For Bids
First Page Bridger: This optimization recommends increasing bids for high potential keywords. These are keywords with a high Quality Score that can be pushed to the first page of search results with a small bid increase. It helps make the most of the account budget.
For Ads
A/B Testing for Ads: This optimization identifies underperforming ads and enables you to pause them with a single click. This ensures that only the best performing ads remain active in each ad group. Suggestions are based on statistically significant data and losing ads can be determined based on CTR, Conversion Rate and Conversions/Impression.
Data Analysis Tools
Account Dashboard: The new dashboard for Bing gives a quick overview of how the account is performing across key metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, cost and more.
Performance Comparison: This tool compares performance for campaigns and ad groups across date ranges. It lets you aggregate performance for multiple campaigns and ad groups to compare as well.
PPC Investigator: This tool helps you investigate why a metric like clicks or conversions saw a change in performance. It lets you view a cause chart to analyze which elements of an account are affecting performance. The root cause analysis helps you go a step further to find the potential causality at keyword/ad group or campaign level.
Reporting
The Report Designer for Binglets you create and share customized account performance reports. You can include KPIs, daily metric charts, segment performance and more in the reports. In the Pro plan, you can also combine data from different AdWords, Bing and Analytics accounts in the same report.
You can select a Bing account from the Optmyzr dashboard and access the tools for Bing here. Let us know which other tool you would want to see for Bing Ads next, and we will work on it to help you optimize your Bing accounts quickly and efficiently. Till then happy optimizing!
Managing PPC budgets can get extremely tedious so we’ve recently introduced 4 new tools to help make life a little easier.
Spend Projection Tool
Our newest addition to Data Insights is our Spend Projection tool. It helps predict how much you will spend by a certain date and recommends how much budget you should allocate to reach a target level of spend.
See an estimate of how much your PPC campaigns will spend by the end of the month or any other date in the future.
As you can see in the example above, the projected spend ranges from $968 to $1,305 and is most likely going to come in at $1,202. The way we calculate the range is based on recent performance and we show that performance in the “recent trends” view shown below.
See how much your PPC has spent for the past few days and get a sense of how consistent your spend is from one week to the next.
You can enter a target spend and target date to get some further insights in this tool. Based on your actual performance we can tell you how you are pacing against your target. For example, if you should have spent $100 by today but your actual cost is only $90, then you are pacing at 90%, slightly behind where you should be.
See how your actual spend compares to the target and the amount you should have spent by today to reach that target.
The final insight this tool provides is how much you should spend for the remainder of the budget period in order to hit your target spend. The recommendation takes into account very recent performance trends since you may have already adjusted budgets recently based on how you were pacing.
Get a recommendation for how much to spend per day to reach your target PPC spend for the month.
With this recommendation, the next step is to change budgets to meet that recommendation. That brings us to our second new tool…
The Optimize Budgets One-Click Optimization™ is designed to help allocate budgets in the most efficient manner. Remember that AdWords operates with daily budgets at the campaign level or shared budgets that encompass one or more campaigns. This tool helps translate monthly budget targets that are commonly used by companies to daily budgets as required by AdWords.
As with all optimizations, using the most granular setting should produce the optimal results, so we recommend using individual budgets for every campaign. However this tool works equally well with shared budgets, or even a mix of shared budgets and individual campaign budgets.
By enabling the custom columns for the key performance indicators (KPIS) you care most about, you can quickly prioritize campaigns that should have their budgets changed.
Re-allocate budget between campaigns and shared budgets to optimize overall PPC account performance.
In the example above for a lead-gen focused advertiser, we have enabled the column “Cost / Conv” as well as “IS Lost (Budget)”. Now we can easily see if there are budgets with opportunity for increased spend that also have a great CPA. Advertisers could also use the data in this tool to reduce spend, or improve performance for branding or ecommerce focused accounts.
Advanced Budgets – Pause when things spend too much
The 3rd new tool is an Enhanced Script™ for AdWords and is one of 2 new scripts to give you the ultimate level of automation for budget management. In fact, most advertisers will want to use both of our new Enhanced Scripts™for budgets at the same time.
This one prevents you from spending more than intended. If you’ve been spending time manually checking budgets at the end of the month to make sure you’re not overshooting the target, this script will automatically do this for you every single hour.
Here’s how you’d set this one up to prevent an account from spending significantly more than $10,000 per month:
Don’t spend more than intended in an AdWords account using this Enhanced Script.
This script can be copied-and-pasted into AdWords (either at the MCC or individual account level) and scheduled to run automatically every hour. As soon as the script detects that the cost for the month exceeds the maximum, all active campaigns can be paused and labeled. The script can even re-enable all campaigns it had paused at the start of the next month.
While this script is very useful for automating monthly budget management, it can do a lot more. For example, you can apply budgets at any level of the AdWords hierarchy: account, campaign, ad group, keyword, or ad. You can set budgets to be monthly, weekly (Monday through Sunday), weekly (Sunday through Saturday) or daily. An example use case is to enforce a daily budget for a set of experimental keywords (which you have labeled) so that they are not taking up too much budget from old keywords you already know to be performing well.
The 4th and final new budget management tool is another Enhanced Script™ but this one updates daily budgets based on how much money is left to be spent for the month.
Just like clients don’t like it when you overspend their target budget, they also don’t like it when you don’t spend enough. When used in combination with the previous script, this one can help ensure you end the month as close as possible to the target spend without having to monitor and tweak it manually.
Use this script to automatically update daily budgets to help reach a target spend by the end of the month.
This script works with either campaign-level or shared budgets. You simply specify the name of the budget (or the campaign) and how much you’d like to spend for the month. Tell it what to do when the budget has been exceeded (normally I leave the budget as-is because the other script handles that situation) and how to divide the remaining spend over the days remaining in the month. You can either split it evenly, front-load or back-load it, or use our most sophisticated method which uses historical data to determine the typical spend on different weekdays and then allocates bigger budgets on days with a higher usual spend potential. For most advertisers, this setting would set a higher budget on Mondays than on Sundays because there are usually more searches and more clicks on Mondays than Sundays.
There are additional settings to tell the script how many weeks of data to use for determining day-of-week spend, and to allow the script to carry over unused budget from last month.
When you run this script using the verbose output mode (this is an advanced setting you can enable), you’ll see something like this:
When running the script you might see logs like these indicating that the daily budget has been adjusted to help meet the monthly target spend.
We hope you’ll give our new budget management tools and automations a try. We built these based on customer feedback and we’d love to hear more feedback about how else we can make these more useful, or what completely new methodologies you wish Optmyzr would build next.
Finding answers to frequent questions like why an account saw an increase/decrease in clicks or conversions is tedious. A drop in conversions or clicks can be attributed to multiple elements like keywords, placements, or an entire network, which makes answering such questions difficult and time consuming.
Optmyzr has automated this investigation process through its new PPC Investigator tool. If someday, your account experiences a sudden decrease in clicks, just ask PPC Investigator what brought on the change and you will get an answer within seconds.
How does it work?
As the performance of every metric depends on the performance of other underlying metrics, PPC Investigator uses the relationship between different metrics to show potential causality. Then it takes it to the next level and highlights exactly which element (keyword, ad group etc.) in the account caused performance to change. There are two levels at which the performance change can be investigated – Cause Chart and Root Cause Analysis
Cause Chart
The Cause Chart breaks down a metric’s performance into its underlying related metrics and highlights the metric that impacted performance in red. Analysis from the Cause Chart can help find those areas in an account that can benefit from a bid or ad optimization. For example, if conversions dropped and the underlying reason is identified to be an increase in impression share lost due to ad rank, a bid optimization will help. Subject to availability of budget, an account manager can choose to bid higher for better impression share, higher CTR and more conversions.
But wait! That’s not all! PPC Investigator also helps in examining and identifying the positive and negative top movers in an account. It shows the elements in an account (keywords, ad groups. campaigns) that were significant contributors to the change in the account over a period of time. This analysis is available under the Root Cause Analysis tab. Root Cause Analysis
PPC Investigator’s Root Cause Analysis evaluates the exact Campaigns/Ad groups/Product partition/Keywords etc. responsible for change in an account. The tool finds the top contributors by taking into consideration individual keywords/ad groups/network/device and even their combinations like keyword+device or network+ad group. You can view the top three positive and negative movers for a particular account which are further broken down to check sub-contributors. Here is a quick overview of the account insights the Root Cause Analysis can give:
Identify the pain points which impacted account performance to streamline workflows. You’ll know exactly which keyword or ad group caused the change and needs to be investigated.
Check the impact of paused campaigns/ad groups/keywords and make a decision on whether you would like to enable them or keep them paused. These are keywords or campaigns that shows a 90-100% drop.
Find optimization opportunities by viewing the networks or devices that might be pulling down the performance of an ad group or campaign.
Read more about the PPC Investigator here. You can try it out in your Optmyzr account under the Data Insights tools.
A good account structure is still one of the most important aspects of managing an AdWords account. It makes it easy to manage different types of bid adjustments and track performance.
Keyword grouping is essential to a good account structure because it affects ad relevance and in turn Quality Score. Over the years account managers have come up with different methodologies to structure AdWords accounts. All these methodologies target a stronger keyword-ad relevance and a higher Quality Score. One such methodology is SKAG or Single Keyword Ad Group that is probably the utopia of keyword grouping. As the name suggests, each keyword has it’s own ad group which makes it possible to achieve a very high keyword-ad relevance. However, this is not always easy to do.
Optmyzr has automated routine processes like adding new keywords, pausing non-converting keywords as well as adding negatives through One-Click Optimizations™. One such optimization is the Keyword Lasso where our system recommends adding high performing search terms as keywords. This enables users to manage them better by setting bids and writing relevant ad text. Suggestions from the search terms report also bring out new keyword themes that require keywords to be put in individual ad groups.
New Keyword Lasso – With SKAG support
In the new version of the Keyword Lasso One-Click Optimization™we’ve added a feature that lets you create new ad groups from within Optmyzr. This feature can create ad groups using a template which enables automating methodologies like SKAG. It’s as easy as selecting a list of search terms and clicking a button to move them into individual ad groups.
Also, the tool automatically copies over all the ads from the ad group that triggered the search term. If search terms across multiple ad groups are being combined, it selects all the ads from the best performing ad group and uploads them to the new ad groups. It also sets bids for the search terms that are being added to be the same as the keywords they matched to. You can read more about the new Keyword Lasso and SKAG feature here.
We’re a small agency in Milwaukee with big PPC experience. That experience comes from working for a combined 8 agencies, multiple in-house marketing teams (including Best Buy and Kohl’s), and even hiring a few agencies ourselves in our “previous lives”. With all of that comes a ton of hands-on experience and exposure to every PPC management tool under the sun. When we were looking at additional tools to add to our roster at Granular, Optmyzr came up multiple times during our search.
We approached Optmyzr with a high level of curiosity but also with a good amount of doubt. We’ve read plenty of feature lists before, we’ve seen “PPC celebrities” endorse products before, being around so many SEOs we knew what snake oil looked like (kidding guys!). You get it, we entered with caution.
Much to our delight, Optmyzr blew us away within 15 minutes of the free trial. We knew it was the real deal and could immediately tell that it was built by a true PPC expert. The features that it had were inherently different and it was as if someone built this by looking over our shoulders and watching us work for a year…then figuring out how to make our lives easier.
Check out some of our favorite features below:
White Label Reports
It’s refreshing to have true white label reporting. They don’t sneak in their logo or website address like some others on the market. It can take as little as 2 minutes to build and save a PDF or web-sharable report.
• No logo or watermarks • Insert Agency and Client Logos on cover page – looks custom • Insert custom data with screenshots • Include other channels from GA reports • Easily customize, Save and Schedule reports for each client
Quality Score Tracking
Who wouldn’t love this? We do, that’s for sure. With aggregate views and daily trended score tracking, it’s everything you need to thoroughly keep an eye on your quality scores.
• Overall QS gauge for your account, Campaign, or AdGroup level • Google doesn’t even have this feature in AdWords • Clients know about QS, so you should include it in reporting and conversations with them
Hour of week analysis and bidding
Want to look like an all-star to your clients or internal marketing team? Want to stop wasting money during off hours or want to capture more opportunity during profitable times? Then bid by hour of the week.
• It helps us “live our name”, Granular • Another feature hard to match with AdWords out of the box • Ultimate customization and tracking for your accounts • Find “waste hours” and move their budget towards “profit hours”
Automated…but not too automated
We don’t like full automation; most senior-level PPCers feel the same way. We want to get our hands dirty and execute certain optimizations after closely analyzing the data ourselves.
• We’ve used Marin, Acquisio, Kenshoo and Adobe which all serve their purpose for large accounts, but are still a little too hands-off for us
• Optmyzr found a nice middle-ground where we can automate general tasks, yet remain hands on for the more in-depth stuff.
Landing Page Analysis
Nice and quick insight into how well your PPC landing pages are working, based on search performance data.
• We find the “Good CTR but Low Conversion Rate” numbers helpful in identifying destination URLs that need improvement. It shows us when our ads in the ad group are engaging but not converting the relevant user.
• The High Performer section shows us pages with high conversion rate and high CTR. That allows us to apply what’s working for one page to other landing pages needing help.
Geo Heat Map
Everyone likes a good visual heat map. Optmyzr hit another triple with this feature which takes your geo data and visualizes it in a way that C-Level folks can digest during their morning elevator ride.
• Makes viewing location performance super easy • Region, city or country level • Lots of metric options to change views and get better insights • Quick way to set location bid adjustments, with visual reference • Sort and view by aggregate, campaign, or even by device and network breakout
Spend Projections
Have you ever gone over or under budget for a client with strict budget guidelines? It’s not fun. If you do it internally, it may be even worse because you can’t blame the agency. Here’s an easy solution for you.
• Quick, easy, and accurate way to stay on track for monthly budgets • Gives budget suggestions and handles the math for you • Saves you enough time to be a significant help
NEW PPC Investigator
This just mimicked what any good PPCer does on a daily basis when investigating why and how performance changed in a campaign or account. It’s truly amazing but simple at the same time.
• Example: Why did conversions drop over the last 7 days versus the previous period? • Look into impressions (less demand?) and CTR (is my ad less compelling?) • Ok, impressions were down. How is my impression share in search and display? • Ok, I lost a bunch of display share. Let’s look at what was changed and see if I can fix it. • This all happens with a few clicks and is displayed in a nice mind map or “cause chart”
Bonus
Almost all of the amazing reports and data insights can be exported in a CSV with a click of a button. This allows us to dive in even deeper and also blend it into some of our custom reports.
Studio 40 asked 21 PPC experts like Larry Kim, Chris Haleua, and John Gagnon what PPC tools they couldn’t live without. 43 tools were mentioned and I’m pleased to say that Optmyzr made the list.
Here are some of the other tools named Best PPC Tool alongside Optmyzr.
Microsoft Excel
Excel took the #1 spot, not surprising given its ability to help PPC managers crunch the numbers for large data sets. While you can’t use Optmyzr in a generic way like Excel, we have taken some of the most common data questions and turned them into Data Insight tools where we fetch the data from AdWords and Bing automatically, merge several datasets when necessary, handle the filtering and aggregation of the data, and present findings in a matter of seconds. Our Hour-of-Week analysis is a great example of how we can quickly help advertisers identify if they are missing opportunities at specific times of the week.
AdWords Editor
The AdWords Editor was the #2 tool and that makes me happy because I was on the team at Google that started the Editor project. There are some great engineers working on this tool at Google and it’s great to see that even after a decade this one still saves PPC account managers a tremendous amount of time. Saving time is also one of the core goals we have whenever we build new tools at Optmyzr because we know that good PPC professionals are in short supply so making them more efficient with their time is critical. We automate common optimization tasks through our One-Click Optimizations™, for example helping advertisers A/B test different variations of ad text, image ads, or dynamic search ads (DSA).
Google Analytics
#3 on the list is Google Analytics and I have a pretty close connection with that one too as I was on the team at Google that acquired a San Diego company that would become Google Analytics: Urchin. Wesley Chan, the Google PM who led the acquisition thought it was important to offer advertisers a better way to track the results they were getting from buying AdWords ads and analytics would help with that. Where AdWords tells advertisers how many conversions they got and how much they spent on those, Analytics gives insights into what people did on the site, helping to improve conversion rates which in turn lets advertisers bid more in AdWords.
AdWords Scripts
AdWords Scripts are #7 on the list, another one I’m very happy about as it was a big part of the reason Optmyzr got started. After leaving Google in 2012 I had been doing some AdWords consulting and I found myself short on time to do a lot of the AdWords management tasks I knew were critical to the health of accounts. One day I was having lunch with Mark Martel, a Product Marketing Manager from Google and he told me about a new technology called AdWords Scripts that hadn’t seen a lot of uptakes. I went home after lunch and started coding my first script. I then blogged about it for SearchEngineLand, was one of the first to cover the topic at a PPC conference (HeroConf Austin) and met my cofounders because they read about my script that checked for broken landing pages.
A special thanks to George Bates from Studio-40 for compiling the votes, and to Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media and Kirk Williams from ZATO Marketing for being some of our biggest supporters.
We’re excited to share that Optmyzr won the award for Best PPC Management Software at the US Search Awards in Las Vegas on October 7, 2015. Other nominees for this award were Marin Software, Adobe Media Optimizer and two time winner, Kenshoo so we’re extremely flattered to have been selected from this formidable group of solutions.
The award for best PPC Management Software was presented by our friend David Szetela, VP of Search Marketing Operations for Bruce Clay Inc. I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest on his podcast, PPC Rockstars many times.
Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys accepts the award for Best PPC Management tool from David Szetela at the 2015 US Search Awards in Las Vegas.
The judging panel for this award included 30 experts in the field of online marketing, PPC and SEO including long-time Optmyzr user Jim Banks who I had the pleasure of meeting at Pubcon last week. Jim has been doing PPC longer than almost any of us and started in 1999 and now heads up Biddable Media for Cheapflights. I find it really exciting that people who’ve been doing PPC for so long recognize there is room for innovation in the PPC management tool space.
I also have to give a special thanks to Larry Kim, founder of WordStream and Mobile Monkey for inviting us to attend the event as a guest at their table. Congrats to Larry on his well-deserved win of Search Personality of the Year.
With Larry Kim, Founder of WordStream at the US Search Awards and winner of Search Personality of the Year.
Congrats to our other friends who won at this event:
Steve Hammer, RankHammer – Best Small PPC Agency
Maddie Cary, PointIt – Young Search Professional
Marty Weintraub, AIMClear – Best Low Budget PPC Campaign & Best Use of Social Media in a Search Campaign
With Steve Hammer, winner of Best Small PPC Agency.
With Marty Weintraub, winner of several PPC awards, and Eric Enge, author of “The Art of SEO” and the guy who got Frederick to leave Google.
And congrats to the many people I know at these agencies for the wins their agencies scored:
EliteSEM – Best Large PPC Agency
MerkleRKG – Best Use of PR in a Search Campaign
PointIt – Best PPC Campaign
We are truly honored to receive this prestigious recognition for the tools we’ve created to help PPC account managers do more in less time. We had a lot of innovation in our second year and we will continue to build what our customers want so please let us know how we can make Optmyzr better!
My monthly post on PPCHero just went live this morning and I share the code for an AdWords Script you can use to pause your account if there is an issue with the site.
We already have a script that automatically checks for broken URLs and pauses the associated ads but the idea for this script is that it should also work for emergencies where the site may still be running, like when the payment processor is down and people can’t place orders. This script will help quickly stop and then resume any ad groups using the impacted domain.
If you want a free copy of the AdWords Script code, you can grab it here or you can use this tool through our Enhanced Scripts where it works on MCC accounts and where we provide ongoing support so that the script will work even when Google changes their APIs.
The way I have set up the Enhanced Script in our own AdWords account looks like this:
As you can see I took advantage of the ability to create multiple settings of any script. I created one setting that will pause ad groups when my site breaks and another to resume the ad groups as soon as the issue is resolved. I only have 1 of these active at any time!
Another important difference from most of our scripts is that I haven’t scheduled this one to run automatically. Instead, if the need arises, I will go into AdWords to manually run the script once. At that time, it will pause ad groups.
Then when the issue is resolved I will change the status of both settings so that the resume option becomes active and manually run the script again.
I hope nobody needs this script but it’s a good one to have at the ready in case a site issue happens, especially during the holidays when CPCs can skyrocket.
The Quality Score Tracker is one of our most popular tools and we’ve just given it a makeover! We’ve added several new capabilities that we’re sure you’ll love.
See historical QS at a glance
We improved how we show historical QS by including the data for the first and last date of the selected date range on all views. We now also include the highest and lowest QS values from the selected period, giving you a better understanding of how your current QS compares with historical data.
Find areas of opportunity
Our new Top Movers table shows the campaigns, ad groups, and keywords that saw the most significant change in Quality Score for the selected date range. This makes it easier to find items whose QS has slowly declined and needs to be fixed. It also shows items whose QS has improved which may provide insights about the types of optimizations that are delivering results.
Find ad texts to fix
We added the Keyword Ad Relevance subcomponent of QS to keywords and also aggregated it at the account, campaign, and ad group levels. This makes it easy to find instances where you can improve QS by improving the ad text using tools like our AB Ad Testing tool or the Ad Template Report Enhanced Script.
See only the data you need
We added a text search box so that you can quickly hone in on just the keywords, ad groups, and campaigns that contain specific text.
A big change that we made to the Quality Score Tracker was that we now include impressions from all devices (mobile, desktops, tablets) on Google search to calculate the weighted impression share. Earlier, we were only using impression data from desktops on Google search. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from mobile, you’ll may notice a change in the account, campaign and ad group level Quality Scores.
One of the features that makes Optmyzr’s tools effective is that they are data-driven. The suggestions that you see in the one-click optimizations are all based on data. While the data-driven methodology works very well for accounts that have a sizable amount of traffic, it may not show a lot of suggestions for accounts that are still growing. This is because accounts that are relatively small in size may never get enough traffic to make decisions based on statistically significant data. Keeping this in mind, we recently launched the Turbo Mode in our most popular optimizations.
What is Turbo Mode?
In the Turbo mode, our system lowers the traffic threshold required to show optimization suggestions and gives you access to a larger, less-refined data set. The idea is that you can view a larger number of suggestions and then implement your own optimization strategy on them through custom filters.
Which optimizations is the Turbo mode available in?
1. Keyword Lasso
Adding new keywords is critical to any AdWords account which is why the Keyword Lasso is probably one of our most important optimizations. When you enable the Turbo mode in this optimization, it shows you all the search terms that received traffic but are not present as keywords in your account. You can apply custom filters to these suggestions to find positive and negative keywords and then add them with a single click.
2. Non-converting keywords
Our system uses stringent parameters when recommending non-converting keywords that should be paused. We understand that many times you want to find non-converting keywords in your account early on and optimize or pause them. For this reason, we added the turbo mode to the non-converting keywords optimization. The turbo mode displays any keyword that received more than 20 clicks and did not convert during the selected date range. Some ways in which you can use the non-converting keywords optimization are mentioned below:
• Optimize or pause keywords that have not converted in the last three months and haven’t converted in the last 365 days.
• Investigate keywords that have a high CTR and high Bounce Rate because this means that the keyword is relevant to the ad but the landing page is probably not correct.
3. AB Testing for Ads
The AB Testing for ads optimization identifies winning and losing ads in each ad group. However, it requires data to be statistically significant before making a recommendation and only displays ad groups that have winning and losing ads. However, there are times when an account doesn’t have enough traffic to make a decision based on statistical significance. Or, you want to optimize your ads early on. To enable this, we launched the turbo mode in the AB Testing for Ads tool. This lets you see ads that have traffic in all ad groups and also create new ads in these ad groups.
We recently hosted a webinar about the recent changes in Quality Score with Convirza and they just posted the transcript of the Q&A we did at the end. Read it here…
If you’re interested in the topic of Quality Score and missed my 2 recent posts on this topic, here are the links:
One of the most common questions we get asked is how can Optmyzr help me or, what is Optmyzr? I’ve tried to answer these questions here.
At a high level, Optmyzr has API based Tools and Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords. This blog post gives a quick overview of the tools available to users when they sign up for an account. The tools fall under three broad categories based on which function of AdWords management they will help you with.
Data Insights
The tools under this section help you see trends and find optimization opportunities by converting rows of data into easy-to-understand visualizations. The tools that fall under this category are:
Dashboard: Quick snapshot of how your AdWords account is performing across devices and networks. Data can be aggregated by labels.
Hour of the Week: Find the best and worst-performing time-slots during the week for your AdWords campaigns.
Geo HeatMap: Find the best and worst-performing geographic areas for ads in terms of traffic, conversions and ROAS.
Performance Comparison: Compare performance of campaigns, ad groups, categories, devices and networks. Do quick post-optimization analysis.
Quality Score Tracker: Get the historical Quality Score of your account, campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Compare how Quality Score affects Avg. CPC. Get a list of ad groups that need to be optimized.
Landing Page Analysis: Find which Landing Pages in your AdWords account need to be worked on.
Search Terms Word Cloud: Get aggregate data for all the long-tail queries that get drive traffic to your AdWords account.
Spend Projection: Get an estimate of how much your account will spend using simple linear regression analysis.
One-Click Optimizations™
The tools under this section help you perform optimizations in your AdWords account with just one click. The system does all the data crunching to make intelligent recommendations. All you have to do is review and implement. The optimizations suggestions are made real-time.
One-Click Optimizations that help you optimize keywords:
Conversion Lasso: Add converting and high CTR search terms to your AdWords account. It doesn’t recommend search terms that are already present as keywords.
First Page Bridger: High-Quality Score keywords that are just below the first page bid.
Keyword De-Duper: Shows keywords that are absolute duplicates. Recommends which one to keep and pauses the rest.
Conversion Grabber: Finds high converting keywords that are losing impression share due to ad rank. Recommends selective bid increases for those keywords.
One-Word Keywords: Finds one-word keywords in broad and phrase match that are accruing cost and traffic.
Traffic Sculptor: Helps direct traffic to the right ads by recommending exact match negative keywords.
A/B Testing for Ads: Uses statistical analysis to identify the best and worst-performing ads in an ad group including image ads for display.
Display Placements Exclusion: Recommends placements to exclude based on your goal – Branding, Traffic or Conversions.
Non-converting Keywords: Identifies non-converting keywords that are driving up cost.
Hour of the Week Bidder: Set bid modifiers for different times of the week based on performance.
Shopping Bidder: Let’s you change bids for product groups in shopping campaigns with one-click. Product Groups can be selected based on ROAS.
Shopping Campaign Builder: This lets you create well-structured product groups from your Google Merchant Feed in minutes. You can manage bids and exclusions with just few clicks.
Reporting
This section has the Custom Report Designer and some other tools designed specifically for reporting on AdWords account performance. The tools under this section are:
Report Designer: This lets you create report templates for AdWords reports that can be used across accounts. You can whitelabel and schedule reports to be emailed automatically as PDF attachments. It gives you access to unique widgets like Hour of the Week, Quality Score Tracker and Geo HeatMap that are unique to Optmyzr reports. Don’t want to create a template from scratch? The section also has some pre-built templates that can be used. The icing on the cake is the ability to automatically schedule reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Instant Reports: Don’t have time to create a report template from scratch? You can use one of the instant report templates for AdWords or Google Analytics as is or customize them.
If you have questions or, need help getting started with Optmyzr, please feel free to write to us at support@optmyzr.com.
Both Google and Optmyzr launched updates to their MCC dashboards for AdWords today offering exciting new functionality. Here’s what’s new.
AdWords MCC changes
Here are the new capabilities launched in the AdWords MCC update:
Segment MCC data
Filter MCC data
Graph MCC data
See data further back than 90 days
Now you can segment the data the same way you already could in individual accounts, for example by day of week, network, device, click type, location on page (top or other), and conversion name. Here’s what that looks like when you segment the data by quarters:
You can also filter the data, for example to see just the accounts managed by a particular account manager or for a particular vertical. There are the same filters for metrics and conversion data we already know from individual AdWords accounts but here are the new filters associated with the MCC level:
You can now view any two metrics on a chart. This is cool because it works together with the filters so it’s easy to get a chart for accounts that meet particular criteria, like who is managing them.
The most subtle but possibly most important change is that you can now look at data further back than 90 days.
Optmyzr MCC changes
At Optmyzr, here’s what we updated today along with a few other recent changes to our MCC that you may have missed:
Filter data by network and device
Include Google Analytics data
Include account Quality Score data
Redesigned account picker
Birds eye view improvements
Enhanced account Cues
Faster access to the Optimizations Inbox
Before today’s updates we already offered a date range picker that can use any date range, date range comparisons, and the ability to filter data for different segments and networks. Here’s what our filters look like:
By linking your GA accounts to Optmyzr (a capability in our Pro plan), you can add goals, goal conversion rate, and e-commerce directly to the MCC dashboard where you can even use date range comparisons to get a quick view into how your results are changing.
We also offer a column that shows the account Quality Score, a metric we calculate from the keyword level QS numbers Google shows in their UI. It’s useful to track this number in the MCC dashboard to find out if all the optimization work you do is paying off in terms of improving relevancy.
Here’s the new account picker we launched. When you star accounts, you can see just those accounts in a separate view. Because every user gets to star their own accounts, this is particularly useful for teams where every person may be working on different accounts and wants to track those accounts most closely.
Our birds eye view has a new icon to make it easier to find. This view can be very useful when you quickly need to see if a change in performance is due to a one-day anomaly or part of a longer trend.
Our account Cues feature is still in whitelist beta (contact us for access) and it lets you compare each account’s recent performance against historical expectations for a set of typical KPIs that depend on the business model of each account. The cues look like red or green dots next to each account.
Here is the detail view you get when you click on the Cue:
Finally we’ve given our Optimizations Inbox a new home on the MCC dashboard. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s a great place to find out which optimizations have the most changes available for all your accounts.
We recently launched a more powerful version of the Optmyzr MCC dashboard. What makes this dashboard so powerful is that it lets you:
1. View and compare goal data from Google Analytics along with data from AdWords You can link your Google Analytics account to Optmyzr and view goal and e-commerce data alongside AdWords data. In the favorite accounts tab, you can compare this data to a different date range and see how performance has changed.
2. Add notes and labels to accounts With the Pro dashboard you can add labels and notes at the account level and these will be visible to your team members. The search box at the top will help you filter accounts by label.
3. Add more data fields like monthly budget, percentage of budget spent When managing multiple AdWords accounts it becomes difficult to see if all accounts are on track to spend the amount allocated for that period. With this feature you can specify a monthly budget for each account and then use the % Monthly Budget spent field to identify accounts that may not meet or may exceed the allocated budget. Even as a company if you’re managing multiple AdWords accounts, this feature will definitely come in handy.
4. Segment data by network and device at the account level This is one of the most powerful features of the Pro dashboard. You can use the filters on the left side of the dashboard to see how much each account is spending on a particular network and device. You can see how performance for all your accounts has changed on mobile phones.
This version of the dashboard is available to users on the Pro and Enterprise subscription plans
The two things people care most about when managing AdWords campaigns are reducing cost and increasing conversions. Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the most common questions we get asked at Optmyzr is “how can your tools help me reduce spend and increase conversions?” In this blog post, we want to highlight the top four tools in Optmyzr that can help you reduce wasted spend on AdWords instantly.
1. Non-Converting Keywords
This is a one-click optimization that finds keywords that have not converted in the last 30 days. It takes into account statistical significance of data and only recommends those keywords to be paused that have received enough traffic but haven’t converted yet. It lets you pause these keywords with a single click. To help you make an informed decision, the system includes assisted conversion data and data from Google Analytics like bounce rate and average time on site. (One-Click Optimizations -> Non-Converting Keywords)
2. Hour of the Week Bid Modifier
Scheduling your ad to not show or to run at a reduced bid during underperforming times of the week is another great way to reduce wasted spend. This methodology lets you allocate more budget to those times of the week that perform well. The Hour of the Week Bidder lets you set bid modifiers with a single click in your AdWords account. It also gives you the option to imitate a metric where you can set bid modifiers based on the trend line conversions follow during the week. (One-Click Optimization -> Hour of the Week Bid Modifier)
One good way to optimize your campaigns is to make sure you’re reaching users in the right geographic location. With the Geo HeatMap you can find locations that result in spend but no conversions and locations that have a low ROAS. (Data Insights -> Geo HeatMap)
There are two ways to use this data:
Exclude underperforming geographic locations
Split your campaigns by location and allocate more budget to better performing locations
Ads leading to 404 error pages always result in wasted spend and a bad user experience. It is difficult to keep track of landing pages that stop working. This Enhanced Script for AdWords automatically check landing pages for all active ads and automatically pauses them to stop money from being spent on wasted clicks. (Enhanced Scripts -> Check Destination URLs) Read more about how this script works
Figuring out whether an AdWords account is healthy or not can be a very time-consuming task, especially when managing multiple accounts. In the past, we added red and green arrows to show the directionality of key metrics to our MCC dashboard.
Optmyzr’s MCC dashboard shows changes in account performance using red and green arrows.
However, we found that this still didn’t help us quickly identify accounts that were in trouble because accounts with lots of green arrows could still be underperforming. So one of our engineers, Manu, got to work on figuring out how to roll up all the data into a single indicator of account health. Today we’re starting a whitelist preview of what we came up with: Account Cues.
Each account gets a color coded dot that indicates how the account is performing for its key metrics when comparing a recent period to the last 6 months of data:
Account Cues use a single color-coded dot to indicate whether an account is meeting or missing its main goals.
By clicking on the dot, you can see more data about the metrics that Cues is evaluating:
Account Cues analyzes the most important metrics for each account’s main goal.
There are five types of cues available for every account and they are based on the main goal which can be sales (conversions), leads (converted clicks), traffic (clicks), branding (impressions), or meeting a target for one metric of your choice.
For a goal like leads, we automatically analyze three related metrics: converted clicks, converted click rate, and cost per converted click. If any of these deviate more than 10% from the expected values based on six months of historical data, the account will be flagged with a red dot to draw attention to it.
Once you see that an account is not performing well, the next step is to investigate why. This can also be quite time-consuming so we tried to simplify this too with a new Data Insight called “Ask Optmyzr”. When you start with this tool you can ask a question about why key metric is either up or down for a certain date range:
Then we pull several reports in the background and present the results in an easy-to-read manner like with a cause tree:
Quickly identify the main reasons why certain AdWords metrics are changing.
The concept of this tool is that every metric depends on other underlying metrics and rather than randomly hunting in your account for things that are different we show potential causality. For example, if clicks are down like in the example above, we highlight that fact in red and show the underlying related metrics: impressions and CTR. In this case, CTR is not an issue (it’s green), so we look further down the tree to see that impressions are down because IS lost due to budget has increased dramatically. From this visualization, we can quickly determine that raising the budget and taking a look at the conversion rate of the landing pages should help restore conversions to this account.
We provide additional aggregated reporting for campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and queries to help you find the specific elements with the biggest change in the account. Finally, we combine all this data with segments like devices and networks to help you discover if any of these are contributing to the problem.
We’re excited to launch Account Health Cues and Ask Optmyzr in whitelist beta today and we can’t wait to hear your feedback about how we can improve this to make your lives easier when managing PPC accounts. If you want to try it out, just drop us a line through the support links.
I spend a lot of time talking and writing about the more humanistic elements of advertising; how to appeal to your audience in a unique and personal way, how to create a genuine connection with your visitors and so on and so forth. In our experience, there’s a lot to be said for these sorts of unquantifiable things that often get overlooked amongst the maelstrom of statistical analysis and data crunching.
Often times we need to make a judgment call that accounts for both our intuition and the immutable data our campaigns accrue.
That being said there are times when it’s important to sublimate our instinctual emotions and optimize our campaigns within the ruthlessly unforgiving framework of our historical data.
A/B split testing ad copy is one these instances.
Few, if any, of the standard optimization techniques we SEMs use will yield as consistent and predictable results as A/B split testing our ad copy. We can peel and stick keywords into new ad groups, restructure our account to work on our Quality Scores, readjust our custom bidding schedule with the hope of increasing our conversion rates – but they’re all inherently unpredictable to a certain extent. A/B split testing ad copy, when done right, will guarantee that your KPI of choice will increase (however incrementally) over time.
However, there are some important things to understand about A/B split testing ad copy that will spell the difference between your tests’ success or failure.
Setting yourself up for success in Adwords
Optmyzr provides by far the most advanced and efficient A/B split testing tools available to agencies and individual advertisers, but you need to make sure your AdWords campaigns are configured in a way that will help you run your split tests appropriately from within the Optmyzr dashboard.
By default, AdWords will optimize your ad rotation based on the ads expected to get the most clicks. This is great – if you’re lazy 🙂
If Google rotates your ads based on the ads expected to get the most clicks, you’ll generally see one or two of the ads in a given ad group getting the lion’s share of impressions and clicks. Naturally.
A/B split testing is all about getting statistically significant data across all the ads involved in any given test, so the first thing you need to do is change the ad rotation settings to rotate evenly. AdWords offers the option to rotate evenly for 90 days and then optimize, but since we’re going to be A/B split testing long after 90 days (right!?) we want to choose the “rotate indefinitely” option.
You can change this setting in the campaign setting tab. Keep in mind, since this is a setting modified at the campaign level, it will apply the rotation setting to all the ad groups in the campaign.
Developing your A/B Split Tests
Now that we’ve configured our ads to rotate evenly, we need to figure out what to test and how to test it. Based on how much data your account is generating you’re going to have to decide what type of split test you want to run.
People often confuse technical terminology, so we’ll begin by defining the difference between a multivariate (full factorial) test and an A/B test.
A/B split tests are the easiest to run and unless your landing pages are getting high volumes of daily traffic, an A/B split test is the method of choice (in my opinion at least). While many people think that A/B split testing is strictly for testing one individual variable, that’s not really the case. You can run 2 completely different ads against each other (or 3 or 4 for that matter), with different headlines, description text and display URLs, and still call it an A/B split test.
If you’re just measuring which ad performed the best, and not which individual variable performed the best, it’s an A/B test.
A multivariate test is when you seek to learn which individual variable performed the best. In other words, if you were testing 4 different variables (headline, description line 1, description line 2 and display URL), you would need to write 16 different ads (all possible combinations) in order to see which combination of variables worked the best. For most accounts, multivariate tests sound great in theory but don’t work so effectively in practice. In order to determine a winning ad, you need statistically significant data. Most accounts aren’t getting the kind of volume to make multivariate tests worth the time and effort.
So for our sake, let’s go back and talk a little more about A/B split tests.
I strongly recommend running single variable A/B split tests whenever possible (and let’s face it … it’s always possible). When you run 2 ads alongside each other testing just one variable, you know what element in the ad accounted for the better (or worse) performance.
For example, say you decided to run an A/B test on 2 different ad headline ideas. You’re a high end self-publishing company and you thought it may be a good idea to include your minimum order price in your ad headline to help dissuade people looking for cheap solutions from clicking on your ad. So you write two identical ads and only change the ad headline in one of them to include your minimum order price. When the statistically significant (more on that soon) results are in, you’ll know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was the change in the ad headline that accounted for the difference in performance.
If for example you also changed the description lines of the ad to something other than the identical copy of the other ad in the ad group, you won’t know if it was the headline or the description or a combination of the two that accounted for the difference in performance.
Like we said, that would still be considered a valid A/B split test since we know one of the ads statistically outperformed the other ad, but we won’t know exactly which element of the ad should get the credit.
That being said, there are times a multivariable A/B split test is really useful. If you’re running a new ad group and you have two completely separate ideas that are thematically dissimilar, running two completely separate ads in an A/B test to determine which direction you should take for future tests could be a really useful strategy to use.
Let’s go back to our previous example of your high-end self-publishing company. You’re not sure whether highlighting the speed and quality of your service or the professionalism and experience of your editorial staff would make for a better ad. These are two separate ideas, and with the allotted ad space you can’t cover both aspects of the business. In this case, it may be a good idea to run a multivariable A/B test with one ad focusing primarily on the speed and quality and another ad focusing primarily on the editorial staff. You’re not testing any one variable like a headline, but rather a concept as a whole. Once your test determines which ad is more appealing (based on the KPI you choose to measure by – more on that soon) you can then dive into single variable A/B tests to further refine your copy and consistently increase performance.
For the sake of not getting stuck in a rut of stagnation and complacency, it’s always a good idea to periodically test new multivariable “concept” ads to try and find new ideas that you haven’t explored in the past.
Now that we know the sort of test we want to run, what do we actually test? You’ll probably get five different answers to this question if you ask five different people, so I’ll just tell you what we’ve found from the hundreds of accounts we’ve managed over the past few years.
Start with A/B testing ad headlines. When testing one variable like a headline, I generally aim to write four variations – which of course would give us four separate ads in an ad group. If you’re getting fewer than 75-100 clicks daily for any given ad group, consider writing 2-3 ads instead.
Your headline is not only the first element of your ad read by a user; it is often the only part of the ad that gets attention. If someone sees an ad headline they really like, they’ll often click the ad without reading the rest of what you have to say for yourself. Conversely, if the headline turns them off or isn’t precisely what they’re looking for, they’ll likely pass you on and move to the next ad on the page.
There’s a lot of information to swallow on a search engine results page, and people just don’t have the time or mental fortitude to read and analyze every line of every ad and organic result. It’s not something we advertisers like (after putting so much work into every character of our precious ads) but it’s the cold reality we have to eventually come to terms with. So in fewer words, test your headlines first. I hope most people would agree with that.
Following our logic, test your description lines of text next. Whether you test one line at a time or both lines of description text in one shot depends on your preference and the type of ad you’re writing (is there a distinct thought on each line or are both lines one long message?).
It’s a good idea to test your display URLs since the historical CTR of your display URLs plays a role in your Quality Score. Don’t expect to see dramatic results from an A/B test on display URLs (if there’s one part of your ad someone won’t read, it is the display URL), but test them anyway for the sake of Quality Score and for the sake of doing your job right.
What specifically to test is a longer discussion for another time but I try to always think of the products and services we’re advertising more in the context of their emotional benefits to the customer and less in the context of their features. Nobody buys a vacuum because they want a vacuum; they buy a vacuum because they want a clean room. We’ve seen some extraordinary A/B test results testing features VS. benefits (“bag-less and compact!” VS. “a home as clean as you after a long hot shower!”), and in almost every case, highlighting benefits and emotional payoffs always produce better results.
Also consider the idea of what I like to call qualifiers. Qualifying your clicks by including prices in your ads is one way of dissuading undesirable clicks from people whose traffic you don’t want to pay for.
A/B testing landing pages is also something that is highly effective, but with the advent of complex A/B landing page tools and software it has become an industry unto itself and need not conflict with your ad copy A/B split tests.
I’d be remiss to not mention the idea of testing your call to action. Of course, you have a call to action (right!?), and it’s a great idea to test different CTA’s to see which ones capture the attention of your audience the most effectively.
Now that we know how and what to test, let’s take a look at how we measure and define the results of our tests.
Statistical significance
If we didn’t have a tool like Optmyzr, the next few paragraphs would probably (definitely) bore you half to death. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather watch paint dry than talk, write or listen to anything that had to do with coefficients, correlations and the holy grail of statistical measurements – p values.
Luckily for all of us, Optmyzr does all that work for us. But just for the sake of our intellectual well-being, a quick word on p values.
In a statistical test, a p value tells us how significant, or scientifically interesting, our results are. We may find that headline A had a higher CTR than headline B, but how confident can we be that we’d see the same results if we ran the same test again? And again after that?
Our p values (also referred to as our confidence interval) tell us how confident we can be that we’d see the same results repeated, or in other words how reliable our findings were. A p value is just a number outputted by the statistical equations used to calculate the correlation between our variables, and depending on the field of study, different p values represent different thresholds of acceptability.
In the medical profession, when the results of a test can quite literally inform a surgeon on a life and death decision, a p value of less than .01 is required to determine reliability. For AdWords, a slightly less precarious area of study, we could assume that a p value of less than .05 is perfectly acceptable. In fact, in the social sciences p<.05 is the benchmark for reliability.
At this point you’re probably thinking if you never hear the words p value again it would be too soon. Amen to that, brother. I promise, it’s going to be lots of colorful pictures from here on out.
Since this isn’t a beginner’s Optmyzr tutorial, I’m going to assume basic working knowledge of the Optmyzr dashboard.
So we’ve configured and launched our split test, and now we want to see if we have enough statistically significant data to pick our winners.
Navigate over to the A/B testing for ads under the one click optimizations dropdown in Optmyzr.
Before we analyze our results, we’ll want to take a look at the settings Optmyzr allows us to configure.
Remember p values? That’s what OPTMYZR is referring to with Required Confidence. By default it’s set to 95% (p<.05) and that’s a good place for it to stay. You can also filter your results by Ad Type, Network, Minimum Impressions Per Ad and the Date Range.
The important option to look at here is the Parameter options list. As you can see from the first image, Optmyzr sets our parameter to CTR by default. This means that the statistical analysis will look at CTR as our key performance indicator of choice to determine the winning ad. As you can see from the green and red highlights in the CTR column, CTR is the metric being “studied” in this test.
You can also choose to run the A/B test results using conversion rate and conversions per impression as your metric of choice.
In order to determine which parameter you should use depends on the strategy behind the ad groups you’re testing ads in. If you’re running a broader, loosely targeted campaign to drive traffic to your site so you could build your remarketing audiences or your brand awareness, CTR may very well be the metric of choice for you. If your campaign is designed to drive profit and a positive ROI, then you may want to analyze your ad performance in the context of conversion rate.
Because the campaign we’re looking at here is a branding campaign, I care primarily about visitors to the site – so I’ll keep CTR as our metric of choice.
So for this A/B test we’re testing two different headlines. Based on a confidence level of 95%, Optmyzr outputs a winning ad using CTR as our metric of choice.
But can you spot something wrong?
The winning ad has a much higher volume of clicks and impressions as the losing ad. This is because the ads in this ad group were not set to rotate indefinitely and Google was giving preference to the ad expected to get more clicks. While the test results are still statistically significant, we want our data to be more equal when it comes to the volume of clicks and impressions.
Let’s hop over to another account to see what a proper A/B test should look like.
In this example, we ran a multivariable A/B test on two different overall ad concepts. Even though the winning ad still has quite a few more clicks than the loser, the losing ad has enough volume to lend real validity to the results of this test.
Notice another thing. Even though my parameter of choice over here is still CTR, Optmyzr graciously lets us know if another one of the metrics also matches up with statistical significance at our desired confidence interval. In this example, the winning ad also has a statistically significant higher Conversion per Impression rate than the losing ad. Good to know!
If you run into instances when one ad wins on CTR but loses on conversion rate, you need to seriously think about the campaign strategy and decide which metric to base your optimizations off of.
If you haven’t fallen in love with Optmyzr, you will now!
Not only does Optmyzr make it incredibly easy (and a little fun) to run AB split tests results across an entire account in one shot, Optmyzr also allows you to pause the losing ads from each split test with the click of a button.
By default, Optmyzr selects all the losing ads across all the ad groups and A/B tests that had statistically significant results within your defined parameters.
If you’re satisfied with the results, you can click the blue “Pause Selected Ads” button in the upper right hand corner and the losing ads will be paused inside your live AdWords account. Seriously, how cool is that?
But now that you’ve paused one of the ads, you want to write a new ad in its place so you could run another A/B test. Optmyzr has another incredibly useful tool that allows you to do just that without leaving the dashboard.
By clicking the “Create Ad” button in the upper right hand corner of an ad group’s section, Optmyzr presents you with a dialogue box that will allow you write a new ad and publish it live in the ad group you selected. Even cooler, Optmyzr gives you suggestions for each element of the text ad based on results from historical data and previous A/B tests run in the account.
As you can see, OPTMYZR offers a completely thorough solution to do A/B split testing in an easy, aesthetically simple and intuitive way.
The best way to get a sense of how it works is to just go in there and mess around with the different parameters. Once you get the hang of it, running what would otherwise have been complex analysis will take you a couple minutes.
Conclusion
A/B split testing ad copy gets overlooked even though it’s one of the most reliable and effective forms of optimization. Because of its inherent complexities and ambiguities, we sort of just gloss over it picking and choosing winning ad copy based more on our intuition than on statistically sound results.
Optmyzr’s A/B split testing tool really changes that for a lot of people by simplifying a complex task and making it incredibly easy and hassle-free to perform regularly and effectively.
Even though we rely heavily on statistical evidence with A/B tests, it’s crucial to express your creative voice and use your intuitive sense to determine what, where and how to test. By combining your unique personality and some good statistical analysis, you’ll be A/B testing like a pro.
Again, it’s easy to get complacent in a certain holding pattern with A/B tests, so remind yourself once every couple months (or weeks) to go back to the drawing board and test some new “concept” ads.
If you have any interesting data on A/B tests you’ve run in the past, I’d love to hear about them. Of course, any comments or questions are more than welcome (leave them below), and I’ll be sure to get back to you.
If you’ve made it all the way down here, I really appreciate you taking the time to read this post. Looking forward to next time …
Happy Testing!
Learn more about how I manage AdWords accounts at Adventure PPC.
With 2014 now well behind us, I wanted to give a quick round-up of Optmyzr’s most popular media coverage. A lot of these are evergreen content that should be helpful for anyone looking to learn a bit more about how to be more effective at managing AdWords.
I used BuzzSumo to discover the most shared content on the internet related to AdWords last year and that showed that one of our articles on SEL was the 13th most shared post of the year, not bad considering it’s competing with Google’s own product announcement blog. These 10 Analytics Reports Will Improve Your AdWords Results. I also delivered this content during a Google Partners Hangout On Air: Use Google Analytics to Improve AdWords Performance.
We also picked up some coverage related to the ever-popular topic of Quality Score. According to BuzzSumo, it was only the 50th most shared AdWords content, but it’s a good read if you’re trying to make sense of how Quality Score works: Quality Score’s Impact on Ad Rank and CPC.
Our product launches got some nice mentions in various publications, but we’re always happy to see them mentioned by dedicated SEM practitioners like here:
We recently launched a lot of new features to make Optmyzr’s reporting platform even more powerful.
Report Navigator
We added the Report Navigator feature to the report view. This lets you click on any section of the report and scroll to it instantly. The names of the sections are the title widgets that are used in the report. With this feature, the interactive reports have become even more powerful. Try it out and let us know what you think!
Image Widget
Now you can insert images up to 1 MB in size in your report templates. These images can be charts or screenshots that you would like to share as part of the report. The widget accepts image file formats like jpeg and png.
We recently added more functionality to the logo feature in the Report Designer that makes the report templates easier to use across accounts. You can now save logos separately at the AdWords account and report template level. If there is a logo at the account level, it will override the default template logo if any. For example, as an agency, you can save your company’s logo at the template level and the customer logo at the AdWords account level.
The Keyword Lasso one-click optimization is one of the most used optimizations in our suite of tools. It analyzes the AdWords search terms report and makes recommendations on which search terms should be added as keywords based on performance. We’ve added a lot of new features to this optimization to make it even more powerful. Details below:
Adding search terms as negative or positive keywords
Now you can add search terms from the Keyword Lasso as either negative or positive keywords to your AdWords account. If you find a search term that you don’t want to show on, add it as a negative. When the match type for a keyword is set to negative, the row is highlighted in red to help you separate the negative keywords from the positive keywords visually. When you click on ‘Add Selected Keywords to Account’ the system adds both the negative and positive keywords together.
Broad Match Modifier as a match type
In AdWords, to add a keyword as a broad match modifier (BMM) you need to manually type in the ‘+’ symbol in front of each word. In the Keyword Lasso it is present as a different match type and selecting it will automaticaly insert ‘+’ symbols in the keyword. You can see and edit the keyword before adding it as well.
In-line editing of search terms
Sometimes you want to edit search terms before adding them to your AdWords account. This is especially true when you’re adding negative keywords. Now when you click on the search term in Keyword Lasso, it becomes an editable text box. Also, you can see all edited keywords highlighted in Yellow in the Optmyzr interface.
Add search terms to different campaigns and ad groups
When you’re following a specific account structure you may not want to add the suggested search terms in the ad group they were triggered in. The ‘Advanced Mode’ in Keyword Lasso lets you do this. You can switch to the advanced mode by clicking the ‘Toggle Advanced Mode’ button at the top right corner in Keyword Lasso. This will show you additional options to pick the campaign and ad group you want to add the search terms to and clicking ‘Move’ will show you the search term under the new campaign and ad group in the interface. When you click ‘Add selected keywords to account’ it will add them to your AdWords account.
Keyword Notes
The search terms report also gives you ideas for new ad group themes and negative keywords. Now you can make a note of search terms that can be themes for new ad groups or negative keywords by clicking on the icon displayed when you hover over the search term. After you’re done, export the list as a csv.
Removing underperforming ads is one part of testing ad text in an AdWords account. The other part of the process is to create new ads so you can continue testing new ad copy. Optmyzr’s AB Testing For Ads optimization already lets you remove underperforming ads with one click. Creating ads in this optimization was a long standing request from our users and we’re happy to announce that this feature is now available!
You can now instantly create ads in ad groups from which you remove underperforming ads. What takes this feature to the next level is that the system automatically recommends high performing headlines, description lines and display URLs to choose from. This makes creating new ads efficient and easy.
Step 1
In the AB Testing for ads optimization, all ad groups that have underperforming ads are displayed. There is a button above the results to create ads in each ad group.
Step 2
Clicking on ‘Create Ad’ will open up an easy-to-use interface that will let you create ads in the ad group. When you click on each component (headline, description lines) of the ad, the system automatically shows you the best performing options. You can either choose from the options displayed or write your own text.
Step 3
Clicking on ‘Create Ad’ in the ad creation window will upload the ad instantly to your AdWords account. You’ll see a message that it has been successfully uploaded at the bottom of the window. In case there is an error and AdWords rejects the ad, the system will let you know that the ad was not uploaded. You can continue to create additional ad variations in the same window and upload the ads in your AdWords account.
Try out this feature in the AB Testing for Ads Optimization here.
In 2013, Optmyzr was one of the first companies to create AdWords Scripts for advertisers who were looking for more efficient ways to manage their accounts. As the capabilities of AdWords Scripts grew and advertisers started using them in more accounts, we saw some interesting ways they could be made easier to use for the average non-technical marketer.
Today, I am very excited to launch what the team and I have built: Enhanced Scripts™, a whole new way to use AdWords Scripts without ever touching a single line of code. Here are some of the key features:
Maintain Script settings on the Optmyzr website instead of in the code.
Enhanced Scripts for AdWords make it easy for non-programmers to use powerful AdWords reports and automations using AdWords Scripts.
Get all Script output directly in Optmyzr
Get all the output from AdWords Scripts directly in your Optmyzr account with Enhanced Scripts.
Copy-and-paste the code once and never touch it again.
Copy-and-paste the code once. After that it never changes but you can still modify what the script does by changing the settings in Optmyzr.
Demo video
Script example: Create Ads from a Google Spreadsheet
To showcase the capabilities of Enhanced Scripts™, we took our most popular regular script and turned it into an Enhanced Script™. This script creates ads from a Google spreadsheet, making it easy to maintain a large account where the ad groups, ads, and keywords are constantly changing based on inventory.
Here’s a video that illustrates how this specific Enhanced Script™ works.
Static AdWords reports limit the amount of information you can include or, you run the risk of including so much data that the reports become overwhelming. We recently launched a new way to share reports that makes them interactive. You can now generate a link to the report and share it with users.
The report is no longer static as in a PDF and you can hover over charts and graphs to see data points. For example, if you notice a sudden drop in clicks on a particular day you can hover over that particular point and see the exact number without having to log in to your AdWords account.
Instant data gratification: Hover over charts to see actual data at different points without having to log in to your AdWords account Get more granular data: Zoom in to widgets to go a level deeper. For example, if the Geo HeatMap in your report is at the country level, this format will let you zoom in and see data at the city level without having to generate another report.
Steps to generate a link for the report:
Click on the report you want to generate a link for on this page in your Optmyzr account.
In the report, select Create Link from the Report Actions drop down.
Copy and share the link.
Tip: You can use the Share a Link option with the new commenting feature we launched. Using the two features together will let you share a link to the report with your comments.
After creating AdWords reports, account managers spend a lot of time adding observations that help their customers make sense of the data. We understand that the commentary that goes with the reports is as important as the reports themselves. To make this easy for our users, we’ve added a comment feature to reports. You can now add comments to reports after they have been generated and then download the report as a PDF, email it or share a link with the comments intact.
How is this feature different from the text widget in the report designer?
The text widget lets you add text while creating the report in the report designer. This works when you want to include text that will remain consistent each time the report is generated. To record observations that are specific to a particular month or week, the comments feature is more useful because the comments don’t become part of the report template. They are specific to that report and you don’t have to edit the template each time.
To use this feature, follow these steps:
1. Click on the report you want to add comments to on this page in your Optmyzr account
2. In the report, hover on top of any widget and it’ll show you a highlighted box to add comments
3. After adding comments, download the report as a PDF, email it as a PDF or, share a link to the report
We’re adding a feature that will let you save the reports with comments in your Optmyzr account. You can edit the comments later or, maintain a history of your observations for future reference.
This feature is available in the Pro and Enterprise plans. Also, available on the old Gold plan.
It can be quite tedious to manage multiple AdWords accounts and stay on top of them all the time. In this post we want to highlight features and tools in Optmyzr that are designed to help you manage multiple AdWords accounts more efficiently.
MCC account dashboard
In your MCC account in AdWords, you can get a list of accounts and can see metrics over a given period of time. However, figuring out which account needs your attention is entirely up to you. The new MCC account dashboard from Optmyzr helps with this. It lets you see how the performance of your favorite AdWords accounts has changed over two periods of time. This instantly tells you which accounts had the biggest drops and need immediate investigation. You can also compare performance to the same period last year to see if it is a seasonal trend.
Add accounts to favorites by clicking on the star next to the account name
Select which metrics you want to see from ‘Choose Columns’
Select the date range to compare
Hover over the account name to see a birds eye view of performance
Optimization inbox
Don’t know which AdWords accounts to start optimizing? The Optimization Inbox gives a quick snapshot of the number of optimization suggestions available in each AdWords account. You can filter and sort data by account name, the type of optimization (keywords or bids), number of suggestions and the last time an optimization was implemented in the account. A great way to prioritize your work week and save time.
Favorite report templates
You can favorite the most frequently used report templates for each AdWords account in Optmyzr. The advantage is that they show up at the top under favorite templates and you can get to them without sifting through a huge list. Also, the rest of the templates are available at the bottom of the page in case you need to use or replicate one for an account. You can schedule weekly/monthly reports to be emailed automatically, download a PDF or, share a link to an interactive report.
One of the first tools built by Optmyzr was a Quality Score Tracker that lets you to see your account level quality score, and track historical quality scores of individual keywords.
One of the more recent tools that we built, and one that I was specifically responsible for, is the multi-client center (MCC) dashboard, where advertisers can get a quick view of all of their accounts, including recent stats as well as trends.
I’m excited to announce that we’ve just merged these two capabilities: now you can see account level quality score directly on the MCC dashboard. Not only can you see the current quality score for the account, but you can also see how it has changed from one period to the next.
See the account-level Quality Score for all the AdWords accounts you manage on a single page
See the percent change of the account-level Quality Scores for all your accounts on one screen.
One of the highlights of Optmyzr’s report designer is that you have the option to include multiple date ranges in the same report. For example, when creating a monthly performance report you can include a graph to show how account performance has changed over the last six months. In the same report, you can include data broken down by day for the month.
To make it easier to show data for long periods of time, we updated the Time-wise trends chart (earlier daily trends chart) to include an option to specify the time interval. Now you can choose the level at which you want to show the data in the chart – daily, monthly, weekly.
Sometimes data at the daily level can be too noisy to show trends or performance over a longer period of time like three or six months. In this case choosing the option to show data at weekly or monthly level helps.
This is how the different intervals will show up on the chart
If you’ve read any of my blog posts about AdWords Quality Score (QS) or seen any of my presentations at SMX, SES, or PubCon, you should already be familiar with the importance of the AdWords account-level QS. It’s Google’s measure of how relevant the keywords in an account typically are and it’s a major factor in determining how much an advertiser has to pay to get new keywords started in their account.
An account with great account-level QS has to pay a lower CPC than if it had poor QS to get the same ad rank for a new keyword. As soon as the new keyword has enough CTR data to establish its relevance, the account-level QS factor becomes far less important.
The thing is that Google has never disclosed what the account’s QS is… until now! I just received a booklet from the Google Partners team with data for a few accounts that are under my MCC and while it’s so subtle I originally didn’t notice it, there is an account Quality Score published for each account!
So I immediately went to our Optmyzr Quality Score Tracker to see how Google’s numbers compare to the ones we’ve been calculating and reporting to our customers for nearly a year now. The good news is that they match up very closely. We are somewhat limited in how we can calculate the QS number but it seems our formula is pretty close to the one Google uses and for all accounts I checked, we were within 1 point of what Google said. Because Google rounds to an integer and their number is for the entire quarter, that’s as close as I think we could get.
Google Partners started to report the account Quality Score in a booklet they send agencies.
Doing an AdWords account audit essentially means using data to get a quick snapshot of where the account stands and what are the optimization opportunities. In this blog post, we’ll give you an account audit checklist that you can follow using Optmyzr’s tools.
Use Cases for an Account Audit
Taking on a new customer: As an agency when you’re taking on a new account it helps to know how much work the account requires. It is also a great way to give that extra piece of information that shows that you’ve gone the extra mile to analyze the account.
Keeping existing clients happy: While it’s important to get new clients on board it is equally important to keep existing clients happy. Account audits help keep a tab on account performance as well as create a road map for the next few months.
Quarterly audits: As an advertiser, it is important to know how your AdWords account is performing and which parts of an AdWords account need to be worked on. It helps isolate and prioritize which areas of an account need to be optimized.
Audit Checklist – The questions to ask
Step 1: Is the account using all the latest features and best practices?
Network targeting – Does it have separate campaigns for search and display? If not, splitting out the campaigns is a good optimization suggestion.
Account structure – Does it have too many keywords per ad group? Having too many keywords in an ad group makes the ads in the ad group less relevant to each of the keywords. It dilutes the keyword-ad text relevance which affects Quality Score.
Conversion Tracking – Does the account have conversion tracking set up? If the sales and leads in an AdWords account are not being tracked you can’t accurately measure ROI.
Remarketing – Does the account have remarketing lists? If yes, does it have at least one campaign targeting those lists?
Is the Quality Score of the account good?
The Quality Score Tracker gives you the current Quality Score of the account. Since this is weighted by impressions it will give you an idea of the general QS of the keywords that get the most traffic.
Also, look at the distribution of keywords by Quality Score. If most keywords have a QS of less than five, the account can benefit from a Quality Score optimization. This also lists the number of keywords that are getting traffic giving you an idea of the size of the account.
In the Quality Score Tracker, the list of ad groups to optimize tells you which ad groups need immediate QS optimization.
Step 2: Are the keywords in the account well structured?
Tools used: Optimization Dashboard
A quick view at the Optimization dashboard will give you an idea of the kind of optimizations the keywords in the account require. For example, the keyword de-duper tell you if there are duplicate keywords in the account that are competing against each other?
You don’t need to run the optimizations as the approximate number of suggestions are mentioned next to each optimization technique. This gives an idea of the opportunity in the account.
Step 3: Segmentation Analysis – Get more granular with the data
Are there day-parting opportunities?
Tools used: Hour of the Week
Different times of the day work for different products. The Hour of the Week tool tells you which time slots are not driving conversions or leads and it would be better to schedule your ads to not run during that time.
You can also compare Search Impression Share and Conversion Rate to find the best converting time slots and increase bids during the time that has low impression share but high conversion rate.
Are bid modifiers set up correctly? Tools Used: Dashboard
With enhanced campaigns becoming the norm ads show on all devices – desktops, tablets and mobile. One way to optimize for devices is to set bid modifiers. You can segment data and see how the account is performing on mobile vs. desktops to decide whether bid modifiers will help improve performance. For example, on the dashboard compare the percentage of spend on mobile with the percentage of conversions to get an idea of the cost/conversion on mobile.
Are there opportunities to optimize by geography? Tools used: Geo HeatMap
In the Geo HeatMap, take a look at the return on ad spend (ROAS) data broken down by city to find cities that have a higher return on investment. Based on this, you can recommend increasing bids for geographies that have a higher ROAS. Even having this insight into how campaigns are performing by location is beneficial.
Also, make sure that the account is getting data from the right geographies. For example, if you notice a lot of clicks coming from a country/city that has zero conversions then it may be a good idea to either exclude that geography or, create a separate campaign and optimize for it.
Step 4: Trends
Is the account headed in the right direction? Tools used: Performance Comparison
Doing a quick before and after comparison of data for the last 30 days or quarter can tell you if the account is growing or not. You can also go into details and see which metrics are growing and which ones are dropping. For example, if conversions have dropped and clicks have increased then it may be a good idea to see if the landing page or conversion process has changed.
Are the different segments and networks trending in the right direction? Tools used: Performance Comparison
You can also see which segment or device has had the maximum change in traffic and conversions using the Performance Comparison Tool. For example, it is possible that conversion on desktops actually increased but the overall number is showing a drop because conversions on mobile dropped drastically.
These comparisons can be done with one-click in a single report using the pre-built audit templates in your Optmyzr account.
Don’t have time to read the entire post? Watch Frederick Vallaeys walk you through this audit process in here.
One-Click Optimizations are automated, time-saving and easy to implement. When things are automated and don’t take much time, we sometimes tend to do overdo them 🙂
In this post, we’ve given suggestions on how often should you run each of the One-Click Optimizations. The time interval between optimizations may vary for different accounts depending on size and traffic. The suggested times are only directional.
Keyword Lasso
This optimization suggests adding search queries that converted/performed well as keywords to your account. The Keyword Lasso does take into account traffic when suggesting search terms that should be added to an AdWords account. Should you be running this everyday? Probably not. Traffic from just one day is not enough to make a decision on whether you should add a search term as a keyword even if the search term converted. You could end up adding a lot of keywords that just converted once.
Suggested time interval: 7 – 14 days.
The time interval also depends on how much traffic you get on average. You could be getting 100K impressions a day or, just 100 impressions.
Keyword De-duper
This optimization removes keywords that are absolute duplicates (same match type, same targeting etc.) and compete against each other. This is particularly useful when adding keywords in bulk.
Suggested time interval: 14 days (If you add keywords every day, then run it more often.)
First Page Bridger
This optimization finds keywords with a good Quality Score that have bids that are just below the first-page bid and can benefit from a slight bid increase. There is no point running this optimization every day because it will keep increasing bids unnecessarily for the same keywords. Wait for at least 7 days after a bid increase to see performance.
Suggested time interval: 7 -14 days
Keyword Sculptor
This optimization ensures that the right ad shows for each search query by adding exact match negative keywords at the ad group level. Google sometimes broad or phrase matches search queries to keywords in an account even though the search query exists as a keyword in the account. You can run this report as often as you want but you may not get results if you run it every day.
Suggested time interval: At least once in 30 days
Have questions? Write to us at support@optmyzr.com, we’d love to hear from you!
This optimization automatically suggests converting/high-performing search terms that should be added as keywords in the account. This helps drive more sales and relevant traffic by pairing the search terms with the right ads and bids in the form of keywords.
It is difficult to add all possible keyword variations to a campaign when it is built out. The search terms report is a good way to find new keywords to add to your account because they are already validated. You can see how the search term is performing before adding it. The advantage of adding search terms as keywords is that you have more control over the ad with which it shows, and you can set a different bid than the keyword that triggered it. The probability that your ad will show more often for that search term increases when it is added as a keyword.
How does the Conversion Lasso help?
Optmyzr’s Conversion Lasso analyzes the search terms report from AdWords to suggest new keywords that should be added to your account. We go through the entire list of search terms, do the number crunching, apply logic and only suggest the search terms we think would be good to add as keywords. These are search terms that have good conversion or clickthrough rate (CTR) statistics. By default, the match type in which the search term will be added is set to phrase but you can change it to broad or exact as well.
When keywords don’t appear on the first page of search results, you’re losing out on a lot of potential traffic. The First Page Bridger identifies keywords that are just shy of making the first page with your current bids. With just a small increase in the bid, they’ll catch the train to more impressions rather than fall in the gap where they’ll be relegated to second-page oblivion.
Google assigns the first-page bid to each keyword. This bid is an estimate of the amount you need to bid to show up on the first page. It is not the same for all keywords or, even for the same keyword across accounts. It is calculated based on Quality Score and competition. The required first-page bid is relatively low for keywords with a good Quality Score. However, in competitive and saturated markets, you’ll find high first page bids for keywords with good Quality Scores (7- 10) as well.
The first-page bid is directional. It is the minimum required bid to show on the first page of search results. It doesn’t guarantee a high position.
Why is it important to show on the first page of search results?
Ad space on the first page of search results is prime real estate as most users don’t go beyond the first page when they are looking for something. Keywords showing on the first page of search results always get more traffic.
How to decide which keywords should be above the first-page bid?
This really depends on your budget and how important a keyword is to your business. If you have the budget, you can keep all your keywords above the first-page bid. However, if you have to choose, we recommend segmenting keywords into three sections based on impact and the required bid increase to meet the first page requirements. The easiest way to create these segments is by using tangible data. We recommend increasing bids for the first section of keywords.
Minimum increase, maximum impact: Keywords with a high Quality Score (7 – 10) and current bid just slightly (10 – 20%) below the first-page bid.
Medium increase, high impact: Keywords with a Quality Score between 5 to 6 and current bid 20 – 40% below the first page bid.
Maximum increase least impact: Keywords with a Quality Score lower than 5 and current bid 40%+ below the first-page bid.
How does Optmyzr help?
Our system analyzes performance data for each keyword and gives you a list of keywords that will have the highest impact with a minimum bid increase. You can choose to increase the bid to the first-page bid or, to a % slightly higher than the first-page bid for these keywords. The keywords the system recommends already have a good Quality Score and just need a little push in terms of bids. Increasing bids for these keywords gives them a chance to perform and can help get more traffic and sales. It is sometimes difficult to spot these keywords because they get ‘buried’ in the list of keywords that have bids below the required first-page bid. You can review and implement bid changes with just a click from within the Optmyzr interface.
Duplicate keywords in an AdWords account compete with each other and traffic gets divided. Optmyzr’s Keyword De-duper finds duplicate keywords in your account, analyzes their performance and suggests which keywords should remain active and which ones should be paused.
What is a duplicate keyword?
A keyword that is present more than once in an AdWords account with the exact same targeting settings (network and geography) and the same match type is a duplicate keyword. If you have the same keyword targeting different countries/regions, it is not a duplicate because they don’t compete.
Why should you remove duplicate keywords?
Duplicate keywords in an AdWords account end up competing with each other. At a given point in time, the AdWords system will choose one keyword from the duplicate keywords to enter in the ad auction. The system makes the choice based on bids, relevancy, Quality Score etc. The traffic between duplicate keywords gets divided which affects performance and you may not have substantial data for one keyword. Sometimes none of the keywords get enough data to determine whether they are performing well or not.
How to find duplicate keywords?
You can use AdWords Editor to find duplicate keywords. However, in AdWords Editor, you’ll just get a list of duplicates and you have to manually check if they are actually duplicates. Even keywords in campaigns targeting different countries and networks will figure in this list. Also, you’ll have to do the analysis to choose which one is performing better and which duplicate keyword should be kept.
Optmyzr Smart Select for duplicate keywords
This feature in Optmyzr ensures that only keywords that are absolute duplicates – same network targeting and same match type are reviewed. It automatically selects the best performing keyword based on a number of factors like conversions, CTR, Quality Score and traffic. All you need to do is review the list and implement the changes.
Traffic Sculptor ensures that the right ads show for each search query in an AdWords account.
Sometimes Google shows an ad that is less closely related to the query because it preferred to match to a keyword that has a higher rank, usually because of a high bid. This is undesirable because there is a better ad in your account for this query so we use traffic sculpting techniques to make sure we show the best ad for the search query every time.
For example, as shown below, there are two keywords with different ads in two different ad groups in an AdWords account.
Ad Group1/Keyword 1: Women’s Black Shoes
Ad 1: Women’s Black Shoes. Great Collection Starts At $30. Get 5% Cash Back. Order Today! www.abcbuy.com/BlackShoes
AdGroup2/Keyword 2: Buy Shoes
Ad 2: Buy Shoes & Bags Great Collection Of Leather Bags & Shoes. Free Shipping. Order Today! www.abcbuy.com
Search Query: Buy Women’s Black Shoes
In the above example, even though the first keyword and ad text are more relevant to the search query, Google can choose to match the search query to the second keyword and show the less relevant ad text because the ad rank due to the keyword bid may be higher for the second keyword.
The Traffic Sculptor ensures that traffic gets directed to the right ads by adding exact match negative keywords at the ad group level.
The negative keyword suggestions you see in the Traffic Sculptor look very relevant for your account. So why do we recommend these as negative keywords? That’s because you already have these keywords in your ad groups but Google has not always used these when a user searched for one of these keywords. Rather than showing the ad you want, they display another ad from your account because it has a better ad rank (often because it has a higher bid). By adding these keywords as negative exact matches, it forces Google to show the ads you want rather than the ones that rank higher but are potentially less relevant.
Search queries are still the primary source of traffic for search campaigns, so it’s important to monitor the ones your ads show for so you can remove irrelevant ones (add them as negative keywords). It’s also a good idea to add high-performing search queries as keywords because you can write more specific ads for them.
Optimizing to increase Quality Score is one way to reduce your CPA and increase ROAS. Even though Google is automatically setting your bids in the auction, a high Quality Score requires a lower bid.
This isn’t about setting bid adjustments for different times of the week; your automated bidding strategy already does that. We’re talking about allocating campaign budgets to the more lucrative times of day by turning your ads off when they’re not profitable, making it something of a budget optimization.
Pause keywords that have not converted in a long time but have accrued significant cost. This optimization should only be done if you aren’t running on last click attribution. Otherwise, you’ll pause top-of-funnel keywords and eventually reduce conversions.
You did budget optimizations before automated bidding, and you should continue to do them now. Reallocating budgets across campaigns based on performance helps improve overall account ROAS.
If you’re running on the standard automated bidding strategy (target CPA and target ROAS), you can tweak targets at the ad group level. There are two instances where I’d recommend doing this:
Ad text automation is probably one of the last things that will happen in PPC — writing ads always involves subjectivity and creativity. Responsive Search Ads are a step in that direction, but they only combine headlines and description lines; you still have to write them.
Perhaps one of the most important things you can do is set up alerts to notify you of sudden changes in traffic, conversions, CPA, ROAS, or any other KPI that’s important to you.
Knowing when to pivot is critical to success, be it in PPC or any other business. It’s a good idea to regularly check on the performance of your campaigns’ bidding strategies to see if you need to pivot.
Regular account audits are so important for good structure. Check for things like too many keywords in an ad group, too few ads, campaigns with not enough negative keywords, or campaigns missing site links.
We’re excited to share that 
