If you want to scale the growth of your Apps, then Google’s UACs (Universal App Campaigns) must be one of the focal points of your marketing strategy. An automated type of campaign, UACs are an excellent choice for driving both installations and in-app actions, like purchases. This campaign type allows targeting audiences across Google Search, Google Display, Youtube, Google Play, and Apple Store. Google has an excellent course that can help you learn more about Universal App Campaigns.
UACs were launched to make in-app advertising easier and quicker. In line with this, to set up your UACs – you only require minimal initial data like texts, images, or videos. Google’s machine learning-based algorithms then work to show your App’s ads to your target audience. Since, these are automated campaigns – unlike your search ads – you won’t need to manually test the ads to find the best performers. Google does this bit for you.
No doubt Google does a decent job of driving high-quality traffic for UACs, but did you know that you can lend Google a hand to bring you better results? This can help you save money being spent on the wrong placements and audience and at the same time help you use your budget efficiently.
Here are some tips to try out that will help you exert a higher level of control over your UACs using Optmyzr:
1. Manage location targeting
Google doesn’t translate your ads for specific spoken languages for locations. This makes it imperative to run ads for only those locations that align with the languages in which an App is available. Therefore, while you work on making your app available in more languages, don’t forget to target locations for your campaigns accordingly.
You can also go granular within these locations and manage targeting based on how regions and cities perform. Some ways to optimize location targeting are:
Find cities that are driving expensive clicks and zero conversions and exclude them.
Find cities or regions driving high numbers of conversions, and target them in separate campaigns with separate budgets. This will help get more traffic from such locations.
Pro Tip: Use theGeo HeatMaporRule Enginefrom Optmyzr to get a report of cities, regions and postal codes that are performing best or worst – to target or exclude them respectively.
2. Optimize for in-app goals
How cool would it be to find campaigns which are driving registrations or in-app purchases and manage the Target CPA for them? Optmyzr’s Rule Engine can help you achieve this.
Take a look at the screenshot below of the Optmyzr Rule Engine, wherein we are pulling the in-app actions and even action values that are being tracked as conversions and conversion values. You can base optimizations on any such custom conversions which you might be tracking for your campaigns.
For example, here’s a rule that finds all the campaigns which have brought in registrations and recommends increasing the Target CPA for them by 10%.
Check out the campaigns below, which have had the “Registrations” type of conversions, and the system is recommending tweaking target values for them. Just like this, you can optimize for any in-app action as required. Eg: If you’re driving “Registrations”, and losing impression share, increasing TCPA can help.
3. Ensure sufficient budget for your CPA
It is recommended that these campaigns have a daily budget of at least 20-30 times of your CPA (cost-per-action). Create a rule in the Rule Engine to label campaigns on which you need to consider increasing your budgets.
Conclusion
UACs have helped unburden advertisers from needing to try out ad combinations to find what drives good results i.e. acquisitions/conversions. While you should make use of Google’s machine learning, don’t forget to optimize and control your campaigns from time to time.
To start setting up UACs, Sign in to your Google Ads account → go to the page menu → Campaigns → Universal App.
Once you’ve accrued traffic on UACs – try out the tricks I shared above using Optmyzr (14-day free trial) and improve the performance of your campaigns. Feel free to reach out to support@optmyzr.com if you have any questions.
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.
Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that changed the way advertisers perceived Shopping campaigns. By making Google Shopping listings free, the world’s largest advertising network forced everyone selling tangible products to rethink their PPC strategies.
Suddenly, this component of the Google advertising network became much more attractive.
At first, brands and PPC marketers were captivated by the prospect of free ad space. Once the initial hype faded, it became clear that only a portion of Google Shopping listings would be made free and that certain conditions had to be met.
To take advantage of these free listings, advertisers need to have active Google Merchant Center accounts and enable their products to show on all surfaces including Google Images, the Google Shopping tab, Google Lens, and Google Search.
As of late May, our conversations with experts like Kirk Williams of Zato Marketing revealed that an average of 5-6% of Google Shopping listings were made complementary.
But that’s not the only reason it makes sense to give your products Google Shopping visibility.
If like many other brands, your business or client are just starting to get involved in building Google Shopping campaigns, this article will help you figure out how to sell on Google Shopping.
In this article, we’ll explore:
How to take advantage of Google Shopping listings
Why Google Shopping is a proven channel for product visibility
How to sell on Google Shopping the easy way
How to take advantage of Google Shopping listings
Google Shopping allows advertisers to promote physical, shippable products with a greater amount of visual appeal. Consumers searching for ‘blue shoes’ or ‘leather couch’ can view and explore a range of product listings that match closely with what they’re looking for.
Google Shopping campaigns come in two varieties: Standard and Smart.
Image sourced from versafeed.com
Standard campaigns are built manually to deliver on highly strategic goals. These require some understanding of product groups, campaign structures, and other campaign components in order to achieve a specific goal, such as a target ROAS.
Smart campaigns on Google Shopping reduce the entry barrier by using machine learning and automation to speed up the process. This makes them ideal for small businesses with limited budgets, or advertisers who don’t have the time to build out Standard campaigns.
While Standard campaigns afford greater control over location targeting, negative keywords, custom scheduling, and network placement; Smart campaigns require historical data but will determine placement and other parameters for you based on past performance of other campaigns.
Google Shopping: A proven channel for product visibility
Google Shopping campaigns have always been considered a core part of the PPC marketer’s toolbox. They carry a visual component, which has proven to be more attractive than plain text when products are involved.
Here are four more reasons why Google Shopping is a proven way to give your products the visibility they need, especially with the current economic landscape in mind.
The effects of COVID-19 have made e-commerce more viable and attractive than ever. Even if customers can’t visit your store, you can still sell and ship your products to people who might need (or simply want) them.
Google Shopping campaigns (and e-commerce in general) enable you to widen your catchment area. A brick and mortar store can only serve a specific geography; selling online lets you grow your audience, market, and business.
Including images of your products in Google Shopping campaigns lets consumers see what they’d be getting if they made a purchase. Just be sure to use accurate imagery to align expectations with reality.
Free Google Shopping listings are a valuable bonus. While a 5% boost won’t change your bottom line, many businesses need all the help they can get.
How to sell on Google Shopping the easy way
Google Shopping campaigns can be highly valuable if your business calls for them. But it can be confusing and tricky to build them out if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Moreover, creating splits (e.g. by brand or category) takes a significant amount of time when done manually — and leaves you prone to human error.
Optmyzr’s tools for Google Shopping cover the full life cycle, allowing you to create campaigns and set structures from scratch. Use us to do the heavy lifting and help you create the campaign structures you want, quickly and without error.
With Optmytzr guiding you step by step, you can create both Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns and ad groups in just a few clicks.
Campaign Builder 2.0
Campaign Builder 2.0 is Optmyzr’s tool to build Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns from scratch. Anyone can link a spreadsheet or Google Merchant Center feed to get started in minutes.
Product Group Refresher 2.0
Product Group Refresher 2.0 optimizes existing Google Shopping campaigns by adding new products and product groups based on existing campaign structures. It looks at your current campaign structures and syncs with the feed to accurately reflect your inventory.
Machine learning provides suggestions, and you can even automate the entire process. For example, when new products are added to the inventory feed, Optmyzr can automatically create new product groups for them.
Manage Shopping Bids
This optimization identifies high-performing product groups, allowing you to raise bids for product groups that are driving results. It also shows which product groups are underperforming or failing, letting you lower bids for them.
By nature, this tool only supports Standard Google Shopping campaigns.
Shopping Analysis
One of our most popular Insight tools, Shopping Analysis helps Optmyzr users understand how their products are performing irrespective of structure. Use it to aggregate data and determine performance based on a number of different attributes.
Performance Metrics, such as ROAS or CPC
Standard Attributes enabled by Google, such as brand or product type
Feed Attributes based on your inventory, such as color or size
Aggregate data by price to see the performance and ROAS that products at different price points drive. Or if you’re selling shoes, easily see which sizes are more popular and sell more, or which ones aren’t in demand so you can fine-tune procurement.
Shopping Analysis works with both Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns. With the former, you can use this aggregate data to change bids using the Attribute Bidder. For Smart Shopping, you can see which products are selling better — an insight that’s not easy to obtain in Google Ads.
Conclusion
While it’s admirable that Google is thinking of advertisers and supporting them with some complementary Shopping listings, there’s greater value to be experienced than just a couple of freebies.
Unlike services, products have shape and form — and people love to see what they’re buying before they make a purchase. Google Shopping campaigns enable you to do this while expanding your reach, allowing small businesses to flourish and hobbyists to turn passion into profession.
To learn more about how we can help you build and optimize Google Shopping campaigns with minimal time sink, write to us at support@optymzr.com or sign up to try Optmyzr free of cost.
The last time we sat down with Google to talk shop, the discussion found its way to managing PPC campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With supply chains disrupted and business models being tested, companies around the world are facing a variety of new conditions. And though the results aren’t uniform, what’s consistent is how every business has been affected in some way.
Many are struggling to find customers. Some are facing uncertain futures. A few fortunate ones are doing better than ever — will they struggle when things return to normal?
We put together some advice for PPC marketers that took the shape of this blog post. But in the weeks since, we’ve seen and heard the debate over automated bidding become one of the prevailing industry conversations.
Thankfully, our friends at Google had plenty more to say.
Here are their recommendations for 6 secret tips that can help you impact Smart Bidding and more reliably navigate a marketplace in flux.
6 Secret Tips to Impact Smart Bidding
As you monitor shifting trends and course-correct your business plan, you’ll also need to bring your strategic approach in line with what the current situation demands. To help you provide clients and customers with a fruitful experience without eating too much of your time, Google recommends Smart Bidding.
Let’s recap the tactics we recommended last time, as well as explore how they impact Smart Bidding.
1. Keywords
Recommended Tactics
Use negative keywords as a safeguard against undesired clicks that might drive lots of cost but no conversions.
The way users are searching for your business may have changed, which is why it’s important to capture those shifts in search behavior through broad match keywords.
When bidding on keywords with your brand name, adjust goals for Impression Share or use tCPA/tROAS.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Keyword optimization helps deliver more at the same CPA/ROAS goal, and ensures that brand strategies align with business goals. Broad match keywords allow the Smart Bidding machine to discover new opportunities for conversions.
Optmyzr Tip: You’ll still want to keep other match types and regularly review new search terms with tools like Optmyzr. The Rule Engine’s latest addition takes high-performing keywords with one match type and lets you add new match types at the ad group level.
2. Creatives
Recommended Tactics
Use Dynamic Search Ads to show up on new relevant searches your keywords may be missing out on.
Use Responsive Search Ads to adapt ad content to more closely match user search terms.
Make offers stand out and take customers to the right page with promo and site extensions.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Getting your creatives right prevents your message and customer experience are on the same page, which ensures that each bid brings relevant engagement.
Optmyzr Tip: Regulations and restrictions can change frequently. With the Ad Text Optimization tool, you can quickly and consistently change ad copy to reflect the real-world operating conditions of your business. The Add Responsive Search Ad tool is also useful to build RSAs for each of your ad groups.
The Responsive Search Ads tool lets you maximize your chances of getting meaningful clicks
3. Bids and Budgets
Recommended Tactics
Move unused parts of your budget to the ads that need it most.
Raise the budgets of campaigns that are performing well to drive more traffic.
Use Performance Planner to understand the implications of different budget scenarios.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Putting your marketing dollars where they’re likely to yield the best returns is PPC 101. You capture more leads at the same CPA/ROAS goal, and forecasting often captures the most recent demand trends.
Optmyzr Tip: Campaigns that worked a few months ago might not be winners today, for no fault of their own or yours. Put your dollars where they need to be with the Optimize Budgets tool. It can help you quickly re-allocate budgets based on how different campaigns are doing against your goals.
Optimize Budgets lets you see how to adjust spend to achieve specific goals
4. Target Constraints/Goals
Recommended Tactics
Evaluate your new business strategies and confirm target goals.
Set performance targets and customize settings to your unique business goals.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Using CPA/ROAS goal adjustments can help you control spend and volume. But to achieve the same thing for Max strategies, Google recommends using budget adjustments.
Optmyzr Tip: Use the Optimize Target CPA & ROAS on campaigns with automated bidding to increase conversions and Impression Share. You can also see converting ad groups that use other automated bidding strategies.
5. Account-Wide Best Practices
Recommended Tactics
Capture all signals using Data-Driven or Non-Last Click Attribution.
Only include conversions that are relevant to the business.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Smart Bidding uses account-wide signals (cross-account under MCC, if applicable). If you’re struggling to see results from Smart Bidding, it might be because you’re still using Last Click Attribution in an era of erratic search behavior.
Optmyzr Tip: The Rule Engine allows you to create data-based strategies, like removing non-converting keywords related to COVID-19. Or for a fun way to keep your account in shape, try the Workouts that combine multiple optimizations to achieve a specific objective.
6. Audiences
Recommended Tactics
Add all RSLA, Similar Audiences, and Customer Match lists to Smart Bidding campaigns.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
First-party audience lists improve Smart Bidding algorithms, but Google lists have a neutral impact on Smart Bidding. For best results, provide your own customer information.
Optmyzr Tip: You always want Smart Bidding to have the latest and greatest information about your customers. Use the Customer Match List Updates tool (under Optimizations > Utilities) to keep your audiences in sync between your business data and Google’s audience repository.
6 Ways to Fully Control & Adjust Smart Bidding
While Smart Bidding might make PPC a bit less time-consuming, it’s far from a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality. There are many things you can do to affect the degree of control and influence you have over your bids.
Check out these 6 ways to fully control and adjust Smart Bidding.
1. Goals
Goals are the end objectives of your campaign; think of them as a destination. Tweaking goal values can change the way Smart Bidding tries to get there.
CPA/ROAS goal adjustments
Ad Group targets
Portfolio targets
Device CPA modifier
Operationalize forecasts
2. Conversions
Current market realities have impacted conversions across the board. Use the information in this space to inform your strategy and reshape the Smart Bidding process.
Conversion value adjustments
Campaign-level conversion setting
“Hack” data exclusion (seasonal adjustment)
New secondary KPIs
3. Constraints
Setting hard limits on your financials can enable Smart Bidding to look at creating value over volume. As always, keep an eye on things as you implement this approach.
Limiting budgets on purpose
Portfolio CPC max/min bid limits
4. Targeting
Audience is one of the most influential factors in PPC, and there’s no doubt that who and how you choose to target can make a difference to Smart Bidding results.
Pausing targeting
Opening targeting
Split testing
5. Budgets
At the end of the day, it’s all about the dollars. Experimenting with budgetary values can provide some of the most significant influence on Smart Bidding.
Shared budgets
Uncapped budgets
Constrained budgets
6. Misc. Adjustments
There are other adjustments you can make to shape Smart Bidding, including seasonal adjustments. We suggest exercising oversight when using some of these in today’s market.
Seasonal adjustments
Campaign structure
Split testing bid strategies
Conclusion
It’s been said before but bears repeating: There’s only one way PPC professionals can do right by their businesses and clients — by having as much information as possible. That’s why we’ve partnered with Google to bring you these posts on how to gain maximum value from the tools at your disposal.
These recommendations from Google are intended to supplement a brand’s unique business strategy. Both Google and Optmyzr suggest you balance any automated bidding strategy by keeping a close eye on your accounts. After all, only humans can provide context to the data.
And be on the lookout for the third part of our collaboration with Google, when we discuss what advertisers in hard-hit industries can do to prepare for the end of lockdown.
Anyone who’s ever done strength training knows the challenge of overcoming a plateau. Once your body gets used to a certain regimen, it’s important to scale up your activity level — but without hurting yourself by doing too much too soon.
The same logic applies to scaling your PPC budget.
When your account is already performing well and receives a significant financial boost (like the one many brands will experience as we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic), it can be difficult to spend more while maintaining the same level of ROAS or CPA.
While it’s fairly simple, it certainly isn’t easy.
With that being said, here are some tips to help you to take greater control of your PPC budget without compromising on ROAS and CPA goals.
Manage your budgets better
If it sounds straightforward, that’s because it is. Effective budget scaling begins with making your marketing dollars work more efficiently, and a better understanding of where your account is experiencing the greatest returns and wastage.
Fortunately, Optmyzr gives you the tools to get where you need to go.
Optmyzr’s Spend Projection tool uses historical data to predict future spend.
Spend Projection: This insight from Optmyzr predicts your account’s likely spend by the end of the selected time period (user guide).
Optimize Budget: Use this tool to identify budgets and campaigns losing impression share due to budget and optimize them to maximize ROAS (user guide).
Budget Simulator: Found as a feature in the Optimize Budget tool, this gives you intelligent suggestions for budget reallocation, including daily budgets. It tells you how much budget a campaign or shared budget can actually spend. This recommendation is based on years of historical spend analysis and current spend patterns.
If your current campaign setup and traffic don’t exhaust your budget, there are additional steps you can take.
Grow your account
Given the way your current campaigns are set up, you may not have significant opportunity to grow your account traffic. In this case, you’ll need to grow your account.
You can achieve this with a two-pronged approach.
1. Hone more keyword opportunities
Reviewing search terms with good performance can open up a world of possibilities that you may have neglected or been unaware of. Optmyzr lets you do this with a number of one-click optimizations.
Find search queries with conversions and high CTR using the Keyword Lasso tool. Add them as new keywords, or create entirely new ad groups.
Create and automate custom strategies to manage search queries using the Rule Engine (work with Google Microsoft, and Amazon advertising accounts).
The Rule Engine allows you to add keywords based on queries that are driving conversions or that have a better CTR than the associated keyword, or to add keywords of another match type.
Use the Keyword Lasso tool to discover new opportunities to fully utilize your budget.
2. Promote existing keywords, ad groups and campaigns
Sometimes, it’s not a question of looking for new opportunities, but optimizing the ones you’re already capitalizing on to yield better results. We can help you take performing campaigns up a notch without needing to do the heavy lifting yourself.
Use the Conversion Grabber to increase bids for converting keywords losing impression share due to ad rank.
The Optimize Target ROAS and CPA tool allows you to tweak target ROAS and CPA values at ad group level for ad groups losing Impression Share due to ad rank.
Apply bid adjustments based on time, location, gender, and audience to maximize campaign performance and better utilize available budgets.
The Optimize Target CPA & ROAS tool helps increase conversions with automated bidding.
The importance of risk mitigation
At Optmyzr, we believe risk mitigation is a vital component of any evolving PPC strategy. So while you explore these options to expand your account and promote existing inventory, be sure to have a safety net in place.
Acquire a list of expensive keywords or product groups, and update it on a regular basis. Keep an eye on these so they don’t accrue unnecessary cost, raising CPA and reducing ROAS.
Automate the process of adding negative keywords to search or shopping campaigns in order to limit clicks that don’t convert. Use the Non-Converting Search Queries strategy in the Rule Engine.
Maintain and monitor ROAS performance
Once you have the different pieces in place, it’s important to keep a regular eye on things. As humans, we can provide context that machines don’t have and increase the chances of a favorable outcome.
Alerts and budget tracking on the MCC dashboard will drop notifications if the performance for a metric falls below target — or even if it starts trending in the wrong direction.
When running a manual bidding strategy, establish and track target ROAS for keywords using the Rule Engine. If you prefer to use automated bidding, this piece by Optmyzr and Google might offer more relevant insights.
Conclusion
PPC strategy is never as easy as we’d like it to be, and challenges like the ongoing pandemic add variables that can affect performance overnight.
At a time when current data is volatile and historical data is unreliable, this ‘human context’ is more critical than ever to getting the most out of machine learning.
By regularly checking in on your automations, you’ll be able to exert greater influence over how and where your marketing dollars are channeled, giving you a better chance of seeing the results your brand is looking for.
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.
Shopping campaigns work very differently from search campaigns. The biggest difference is that, unlike search campaigns, you can’t specify the keywords that you would like to show your ads for. However, you can decide which keywords you _don’t_ want to show for, by adding negatives at the ad group and campaign level.� Usually the purpose of adding negative keywords is to cut out irrelevant traffic which helps increase profitability. However, Google does a pretty good job of not matching irrelevant queries to shopping ads. The question then is – how can negative keywords help improve performance of AdWords shopping campaigns?
It can be done in two ways:
Direct traffic to more profitable ad groups
Negatives for shopping campaigns can be used to direct traffic to more profitable ad groups. When using a multi-campaign structure with different priorities, the same query can match to different ad groups. Comparing performance of the same search query across ad groups and adding it as an exact match negative to the ad group it is underperforming in will make sure that the query always matches to the more profitable ad group. By doing this you can sculpt the traffic to go to the ad group that you want.
Remove generic non-converting queries or queries with low ROAS
Google doesn’t match irrelevant search queries to shopping ads but it does match generic queries. For example, if you have an ad group selling ‘Adidas Running Shoes’, it can match to a query like ‘Black Shoes’ which is not irrelevant because it does refer to shoes but the search query is generic. Sometimes when campaigns have limited budget it is a good idea to concentrate on the queries that have the highest return on investment. Adding generic queries that don’t convert or have a very low ROAS as exact match negatives helps increase overall ROAS.�
The new Shopping Negatives Tool from Optmyzr supports both the above strategies of adding negative keywords. It analyzes the search terms for shopping campaigns and recommends exact match negatives based on the these strategies.
Duplicate Queries (Across ad groups)
This strategy finds queries that match to more than one ad group and recommends adding the query as an exact match negative to the under performing ad group. It is like AB Testing the search query and keeping it in the best performing ad group.
Low Performing Queries (within ad groups)
This strategy finds queries that are not performing well within an ad group. They may have a lower ROAS than the ad group average or a much higher cost/conversion. If you’re on a limited budget, these queries can be added as exact match negatives to the ad group to reduce cost.
You have the option of clicking on the query and seeing exactly why the system is recommending adding it as a negative keyword. Also, the confidence level says how confident the system is when making the recommendation.
Watch this video to find out more.� � � Try the Shopping Negatives Tool here.
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.
Running search ads is an easy sell for agencies, because clients like the measurability and control this medium offers.
Then comes the discussion of the agency fees and hours required to execute a successful campaign, often yielding a chasm between the service a client expects and what the agency can offer, yet remaining profitable. As contract negotiations whittle down already aggressive project bids, the pressure falls on the day-to-day PPC managers to complete mountains of work in little time.
The danger for agencies—besides write-downs and overages—is becoming so focused on checking off a task list that they fail to make the strategic moves necessary for the results they promised. To prevent this unenviable situation, agencies need to pause and take a hard look at where their time is going to maximize efficiency and boost profitability of PPC campaigns. Automation of AdWords and PPC campaigns overall is key. �
[][1]PPC OPTIMIZATION Businessman working at office desk and using computer and objects, coffee, top view, with copy space
4 PPC Agency Time Killers
Reality is, dozens of time killers plague search marketing agencies, but we want to focus in on a few specific areas of exceptional opportunity to automate the most frequent time-consuming PPC tasks. At the very least, analysis of the following automation opportunities can put agencies on the path to better profitability.
Reporting. PPC account managers field constant client questions about results and requisite explanations of how campaigns affect business. Many agencies tell us reporting can consume three, four or even five full days of exhaustive, detailed, manual work each month. Reporting is perhaps one of the most essential parts of campaign management, but it shouldn’t eat up otherwise profitable time. Thankfully, machine learning and automated processes now make it possible for campaign managers to automatically and reliably pull data, analyze for key findings and structure custom-looking reports in minutes versus days. We have multiple clients notching 90 percent reductions in reporting time via automated reporting capabilities. Read about experiences for EU-based Geniadsand US-based Granular. Both agencies saw dramatic reductions in time spent on reporting, allowing them to redirect critical thinking to campaign optimization. Google also recently stepped up its automation game with a simple API connecting AdWords data with Google Slides. Simple AdWords scripts can be used to create presentations or automate appending additional data into existing ones. There may be upfront time required to do additional scripting or implement ready-made scripts like our Enhanced Scripts™, but once implemented, automated PPC reporting can drive agency efficiency, effectiveness AND profitability.
Bid management.Effective bid management can make or break campaigns. Google actually builds in automated bid management right in the Adwords interface to automate strategies like “bid to top of page.” These sorts of Automated Rules are basic, but can save tremendous amounts of time compared to doing the same work manually in spreadsheets. Many PPC pros, however, cling to their own bid management processes to maintain as much control as they can. But they miss the fact that relinquishing control of such manual processes can free them up to do more strategic, high-value campaign management. Prebuilt rules can take the tedious work out of managing bids to position, target CPA, target ROAS and other key metrics. With a little time and thought in HOW and WHAT to automate, PPC pros can reliably take big chunks of time out of bid management.
Keyword management.Automation and artificial intelligence can even help with tasks that require a bit of human input, like keyword management. Computers can find optimal new keywords based purely on the data, whereas PPC pros may be inclined to rely on intuition when they should follow data. Automating keyword management shifts a PPC pro’s job to confirming the suggestions and tweaking the model being used as opposed to groveling over every keyword to make a difference. Considering many accounts have tens of thousands of new queries to contemplate adding as keywords, shifting to automation can be a huge time saver. The challenge is about releasing control of keyword management to open up productive time. Ask yourself if the task is something you really NEED to be doing. If automation can do the same or even better, why would you even think about continuing with the status quo. And even if the automation is slightly worse than a human, consider the tradeoff between your employees’ valuable time and the change in performance from a more automated keyword management process.
Ad Testing.� Google offers ready-made tools for PPC pros to test theories and decipher infinitesimal differences between ads. These tools are only a starting point for automation. The trouble is, expanding permutations of all the variables between keywords, ad creative, regions, bids and the myriad other variables can make even the best PPC pro’s head spin. Managing the ads becomes an intricate ballet, prioritizing what we think is important and digging into the subtleties of the data and understanding what “statistically valid” really means. As PPC pros advance along an automation path, they can harness the power of visualization and data insight tools to move their energy, talent and creativity away from test building and into informed, strategic optimization. Looking beyond Google’s built-in automation tools, more powerful options such as Optmyzr Ad Optimization, can systematize repetitive tasks that often fall short due to human interpretation or error. PPC pros who embrace ad testing automation are able to look at the bigger picture, make adjustments and gain significant efficiency. �
Time spent on repetitive tasks ripe or overdue for automation can exact a painful toll on agency profitability and competitiveness. Of course, write-downs and write-offs will always be a fact of agency life, but many profitability killers are preventable with automation, advanced scripting, AI and machine learning.
Because of such rapid transformation, automation will be a key area of focus on this blog throughout 2018 – along with our contributed articles in Search Engine Landand Search Engine Journal. I encourage you to read my most recent Search Engine Journal articleeasy ways to get started with PPC automation.
“Automate or be rendered obsolete” might well become the PPC pro’s rally cry in the near future. Agencies and PPC pros alike need to explore automation to stay ahead of the curve. The industry will only get more competitive with tighter margins.
Anyone who has worked with Optmyzr knows our innovative platform has greatly streamlined and automated Pay-Per-Click campaign management for Google AdWords. Many marketers who work with our innovative PPC Management Software have seen significant improvements in campaign performance and agency profitability.
We now offer much of that same automation to support Bing Ads management for agency and in-house marketers alike. PPC pros can tap the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make Bing Ads accounts more effective and profitable – much the same way they use Optmyzr for AdWords.
Specific features rolled out for Bing Ad management include an intuitive UI that brings together key PPC management tools in one package:
Budget and KPI monitoring: Marketers have access to powerful visualizations and alerts to track and manage against key metrics, such as conversions, return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost per conversion.
Ability to find new keywordsand create single keyword ad groups (SKAGS): Optmyzr’s intuitive Keyword Lasso tool allows One-Click Optimization™, which automates analysis of search terms and identifies higher performing search queries. Previously only available to support AdWords accounts, the Keyword Lasso now allows the same ability to identify optimal keywords and create new ad groups that support SKAG ad group structures.
New ad creation in A/B testing: Optmyzr now extends ad creation and A/B testing for Bing Ads management. Marketers benefit from automated suggestions for ad content based on what has worked in campaigns.
Hour-of-week performance optimization: A new Hour of Week Bidder for Bing gives PPC pros recommended hourly bid adjustments, based on conversion and cost goals as well as other variables. Ad schedules can be changed in bulk, giving marketers greater ability to turn off ads when they are not needed.
Search term N-grams for Bing: This tool allows marketers to gain quick insight into long-tail search behaviors, helping to minimize wasted spend and improve results by unearthing words (N-grams) that lead to wasted spend.
Landing page analysis: PPC pros can now benefit from aggregated performance data for landing pages across Bing campaigns. This helps understand which pages perform well and gives insight into improvements that can be made to landing pages that have low conversion rates.
Geo HeatMap analysis: Optmyzr now brings powerful visualizations of Bing Ads geo data via an interactive heatmap. Marketers can tap this information to analyze traffic and conversions based on location, allowing more strategic budget allocation right down to the city level.
The above mentioned features are available to try out in Optmyzr. Use this link to access tools for Bing Ads accounts.
Our developers have enhanced marketers’ abilities to optimize Google AdWords campaigns over the last several years. Of course, Google still dominates the PPC landscape, but Bing has gained market share for six consecutive years. As a result, many marketers now manage similar campaigns across both platforms. Our objective is to help marketers improve efficiency and profitability of their overall PPC initiatives.�
Stay tuned for additional Bing-specific functionality as we move through 2018. We are working on additional ways marketers can extend instant optimizations and gain quick insights into their PPC programs.�
The Hour of the Week tool is an incredibly helpful way of visualizing the times and days of the week where your AdWords campaigns perform better. You can manage your bids based on which time slots have the best performance, and avoid wasting budget unnecessarily on those hours of the day when the return on investment is low.
After all, information is the key to success, right?
But wouldn’t it be great if you could not only see the information displayed, but also get recommendations based on your AdWords performance, and make a greatly useful task even easier? Well, luckily, we’re all about smooth efficiency! And that’s where the New Hour of the Week Biddercomes into place.
Our latest update to the Hour of the Week Bid Adjustment includes time-based bid adjustments based on your AdWords KPIs. The tool uses intelligence to tailor bid adjustment suggestions based on your goals. The recommendations are based on historical performance and estimated potential.
With the New Hour of the Week Bidder, you can:
Choose a goal that works for your business. Whether its increasing conversions, reducing cost per conversions or increasing traffic, we’ve got you covered!
Get bid adjustment recommendations based on historical analysis and expected performance, as well as seeing estimated change in traffic and conversions.
Performance and opportunity analysis for individual day parts, which will also allow you to edit day parts.
A small step for your bids, a giant leap for your budget!
Optmyzr has a new tool that will make it easy to restructure existing shopping campaigns to improve performance.
Create GRIP Structure Tool
In shopping campaigns, the product group is the level at which you can set bids. A product group can have any number of products. Having a granular shopping campaign structure lets you set a bid for each product individually. This is important because different products have different prices and having the same bid for all products may not result in high ROAS. For example, if you’re selling shoes and you choose to split campaigns by Category 0->Category 1->Product Type 0, you could end up with a structure where the last level has different types of shoes like running shoes, walking shoes. In this case you could end up bidding the same $2 for a pair of shoes that costs $100 and another that costs $250. To make sure you can bid relative to how each product performs, it is important to have a structure where there is one product or item in each product group. This is the GRIP (GRoup of Individual Products) structure.
How can you achieve the GRIP structure without spending hours in your AdWords account? The Shopping Campaign Builder lets you create the GRIP structure for new campaigns. You can specify the high level split, the tool will pull the data from your feed, put it into the defined structure and you can upload it to AdWords with a single click. For existing shopping campaigns that already have performance data, you can either spend hours creating this structure in AdWords or use the new Create GRIP structure tool from Optmyzr. This lets you restructure existing shopping campaigns to have the GRIP (groups of individual products) structure.
How does it work?
The tool detects the last level at which an ad group is split and splits it one level further at the item id level. This enables you to have one product group per item id while preserving the historical data associated with the ad group. Once you have this structure you can use the Shopping Attribute Bidder to aggregate data by any attribute in the feed.
Benefits of using the tool
No restructuring required: It works with existing campaign structures
Preserves historical data: It splits out existing ad groups so historical data is not lost
Higher ROI: It enables you to manage bids for each product which results in better performance and higher ROI
Saves time: You can create thousands of products groups within minutes
This tool is currently in beta and is available in the Pro subscription plan on Optmyzr.
I’m the engineer behind our� recently announced Shopping Attribute Bidder and I would like to show you some of the benefits you can achieve by deploying a more granular structure for your product groups in shopping campaigns.
How Bids Work For Shopping Ads
In shopping campaigns, you set bids for product groups. However, not all product groups can get a bid. Why is that? It’s because product groups can be subdivided and the bid can only be set at the final level of subdivision.
Here’s an example where products have been segmented (subdivided) along a few dimensions: first by the category (‘electronics’ or ‘toys’). Electronics are subdivided further by ‘brand’, and toys are not subdivided further. The right column in green represents all other product categories and is called “Everything else” in AdWords. This is further subdivided by ‘used status’.
This segmentation can be shown as a tree:
What’s important here is that in the AdWords interface, each division is called a ‘product group’ but only the ones at the lowest level (the colored ones in the image above) can have a bid. We’ll call these ‘biddable product groups’.
Why AdWords Has Non-Biddable Product Groups
So why does AdWords even have non-biddable product groups? It’s because the way they let advertisers do the subdivisions in the interface requires one subdivision at a time. In creating the tree, each level has to be subdivided individually.
Doing this is actually really really painful if you just want to build a logical division, for example, splitting all products by category 0, and then splitting all those by brand. AdWords supports 7 levels of subdivision but in the interface anything more than 2 levels is extremely manual.
If you need help with that, check out our super fast Shopping Campaign Builder tool. We’ve had advertisers create hundreds of ad groups and thousands of granular product groups in just minutes with it.
How to Set Unique Bids Per Product (SKU)� in Shopping Ads
How granularly you can set bids depends on how granular your biddable product groups are. So if you want very granular, SKU level bids, you must place each SKU in its own product group.
It’s a similar concept to SKAGs in search campaigns. SKAG stands for Single Keyword Ad Group. The name I came up with for the equivalent of a SKAG in shopping campaigns is the GRIP structure. GRIP stands for GRoup of Individual Products.
Let me show you two ways to split four SKUs (item IDs) into biddable product groups.
Here’s what your biddable product groups contain in a GRIP structure:
In the GRIP structure above, each individual shoe is placed in a product group. The same four products in a non-GRIP structure below are all grouped together based on a subdivision of something they have in common, in this case the fact they’re all sneakers.
In the GRIP structure, I can set a unique bid for each item I sell. In a non-GRIP structure, the bid for all four sneakers has to be the same.
Why the GRIP Structure Is Good For Bidding
With the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool I created, we can analyze AdWords performance for any attribute we have included in our Google Merchant Feed. For example we could analyze how shoes of different sizes perform. Here’s what we might see in Optmyzr:
As you can see, size 11.5 shoes have an ROAS of 1361%. Size 10 shoes on the other hand haven’t sold anything so their ROAS is 0%.
In a non-GRIP structure, this useful insight cannot be acted on because shoes of different sizes exist in the same biddable product group.
In a GRIP structure, on the other hand, we can act on this insight:
What’s really cool is that your structure no longer limits your ability to act on insights. If you want to analyze performance by brand or color, that would work just as easily. Here we use the GRIP structure to change bids for things that are red:
And here we change bids for products from a certain brand:
Not only can you now analyze data using attributes not available in AdWords (we do this by merging your merchant feed with the AdWords reports in our systems), you can even combine attributes to find more granular insights.
Changing Bids For GRIP Ads
It was important for us to give you the ability to act on insights right from the page where you got the insight. Here’s what the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool looks like when you’ve found an insight that you want to use for a bid change:
The analysis here looks at price ranges of products, something the advertiser has entered using a custom attribute. We can see performance data for each attribute. When products with the same attribute have different bids, we show each bid so that you can raise or lower them all by a percentage or a fixed amount.
Conclusion
I see a lot of e-commerce advertisers with sub-optimal product groups. That’s why I’m excited about the fact that with Optmyzr you can now more easily create a great shopping structure and use that to improve bid management. Try it out and let me and the team know what you think…
Today you will see some new tools for managing Shopping Ads in Optmyzr’s One-Click Optimizations™ menu. These new and updated tools help e-commerce advertisers manage every aspect of advertising an e-commerce business on Google AdWords. Both the setup and management of shopping ads are made more efficient so that you can get better results with less effort.
The following tools are part of our updated Shopping Ads management suite:
You specify how you want your products to be segmented in AdWords. Our tool automatically builds out the associated structure, handling the creation of thousands of very granular ad groups and product groups.
This tool speeds up the creation of well-structured shopping campaigns, making it possible to conduct A/B tests and experiment with different structures. Without the Campaign Builder tool, a merchant selling ten brands, and products in ten categories and ten subcategories would have to load 1,000 pages in AdWords to create the same structure that can be set up with Optmyzr in just six clicks.
To achieve the best return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), you have to set the right bids for all products you advertise with Google Shopping ads. This level of bid control requires that product groups in AdWords correctly reflect the range of goods you sell. Because ad groups in AdWords don’t automatically get updated based on changes in the merchant feed, Optmyzr has created this tool to make it easier for you to sync a store’s inventory with AdWords.
In AdWords, product groups are created based on a snapshot of the data in a product feed. Because this data changes dynamically based on inventory, the AdWords structure can quickly become out of sync. Catching mismatches between what is sold and what is managed in AdWords is time-consuming, manual, and often overlooked by advertisers. Accounts whose bids are poorly managed due to the complexity of maintaining a correct structure can suffer from decreases in ROAS.
Optmyzr’s Shopping Campaign Refresher analyzes the AdWords Shopping campaign to determine its structure and compares this with the data in the Merchant Center feed to provide an automated optimization proposal that corrects any mismatches.
Optmyzr now provides three ways to manage CPC bids for product groups.
Bid by Rules (Rule Engine)
Complex bidding logic can be automated with our Rule Engine. The Rule Engine can combine data from different entities, and date ranges with data maintained in Google Sheets. The data can be used to create a series of if-then-else statements, giving you the complete flexibility to create advanced bidding logic.
We have provided default rules for managing bids based on ROAS and CPA, and you can enhance these rules with your own insights about your company and industry.
Quickly identify product groups that meet basic profitability criteria and apply bid changes in bulk with this tool. When there isn’t enough data to make bid management decisions, the tool can help reach the required data levels by aggregating metrics based on commonalities between products. For example, advertisers who have structured product groups by brand could use brand-level metrics to make bid changes for items where data sparsity is an issue.
The most powerful way to bid for Shopping Ads is with the new Shopping Attribute Bidder. Regardless of the structure in AdWords, you can view shopping performance by any attribute of your merchant center feed (even by color or size). If product groups are divided by item id, you can act on insights by updating bids from the same page where you got the insight.
For example, a shoe retailer can get instant insights into what size shoe has the best ROI. They could further refine their analysis by analyzing a combination of multiple attributes, like shoe size and color.
What makes Optmyzr’s tool unique is that insights can be turned into intelligent optimizations unlike in AdWords where the analysis and bid changes happen in separate places, and where they are limited by the way an account is structured.
Optmyzr’s tools for optimizing bid adjustments for dayparting, device, and geography� are all compatible with Shopping Campaigns.
Budget Pacing
Our Enhanced Scripts™ for reaching a target budget� without exceeding it are compatible with Shopping campaigns as well as many other campaign types.
The Lifecycle of a Shopping Ad
We covered the three stages of managing Shopping ads� in a recent blog post. Whether you need to build, update, or optimize shopping ads, Optmyzr now makes that easier than ever.
If you’re relatively new to managing shopping ads, you might enjoy our 3-part series on SearchEngineLand. Part 1, part 2, part 3. Many of the concepts have evolved but this series of articles lays out many of the basics you should understand before you can become proficient in managing shopping ads.
We hope you’ll try out our new and updated tools and let us know how we can help make your shopping ads even more successful.
It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been running search campaigns. One thing that never goes away is search query management. Your search query or search terms report will continue to require attention because the way people search is constantly changing.� It is important to manage search queries because it directly impacts� return on investment (ROI). When managing search queries the two basic things to keep in mind are making sure that your ads are showing up for the right search queries and conveying the right message.
Analyze search terms to find the good, bad and ugly
The Search Terms Report from AdWords is useful to understand what your customers are looking for, but it can take time to go through all the information and leverage the huge� amount of data available.� You need to filter the information and identify what is relevant to your ads and campaigns to separate search terms with high potential (to add them to your keyword list) from the ones that aren’t relevant to your business (to add them as negative keywords). Adding good� search terms as keywords is the best way to ensure you will be bidding on the right keywords and won’t be� spending money showing your ad to people who aren’t interested in it.
We have a couple of tools that can help you make the task much easier.
#1 Add relevant search terms as keywords – Keyword Lasso
One question that comes up often is – Why should I add search terms as keywords if my� ad is already showing for them? The answer – To manage bids and to control the messaging. If you don’t want to spend time going through lots of queries, you can use the Keyword Lasso to focus specifically on converting or high performing search terms.� This One-Click Optimization™ will help you save time by suggesting only search terms that have a good conversion rate or clickthrough rate (CTR), allowing you to add them as keywords in any match type with a single click. One of the most popular features of this optimization is the ability to create SKAGs (Single Keyword Ad Groups) that helps you upload multiple keywords in new ad groups in one go. You can read more about the SKAG feature here. Also, within the same tool, you can add queries that are irrelevant or not performing well as negatives at the ad group or campaign level.
#2 Remove irrelevant traffic by adding negatives – Negative Keyword Finder
With this optimization, you can quickly add negative keywords across your campaigns through shared negative lists. It finds words and phrases� that may be irrelevant at the account level. It analyzes� individual words that are part of search queries and� are not performing well. It also shows you phrases that the individual� words were part of in case you want to add them as negative phrase match. It also does a relevance analysis to determine if you intended to target those words before showing them in the list.
#3 Identify new trends – Search Terms Word Cloud
This analysis tool helps you find queries that are getting the most clicks or have the highest cost but with a different approach: by showing you individual words. You can have several long tail search terms that individually have few� clicks, but sometimes there is a word that frequently appears among them, and if you were to aggregate data� for the queries that include this word you can identify trends. That is why the search terms word cloud� displays individual words with a large aggregate volume at account or campaign level.� After evaluating the single word, you can choose to add it to your keyword list or update your current ads with it. In other cases, if you find that it is irrelevant, you might want to add it as a negative keyword. It is also a great way to find new themes for ad groups. For example, if you’re a travel agency and you start seeing 2018 appearing often in the list, it means that people have started making travel plans for next year and it is a good idea to create ad groups to capture that traffic.
#4 Show the right ads� – Traffic Sculptor
Sometimes, AdWords� can show your ad even if it is not the match for the query because it prefers to broad or phrase match the query to a keyword with a higher rank. To prevent this from happening, this optimization finds search terms that are already present as keywords in your account but wrongly matched to other keywords. Then it recommends adding them as negatives (in other ad groups) to force Google to show the ad that was meant to show with the search term. This will guarantee that you are matching the most relevant� ad to the query each time. You can read more about how the Traffic Sculptor works here.
AdWords introduced expanded text ads (ETAs) last year and promised higher click-through rates for advertisers and a better experience for users. In continuation to the announcement, AdWords removed the option to create standard text ads on 31st January 2017. Following which advertisers have either completely moved to ETAs or are in the process of doing so. To smoothen the transition, AdWords automatically added ETAsto accounts, which gave� users the option to� test out performance of ETAs but offered little control over the ad text. � Optmyzr has solutions to help you create ETAs at scale in your AdWords account while maintaining control over the ad copy.� You can create ETAs from a spreadsheet as well as from existing standard text ads. I’ve listed three tools in Optmyzr that support creation of ETAs.
#1 Generate Text Ad Bulksheets Enhanced Script
Creating ETAs from scratch can be very time consuming especially if you have many campaigns in your account. The Generate Text Ad Bulksheets Enhanced Script helps in creating new ads based on performance of existing ads. For example, you can pick a metric like CTR and use it as a benchmark for creating new ETAs that can be quickly uploaded to AdWords. This videoexplains how this script can be used for creating ETAs via bulk uploads or the AdWords Editor.
#2 AB Testing for Ads
The AB Testing for Ads optimization compares performance of legacy ads (old text ads) with new ETAs and it lets you pause losing ads with a single click. It also lets you create new ETAs to populate ad groups and continue testing ads. To make it easy, it recommends high performing headlines and description lines that can be easily combined to create new ads. Pro Tip: Use the Turbo Mode to view all active ads in ad groups and to quickly create new ETAs across ad groups.
#3 Create Ads from Spreadsheet Enhanced Script
Well, that’s not all. If you are looking to create fresh ETAs in a campaign, you can use the Create Ads from Spreadsheet Enhanced Script. Using this script you can use data from a spreadsheet to create new ads, keywords and ad groups. This videoshows how this script lets you easily automate the creation of ads from a spreadsheet. You don’t need any coding skills to implement this.
Not sure which ad groups don’t have ETAs? Use the audit widgets in Optmyzr to find ad groups with less than ‘n’ ETAs. Read more about how to use these widgets here.
If you don’t have an Optmyzr account, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial of Optmyzr’s tools to try out these tools � 🙂
How much time do you spend managing shopping campaigns in AdWords?� In this blog post, we talk about how you can save time by automating shopping campaign optimization and management.
#1 – Creating Campaigns
The first step is to create a well structured shopping campaign with properly defined� product groups. Unlike AdWords search campaigns where keywords are the biddable elements in shopping campaigns it is product groups. The ideal structure is to have an individual product group for each item in the feed. This enables you to control and manage bids at the most granular level based on performance. In AdWords, it is difficult to create one product group per item id because you need to split them� manually. Due to this, depending on the size of the feed it could take hours or days to just set up a shopping campaign.
The Shopping Campaign Builder from Optmyzr lets you create shopping campaigns� within a few minutes. You can define the structure you would like to split your product feed by and upload product groups to AdWords with a single click. Watch this short video of how the Shopping Campaign Builder works.
#2 – � Managing Bids
When you’re managing bids for product groups, it is important to take into account� the revenue they generate and the return on investment (ROAS).� Having one product group per item id gives a lot of flexibility when managing bids as you can measure the return on investment at a very granular level. However, if you have thousands of product groups, AdWords doesn’t make it easy. I’ve mentioned three tools from Optmyzr that can help you manage bids at scale for product groups.
Shopping Bidder
This is a One-Click Optimization™ that lets you change bids for product groups based on performance. You can choose to change bids for product groups that have ROAS>100% and ROAS<100%. It is also possible to automate your optimization strategy by creating custom filters. These can then be used to change bids for product groups based on performance. This version of the Shopping Bidder lets you view data for product groups at the product group level.
Shopping Attribute Bidder
This new optimization for shopping campaigns lets you aggregate and combine data across product groups based on attributes and use that to change bids. You can choose from attributes available in the feed like color, size, gender, group id and more. What makes this powerful is that it enables you to aggregate data across the campaign� irrespective of the structure and change bids at scale. Watch a video of how the Shopping Attribute Bidder works.
Rule Engine
The new Rule Engine from Optmyzr gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of analyzing performance for product groups and also how bids are changed. It lets you automate your own bidding strategy for shopping campaigns. For example, you can use a formula to compare the performance of the product group to that of the ad group and campaign. Similarly you can choose to change the bid using a formula that takes into account conversion rate when calculating the new bid.
The Shopping Bidder and Rule Engine let� you change bids by absolute numbers or percentages.
#3 – Refreshing� Campaigns
Once you create shopping campaigns in AdWords, the number of product groups will not automatically change based on your feed. For example, you are selling shoes and create one product group for each model or item id in the feed. Now when new types of shoes� get added to the feed, AdWords doesn’t automatically create product groups for them. As a result, the new products end up in Everything Else. This may lead them to get very little traffic as ‘Everything Else’ usually has a low bid.
To avoid this, you can go to your AdWords account and create new product groups for products that end up in� Everything Else. Or, you can use the Shopping Refresher from Optmyzr.
Shopping Refresher
This One-Click Optimization™ automatically finds new products that are added to the feed, identifies the structure of the Shopping Campaign and creates new product groups. We have two versions of the Shopping Refresher. In the regular version, you can run the refresher ad group by ad group. In the Pro version, you can run it for all ad groups in the campaign together. The Pro version also creates new ad groups if the campaign structure requires it. See how the Shopping Refresher works. To try the Shopping Refresher Pro (currently in Beta), contact our support team.
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.
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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.
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.
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 sizeable 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 the 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
How to use this feature?
1. In the AB Testing for ads optimization, all ad goups that have underperforming ads are displayed. There is a button above the results to create ads in each ad group.
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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.
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.
Adding negative keywords to AdWords campaigns has been a long standing ask from our users and we’re happy to announce that this feature is now live in the Keyword Lasso.� The Keyword Lasso tool was designed to analyze the AdWords search terms report to find keywords to add with one-click. The search terms report is also where you get negative keyword ideas from and it made perfect sense to combine the two.
In the Keyword Lasso, you can now choose to add search terms as negative or positive keywords in broad, phrase or exact match at the ad group level. For positive keywords, the tool also gives you the option to select the BMM (Broad Match Modifier)� match type.
The advantage is that you can select positive and negative keywords to be added simultaneously and then upload them together in your AdWords account with a single click.
When you mark a keyword as negative, the row gets highlighted with a light red color. This helps differentiate between positive and negative keywords visually. You’ll see two drop downs next to the search term, one to select the type of keyword – Positve or Ad group Negative and the other to select the match type – Broad, Phrase, Exact or BMM (Broad Match Modifier).
We’ve been pretty excited about the launch of Google Shopping ads since they’re a great way for retailers to highlight their products’ photos and prices. Unfortunately when running Shopping ads for thousands of products, bid management using the AdWords interface is a full time job: not because it’s difficult, but simply because the interface is excruciatingly slow when managing many products that are split across many campaigns and ad groups.
After confirming that this was a real problem with some other PPC folks at the HeroConf conference last month, we started building a bid management tool for Shopping Ads and today we’re excited to reveal it to the world.
[][1]Optmyzr’s Shopping Bidder Tool for AdWords makes setting the correct CPC for your shopping ads a quick and easy process that can easily be done for thousands of product groups in a matter of mere minutes.
Here’s how our Shopping Bidder works:
You get all the biddable items for your entire account on a single page.
You can filter the view to see just ROI positive, ROI negative, or items with no impressions or you can apply a custom filter using your own criteria like clicks, cost, impressions, etc.
You can change bids in bulk for all the items that meet your filter criteria, for example, lower all bids 10% for ROI negative items with at least 10 clicks in the past 30 days.
With one click, you can send the new bids to AdWords where they go live instantly.
This is much, much faster than doing the same in AdWords which has a few shortcomings:
You cannot see all biddable items from your entire account on one page. You have to open up every ad group one by one.
There are no filters for product groups so you have to manually find items that meet your criteria for needing a bid change.
To change a bid it takes several clicks to expand the product groups until you get to the level where bids can be set.
Initially this tool will � make bid management for Shopping ads a lot faster but when it becomes this easy, you’ll also find yourself splitting up your product groups ever more granularly, and that should further improve results.
We’re really excited to have this ready for our users today and we hope you’ll send us feedback about how we can make this even more useful for you.
If you want to scale the growth of your Apps, then Google’s UACs (Universal App Campaigns) must be one of the focal points of your marketing strategy. An automated type of campaign, UACs are an excellent choice for driving both installations and in-app actions, like purchases. This campaign type allows targeting audiences across Google Search, Google Display, Youtube, Google Play, and Apple Store. Google has an excellent course that can help you learn more about Universal App Campaigns.
UACs were launched to make in-app advertising easier and quicker. In line with this, to set up your UACs – you only require minimal initial data like texts, images, or videos. Google’s machine learning-based algorithms then work to show your App’s ads to your target audience. Since, these are automated campaigns – unlike your search ads – you won’t need to manually test the ads to find the best performers. Google does this bit for you.
No doubt Google does a decent job of driving high-quality traffic for UACs, but did you know that you can lend Google a hand to bring you better results? This can help you save money being spent on the wrong placements and audience and at the same time help you use your budget efficiently.
Here are some tips to try out that will help you exert a higher level of control over your UACs using Optmyzr:
1. Manage location targeting
Google doesn’t translate your ads for specific spoken languages for locations. This makes it imperative to run ads for only those locations that align with the languages in which an App is available. Therefore, while you work on making your app available in more languages, don’t forget to target locations for your campaigns accordingly.
You can also go granular within these locations and manage targeting based on how regions and cities perform. Some ways to optimize location targeting are:
Find cities that are driving expensive clicks and zero conversions and exclude them.
Find cities or regions driving high numbers of conversions, and target them in separate campaigns with separate budgets. This will help get more traffic from such locations.
Pro Tip: Use theGeo HeatMaporRule Enginefrom Optmyzr to get a report of cities, regions and postal codes that are performing best or worst – to target or exclude them respectively.
2. Optimize for in-app goals
How cool would it be to find campaigns which are driving registrations or in-app purchases and manage the Target CPA for them? Optmyzr’s Rule Engine can help you achieve this.
Take a look at the screenshot below of the Optmyzr Rule Engine, wherein we are pulling the in-app actions and even action values that are being tracked as conversions and conversion values. You can base optimizations on any such custom conversions which you might be tracking for your campaigns.
For example, here’s a rule that finds all the campaigns which have brought in registrations and recommends increasing the Target CPA for them by 10%.
Check out the campaigns below, which have had the “Registrations” type of conversions, and the system is recommending tweaking target values for them. Just like this, you can optimize for any in-app action as required. Eg: If you’re driving “Registrations”, and losing impression share, increasing TCPA can help.
3. Ensure sufficient budget for your CPA
It is recommended that these campaigns have a daily budget of at least 20-30 times of your CPA (cost-per-action). Create a rule in the Rule Engine to label campaigns on which you need to consider increasing your budgets.
Conclusion
UACs have helped unburden advertisers from needing to try out ad combinations to find what drives good results i.e. acquisitions/conversions. While you should make use of Google’s machine learning, don’t forget to optimize and control your campaigns from time to time.
To start setting up UACs, Sign in to your Google Ads account → go to the page menu → Campaigns → Universal App.
Once you’ve accrued traffic on UACs – try out the tricks I shared above using Optmyzr (14-day free trial) and improve the performance of your campaigns. Feel free to reach out to support@optmyzr.com if you have any questions.
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.
Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that changed the way advertisers perceived Shopping campaigns. By making Google Shopping listings free, the world’s largest advertising network forced everyone selling tangible products to rethink their PPC strategies.
Suddenly, this component of the Google advertising network became much more attractive.
At first, brands and PPC marketers were captivated by the prospect of free ad space. Once the initial hype faded, it became clear that only a portion of Google Shopping listings would be made free and that certain conditions had to be met.
To take advantage of these free listings, advertisers need to have active Google Merchant Center accounts and enable their products to show on all surfaces including Google Images, the Google Shopping tab, Google Lens, and Google Search.
As of late May, our conversations with experts like Kirk Williams of Zato Marketing revealed that an average of 5-6% of Google Shopping listings were made complementary.
But that’s not the only reason it makes sense to give your products Google Shopping visibility.
If like many other brands, your business or client are just starting to get involved in building Google Shopping campaigns, this article will help you figure out how to sell on Google Shopping.
In this article, we’ll explore:
How to take advantage of Google Shopping listings
Why Google Shopping is a proven channel for product visibility
How to sell on Google Shopping the easy way
How to take advantage of Google Shopping listings
Google Shopping allows advertisers to promote physical, shippable products with a greater amount of visual appeal. Consumers searching for ‘blue shoes’ or ‘leather couch’ can view and explore a range of product listings that match closely with what they’re looking for.
Google Shopping campaigns come in two varieties: Standard and Smart.
Image sourced from versafeed.com
Standard campaigns are built manually to deliver on highly strategic goals. These require some understanding of product groups, campaign structures, and other campaign components in order to achieve a specific goal, such as a target ROAS.
Smart campaigns on Google Shopping reduce the entry barrier by using machine learning and automation to speed up the process. This makes them ideal for small businesses with limited budgets, or advertisers who don’t have the time to build out Standard campaigns.
While Standard campaigns afford greater control over location targeting, negative keywords, custom scheduling, and network placement; Smart campaigns require historical data but will determine placement and other parameters for you based on past performance of other campaigns.
Google Shopping: A proven channel for product visibility
Google Shopping campaigns have always been considered a core part of the PPC marketer’s toolbox. They carry a visual component, which has proven to be more attractive than plain text when products are involved.
Here are four more reasons why Google Shopping is a proven way to give your products the visibility they need, especially with the current economic landscape in mind.
The effects of COVID-19 have made e-commerce more viable and attractive than ever. Even if customers can’t visit your store, you can still sell and ship your products to people who might need (or simply want) them.
Google Shopping campaigns (and e-commerce in general) enable you to widen your catchment area. A brick and mortar store can only serve a specific geography; selling online lets you grow your audience, market, and business.
Including images of your products in Google Shopping campaigns lets consumers see what they’d be getting if they made a purchase. Just be sure to use accurate imagery to align expectations with reality.
Free Google Shopping listings are a valuable bonus. While a 5% boost won’t change your bottom line, many businesses need all the help they can get.
How to sell on Google Shopping the easy way
Google Shopping campaigns can be highly valuable if your business calls for them. But it can be confusing and tricky to build them out if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Moreover, creating splits (e.g. by brand or category) takes a significant amount of time when done manually — and leaves you prone to human error.
Optmyzr’s tools for Google Shopping cover the full life cycle, allowing you to create campaigns and set structures from scratch. Use us to do the heavy lifting and help you create the campaign structures you want, quickly and without error.
With Optmytzr guiding you step by step, you can create both Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns and ad groups in just a few clicks.
Campaign Builder 2.0
Campaign Builder 2.0 is Optmyzr’s tool to build Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns from scratch. Anyone can link a spreadsheet or Google Merchant Center feed to get started in minutes.
Product Group Refresher 2.0
Product Group Refresher 2.0 optimizes existing Google Shopping campaigns by adding new products and product groups based on existing campaign structures. It looks at your current campaign structures and syncs with the feed to accurately reflect your inventory.
Machine learning provides suggestions, and you can even automate the entire process. For example, when new products are added to the inventory feed, Optmyzr can automatically create new product groups for them.
Manage Shopping Bids
This optimization identifies high-performing product groups, allowing you to raise bids for product groups that are driving results. It also shows which product groups are underperforming or failing, letting you lower bids for them.
By nature, this tool only supports Standard Google Shopping campaigns.
Shopping Analysis
One of our most popular Insight tools, Shopping Analysis helps Optmyzr users understand how their products are performing irrespective of structure. Use it to aggregate data and determine performance based on a number of different attributes.
Performance Metrics, such as ROAS or CPC
Standard Attributes enabled by Google, such as brand or product type
Feed Attributes based on your inventory, such as color or size
Aggregate data by price to see the performance and ROAS that products at different price points drive. Or if you’re selling shoes, easily see which sizes are more popular and sell more, or which ones aren’t in demand so you can fine-tune procurement.
Shopping Analysis works with both Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns. With the former, you can use this aggregate data to change bids using the Attribute Bidder. For Smart Shopping, you can see which products are selling better — an insight that’s not easy to obtain in Google Ads.
Conclusion
While it’s admirable that Google is thinking of advertisers and supporting them with some complementary Shopping listings, there’s greater value to be experienced than just a couple of freebies.
Unlike services, products have shape and form — and people love to see what they’re buying before they make a purchase. Google Shopping campaigns enable you to do this while expanding your reach, allowing small businesses to flourish and hobbyists to turn passion into profession.
To learn more about how we can help you build and optimize Google Shopping campaigns with minimal time sink, write to us at support@optymzr.com or sign up to try Optmyzr free of cost.
The last time we sat down with Google to talk shop, the discussion found its way to managing PPC campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With supply chains disrupted and business models being tested, companies around the world are facing a variety of new conditions. And though the results aren’t uniform, what’s consistent is how every business has been affected in some way.
Many are struggling to find customers. Some are facing uncertain futures. A few fortunate ones are doing better than ever — will they struggle when things return to normal?
We put together some advice for PPC marketers that took the shape of this blog post. But in the weeks since, we’ve seen and heard the debate over automated bidding become one of the prevailing industry conversations.
Thankfully, our friends at Google had plenty more to say.
Here are their recommendations for 6 secret tips that can help you impact Smart Bidding and more reliably navigate a marketplace in flux.
6 Secret Tips to Impact Smart Bidding
As you monitor shifting trends and course-correct your business plan, you’ll also need to bring your strategic approach in line with what the current situation demands. To help you provide clients and customers with a fruitful experience without eating too much of your time, Google recommends Smart Bidding.
Let’s recap the tactics we recommended last time, as well as explore how they impact Smart Bidding.
1. Keywords
Recommended Tactics
Use negative keywords as a safeguard against undesired clicks that might drive lots of cost but no conversions.
The way users are searching for your business may have changed, which is why it’s important to capture those shifts in search behavior through broad match keywords.
When bidding on keywords with your brand name, adjust goals for Impression Share or use tCPA/tROAS.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Keyword optimization helps deliver more at the same CPA/ROAS goal, and ensures that brand strategies align with business goals. Broad match keywords allow the Smart Bidding machine to discover new opportunities for conversions.
Optmyzr Tip: You’ll still want to keep other match types and regularly review new search terms with tools like Optmyzr. The Rule Engine’s latest addition takes high-performing keywords with one match type and lets you add new match types at the ad group level.
2. Creatives
Recommended Tactics
Use Dynamic Search Ads to show up on new relevant searches your keywords may be missing out on.
Use Responsive Search Ads to adapt ad content to more closely match user search terms.
Make offers stand out and take customers to the right page with promo and site extensions.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Getting your creatives right prevents your message and customer experience are on the same page, which ensures that each bid brings relevant engagement.
Optmyzr Tip: Regulations and restrictions can change frequently. With the Ad Text Optimization tool, you can quickly and consistently change ad copy to reflect the real-world operating conditions of your business. The Add Responsive Search Ad tool is also useful to build RSAs for each of your ad groups.
The Responsive Search Ads tool lets you maximize your chances of getting meaningful clicks
3. Bids and Budgets
Recommended Tactics
Move unused parts of your budget to the ads that need it most.
Raise the budgets of campaigns that are performing well to drive more traffic.
Use Performance Planner to understand the implications of different budget scenarios.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Putting your marketing dollars where they’re likely to yield the best returns is PPC 101. You capture more leads at the same CPA/ROAS goal, and forecasting often captures the most recent demand trends.
Optmyzr Tip: Campaigns that worked a few months ago might not be winners today, for no fault of their own or yours. Put your dollars where they need to be with the Optimize Budgets tool. It can help you quickly re-allocate budgets based on how different campaigns are doing against your goals.
Optimize Budgets lets you see how to adjust spend to achieve specific goals
4. Target Constraints/Goals
Recommended Tactics
Evaluate your new business strategies and confirm target goals.
Set performance targets and customize settings to your unique business goals.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Using CPA/ROAS goal adjustments can help you control spend and volume. But to achieve the same thing for Max strategies, Google recommends using budget adjustments.
Optmyzr Tip: Use the Optimize Target CPA & ROAS on campaigns with automated bidding to increase conversions and Impression Share. You can also see converting ad groups that use other automated bidding strategies.
5. Account-Wide Best Practices
Recommended Tactics
Capture all signals using Data-Driven or Non-Last Click Attribution.
Only include conversions that are relevant to the business.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
Smart Bidding uses account-wide signals (cross-account under MCC, if applicable). If you’re struggling to see results from Smart Bidding, it might be because you’re still using Last Click Attribution in an era of erratic search behavior.
Optmyzr Tip: The Rule Engine allows you to create data-based strategies, like removing non-converting keywords related to COVID-19. Or for a fun way to keep your account in shape, try the Workouts that combine multiple optimizations to achieve a specific objective.
6. Audiences
Recommended Tactics
Add all RSLA, Similar Audiences, and Customer Match lists to Smart Bidding campaigns.
How does this impact Smart Bidding?
First-party audience lists improve Smart Bidding algorithms, but Google lists have a neutral impact on Smart Bidding. For best results, provide your own customer information.
Optmyzr Tip: You always want Smart Bidding to have the latest and greatest information about your customers. Use the Customer Match List Updates tool (under Optimizations > Utilities) to keep your audiences in sync between your business data and Google’s audience repository.
6 Ways to Fully Control & Adjust Smart Bidding
While Smart Bidding might make PPC a bit less time-consuming, it’s far from a ‘set it and forget it’ mentality. There are many things you can do to affect the degree of control and influence you have over your bids.
Check out these 6 ways to fully control and adjust Smart Bidding.
1. Goals
Goals are the end objectives of your campaign; think of them as a destination. Tweaking goal values can change the way Smart Bidding tries to get there.
CPA/ROAS goal adjustments
Ad Group targets
Portfolio targets
Device CPA modifier
Operationalize forecasts
2. Conversions
Current market realities have impacted conversions across the board. Use the information in this space to inform your strategy and reshape the Smart Bidding process.
Conversion value adjustments
Campaign-level conversion setting
“Hack” data exclusion (seasonal adjustment)
New secondary KPIs
3. Constraints
Setting hard limits on your financials can enable Smart Bidding to look at creating value over volume. As always, keep an eye on things as you implement this approach.
Limiting budgets on purpose
Portfolio CPC max/min bid limits
4. Targeting
Audience is one of the most influential factors in PPC, and there’s no doubt that who and how you choose to target can make a difference to Smart Bidding results.
Pausing targeting
Opening targeting
Split testing
5. Budgets
At the end of the day, it’s all about the dollars. Experimenting with budgetary values can provide some of the most significant influence on Smart Bidding.
Shared budgets
Uncapped budgets
Constrained budgets
6. Misc. Adjustments
There are other adjustments you can make to shape Smart Bidding, including seasonal adjustments. We suggest exercising oversight when using some of these in today’s market.
Seasonal adjustments
Campaign structure
Split testing bid strategies
Conclusion
It’s been said before but bears repeating: There’s only one way PPC professionals can do right by their businesses and clients — by having as much information as possible. That’s why we’ve partnered with Google to bring you these posts on how to gain maximum value from the tools at your disposal.
These recommendations from Google are intended to supplement a brand’s unique business strategy. Both Google and Optmyzr suggest you balance any automated bidding strategy by keeping a close eye on your accounts. After all, only humans can provide context to the data.
And be on the lookout for the third part of our collaboration with Google, when we discuss what advertisers in hard-hit industries can do to prepare for the end of lockdown.
Anyone who’s ever done strength training knows the challenge of overcoming a plateau. Once your body gets used to a certain regimen, it’s important to scale up your activity level — but without hurting yourself by doing too much too soon.
The same logic applies to scaling your PPC budget.
When your account is already performing well and receives a significant financial boost (like the one many brands will experience as we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic), it can be difficult to spend more while maintaining the same level of ROAS or CPA.
While it’s fairly simple, it certainly isn’t easy.
With that being said, here are some tips to help you to take greater control of your PPC budget without compromising on ROAS and CPA goals.
Manage your budgets better
If it sounds straightforward, that’s because it is. Effective budget scaling begins with making your marketing dollars work more efficiently, and a better understanding of where your account is experiencing the greatest returns and wastage.
Fortunately, Optmyzr gives you the tools to get where you need to go.
Optmyzr’s Spend Projection tool uses historical data to predict future spend.
Spend Projection: This insight from Optmyzr predicts your account’s likely spend by the end of the selected time period (user guide).
Optimize Budget: Use this tool to identify budgets and campaigns losing impression share due to budget and optimize them to maximize ROAS (user guide).
Budget Simulator: Found as a feature in the Optimize Budget tool, this gives you intelligent suggestions for budget reallocation, including daily budgets. It tells you how much budget a campaign or shared budget can actually spend. This recommendation is based on years of historical spend analysis and current spend patterns.
If your current campaign setup and traffic don’t exhaust your budget, there are additional steps you can take.
Grow your account
Given the way your current campaigns are set up, you may not have significant opportunity to grow your account traffic. In this case, you’ll need to grow your account.
You can achieve this with a two-pronged approach.
1. Hone more keyword opportunities
Reviewing search terms with good performance can open up a world of possibilities that you may have neglected or been unaware of. Optmyzr lets you do this with a number of one-click optimizations.
Find search queries with conversions and high CTR using the Keyword Lasso tool. Add them as new keywords, or create entirely new ad groups.
Create and automate custom strategies to manage search queries using the Rule Engine (work with Google Microsoft, and Amazon advertising accounts).
The Rule Engine allows you to add keywords based on queries that are driving conversions or that have a better CTR than the associated keyword, or to add keywords of another match type.
Use the Keyword Lasso tool to discover new opportunities to fully utilize your budget.
2. Promote existing keywords, ad groups and campaigns
Sometimes, it’s not a question of looking for new opportunities, but optimizing the ones you’re already capitalizing on to yield better results. We can help you take performing campaigns up a notch without needing to do the heavy lifting yourself.
Use the Conversion Grabber to increase bids for converting keywords losing impression share due to ad rank.
The Optimize Target ROAS and CPA tool allows you to tweak target ROAS and CPA values at ad group level for ad groups losing Impression Share due to ad rank.
Apply bid adjustments based on time, location, gender, and audience to maximize campaign performance and better utilize available budgets.
The Optimize Target CPA & ROAS tool helps increase conversions with automated bidding.
The importance of risk mitigation
At Optmyzr, we believe risk mitigation is a vital component of any evolving PPC strategy. So while you explore these options to expand your account and promote existing inventory, be sure to have a safety net in place.
Acquire a list of expensive keywords or product groups, and update it on a regular basis. Keep an eye on these so they don’t accrue unnecessary cost, raising CPA and reducing ROAS.
Automate the process of adding negative keywords to search or shopping campaigns in order to limit clicks that don’t convert. Use the Non-Converting Search Queries strategy in the Rule Engine.
Maintain and monitor ROAS performance
Once you have the different pieces in place, it’s important to keep a regular eye on things. As humans, we can provide context that machines don’t have and increase the chances of a favorable outcome.
Alerts and budget tracking on the MCC dashboard will drop notifications if the performance for a metric falls below target — or even if it starts trending in the wrong direction.
When running a manual bidding strategy, establish and track target ROAS for keywords using the Rule Engine. If you prefer to use automated bidding, this piece by Optmyzr and Google might offer more relevant insights.
Conclusion
PPC strategy is never as easy as we’d like it to be, and challenges like the ongoing pandemic add variables that can affect performance overnight.
At a time when current data is volatile and historical data is unreliable, this ‘human context’ is more critical than ever to getting the most out of machine learning.
By regularly checking in on your automations, you’ll be able to exert greater influence over how and where your marketing dollars are channeled, giving you a better chance of seeing the results your brand is looking for.
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.
Shopping campaigns work very differently from search campaigns. The biggest difference is that, unlike search campaigns, you can’t specify the keywords that you would like to show your ads for. However, you can decide which keywords you _don’t_ want to show for, by adding negatives at the ad group and campaign level.� Usually the purpose of adding negative keywords is to cut out irrelevant traffic which helps increase profitability. However, Google does a pretty good job of not matching irrelevant queries to shopping ads. The question then is – how can negative keywords help improve performance of AdWords shopping campaigns?
It can be done in two ways:
Direct traffic to more profitable ad groups
Negatives for shopping campaigns can be used to direct traffic to more profitable ad groups. When using a multi-campaign structure with different priorities, the same query can match to different ad groups. Comparing performance of the same search query across ad groups and adding it as an exact match negative to the ad group it is underperforming in will make sure that the query always matches to the more profitable ad group. By doing this you can sculpt the traffic to go to the ad group that you want.
Remove generic non-converting queries or queries with low ROAS
Google doesn’t match irrelevant search queries to shopping ads but it does match generic queries. For example, if you have an ad group selling ‘Adidas Running Shoes’, it can match to a query like ‘Black Shoes’ which is not irrelevant because it does refer to shoes but the search query is generic. Sometimes when campaigns have limited budget it is a good idea to concentrate on the queries that have the highest return on investment. Adding generic queries that don’t convert or have a very low ROAS as exact match negatives helps increase overall ROAS.�
The new Shopping Negatives Tool from Optmyzr supports both the above strategies of adding negative keywords. It analyzes the search terms for shopping campaigns and recommends exact match negatives based on the these strategies.
Duplicate Queries (Across ad groups)
This strategy finds queries that match to more than one ad group and recommends adding the query as an exact match negative to the under performing ad group. It is like AB Testing the search query and keeping it in the best performing ad group.
Low Performing Queries (within ad groups)
This strategy finds queries that are not performing well within an ad group. They may have a lower ROAS than the ad group average or a much higher cost/conversion. If you’re on a limited budget, these queries can be added as exact match negatives to the ad group to reduce cost.
You have the option of clicking on the query and seeing exactly why the system is recommending adding it as a negative keyword. Also, the confidence level says how confident the system is when making the recommendation.
Watch this video to find out more.� � � Try the Shopping Negatives Tool here.
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.
Running search ads is an easy sell for agencies, because clients like the measurability and control this medium offers.
Then comes the discussion of the agency fees and hours required to execute a successful campaign, often yielding a chasm between the service a client expects and what the agency can offer, yet remaining profitable. As contract negotiations whittle down already aggressive project bids, the pressure falls on the day-to-day PPC managers to complete mountains of work in little time.
The danger for agencies—besides write-downs and overages—is becoming so focused on checking off a task list that they fail to make the strategic moves necessary for the results they promised. To prevent this unenviable situation, agencies need to pause and take a hard look at where their time is going to maximize efficiency and boost profitability of PPC campaigns. Automation of AdWords and PPC campaigns overall is key. �
[][1]PPC OPTIMIZATION Businessman working at office desk and using computer and objects, coffee, top view, with copy space
4 PPC Agency Time Killers
Reality is, dozens of time killers plague search marketing agencies, but we want to focus in on a few specific areas of exceptional opportunity to automate the most frequent time-consuming PPC tasks. At the very least, analysis of the following automation opportunities can put agencies on the path to better profitability.
Reporting. PPC account managers field constant client questions about results and requisite explanations of how campaigns affect business. Many agencies tell us reporting can consume three, four or even five full days of exhaustive, detailed, manual work each month. Reporting is perhaps one of the most essential parts of campaign management, but it shouldn’t eat up otherwise profitable time. Thankfully, machine learning and automated processes now make it possible for campaign managers to automatically and reliably pull data, analyze for key findings and structure custom-looking reports in minutes versus days. We have multiple clients notching 90 percent reductions in reporting time via automated reporting capabilities. Read about experiences for EU-based Geniadsand US-based Granular. Both agencies saw dramatic reductions in time spent on reporting, allowing them to redirect critical thinking to campaign optimization. Google also recently stepped up its automation game with a simple API connecting AdWords data with Google Slides. Simple AdWords scripts can be used to create presentations or automate appending additional data into existing ones. There may be upfront time required to do additional scripting or implement ready-made scripts like our Enhanced Scripts™, but once implemented, automated PPC reporting can drive agency efficiency, effectiveness AND profitability.
Bid management.Effective bid management can make or break campaigns. Google actually builds in automated bid management right in the Adwords interface to automate strategies like “bid to top of page.” These sorts of Automated Rules are basic, but can save tremendous amounts of time compared to doing the same work manually in spreadsheets. Many PPC pros, however, cling to their own bid management processes to maintain as much control as they can. But they miss the fact that relinquishing control of such manual processes can free them up to do more strategic, high-value campaign management. Prebuilt rules can take the tedious work out of managing bids to position, target CPA, target ROAS and other key metrics. With a little time and thought in HOW and WHAT to automate, PPC pros can reliably take big chunks of time out of bid management.
Keyword management.Automation and artificial intelligence can even help with tasks that require a bit of human input, like keyword management. Computers can find optimal new keywords based purely on the data, whereas PPC pros may be inclined to rely on intuition when they should follow data. Automating keyword management shifts a PPC pro’s job to confirming the suggestions and tweaking the model being used as opposed to groveling over every keyword to make a difference. Considering many accounts have tens of thousands of new queries to contemplate adding as keywords, shifting to automation can be a huge time saver. The challenge is about releasing control of keyword management to open up productive time. Ask yourself if the task is something you really NEED to be doing. If automation can do the same or even better, why would you even think about continuing with the status quo. And even if the automation is slightly worse than a human, consider the tradeoff between your employees’ valuable time and the change in performance from a more automated keyword management process.
Ad Testing.� Google offers ready-made tools for PPC pros to test theories and decipher infinitesimal differences between ads. These tools are only a starting point for automation. The trouble is, expanding permutations of all the variables between keywords, ad creative, regions, bids and the myriad other variables can make even the best PPC pro’s head spin. Managing the ads becomes an intricate ballet, prioritizing what we think is important and digging into the subtleties of the data and understanding what “statistically valid” really means. As PPC pros advance along an automation path, they can harness the power of visualization and data insight tools to move their energy, talent and creativity away from test building and into informed, strategic optimization. Looking beyond Google’s built-in automation tools, more powerful options such as Optmyzr Ad Optimization, can systematize repetitive tasks that often fall short due to human interpretation or error. PPC pros who embrace ad testing automation are able to look at the bigger picture, make adjustments and gain significant efficiency. �
Time spent on repetitive tasks ripe or overdue for automation can exact a painful toll on agency profitability and competitiveness. Of course, write-downs and write-offs will always be a fact of agency life, but many profitability killers are preventable with automation, advanced scripting, AI and machine learning.
Because of such rapid transformation, automation will be a key area of focus on this blog throughout 2018 – along with our contributed articles in Search Engine Landand Search Engine Journal. I encourage you to read my most recent Search Engine Journal articleeasy ways to get started with PPC automation.
“Automate or be rendered obsolete” might well become the PPC pro’s rally cry in the near future. Agencies and PPC pros alike need to explore automation to stay ahead of the curve. The industry will only get more competitive with tighter margins.
Anyone who has worked with Optmyzr knows our innovative platform has greatly streamlined and automated Pay-Per-Click campaign management for Google AdWords. Many marketers who work with our innovative PPC Management Software have seen significant improvements in campaign performance and agency profitability.
We now offer much of that same automation to support Bing Ads management for agency and in-house marketers alike. PPC pros can tap the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make Bing Ads accounts more effective and profitable – much the same way they use Optmyzr for AdWords.
Specific features rolled out for Bing Ad management include an intuitive UI that brings together key PPC management tools in one package:
Budget and KPI monitoring: Marketers have access to powerful visualizations and alerts to track and manage against key metrics, such as conversions, return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost per conversion.
Ability to find new keywordsand create single keyword ad groups (SKAGS): Optmyzr’s intuitive Keyword Lasso tool allows One-Click Optimization™, which automates analysis of search terms and identifies higher performing search queries. Previously only available to support AdWords accounts, the Keyword Lasso now allows the same ability to identify optimal keywords and create new ad groups that support SKAG ad group structures.
New ad creation in A/B testing: Optmyzr now extends ad creation and A/B testing for Bing Ads management. Marketers benefit from automated suggestions for ad content based on what has worked in campaigns.
Hour-of-week performance optimization: A new Hour of Week Bidder for Bing gives PPC pros recommended hourly bid adjustments, based on conversion and cost goals as well as other variables. Ad schedules can be changed in bulk, giving marketers greater ability to turn off ads when they are not needed.
Search term N-grams for Bing: This tool allows marketers to gain quick insight into long-tail search behaviors, helping to minimize wasted spend and improve results by unearthing words (N-grams) that lead to wasted spend.
Landing page analysis: PPC pros can now benefit from aggregated performance data for landing pages across Bing campaigns. This helps understand which pages perform well and gives insight into improvements that can be made to landing pages that have low conversion rates.
Geo HeatMap analysis: Optmyzr now brings powerful visualizations of Bing Ads geo data via an interactive heatmap. Marketers can tap this information to analyze traffic and conversions based on location, allowing more strategic budget allocation right down to the city level.
The above mentioned features are available to try out in Optmyzr. Use this link to access tools for Bing Ads accounts.
Our developers have enhanced marketers’ abilities to optimize Google AdWords campaigns over the last several years. Of course, Google still dominates the PPC landscape, but Bing has gained market share for six consecutive years. As a result, many marketers now manage similar campaigns across both platforms. Our objective is to help marketers improve efficiency and profitability of their overall PPC initiatives.�
Stay tuned for additional Bing-specific functionality as we move through 2018. We are working on additional ways marketers can extend instant optimizations and gain quick insights into their PPC programs.�
The Hour of the Week tool is an incredibly helpful way of visualizing the times and days of the week where your AdWords campaigns perform better. You can manage your bids based on which time slots have the best performance, and avoid wasting budget unnecessarily on those hours of the day when the return on investment is low.
After all, information is the key to success, right?
But wouldn’t it be great if you could not only see the information displayed, but also get recommendations based on your AdWords performance, and make a greatly useful task even easier? Well, luckily, we’re all about smooth efficiency! And that’s where the New Hour of the Week Biddercomes into place.
Our latest update to the Hour of the Week Bid Adjustment includes time-based bid adjustments based on your AdWords KPIs. The tool uses intelligence to tailor bid adjustment suggestions based on your goals. The recommendations are based on historical performance and estimated potential.
With the New Hour of the Week Bidder, you can:
Choose a goal that works for your business. Whether its increasing conversions, reducing cost per conversions or increasing traffic, we’ve got you covered!
Get bid adjustment recommendations based on historical analysis and expected performance, as well as seeing estimated change in traffic and conversions.
Performance and opportunity analysis for individual day parts, which will also allow you to edit day parts.
A small step for your bids, a giant leap for your budget!
Optmyzr has a new tool that will make it easy to restructure existing shopping campaigns to improve performance.
Create GRIP Structure Tool
In shopping campaigns, the product group is the level at which you can set bids. A product group can have any number of products. Having a granular shopping campaign structure lets you set a bid for each product individually. This is important because different products have different prices and having the same bid for all products may not result in high ROAS. For example, if you’re selling shoes and you choose to split campaigns by Category 0->Category 1->Product Type 0, you could end up with a structure where the last level has different types of shoes like running shoes, walking shoes. In this case you could end up bidding the same $2 for a pair of shoes that costs $100 and another that costs $250. To make sure you can bid relative to how each product performs, it is important to have a structure where there is one product or item in each product group. This is the GRIP (GRoup of Individual Products) structure.
How can you achieve the GRIP structure without spending hours in your AdWords account? The Shopping Campaign Builder lets you create the GRIP structure for new campaigns. You can specify the high level split, the tool will pull the data from your feed, put it into the defined structure and you can upload it to AdWords with a single click. For existing shopping campaigns that already have performance data, you can either spend hours creating this structure in AdWords or use the new Create GRIP structure tool from Optmyzr. This lets you restructure existing shopping campaigns to have the GRIP (groups of individual products) structure.
How does it work?
The tool detects the last level at which an ad group is split and splits it one level further at the item id level. This enables you to have one product group per item id while preserving the historical data associated with the ad group. Once you have this structure you can use the Shopping Attribute Bidder to aggregate data by any attribute in the feed.
Benefits of using the tool
No restructuring required: It works with existing campaign structures
Preserves historical data: It splits out existing ad groups so historical data is not lost
Higher ROI: It enables you to manage bids for each product which results in better performance and higher ROI
Saves time: You can create thousands of products groups within minutes
This tool is currently in beta and is available in the Pro subscription plan on Optmyzr.
I’m the engineer behind our� recently announced Shopping Attribute Bidder and I would like to show you some of the benefits you can achieve by deploying a more granular structure for your product groups in shopping campaigns.
How Bids Work For Shopping Ads
In shopping campaigns, you set bids for product groups. However, not all product groups can get a bid. Why is that? It’s because product groups can be subdivided and the bid can only be set at the final level of subdivision.
Here’s an example where products have been segmented (subdivided) along a few dimensions: first by the category (‘electronics’ or ‘toys’). Electronics are subdivided further by ‘brand’, and toys are not subdivided further. The right column in green represents all other product categories and is called “Everything else” in AdWords. This is further subdivided by ‘used status’.
This segmentation can be shown as a tree:
What’s important here is that in the AdWords interface, each division is called a ‘product group’ but only the ones at the lowest level (the colored ones in the image above) can have a bid. We’ll call these ‘biddable product groups’.
Why AdWords Has Non-Biddable Product Groups
So why does AdWords even have non-biddable product groups? It’s because the way they let advertisers do the subdivisions in the interface requires one subdivision at a time. In creating the tree, each level has to be subdivided individually.
Doing this is actually really really painful if you just want to build a logical division, for example, splitting all products by category 0, and then splitting all those by brand. AdWords supports 7 levels of subdivision but in the interface anything more than 2 levels is extremely manual.
If you need help with that, check out our super fast Shopping Campaign Builder tool. We’ve had advertisers create hundreds of ad groups and thousands of granular product groups in just minutes with it.
How to Set Unique Bids Per Product (SKU)� in Shopping Ads
How granularly you can set bids depends on how granular your biddable product groups are. So if you want very granular, SKU level bids, you must place each SKU in its own product group.
It’s a similar concept to SKAGs in search campaigns. SKAG stands for Single Keyword Ad Group. The name I came up with for the equivalent of a SKAG in shopping campaigns is the GRIP structure. GRIP stands for GRoup of Individual Products.
Let me show you two ways to split four SKUs (item IDs) into biddable product groups.
Here’s what your biddable product groups contain in a GRIP structure:
In the GRIP structure above, each individual shoe is placed in a product group. The same four products in a non-GRIP structure below are all grouped together based on a subdivision of something they have in common, in this case the fact they’re all sneakers.
In the GRIP structure, I can set a unique bid for each item I sell. In a non-GRIP structure, the bid for all four sneakers has to be the same.
Why the GRIP Structure Is Good For Bidding
With the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool I created, we can analyze AdWords performance for any attribute we have included in our Google Merchant Feed. For example we could analyze how shoes of different sizes perform. Here’s what we might see in Optmyzr:
As you can see, size 11.5 shoes have an ROAS of 1361%. Size 10 shoes on the other hand haven’t sold anything so their ROAS is 0%.
In a non-GRIP structure, this useful insight cannot be acted on because shoes of different sizes exist in the same biddable product group.
In a GRIP structure, on the other hand, we can act on this insight:
What’s really cool is that your structure no longer limits your ability to act on insights. If you want to analyze performance by brand or color, that would work just as easily. Here we use the GRIP structure to change bids for things that are red:
And here we change bids for products from a certain brand:
Not only can you now analyze data using attributes not available in AdWords (we do this by merging your merchant feed with the AdWords reports in our systems), you can even combine attributes to find more granular insights.
Changing Bids For GRIP Ads
It was important for us to give you the ability to act on insights right from the page where you got the insight. Here’s what the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool looks like when you’ve found an insight that you want to use for a bid change:
The analysis here looks at price ranges of products, something the advertiser has entered using a custom attribute. We can see performance data for each attribute. When products with the same attribute have different bids, we show each bid so that you can raise or lower them all by a percentage or a fixed amount.
Conclusion
I see a lot of e-commerce advertisers with sub-optimal product groups. That’s why I’m excited about the fact that with Optmyzr you can now more easily create a great shopping structure and use that to improve bid management. Try it out and let me and the team know what you think…
Today you will see some new tools for managing Shopping Ads in Optmyzr’s One-Click Optimizations™ menu. These new and updated tools help e-commerce advertisers manage every aspect of advertising an e-commerce business on Google AdWords. Both the setup and management of shopping ads are made more efficient so that you can get better results with less effort.
The following tools are part of our updated Shopping Ads management suite:
You specify how you want your products to be segmented in AdWords. Our tool automatically builds out the associated structure, handling the creation of thousands of very granular ad groups and product groups.
This tool speeds up the creation of well-structured shopping campaigns, making it possible to conduct A/B tests and experiment with different structures. Without the Campaign Builder tool, a merchant selling ten brands, and products in ten categories and ten subcategories would have to load 1,000 pages in AdWords to create the same structure that can be set up with Optmyzr in just six clicks.
To achieve the best return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), you have to set the right bids for all products you advertise with Google Shopping ads. This level of bid control requires that product groups in AdWords correctly reflect the range of goods you sell. Because ad groups in AdWords don’t automatically get updated based on changes in the merchant feed, Optmyzr has created this tool to make it easier for you to sync a store’s inventory with AdWords.
In AdWords, product groups are created based on a snapshot of the data in a product feed. Because this data changes dynamically based on inventory, the AdWords structure can quickly become out of sync. Catching mismatches between what is sold and what is managed in AdWords is time-consuming, manual, and often overlooked by advertisers. Accounts whose bids are poorly managed due to the complexity of maintaining a correct structure can suffer from decreases in ROAS.
Optmyzr’s Shopping Campaign Refresher analyzes the AdWords Shopping campaign to determine its structure and compares this with the data in the Merchant Center feed to provide an automated optimization proposal that corrects any mismatches.
Optmyzr now provides three ways to manage CPC bids for product groups.
Bid by Rules (Rule Engine)
Complex bidding logic can be automated with our Rule Engine. The Rule Engine can combine data from different entities, and date ranges with data maintained in Google Sheets. The data can be used to create a series of if-then-else statements, giving you the complete flexibility to create advanced bidding logic.
We have provided default rules for managing bids based on ROAS and CPA, and you can enhance these rules with your own insights about your company and industry.
Quickly identify product groups that meet basic profitability criteria and apply bid changes in bulk with this tool. When there isn’t enough data to make bid management decisions, the tool can help reach the required data levels by aggregating metrics based on commonalities between products. For example, advertisers who have structured product groups by brand could use brand-level metrics to make bid changes for items where data sparsity is an issue.
The most powerful way to bid for Shopping Ads is with the new Shopping Attribute Bidder. Regardless of the structure in AdWords, you can view shopping performance by any attribute of your merchant center feed (even by color or size). If product groups are divided by item id, you can act on insights by updating bids from the same page where you got the insight.
For example, a shoe retailer can get instant insights into what size shoe has the best ROI. They could further refine their analysis by analyzing a combination of multiple attributes, like shoe size and color.
What makes Optmyzr’s tool unique is that insights can be turned into intelligent optimizations unlike in AdWords where the analysis and bid changes happen in separate places, and where they are limited by the way an account is structured.
Optmyzr’s tools for optimizing bid adjustments for dayparting, device, and geography� are all compatible with Shopping Campaigns.
Budget Pacing
Our Enhanced Scripts™ for reaching a target budget� without exceeding it are compatible with Shopping campaigns as well as many other campaign types.
The Lifecycle of a Shopping Ad
We covered the three stages of managing Shopping ads� in a recent blog post. Whether you need to build, update, or optimize shopping ads, Optmyzr now makes that easier than ever.
If you’re relatively new to managing shopping ads, you might enjoy our 3-part series on SearchEngineLand. Part 1, part 2, part 3. Many of the concepts have evolved but this series of articles lays out many of the basics you should understand before you can become proficient in managing shopping ads.
We hope you’ll try out our new and updated tools and let us know how we can help make your shopping ads even more successful.
It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been running search campaigns. One thing that never goes away is search query management. Your search query or search terms report will continue to require attention because the way people search is constantly changing.� It is important to manage search queries because it directly impacts� return on investment (ROI). When managing search queries the two basic things to keep in mind are making sure that your ads are showing up for the right search queries and conveying the right message.
Analyze search terms to find the good, bad and ugly
The Search Terms Report from AdWords is useful to understand what your customers are looking for, but it can take time to go through all the information and leverage the huge� amount of data available.� You need to filter the information and identify what is relevant to your ads and campaigns to separate search terms with high potential (to add them to your keyword list) from the ones that aren’t relevant to your business (to add them as negative keywords). Adding good� search terms as keywords is the best way to ensure you will be bidding on the right keywords and won’t be� spending money showing your ad to people who aren’t interested in it.
We have a couple of tools that can help you make the task much easier.
#1 Add relevant search terms as keywords – Keyword Lasso
One question that comes up often is – Why should I add search terms as keywords if my� ad is already showing for them? The answer – To manage bids and to control the messaging. If you don’t want to spend time going through lots of queries, you can use the Keyword Lasso to focus specifically on converting or high performing search terms.� This One-Click Optimization™ will help you save time by suggesting only search terms that have a good conversion rate or clickthrough rate (CTR), allowing you to add them as keywords in any match type with a single click. One of the most popular features of this optimization is the ability to create SKAGs (Single Keyword Ad Groups) that helps you upload multiple keywords in new ad groups in one go. You can read more about the SKAG feature here. Also, within the same tool, you can add queries that are irrelevant or not performing well as negatives at the ad group or campaign level.
#2 Remove irrelevant traffic by adding negatives – Negative Keyword Finder
With this optimization, you can quickly add negative keywords across your campaigns through shared negative lists. It finds words and phrases� that may be irrelevant at the account level. It analyzes� individual words that are part of search queries and� are not performing well. It also shows you phrases that the individual� words were part of in case you want to add them as negative phrase match. It also does a relevance analysis to determine if you intended to target those words before showing them in the list.
#3 Identify new trends – Search Terms Word Cloud
This analysis tool helps you find queries that are getting the most clicks or have the highest cost but with a different approach: by showing you individual words. You can have several long tail search terms that individually have few� clicks, but sometimes there is a word that frequently appears among them, and if you were to aggregate data� for the queries that include this word you can identify trends. That is why the search terms word cloud� displays individual words with a large aggregate volume at account or campaign level.� After evaluating the single word, you can choose to add it to your keyword list or update your current ads with it. In other cases, if you find that it is irrelevant, you might want to add it as a negative keyword. It is also a great way to find new themes for ad groups. For example, if you’re a travel agency and you start seeing 2018 appearing often in the list, it means that people have started making travel plans for next year and it is a good idea to create ad groups to capture that traffic.
#4 Show the right ads� – Traffic Sculptor
Sometimes, AdWords� can show your ad even if it is not the match for the query because it prefers to broad or phrase match the query to a keyword with a higher rank. To prevent this from happening, this optimization finds search terms that are already present as keywords in your account but wrongly matched to other keywords. Then it recommends adding them as negatives (in other ad groups) to force Google to show the ad that was meant to show with the search term. This will guarantee that you are matching the most relevant� ad to the query each time. You can read more about how the Traffic Sculptor works here.
AdWords introduced expanded text ads (ETAs) last year and promised higher click-through rates for advertisers and a better experience for users. In continuation to the announcement, AdWords removed the option to create standard text ads on 31st January 2017. Following which advertisers have either completely moved to ETAs or are in the process of doing so. To smoothen the transition, AdWords automatically added ETAsto accounts, which gave� users the option to� test out performance of ETAs but offered little control over the ad text. � Optmyzr has solutions to help you create ETAs at scale in your AdWords account while maintaining control over the ad copy.� You can create ETAs from a spreadsheet as well as from existing standard text ads. I’ve listed three tools in Optmyzr that support creation of ETAs.
#1 Generate Text Ad Bulksheets Enhanced Script
Creating ETAs from scratch can be very time consuming especially if you have many campaigns in your account. The Generate Text Ad Bulksheets Enhanced Script helps in creating new ads based on performance of existing ads. For example, you can pick a metric like CTR and use it as a benchmark for creating new ETAs that can be quickly uploaded to AdWords. This videoexplains how this script can be used for creating ETAs via bulk uploads or the AdWords Editor.
#2 AB Testing for Ads
The AB Testing for Ads optimization compares performance of legacy ads (old text ads) with new ETAs and it lets you pause losing ads with a single click. It also lets you create new ETAs to populate ad groups and continue testing ads. To make it easy, it recommends high performing headlines and description lines that can be easily combined to create new ads. Pro Tip: Use the Turbo Mode to view all active ads in ad groups and to quickly create new ETAs across ad groups.
#3 Create Ads from Spreadsheet Enhanced Script
Well, that’s not all. If you are looking to create fresh ETAs in a campaign, you can use the Create Ads from Spreadsheet Enhanced Script. Using this script you can use data from a spreadsheet to create new ads, keywords and ad groups. This videoshows how this script lets you easily automate the creation of ads from a spreadsheet. You don’t need any coding skills to implement this.
Not sure which ad groups don’t have ETAs? Use the audit widgets in Optmyzr to find ad groups with less than ‘n’ ETAs. Read more about how to use these widgets here.
If you don’t have an Optmyzr account, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial of Optmyzr’s tools to try out these tools � 🙂
How much time do you spend managing shopping campaigns in AdWords?� In this blog post, we talk about how you can save time by automating shopping campaign optimization and management.
#1 – Creating Campaigns
The first step is to create a well structured shopping campaign with properly defined� product groups. Unlike AdWords search campaigns where keywords are the biddable elements in shopping campaigns it is product groups. The ideal structure is to have an individual product group for each item in the feed. This enables you to control and manage bids at the most granular level based on performance. In AdWords, it is difficult to create one product group per item id because you need to split them� manually. Due to this, depending on the size of the feed it could take hours or days to just set up a shopping campaign.
The Shopping Campaign Builder from Optmyzr lets you create shopping campaigns� within a few minutes. You can define the structure you would like to split your product feed by and upload product groups to AdWords with a single click. Watch this short video of how the Shopping Campaign Builder works.
#2 – � Managing Bids
When you’re managing bids for product groups, it is important to take into account� the revenue they generate and the return on investment (ROAS).� Having one product group per item id gives a lot of flexibility when managing bids as you can measure the return on investment at a very granular level. However, if you have thousands of product groups, AdWords doesn’t make it easy. I’ve mentioned three tools from Optmyzr that can help you manage bids at scale for product groups.
Shopping Bidder
This is a One-Click Optimization™ that lets you change bids for product groups based on performance. You can choose to change bids for product groups that have ROAS>100% and ROAS<100%. It is also possible to automate your optimization strategy by creating custom filters. These can then be used to change bids for product groups based on performance. This version of the Shopping Bidder lets you view data for product groups at the product group level.
Shopping Attribute Bidder
This new optimization for shopping campaigns lets you aggregate and combine data across product groups based on attributes and use that to change bids. You can choose from attributes available in the feed like color, size, gender, group id and more. What makes this powerful is that it enables you to aggregate data across the campaign� irrespective of the structure and change bids at scale. Watch a video of how the Shopping Attribute Bidder works.
Rule Engine
The new Rule Engine from Optmyzr gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of analyzing performance for product groups and also how bids are changed. It lets you automate your own bidding strategy for shopping campaigns. For example, you can use a formula to compare the performance of the product group to that of the ad group and campaign. Similarly you can choose to change the bid using a formula that takes into account conversion rate when calculating the new bid.
The Shopping Bidder and Rule Engine let� you change bids by absolute numbers or percentages.
#3 – Refreshing� Campaigns
Once you create shopping campaigns in AdWords, the number of product groups will not automatically change based on your feed. For example, you are selling shoes and create one product group for each model or item id in the feed. Now when new types of shoes� get added to the feed, AdWords doesn’t automatically create product groups for them. As a result, the new products end up in Everything Else. This may lead them to get very little traffic as ‘Everything Else’ usually has a low bid.
To avoid this, you can go to your AdWords account and create new product groups for products that end up in� Everything Else. Or, you can use the Shopping Refresher from Optmyzr.
Shopping Refresher
This One-Click Optimization™ automatically finds new products that are added to the feed, identifies the structure of the Shopping Campaign and creates new product groups. We have two versions of the Shopping Refresher. In the regular version, you can run the refresher ad group by ad group. In the Pro version, you can run it for all ad groups in the campaign together. The Pro version also creates new ad groups if the campaign structure requires it. See how the Shopping Refresher works. To try the Shopping Refresher Pro (currently in Beta), contact our support team.
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.
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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.
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.
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 sizeable 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 the 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
How to use this feature?
1. In the AB Testing for ads optimization, all ad goups that have underperforming ads are displayed. There is a button above the results to create ads in each ad group.
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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.
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.
Adding negative keywords to AdWords campaigns has been a long standing ask from our users and we’re happy to announce that this feature is now live in the Keyword Lasso.� The Keyword Lasso tool was designed to analyze the AdWords search terms report to find keywords to add with one-click. The search terms report is also where you get negative keyword ideas from and it made perfect sense to combine the two.
In the Keyword Lasso, you can now choose to add search terms as negative or positive keywords in broad, phrase or exact match at the ad group level. For positive keywords, the tool also gives you the option to select the BMM (Broad Match Modifier)� match type.
The advantage is that you can select positive and negative keywords to be added simultaneously and then upload them together in your AdWords account with a single click.
When you mark a keyword as negative, the row gets highlighted with a light red color. This helps differentiate between positive and negative keywords visually. You’ll see two drop downs next to the search term, one to select the type of keyword – Positve or Ad group Negative and the other to select the match type – Broad, Phrase, Exact or BMM (Broad Match Modifier).
We’ve been pretty excited about the launch of Google Shopping ads since they’re a great way for retailers to highlight their products’ photos and prices. Unfortunately when running Shopping ads for thousands of products, bid management using the AdWords interface is a full time job: not because it’s difficult, but simply because the interface is excruciatingly slow when managing many products that are split across many campaigns and ad groups.
After confirming that this was a real problem with some other PPC folks at the HeroConf conference last month, we started building a bid management tool for Shopping Ads and today we’re excited to reveal it to the world.
[][1]Optmyzr’s Shopping Bidder Tool for AdWords makes setting the correct CPC for your shopping ads a quick and easy process that can easily be done for thousands of product groups in a matter of mere minutes.
Here’s how our Shopping Bidder works:
You get all the biddable items for your entire account on a single page.
You can filter the view to see just ROI positive, ROI negative, or items with no impressions or you can apply a custom filter using your own criteria like clicks, cost, impressions, etc.
You can change bids in bulk for all the items that meet your filter criteria, for example, lower all bids 10% for ROI negative items with at least 10 clicks in the past 30 days.
With one click, you can send the new bids to AdWords where they go live instantly.
This is much, much faster than doing the same in AdWords which has a few shortcomings:
You cannot see all biddable items from your entire account on one page. You have to open up every ad group one by one.
There are no filters for product groups so you have to manually find items that meet your criteria for needing a bid change.
To change a bid it takes several clicks to expand the product groups until you get to the level where bids can be set.
Initially this tool will � make bid management for Shopping ads a lot faster but when it becomes this easy, you’ll also find yourself splitting up your product groups ever more granularly, and that should further improve results.
We’re really excited to have this ready for our users today and we hope you’ll send us feedback about how we can make this even more useful for you.
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