Adwords Ad serving and Keyword and site targeting

Hold on for a short fire and brimstone sermon about the Ad Serving setting: Please do not Optimize your ads. I don’t care where you are. Run, don’t walk to a Web browser, log in to your account, choose a campaign, click the Edit Campaign Settings link, and move the radio button from Optimize to Rotate. Then click the Save Changes button. 

   

Done? Okay, now I can get rational and calm again. Let me explain why you made this change, and why it’s so important. When you run two ads in the same ad group, Google shows them to different people and gives you statistics on how each ad performed. If Google optimizes your ad serving, the ads with lower CTR get shown less and the ads with higher CTR get shown more. Eventually, the poor performer stops showing, and Google declares a winner by default. You set the test up once, and it runs without you from then on. 

What could be bad?

First, your tests take much longer when you don’t give each ad an equal chance to be “voted on” by searchers. You need a threshold number of impressions and clicks for each ad to determine a statistical winner. If one ad gets fewer and fewer impressions and clicks, it takes longer to declare that winner. When you can’t declare winners as they happen, you learn slower. Think of how fast bacteria adapt to antibiotics because they go through so many generations in a short time frame. The more iterations per time frame, the more your ads can evolve and improve. AdWords is a playground where both evolution and intelligent design rule. You also lose money, because your campaigns are improving more slowly than they might. 

Ad groups that could achieve profitability in a few days, based on traffic, will take weeks or even months to start making money. In the second-to-worst-case scenario, you don’t learn anything about your market because you don’t even pay attention to the differences between the winning and losing ads. You don’t learn which headlines work best, so you can’t improve your Web site, your e-mails, your expensive offline advertisements, and so on. If you allow Google to optimize your ads, the absolute worst-case scenario involves Google killing off the more effective ads by mistake. Google decides ad effectiveness on the basis of CTR, not on whether the visitors who click an ad end up buying. Often the highest CTR ads lose money because they attract too many non-buyers. 

Networks

As we saw, you can show your text ad in any of three places: Google pages, search partner pages, and the content network. The default setting for each campaign includes all three networks. The trouble with this setting is that the three sources of traffic generally behave very differently, respond to different language and different offers, and don’t command the same bid prices. You can set different bids for the content network, but a cleaner way to separate the networks is to put each one in its own campaign. See the later section, “Separating your account into three types of campaigns” for details.

Locations

Google allows you as much geographical precision as you could possibly need. The default setting is by country: Google gives you a list of countries and you choose the ones whose inhabitants will see your ads. Straightforward and uncomplicated, this setting is common for online businesses who can serve customers pretty much anywhere. If you sell downloadable software, or telephone consulting, for example, you don’t have any reason to exclude customers from Belgium or Israel or New Zealand, assuming language compatibility. In my experience, certain African and Asian countries tend to be hotbeds of credit-card fraud, however and if you don’t think a particular country will add a great deal to your bottom line, you may want to leave it off your list. 

Countries and territories

In its list of available countries and territories, accessible by clicking the Edit button next to Countries and Territories, Google lists the most commonly selected 24 countries at the top, beginning with the United States and continuing alphabetically from Australia to United Kingdom. The following is a list of dozens of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Choose countries by selecting them and clicking the Add button. You can select multiple countries by holding down the Ctrl (Windows) or Ô (Mac) keys as you click the country names. When your list is complete, click the Continue button to return to the Edit Settings page.

Regions and cities

If you want to target prospects more precisely, select the Regions and Cities Option after clicking Edit on the main setting page and Change Option on the Location Targeting Page. When you continue, you’ll be able to choose regions from within a single country If the country is the United States, you can select the States/Regions/Metropolitan Areas radio button, and then select the areas you want from a list box. Or you can select the Cities radio button and enter your own list of cities in the format of city name state abbreviation: Durham NC or Roanoke VA. You can toggle back and forth between these two radio buttons to complete your list.

Customized

If you run a local business, the regional and city targeting may not be precise enough for you. After all, no matter how good a dry cleaner you may be, few customers will drive 45 minutes across town to drop off their dress shirts. Enter Customized targeting to the rescue. You get to that page by editing the location targeting options, clicking the Change Option link, and clicking the Customized radio button on the Location Targeting Options page. You’re given two options: a circular area, or a wild and wacky polygon of your creation. 

- Circular: After entering a physical address or centering the map at your desired location (zoom way in by clicking the + button at the top left of the map), you can enter a radius around that spot in miles or kilometers.  

- Multi-Point Option: Occasionally, a circle will not be precise enough. What if, I don’t want to show my ads in the Gordonsville area and points northeast? Google sends a multi-point option to the rescue. Below the map, click the Multi-Point Option link. Your map reverts to global scale, and you can either enter coordinates like you’re a World War I ace, or zoom in to your map location and draw a polygon that defines your target area.

Keyword and site targeting

If you show your ads on the Content network, how does Google decide which AdSense publishers show your ads? You tell Google whether you want to bid on pages that are optimized for your keywords, or whether you want to choose specific sites for your ads. In the old days (before June 2007), if you select Keyword Targeting, you couldn’t tell which sites were showing your ads. Imagine sending a check to a national TV network so your commercial would be shown on their affiliate stations, but they refuse to tell you where and when (and even whether) your ads will run. That’s what Google’s Content Network was like. Just as this book was entering the “make another change and we’ll break your fingers” stage, Google unveiled a new report that shows you which AdSense Web sites are showing your ads and how well the ads are converting on each AdSense page. To generate the Placement Performance report, you must first set up Conversion Tracking. See www.askhowie.com/sitereports for instructions as well as examples of the power of this long-awaited feature.

Your first campaign uses Keyword Targeting by default, and you can’t change it. Once your first campaign is configured, you can create a Site-Targeted Content Network campaign by clicking the Site-Targeted link next to + Create a New Campaign on the Campaign Summary page. Name your new campaign and your first ad group, choose the language or languages your customers speak, and select your geographic target. Basically, you’re selecting a group of people in some geographic area, from a small town to the entire world, who visit certain Web sites. You can choose Rap/Hip-Hop fans in the Midwest, Progressives in South Carolina, Evangelicals in Chicago, and so on. Interest groups merged with geography can provide very tight, responsive markets for your ads. 

On the next page, you’re prompted to create an ad. You can create a second ad to test, or just click Continue to choose the Web sites where you want your ad to appear. Google doesn’t assume you know any specific sites. The wizard prompts you to select from categories such as games or health, enter topic words, name specific Web sites, or describe your audience and let Google suggest Web sites matching that demographic. 

If you type the topic Gout, Google returns a list of 55 Web sites, along with information like impressions per day and supported ad formats (text, image, video). You can filter the results by clicking Choose Ad Format, so if you have a square 250 x 250 pixel image ad, you can choose only those Web sites that have elected to serve ads of that size and shape. If your desired audience is in the United States and you choose to target the entire country, you can choose Web sites based on demographics. 

Google will show Web sites visited by 25–44-year-old women making more than $60,000 a year who have children in their household. You can select any or all of them to show your ad. The first one, vamoose.com, is a directory of vacation rentals. Ask yourself: Can I create an ad that will interrupt someone trying to rent a vacation home and make them act on my offer? If so, will that person be a good prospect? If both questions can be answered Yes, you may have a successful Content site.