Something new from Google AdWords.
It’s now possible not only to set your maxium bid for each keyword but your preferred average cost per click. Through some kind of bid management Google places your ad in a range of positions according to your preffered average click price.

Preferred cost bidding is an advanced bidding option available for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns. If you identify with the following goals, preferred cost bidding may be the right bidding strategy for you.

* I know how much each click or impression on my ad is worth to my business. (Learn more about determining the worth of clicks or impressions.)
* I would rather target an average cost per click or thousand impressions, rather than specifying the most that I am willing to pay.
* I want my AdWords advertising costs to be more consistent, rather than changing from day to day.
* I do not want to constantly monitor and adjust my bid settings. Within the budget that I set, I want Google to take care of my individual keyword or site bids.

Fyi: Brad Geddes from ewhisper.net is devoting a whole week of blog posts to the biggest AdWords mystery: Quality Score in all its aspects. Quite interesting.

Several updates have been made within the past few days.

Adjustments to the quality score algorithm:

Transparency: advertisers are now able to see their keywords minimum bids as well as a rough evaluation of the quality score (such as high, low and mediocre) in a separate column. You can select this column by clicking ‘Customize Columns’ in one of your ad groups.

Quality: As long as Google wasn’t able to collect data on the quality of a landing page the advertiser is benefited with a lower minimum bid. Also the algorithm in general has been improved.

I’m not too happy about the quality part as - again - my websites seem to be suffering from a low quality score for a lot of the keywords. So far all the quality score updates had only affected me temporarily. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Pause Keywords and ad creatives

As of yesterday advertisers can pause keywords and ad creatives. Before you could only delete them which used to be a bit annoying.

Google’s Conversion Tracking is a really great tool to track the success of your AdWords campaigns. With almost no effort (you only need to implement a java script tracking code into your website) you get the conversion rate and CPA for each campaign, ad group, ad and even every single keyword. And it’s free.
There’s no easier way to see whether a keyword leads to conversions. Using your own tracking can get quite complex when buying tens of thousands of keywords.

However there are things you need to know before trusting Google CT without double checking. Just yesterday I read an article at MindValleyLabs warning that, based on their experience, Google would track about 20-30% less sales than their more rigorous internal tracking systems. That’s about the same figure we’ve experienced at Spreadshirt when first using Google CT. I think the reason for that difference is simple though. Let’s have a look at the AdWords Help Center:

In addition, remember that Google AdWords conversion tracking only reports conversions that occur within 30 days of an ad click. If a customer converts after the 30 days have passed, we don’t report that conversion. When viewing conversions for a specified time period, note that conversions are assigned to the date on which the ad click occurs, not the date on which the conversion occurs.

I’m pretty sure this explains most of the difference between Google’s tracking and internal tracking at Spreadshirt as we do not assign orders back to the date of the click.
Therefore, when you’re looking at the stats of a period that lies a few days (better: weeks) back the difference will melt down to only a few percent.
So please don’t jump to overhasty conclusions based on yesterday’s stats. Give it a while and look back later in order to get valid results.

When Google released version 2.5 of their tool AdWords Editor last December I felt tempted to play around with it a little. Furthermore just shortly after I had installed the program Google offered me to take part in a Webinar. I did take part and I did learn that it really is quite useful eventually.
It took about one hour to show the participants most of the latest features but it was well worth the time.

What is AdWords Editor?

I let Google speak:

AdWords Editor is a free, downloadable application for managing your AdWords account. AdWords Editor offers a wide array of features, but the basic process is simple: download your account, make your changes offline, then upload your revised campaigns when the changes are finalized.

So why using an offline tool when we’re on line constantly?

Because it can do so much more than the online interface and it’s quite comfortable to make some changes and still being able to reverse everything if neccessary before uploading it to our active account.

To me the major advantages are:

- You don’t need to wait for a ’several thousands keywords campaign’ to load everytime you want to access it. Everything works much faster.
- You can switch between several accounts in no time (especially useful when not using the Client Center)
- You can copy existing ad groups, text ads and keywords in 1-2 seconds (depends on how fast your fingers can move from CTRL+C to CTRL+V). This comes in really handy for us as we’re running A/B tests quite often which requires heavy ad group copying.
- There’s no need for bulk sheets anymore. You can copy loads of keywords into an ad group in very little time.
- It’s really easy to make little adjustments such as deciding whether you wanna go for exact match, broad match or phrase
- It let’s you know when you’re about to use a keyword more than once
- You can download and save your campaigns and import them on another computer
- I can still use the online interface when I like to and just download the latest changes to the Editor tool in a second

I think the only problem would be that when you work on a campaign on line and forget to download these changes to the Editor tool but upload changes that you’ve made on the Editor. In this case your on line changes will be overwritten. That’s what just might happen when you’re working on two different interfaces. That’s why the first thing I do when working with the Editor is downloading the latest status of the account. Be careful with that.
There are a few more rather small disadvantaged like using the stats. You can’t choose a date range other than yesterday, last 7 days and last 30 days which is pretty useless. However word is that this will be improved with the next update.

So far I can only recommend it as it really saves a lot of time. I appreciate that Google seeks to improve their advertiser’s usage experiences.