Have you used negative keywords in Google AdWords?
Negative keywords help you to increase your click-through-rate (CTR), reduce your cost-per-click (CPC) and as a result increase your ROI. However, it can be quite exhausting to go through each one of your campaigns and ad groups reviewing and adding negative keywords while in most cases the same negative keywords apply to different ad groups and/or campaigns.
Fortunately Google AdWords has recently announced
positive news for Negative Keywords. The new feature is called Negative Keyword List and it makes the management of negative keywords a lot easier, especially when they are related.
Here’s a simple scenario of where you can use a Negative Keyword List. Let’s say that you sell books online and in store, but you also offer a small number of free audio-books as part of your strategy to increase traffic to your site. Therefore, you have created 4 campaigns in AdWords;
- Campaign 1: Digital Books
- Campaign 2: Bookstore
- Campaign 3: Brand Terms
- Campaign 4: Audio-books
Now you want to add some
negative keywords for the first three campaigns, e.g. words like: Free, Demo, Trial, download, etc. With the new feature, you can create a negative keyword list and apply it to one or more campaigns without having to add each keyword to the separate campaigns and/or ad groups.
In this example, you could create a negative keyword list called “Free Terms” and add it to the first three campaigns. These are the steps for creating and adding a negative keyword list:
1. Go to the 'Control Panel & Library' found on the left hand side of your AdWords screen.
2. Click on 'Negative keyword lists'.
3. Click the button '+ New negative keyword list'.
4. Give a name to the list and add all the negative keywords you want to associate with it. For example;
5. After saving it, go to your Online Campaigns, click on the ‘Keywords’ tab, scroll down until you find the link “Negative Keywords” and click on it.
6. Then click 'Keyword Lists'.
7. Start adding the list to the specific campaigns it applies to.
You can create more than one negative keyword list and add it to one or more campaigns.
There are two main things you need to be aware of;
First of all, when adding a keyword list make sure the terms within this list don’t conflict with keywords under some of the ad groups. For example, in our scenario, let’s say that instead of the 4 campaigns you have a single campaign with four ad groups (within that campaign).
If you add the negative keyword list to the campaign, this would conflict with the ad group Audio-books. Basically, you are offering a free product with ads that include terms like Free Audio-books, Free Book Audio, etc. but you are stopping impressions for searches that contain the keyword Free. In this case, you should add individual negative keywords to each ad group instead of a keyword list to the entire campaign.
Secondly, do not add too many negative keywords because the result could be a very small audience and lost potential customers. It’s all about balance.
Labels: Google AdWords, Google AdWords Tips, Google AdWords Updates
I've been using Custom Variables in Google Analytics since they were released. Custom Variables have solved many problems and put an end to most of the excuses people give me for not using Google Analytics. Most importantly, when trying Custom Variables as a solution, they are really happy with the results!
I would usually write about the coding and the implementation in detail but this time I just want to share some ideas with you of how you can use Custom Variables. Here we go...
1. First and Last Click Attribution
By default, Google Analytics presents the source and medium of the conversion based on the last click that generated the conversion. However, many people want to know which initial touch point actually generated the purchase, sign-up, download, etc. You can get this kind of information by using Custom Variables at a visitor level.
Imagine you have different campaigns (not only AdWords campaigns) for a specific product. If visitors come to your site for the first time as a result of an email campaign, you could set two Custom Variables;
CVSource and
CVMedium. To make this work you will need to add a piece of code to check if the Custom Variable is set or not. If the
CVSource and
CVMedium are not yet set (i.e. undefined), you will need to set them. Otherwise don't do anything.
Now suppose a visitor spends some time on your site but he/she doesn't complete the goal e.g buy the product. Then a few days later, the same visitor comes to your site from a link posted on Twitter and this time he/she completes the purchase. In a normal scenario you would see the purchase came from Twitter which is true but you want to know which campaign generated his/her first visit and maybe analyse why the first one didn't work whereas the second source did.
Using Custom Variables and the technique I outlined above (remember no excuses) you can determine which initial touchpoint started the momentum toward the final conversion. You don't have to give 100% of the credit for the conversion to the last source, you can split it between the first and last source to see which is better and how the campaigns work together.
2. Tracking Website Sections and Categories
Sometimes you have different content to present to visitors and different goals classified by categories in your website. These categories could be presented as part of the menu, lists, sub-menu, etc. You could then set Custom Variables for a session level or in some cases for a visitor level. As a result you can identify the most visited category much more easily than if you filtered by content in your content report in Google Analytics. This also allows you to check which categories are driving more visitors to complete a particular goal and which ones are the most effective categories for converting or completing goals.
3. Segmentation by Type of Information
Tracking Demographics
Many sites use forms to collect information required for purchasing products or services. Awareness of trends in the market and understanding customer/client needs are important to targeting the right audience at the right time with a campaign to promote a product or service.
Imagine your marketing team has created two new ads; one targeting young females and the other targeting families. If the customer already has a login and has previously entered information such as age, gender, income and occupation this makes it easy to segment them and target the ads.
Tracking Location
Not all the classifications defined for a location are available by default in Google Analytics because they are not standard for each country. You can see your reports segmented by Continent, Country/Territory, Sub Continent Region and City but what if you would like to see that information classified by State/Province or by smaller locations inside the City e.g. by suburb. Use Custom Variables! It's up to you to find creative ways of capturing the specific locations your visitors are coming from but if you can access that data you can assign that value to your Custom Variable in a visitor or session scope.
4. Comments and Rating
Some of you might have implemented a plugin or tool to add comments to your articles for example in a blog or to let visitors rate a product or service. You could use Custom Variables to see how many commentators rate your product, service or blog post 'good' or 'bad'.
Let's say you set a Custom Variable called
Ratings_Feedback with two values 'Good' or 'Bad'. Then, each time someone rates a particular element in your website the value will be stored in the Custom Variable. You can then look at your reports and find out: how many ratings you have; how many visitors out of the total are using the plugin tool; and how many rate a specific product or service as 'good' or 'bad' etc.
Effectively Using Google Analytics Custom Variables
I have found using Custom Variables very interesting and effective for all sorts of challenges, and great for insights into using the ecommerce tracking code and/or event tracking. My final suggestion before you start implementing Custom Variables across your site is to analyse your needs very carefully. Try to find out first if you can get the data you want to see with the default dimensions and metrics provided by the default Google Analytics reports.
If it is not possible to do it with the standard tracking code, ecommerce tracking code, virtual pageviews and/or event tracking, then take time to define and design the use of Custom Variables. By following my advice (remember no excuses) you are sure to get the right information you need to segment and analyse your data for great results!
I hope you find this blog post motivating. Custom Variables are an excellent feature of Google Analytics, provide many benefits, and will make your reports easier to prepare and more effective!
Posted by Daniela Fernandez, Analytics Specialist, Mangold SengersLabels: Google AdWords Tips, Google Analytics, Google Analytics Custom Variables
Get ready for changes to how your display URLs will be capitalized.
If you are used to changing the display URL in your AdWords ad variations to get the attention of people searching for a specific term, you might be interested to know that the AdWords team has decided to display the domain portion of the display URL in lowercase letters for all ad variations. If you have ads with a display URL containing capital letters, these will soon automatically be changed to lowercase letters.
So what will this look like?
The example on the left show what you have previously been allowed to do in AdWords and on the right you can see how the ad will start appearing in the coming week or so.
Does this change also apply to sub-domains in the display URL?
Yes, the change will also apply to display URLs that contain sub-domains. For example, if we have
Canon.CameraShopSite.com, soon it will be displayed as
canon.camerashopsite.com
The good news is that the portion corresponding to sub-directories can still be capitalized and use dynamic keyword insertion. For instance, the link
Canon.CameraShopSite.com/Digital-Camera will now appear as
canon.camerashopsite.com/Digital-Camera
Do I have to change my display URLs?
No, you don’t have to make any changes to your ad variations because they will automatically be changed for you.
The bad news is that if you don't have additional information in your display URL, different to the domain (e.g
www.site.com) your destination URL will look plain compared to other ads that use additional keywords within the destination URL (e.g
www.site.com/KeywordSearched).
Why has capitalization of display URLs changed?
The AdWords team has said they "...found that consistent display URL casing leads to better ad interaction rates".
The official blog post announcing the change also indicates that Google is keen for people to start testing variations of their landing pages and driving general website improvement. In other words, it's time to start using Google Website Optimizer to improve your post-click conversions and visitor experience.
Our advice on the new AdWords display URL capitalization:
Keep an eye on the performance of your ad variations during the next few weeks, if Google says it leads to "better ad interaction rates" we could all see an increase in clicks and CTRs (Click Through Rates) for our ads.
If you see a negative impact on your campaigns, create new ad variations, keeping in mind the restrictions for capitalization under the destination URL. Remember you can still add keywords after your domain name in the display URLs and of course use Google Website Optimizer to improve the performance of your landing pages.
Labels: Google AdWords, Google AdWords Tips, Google AdWords Updates
