Jeremy C. has a post about ad auctions. At the end he says something that you may have heard before, but never as clearly or succinctly put:

Let me give you a disturbing vision… Google is actually operating a CPM bidding system. Yup. Your bid position is a consequence of the value you give to Google, per thousand impressions - but quantised to a penny per click.

It's pretty important to grok this if you want to understand AdWords...

Labels: adwords

¶ 7/28/2008

Lately, they really make you *work* to get low-cost clicks. The complex quality-based bidding formula is not entirely profit-oriented, but some of the reason they’ve been so profitable during an economic downturn is because they’ve managed to squeeze higher prices out of the “low priced” keyword inventory. They’ve taken aim at “lowball bidders” in some categories, and made it harder to bid low, plain and simple. Either you pay more than you used to pay, or your ad doesn’t show up.

...

People who’ve been neglecting paid search trends also don’t realize all the amazing free and low cost tools that are now available to improve your ability to build, adjust, and refine campaigns on the fly. New advertisers look at the old paradigms (large keyword lists, lowball bids, bid management to ROI) and don’t see that the game truly is about relevancy today. Careful attention to user intent, and providing “scent” right through the buying process, is a big part of what drives successful campaigns.

(emphasis mine)

That pretty much sums it up for the difference between 2005 and 2008.

Labels: adwords, goodman

¶ 4/28/2008

If you are an experienced Google AdWords advertiser, you probably know the difference between "Broad", "Phrase" and "Exact" match. If not, look here.

But Yahoo Search Marketing's Panama system offers only two keyword match types: Standard and Advanced.

Most of the time, Standard is the better choice. Especially if you like to tailor your ad groups with dynamic keyword insertion, or if you mostly use Phrase and Exact match in Google.

Here's what Yahoo says about Standard vs Advanced match:

• Standard match type – for exact matches of your keywords or their minor variations.
• Advanced match type – for matches that use your keywords in various contexts.

When using Advanced match type, we also provide you with our Excluded Words option to help refine your matches by filtering out searches that do are not relevant to your business.

Standard Match Type The Standard match type displays your ads for exact matches to your keywords, as well as for singular/plural variations and common misspellings.

Just remember - Standard is more like Google's Phrase match. Advanced, though it may sound cool, is really a free-for-all like Broad match. It can hurt your ad relevancy and overall CTR because you'll buy a lot of clicks on less relevant searches with Advanced.

Of course, Yahoo makes Advanced the default. When you use the Yahoo tools to convert an adwords campaign, it ignores the Google match types, and sets them all to Advanced.

This is another area where Yahoo Panama could improve things just by copying what Google AdWords does exactly.

Labels: adwords, panama

¶ 6/07/2007

At the end of the month, I like to evaluate my campaign performance a bit more in-depth.

In late April, I set up a PPC campaign with 700 keywords, and 3 ads as identically as possible on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing (aka Panama), and Microsoft AdCenter.

This campaign was in a high-value consumer electronics area, with a medium amount of traffic (no it wasn't "digital cameras").

So, for the first 30 days of May, here are the stat lines:

Source	Clicks	CTR	Avg CPC	Total Spend	Conversion Rate
AdWords	605	1.25%	0.31	$185.67	10.4%
Panama	655	1.3%	0.28	$186.25	8.4%
AdCenter	20	1.77%	0.26	$5.14	n/a

Just a couple of observations:

• I have no idea why AdCenter gets almost no traffic for this campaign!? Frankly, I don't spend much time analyzing adCenter anymore. Weird stuff like this means it's not worth the time.
• The volume and CTR similarity between Google and Yahoo is pretty amazing in this case. I usually see more volume from Google in most campaigns, but in competitive spaces, I think my Google volume is limited by not bidding more.
• The conversion rate difference between Google and Yahoo is something I find pretty consistent with other campaigns. My theory is simply that on the respective search networks, Google's partner quality is higher than Yahoo's. I.e. there aren't as many garbitrage sites in the Google network.

Labels: adcenter, adwords, panama

¶ 5/30/2007

Well before Panama launched, I entreated Yahoo to just copy Google's interface. Copying the key commands is how Excel took over the market from Lotus 1-2-3.

They did not. They made up their own UI conventions. So far, after about 8 months of use, I'm disappointed at how few improvements in UI workflow Yahoo has made. During the same time, Google AdWords has only increased its usability lead. Fundamentally, Google is better at rolling out changes quickly. It's also better at usability.

Here's a little list of easy things Yahoo Panama could do if they want advertisers to be able to spend more and create bigger campaigns quickly:

1. Get rid of the limits. My account has a ridiculous limit of 30 campaigns. Why?
2. Copy Google's workflow. In AdWords, when you are looking at an ad group, you can simply press "Previous/Next" to get to the next ad group. Even MSN does this a lot better than Yahoo. They have a breadcrumb navigation that makes all components accessible.
3. Adapt Google standards for ad display. For example, in Google, you can have a display URL with capital letters and spaces. This url: http://example.com/Bow Wow is rendered as: http://example.com/bowwow in Panama. Annoying and stupid. Google also has a different notion of "lines" in the ad. Just copy theirs!
4. Enable Keyword substitution that works like Googles. Enable the exact same macros: {KeyWord:Default}.
5. Allow Keywords to be substituted in the the destination URL. This is a huge pain now because you have to use the "custom url" field to put keywords in the destination, and they are relatively static.
6. Email-able reports. Google has this, MSN does too. I complained about it back in January as well.
7. Show all the ads in a single view, with stats, like Google does. Right now, you see the "name" of the ad in Panama, and you have to click each name to see the actual ad.
8. Introduce an equivalent to "Exact" match! Make keyword matching conventions work just like Google. Even with Standard match, Yahoo considers "word" and "words" to be the same. It handles misspells differently than Google as well.
9. Make an advanced search / replace function that works like AdWords'.
10. Turn on international markets in Panama. I shouldn't need a separate account to buy UK ads.

Finally, Panama should just copy the AdWords Editor fat client. For large campaign management, that is a god send. I just changed text on 43 adwords ads in about 3 minutes in AdWords Editor. It'll take me several hours to do that in Panama.

The goal should be for search ad buyers to spend almost no time and bring over large AdWords campaigns into Panama.

Yahoo needs to learn the lesson of Microsoft - "embrace & extend" - there's no shame in simply making the UI work exactly like Google's - Google's done a ton of research on usability that Yahoo could pick up for free. More importantly, they are the market leader, and everyone knows their interface. Standardization means more buyers! Until the Panama team gets that, they won't threaten AdWords.

Labels: adwords, panama

¶ 5/28/2007

Suppose you have a big Google AdWords Campaign, and you want to get it into Yahoo Panama. Here's what you need to do to convert an AdWords Campaign into Yahoo:

1. Be a "Gold Tier" Yahoo Panama customer, so you can qualify for bulk upload. To be Gold Tier, you need to spend at least $500 per month for 3 months. If you've done that, and you don't see a "Import Campaigns" link on your Create a Campaign screen, you need to call Yahoo and get that added.
2. Install the Google AdWords Editor
3. Use Google AdWords Editor to Export your AdWords campaign to CSV.
   • Open AdWords Editor, and update your account information
   • Export your campaign as CSV from AdWords Editor. Select the specific campaign, and then choose: File -> Export to CSV -> Export Current Campaign
   • Open the exported campaign in Excel.
   • Change a lot of stuff in the Excel file. You generally don't want to upload the exact Google campaign. Look carefully at your bids. Also look at destination URLs, you may want to change tracking codes or parameters to indicate that the clicks will be coming from Yahoo. Save the changes.
4. Goto "Import 3rd Party Campaign" tab in Yahoo Panama
5. Import the campaign. Panama will upload your excel file, then convert it to it's format. When this is done, you download the file it creates, Check it carefully, and re-upload into Panama...
6. Before loading it, go and make any Yahoo specific changes.
   • Change any tracking codes to indicate Yahoo sourcing.
   • Yahoo idiotically doesn't allow keyword substitution in the destination URL of the ad. However, it does have a field called "Custom URL" for each keyword, and you can set the specific keyword in the URL. That's handy for when your landing page needs to dispatch off the keyword (i.e. it can include the keyword in the generated landing page by pulling it from the URL.)
   • Look carefully at "Advanced Match" vs "Standard Match". Advanced Match is equivalent to "Broad Match" in Google. "Standard Match" is more like "Exact Match" in Google.
7. Save the modified file. Set the file name to have a ".csv" file extension. BUT - Choose File type to be : "Unicode txt". The resulting filename must end in .csv.
8. Go to the "Import Campaigns" tab in Panama
9. Browse for the modified Excel file, give it an "Upload" name, and do "Upload".
10. Wait a while.
11. Check the new campaign. Look at any errors that may have happened during upload. Check carefully - seriously, mistakes can be costly!
12. Go to the Dashboard page, select the new campaign and set a daily spending limit. You probably should turn off content matching as well.

Let it run. Check it tomorrow. Watch your logs in the meantime. See if it gets worse quality traffic due to all the garbage partners that Yahoo lets have Overture feeds (Hint: It will...)

Anyways, that's the easy and safe way. If you don't have access to the "Gold Tier" upload from Yahoo, you can call Yahoo and ask them to do it for you. If you do that, MAKE SURE you pre-edit the CSV file you give them, or else they'll just put in the stuff from Google, and you probably won't like that.

Labels: adwords, panama

¶ 5/09/2007

To see the Avg. CPM column, click on a campaign in AdWords. Then you get the "Campaign Summary" screen, showing you the AdGroups under the campaign.

In the top part of the list of ad groups, there is a "customize columns" link. Click on that, and select "Average CPM". The list of ad groups will refresh, and add a column for Average CPM.

What does Average CPM mean? It's your average cost of 1000 impressions for your ad group or search keyword. It depends on the following factors:

• The click-thru rate (CTR)
• The cost per click (CPC)

Google computes the Average CPM by multiplying your CTR * CPC * 1000.

Example:

Ad Group	CTR	CPC	Avg. CPM
AdGroup 1	25%	$0.70	$175.00
AdGroup 2	12.5%	$0.70	$88.75
AdGroup 3	12.5%	$0.35	$43.75

In the table above, you see that with a very high CTR (i.e. 25%), you are grabbing a lot of clicks per 1000 impressions - so your Average CPM is high. If your CPC goes down, or your CTR goes down, your Average CPM will fall as well.

I think the best thing about the Avg. CPM is that it allows you to think like Google.

Google is selling ad space by CPM - even though most people think they are selling by CPC. They are trying to maximize CPM for the pages that they put ads on! That's how they measure monetization.

Google has quality score and ad rank to increase relevance and improve monetization, but those imply that a key monetization metric is page CPM. At the end of the day, they compute overall CPM for all the ads on a search engine result page (SERP).

Understanding Avg CPM, and understanding how Google sees the overall CPM of the ads on the page is instructive and helpful - especially when dealing with a competitive keyphrase.

Labels: adwords, cpm, google

¶ 2/20/2007

All of the measured campaigns run only on the Google site and Search network. AdSense is a click-fraud-wonderland, in my opinion, so I avoid it...

Interestingly, there is a correlation between campaigns which drive CPA traffic and increased 'invalid clicks'. Several holiday campaigns that generated affiliate leads had 8-10% invalid clicks, according to the Google report.

Perhaps that's competitive clicking? I need to investigate more, but it's barely worth the time.

Want to know what Google thinks your invalid click rate was? Google doesn't tell you this by default. You can find it by going to Reports, running a Campaign Perfomance report, and choosing the Invalid Clicks field under Advanced Settings -> Add or Remove Columns.

Labels: adsense, adwords, click fraud, google

¶ 1/04/2007