Blake's hidden gem o' the week #2

Thanks for the many hundreds of positive comments on 'Blake's hidden gem o' the week' last week!

Ok, I may be overstating things just a little. But at least a few readers liked it, and I'm going to take that as a sign that I should continue with the series.

This week's hidden gem o' the week will be a treat for those of you who love improving your ads so much that you'd rather read about AdWords than get lost in the latest best seller. (Or for those who of you who want to thoroughly test your new printer.)

How many of you knew that you could print out the entire AdWords Frequently Asked Questions with just a mouse click or two? (And I am not just talking about the questions, either. I'm talking about the answers, too.) Well, my friends, you can do just that. Just go to the (reeeeallly long) webpage here, and print it as your ordinarily would.

Print 'em out, put 'em in a nice binder (a really big one), make yourself some iced tea, and let the good times roll.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Answers to your keyword state questions

It's only been a couple days, but you've let us know you're excited (and a bit scared) about the new keyword states. We share your excitement, and we're here to erase your fears. So with that, your questions:

Question no. 1: Are you changing how you rank ads?
Though you'll see new keyword states in your account, we want to assure you that the 'auction' will remain the same. We'll continue to rank your ads based on your maximum CPC and the Quality Score.

Question no. 2: What is the Quality Score?
The Quality Score is simply a new name for the predicted CTR, which is determined based on the CTR of your keyword, the relevance of your ad text, the historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors.

Question no. 3: Are you going to continue to discount ads?
As always, the AdWords discounter will continue to reduce your actual cost-per-click so that you pay the lowest possible price for your ad.

Question no. 4: How do you determine the minimum bid?
The minimum bid is 100% determined by the Quality Score. Just like the auction, the minimum bid for your keyword is dynamic, and specific to your keyword in your specific Ad Group. This means that if you and your friend are running on the keyword 'soccer cleats', you could each have a different minimum bid; it all depends on your keyword's Quality Score and can change over time. The higher the Quality Score for your keyword, the lower the minimum bid.

Question no. 5: What happens to disabled keywords?
We want to remind you that disabled keywords will remain marked as disabled in your account for about a month after the changes are made to the system. At this time, they will be deleted. This is so you'll have a month to either delete them yourself, or re-enable them (by first deleting them, then adding them back into your account).

We hope this helps you rest easy. If you have more questions, send them our way... And check back for more updates. Same bat time. Same bat channel.

Posted by Jon, Inside AdWords crew

The next generation of keyword evaluation

We’ve been hearing that our keyword states are confusing… In the coming weeks, we're aiming to change all that. Read on to learn about changes we’ll be making to our keyword evaluation system, as told by Bindu R., an AdWords Product Manager.

We heard from you that trying to advertise with our current keyword states is like playing keyword roulette. You never know what keyword state will be assigned, and you sometimes can’t run on your most important keywords. In the coming weeks we’ll make changes to simplify our keyword states and give you more control to run on the keywords that you find valuable. Here are the improvements that you’ll see:

Simplified Keyword States: Keywords will be placed in to one of two states – active or inactive. People like the idea of something that’s a little more binary - on/off, day/night, hot/cold – you get the picture.

Increased Control: We’re replacing the static USD $0.05 minimum bid for all keywords with a minimum bid that varies based on the quality of your keyword and ad text. High quality keywords (determined by the Quality Score) will have minimum bids as low as $0.01, while keywords with a lower Quality Score will be assigned higher minimum bids. As long as the maximum CPC meets the minimum bid, your keyword will be active. You no longer have to worry about on hold, in trial, or disabled keywords.

We’re giving you the control you asked for so you can run on the keywords that are important to your business.

We hope that these changes will let you sleep soundly. Feel better already? Learn more about these changes with our new simplified keyword states and added control and what you can do in the coming weeks here.

Posted by Jon, Inside AdWords crew

Your questions about account management tools

Thanks to everyone who wrote in after our post on campaign management tools. I just wanted to respond to a couple of the emails we received from our readers.

Cheryl C. wrote in asking for a new tool to find and edit destination URLs:

One new tool that I would like to see from Google in addition to the new Find/Edit CPC, the Find/Edit Ad Copy, and the Find/Edit Display Url, is a Find/Edit Destination Url tool...

You're in luck, Cheryl! The Find/Edit Ad Text tool allows you to locate ads by destination URL and replace destination URLs. Just pinpoint the ads you'd like to change and choose the 'replace destination URL' option to change the URLs. I've included a screenshot of the tool below to help illustrate my explanation:



Eric L., another Inside AdWords reader, wrote:

The 3 tools described would benefit greatly from having more powerful search options. You can look for ads that contain "roses" but not ads that contain "roses" but do not contain "sale" as just one example. Being able to search multiple terms, with a mix of phrase matching, broad matching and negative matching capabilities would boost the helpfulness of these tools substantially.

Thanks for your feedback, Eric. I've already forwarded your excellent suggestion along to the right team.

If you have additional comments or questions, please don't hesitate to contact us using the 'Send us an Email' link over on the right sidebar.

Posted by Andrew, Inside AdWords crew

Blake's hidden gem o' the week

If there's one thing I like, it's a good weekly feature - so, I think I'll just start one! I'm going to call it "Blake's hidden gem o' the week."

I should probably explain just a bit this first week, but in following weeks, I'll just write a really quick post with a link a resource that you'll probably be glad to know about. And, as the title implies, I'll post these weekly, though the actual day of the week may vary.

The whole idea behind this series comes from having worked with a few thousand advertisers over the years, and realizing that many of them were unaware of some really useful information in the Help Center on the AdWords site. Actually, you'll find just about anything you’d need to know to run your AdWords account successfully in there, if you spend a few minutes looking. As it turns out, I've spent lots of hours in the AdWords Help Center - and have some personal favorites.

Today's Hidden Gem is the AdWords Demos and Guides page, on which you'll find eight brief Macromedia Flash demos. In order to entice you to visit the Demos and Guides page, I'll only mention two of them. Want some Optimization Tips? Well, you know where to go. Need help Understanding Conversion Tracking more deeply? Yep, it's there too.

Take a little tour - I think you'll be glad you did. As for myself, I can't wait till next week. This should be fun!

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew