When people think of how AdWords changed in July 2013, they only think of the new direction towards Enhanced Campaigns that AdWords took. This feature has been so significant, though, that it’s overshadowed a number of other important changes at AdWords. For instance, AdWords has added a few new ways by which advertisers can analyze the performance of their advertising.
Impression Share
When you design a new advertisement on AdWords, you get to specify exactly what kind of search you want your ad to show for. When you narrowly define a specific set of criteria that a Google search needs to match before your ad shows, you minimize wasted displays and clicks. The new Impression Share report on AdWords lets you keep an eye on exactly how often your ad shows when a person who’s a perfect match for your criteria searches on Google.
The Impression Share report itself isn’t new. It used to be available for entire ad groups, before. If you needed to know how often your ads showed for your criteria, you could get numbers for groups of five or six ads. You couldn’t see information for specific ads, though. If you found that an ad group performed well, but its impression share rate was low, you had no choice but to raise your bid for the entire ad group – even if it was just one or two keywords in the group that you needed to target. The new Impression Share report increases the resolution to give you information on individual ads. You now get to see which individual ads perform well, but have a low impression share number that needs remedying. You just have to raise your bid for that one keyword now. It can save you serious money.
The Top Movers report
Before Google created the new Top Movers report, if you noticed that your conversions on a particular ad suffered a deep fall, the only ways available to you to investigate the drop were to check if the keyword was still good, check your bid levels, and so on. You would need to experiment with all kinds of possibilities trying to get your conversions back up. With the new Top Movers report, though, you get helpful information in the form of a Change History report. It shows you previously unavailable causes for a change – such as a change in the budget of your campaign. The Top Movers report can be a source of important clues when you see a mystifying change in the performance of your ads.
A new filter now shows you
You don’t just need to perform search engine optimization on your website to make sure that it appears on the first page of Google’s results. You need to optimize your AdWords advertising, too. This can help you make sure that your ads are shown on the first search results page when someone makes a relevant search. Most people don’t go past the first page of search engine results. If your ad appears on the second page, they never see it. With the old AdWords, there was no quick way and direct way by which to see a list of just the ads that appeared past the first page. This has been corrected in the new AdWords. You can set a filter now to only show you your keywords that appear on the first page. You can also set the filter to only show you keywords with a good conversion rate or quality score.
When you know which keywords appear past the first page, you can simply raise your bids on them to make sure that they appear on the first page.
Founder and CEO at FullTraffic. Passionate about Search Engine Marketing and Optimization, regular writer for the FullTraffic Blog. Since 2005, FullTraffic has evolved to become one of the most important Traffic providers worldwide for small to medium sized businesses.
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