First page bid estimates are what google approximates you would have to pay to be visible on the first page of search results when the search query exactly matches your keyword. This first page bid estimate (FPBE) is based on your keyword quality score. If your keyword quality is low then you will likely have a higher FPBE than you would have if your keyword quality score were better.
Checking your first page bid estimates is a good way to identify areas for improvement, develop a bidding strategy, and identifying keywords that may be less expensive than others.
There are two ways to view your first page bid estimate.
1. keyword/placement performance report. Customize the report to show the First Page Bid Estimate.
Customizing your Keywords/Placement Performance Report to show First Page Bid Estimate
2. Spreadsheet edit feature is a quick way to review your first page bid estimates.
How to View your First Page Bid Estimates in Spreadsheet Edit.
The spreadsheet edit will display the first page bid estimates like this:
Spreadsheet Edit - First Page Bid Estimates
Again, look at your first page bid estimates from time to time to analyze what effect your quality score has on your account.
I noticed a new link today in the AdWords User Interface labeled “Control Panel & Library”
Control Panel & Library
Unfortunately the page does not load correctly, instead loading an error message.
Loads Control Panel & Library Page with Error Message
Once this error message is dismissed the page continues to try to load data without success. It looks like work in progress to me and I am sure Google will have this working soon.
It “seems” this feature will store exported reports in a library for future access. This will put reports at AdWords members fingertips in the AdWords Interface. This is only my assumption because the page does not load correctly.
I will ask Google for comment on this new feature and report back with details when they become available.
1/28/10 Update: Google Employee AdWordsProStephen was kind enough to share the following:
“The Control Panel and Library will be home to key cross-campaign settings like custom alert preferences and scheduled reports.”
How to Segment your Device and Click Type Traffic Data
Google recently launched Click To Call for high-end Mobile Devices.
Excerpt From Google:
“your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”
To allow AdWords members to analyze their data Google recently added the ability to segment this mobile device data.
AdWords: Segment and View Mobile & Click Type Segmentation
Additionally there is the ability to segment your data by ‘click type’ for those who use Click To Call with their mobile AdWords ads.
AdWords: Segment your Mobile Device Data by Click Type
If your keyword list contains broad or phrase match keywords then negative keywords are most often a must.Negative keywords prevent your ads from appearing and potentially receiving clicks from search queries that are not relevant to your product or service.Suppressing impressions (and clicks) from irrelevant search queries will improve your CTR and quality score and allow your keyword list to work harder to bring qualified prospects to your website.
AdWords Offers the Following Negative Match types:
Negative Broad Matched – To create a standard negative keyword, insert a minus sign before a keyword and add it to your ad group or campaign.
Example: -free download
Adding this negative keyword to your account would prevent your ads from showing on any search queries containing the terms free and download Your ads still have the potential to appear for variations of these terms. Your ads will also still show on search queries that only contain one of the terms.
For example, the search queries software download andfree software could trigger your ads, while free software downloadwill not.
Negative “Phrase” Matched - To create a negative phrase matched keyword surround the term with quotation marks.
Example: -”free download“
Adding this keyword the system wouldn’t let any search query containing the phrasefree downloadtrigger your ads. The search query free download accounting softwarewould not trigger your ads. However, your ads could possibly show on the search querydownload accounting software or free accounting software.
Negative [Exact] Matched – To create a negative exact matched keyword surround the term with brackets
Example: -[free download]
This negative keyword would only prevent your ads from showing on the search queryfree download. Search queries such asfree accounting software download andfree software could still trigger your ads.
It is suggested to add relevant variations of your negative keywords, including both the singular and plural forms.Learnto add effective negative keywords to your ad group or campaign.
Now that we have some familiarity with negative keyword match types the next question is how do we identify negatives to add to the account?AdWords offers two tools to identify negative keywords.
The search query report is a very helpful report to identifying negative keywords.This report will show advertisers what the actual query was that resulted in their ads being served.You can use this report to identify negative keyword to add to your account.
The keyword tool can be used to identify negative keywords.
Watch this Video
Adding Negative keywords is easy.They can be added at the campaign level to cover all adgroups or at the ad group level if the negative keywords are specific to one category.
Research your Search Query Reports regularly to identify negative keywords.Negative keywords will improve your CTR and preserve your budget by showing your ads to only the best prospects for business.
A member in the AdWords Help Forum brought to my attention today that the in-line bidding keyword bidding a.k.a. Max CPC column is missing from the keywords section on Adwords. I went straight into several client accounts and sure enough, it’s gone.
Where is the MAX CPC Column?
After some looking around I found that if you visit the Filter and Views button the option to have the MAX CPC show is located there.
Customizing Columns with Filters & Views
Now I am able to see and most importantly EDIT the Max CPC for individual keywords.
I am pondering why Google would do this. Seems like a great way to cause some confusion.
Additionally, while looking into this issue I noticed another new item, at least new to me. In investigating the issue I selected several keywords and then went to the edit button and Table Edit.
There I found must be a fairly new feature, but it is not active in my accounts.
New Feature to Prefill all Bids to First Page Bid Estimates?
Is this to alleviate the dreaded “below first page bid estimate” issue?
Update: Google’s AdWordsPro Stephen posted in the forum with the following statement: “[...] there was a technical issue with the AdWords UI this morning. We introduced a change that accidentally pushed some of the stats columns out of the right place and caused another issue with column customization. We reverted that change for now, so it shouldn’t be a problem anymore.”
Just noticed that Google has added two new sets of reporting features to the reports section. This data is for video and image ads.
Video Columns
Interaction Columns
New Data Included in AdWords Reports
What great information! To know how much of your video was played, to know if visitors almost clicked your video or image ad. Google is helping us to be a fly on the wall in our potential customers homes and offices.
We fairly often see questions from people who have a difference between their campaign or AdGroup row totals and the summary at the bottom of the table. The problem is usually a drop down box that selects only a part of the networks that Google can reach. The snapshot shows where on the page that box is found – toward the upper right of the statistics table in AdWords 2:
AdWords Statistics MisMatch - Click This Selection!
Personally, even when I am not using the Content Network, I’ll leave this set to show all three networks. Sometimes I can see ways to optimise one or the other of the three networks. Without the triple view, I couldn’t so easily pick up the patterns.
The Search Query Performance Report is one of my favorite reports. It is helpful for extracting new keywords, determining new keyword matching options and finding -negative keywords to reduce unwanted impressions and clicks. Overall it is going to provide valuable data to assist you in increasing CTR to give your account a better quality score and an edge over your competition.
The data below is from an account that was brought to my attention because it was failing to provide a return on investment. To protect this clients identity and keywords I am blacking out part of the keyword. He sells coffee products so for the purpose of further explinations let’s replace the blacked out keyword with ‘folgers’.
Broad Match Keywords = low CTR
As you can see the broad match keyword generated a lot of impressions but few clicks resulting in a low CTR. Because broad match will allow keywords to be inserted before the keyword, after the keyword or related synonyms be used for the keyword the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ can match a broad range of queries.
The first thing I did when I got my hands on the account was run a Search Query Performance Report. The broad match keyword ‘folgers’ generated the below queries circled in red as well as many other queries that I have not shown here. As you can see people were performing search queries on ‘folgers coffee packets’ and the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ was allowing the query to show the ads. There were a good number of impressions for ‘folgers coffee packets’ so I have added the new keyword to the account.
Search Query Performance Report - personal info withheld
The data from the SQPR allowed me to extract many new keywords to add to the account. It also told me to add some negative keywords such as ‘-makers’ because this ad group is specific to coffee (I have another group for makers). Not shown in this report is the many misspelled variations of the keyword I found. I added keywords for all of these misspellings also.
The Below report is a sampling of new keywords I extracted from the SQPR. This is the next day’s data and already look at that CTR! I will keep the broad match keyword ‘folgers’ for now. I expect to see the impressions for the keyword start to drop while I absorb some of those impressions with these more specific variations. The drop in impressions will cause the ‘folgers’ keyword CTR to improve and I can continue to run the report to find more keywords that have good traffic to add to the account. Eventually I may pause the keyword. Note that all the keywords in the report.2 are new are added in exact or phrase match to further increase CTR by restricting the search queries they can appear on.
As you can see the CTR increased dramatically from the broad match keyword ‘folgers’. These scores overtime will help this account to achieve a fantastic historical CTR and the keywords that are scored as OK will eventually become GREAT scores with a really good historical CTR.
