Just a quick note for those of you who couldn’t make it to SES NYC, you can download all of the presentations from the SES NYC site. Here’s the link to the presentations.

Its not quite the same as being there but there is some good information to pull out of there.

Enjoy

I received an email from a friend asking me how to export her Google Adwords account so she could begin importing it into Yahoo and MSN adCenter. I thought it may make a good topic because if one person had the question a lot of people probably have the same.

Since Google removed the simplest solution, which was downloading a bulk sheet, the next best option is to use the Adwords Editor.

Follow the steps below to download your account:

• 1. Download the Google Adwords Editor from Here!
• 2. Go to the File Menu > Export to CSV. You can either download the whole account or the campaign or ad group that is currently selected in the tree view.
• 3. Select the location where you’d like to save your snapshot, change the file name if desired, and click Save.
• 4. For the best view of your account data, open Excel, then go to the File Menu and open your exported file.

The above was taken from the Google Adwords Editor help page found here. and this link also has more directions on how to export your account into other formats.

Barry posted a question regarding how the click activity will change on the paid search ads based on the changes Google made on the SERPs. I guess Barry didn’t see that I already posted the answer. Just kidding, I don’t expect the rustybrick to be one of my 4 readers but I’ll sum up my thoughts after only a few days of the changes being live.

• Clicks have seen virtually no change
• Impressions have not changed
• CTR has gone up by .5% or so

So despite what everyone expects the changes, like I thought, have been minimal. I think that they canceled each other out.

• Ad blindness was affected with the change from blue to yellow
• The increased clicks that should have come from the color change is counteracted by the change from a click-able background to a link only click-able ad

Although its too early to tell the long term affect of the changes, the short term affect is about what I expected, minimal.

According to Google

Clickbot.A is the name of a botnet that Google’s Click Quality and Security Teams investigated last year. Using our findings, we published “The Anatomy of Clickbot.A” - a detailed case study on botnet-based click fraud for the benefit of the technical research community.

Clickbot.A is an example of a botnet operator attempting a click fraud attack against syndicated search engines. Google was able to identify clicks on our advertisers’ ads that exhibited Clickbot.A-like patterns and flagged them as invalid. While Clickbot.A is a specific example of a botnet application that conducted click fraud, botnets can also be used for keylogging, distributed denial of service (DDoS), and other types of attacks.

Due to the potential for misuse and the inherent loss of control that can result from having a machine participate in such a botnet, we hope “The Anatomy of Clickbot.A” will help facilitate further collaboration between search engines, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), anti-virus vendors, and other parties on the Internet in managing botnets and similar threats.

You can download the white-paper study from the Google Adwords Blog

Here is some interesting coverage from the Advanced Paid Search Tactics panel. This is interesting not only because it has some good information but particularly because I know how stingy ppc account managers are with their true “tactics”, not many of us like to give them out. While there is nothing ground breaking here, I will try to find more coverage on this panel. View Panel summary at SERoundTable

Here’s another session talking about the conflicts of internal PPC problems. It’s not too interesting to me but those at the agency level may want to check it out at SERoundtable.com

Unfortunately, I am not at SES NYC this year but with all the great coverage done by the blogosphere, I’ll probably read and absorb more than I would from being there. I digress, I will hopefully be able to grab all the relevant paid search coverage and post it here. If time permits, I’ll try to add my thoughts as well.

The first session on Ads and Quality Score was covered in great detail by Barry on SERoundtable.com (Actually it turns out to be Lisa from Bruce Clay, guest posting.) Irregardless of who posted it, there is some good info on it Ads and the effect the Quality Score can have on your keyword buys. There is a good discussion on the panelists thought on quality score and how to manage it, but in particular the commentary from Jonathan Menedez was particularly interesting to me.

While you can no doubt spend hours upon hours analyzing data in hopes to cracking the quality score beast, but Menedez puts it best. He says:

Jonathan warns audience members about being too concerned with their score. … If you concentrate your efforts on delivering relevancy through your keywords and your ad, your quality will improve and so will your results.

This is confirmed by Nick Fox from Google who was also on the panel and says

Google is trying to do with their quality algorithms. Don?t worry about quality score, just focus on relevance and everything else will follow.

Lisa reports

Nick assures readers that it?s the users who are defining quality. Click through rate is a great metric to see if users are demonstrating interest. Google is trying to capture the essence of what users are telling them about relevance and then incorporate that into the algorithm.

. While CTR is definitely a good metric, it is also important to track your exit rate in conjunction with CTR to make sure you aren’t attracting low quality traffic.

For more coverage visit Lisa’s post on SERoundtable.

The title says it all and I’m sure I’m not the first to notice it but with all the quality score updates, algorithm and scoring changes within Adwords, it is quite possible that Google has lost control of accuracy.

A little background on where this post began: I’ve been searching for new keywords to put in one of my client’s accounts when I decided to include the Company Name + Product number in their account. These keywords would be something similar to PPClab X1234. Very obscure and probably extremely low traffic I still wanted to include the words for testing purposes. I checked the SERPs for about 33.6% (lowest effective sample size, thanks Stats101!) of the words to insure that I wasn’t going to stumble onto some high traffic budget eating word from another industry. 100% of the words I checked had blank search results, which is what I expected. I went ahead and dropped all 700+ words into the account with a min bid of .10 and gave the system some time to soak up my changes.

A few hours later I check the account and I see the following message: Two of my 700+ made up words have been marked as inactive because their minimum bid was too low. From all the digging I’ve done, I can not tell why these keywords are required to have a minimum bid almost 3 times the bid of the rest of the words. The landing pages are specific, the ad texts are shared and their SERP pages are blank as well . Their Quality Scores are “OK”, which is lower than the rest of the words but don’t understand why their bid prices would be so much higher.

The only thing I can think of is probably no surprise to anyone, inconsistencies in Google Adwords Min. Bid Prices but I think it is always interesting to see the data behind it. Does Anyone out there have similar problems or a solution?

We want to update you on two changes coming your way:

1. Short descriptions will be required when you create or modify an ad, beginning in May 2007.
Long descriptions will be optional. Currently, you have two options for your ad descriptions: long (up to 190 characters) and short (70 characters or fewer).

2. Yahoo! Search results will only show short descriptions beginning in June 2007.
If you only use long descriptions, your ad will be automatically cut off to fit within the 70-character limit, which may impact your ability to communicate valuable information to users and your results. We recommend that you create a short description for any existing ad to guarantee that your most important information is included.

In the example below, key messages, such as competitive pricing and free shipping, are not included in the “cut-off” ad:

Why are we making this change?
We’ve found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience and generally get better results. Users are exposed to higher quality search ads and advertisers may attract more interested and enthusiastic potential customers. So don’t wait until June?start now.

You may see something different in your Google search results today. There is no more blue background on the top results, Google has officially made the change to yellow according to the Adwords Blog.

Over the past few years, the sponsored links above the search results have been displayed in a box with a blue background that a user can click on in order to reach an advertiser’s landing page. We’ve now made two changes to the way that we display these ads to improve the experience of our users and advertisers.

First, we thought it was time for a new look: after months of testing, we decided to switch the background color of the top ads from blue to yellow. Second, we’ve modified what counts as a click in this box to be consistent with what counts as a click for the ads on the right hand side. Instead of clicking anywhere in the box, users now need to click on the link in the top line of an ad in order to be taken to an advertiser’s site. Together, these changes help decrease the likelihood that a user will unintentionally click on an ad, while making our highest quality ads more visible.

Aside from the blue to yellow change Google also changed the way a click is recorded. No longer can you click anywhere on the color box and a click be recorded, now the ads act like the other ads on the page and the natural results, a user must click on the actual link. Now I posted a week ago that CTR Rates were going to rise b/c of the change, but I believe the change in how clicks are recorded will counter that initial increase we would have saw as users are awoken from their ad blindness on SERPs.

Frankly, from a user perspective I’m not a fan of the yellow, maybe its my old laptop screen but It kind of hurts my eyes. It also makes me wonder if the yellow will blend into the natural results more and cause a higher importance to be added on the top 1-3 paid placements.

Just keep a heads up on you budgets and CTRs over the next week or so. Google Adwords is rolling out the reported changes from changing the paid ads on the search results to a yellow background. They have been testing this for a while and more and more people are coming to me with notices that they are constantly seeing yellow backgrounds on SERPs.

This is significant for advertisers and account managers because I expect to see an significant increase in clicks as the change from blue to yellow will temporarily suspend the average users “ad-blindness”, ie the mental blocking of ads on SERPs. Budgets can get eaten up quicker than expected but should eventually level back out but everyone should be aware of this upcoming change.