I did try the paid upgrade to AVG earlier in the year with the belief that the extra levels of protection it could provide would be worthwhile.

However, omens were not good when my PC crashed with the blue screen of death during installation.

So I safely reverted back to v8.5

Recently AVG have been publishing an upgrade deadline of December 1st to move up to version 9, which I’d been ignoring for a while.

But yesterday I upgraded to free AVG9, which seems a much superior version.

Later in the day though, AdWords Editor was hanging up in the middle of routine account downloads, and I lost an evenings and a morning’s work.

The only change was AVG V9, so I uninstalled it. AdWords Editor came back to life – thank goodness. Just goes to show that I can’t do my work without it, it’s that critical.

So if you are a mission-critical user of AdWords Editor, and a user of AVG free v8.5 looking to upgrade to V9 – take care, you have been warned…

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Our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and quality score determine how much you pay for a click on Google.com.

So you put your AdWords bids up to raise your Ad position, and your AdRank (position) actually falls – what’s going on?

Google’s Chief Economist, Dr. Hal Varian, demonstrates eloquently how AdRank and Click prices (CPC) are computed, and why Quality Score and Click Through Rate are so important whenever your keyword triggers your Ad to enter the Ad Auction.

The video is insightful and revealing, watch it in full at the bottom of this article.

And I now (as of today) also believe the point Dr. Varian makes about increasing bid prices and actually appearing in other auctions with lower positions as a result, although I didn’t when I first saw the video.

This afternoon I’ve just been doing some advertiser research, which involves typing a keyword, seeing what ads appear, and going through all the pages of search results carrying ads for this keyword (tents) – there were about 140 advertisers (UK).

I noticed several things, some of which I’d seen before, but which now “seem” to gel and make a bit more sense against this backdrop.

Firstly, to confirm I had actually reached the end of the advertiser results, I noticed the See your ad here » link which shows when all ads have finished, before starting over with the top AdRank ad again (rather than More Sponsored Links >> which indicates additional ads to come on subsequent pages).

When I was going through each page, sometimes I would see the same advertiser ad that I had seen on an earlier page, but now in a lower position – a different auction, presumably triggered both by me (since I refreshed the search by going to the next page), and by other users who are all searching just like me.

Some advertiser ads also had disappeared from the auction when I had visited their website, and then gone back a page to the results page carrying their ad which I had previously seen and clicked through on.

(Perry Marshall’s observation of the “search and search again” phenomenon where ads quickly disappear and change position if you repeatedly refresh your browser may also be implicated in this auction discussion).

What I think we need to consider are several points:

1. Quality Score which governs the AdRank position is computed REALTIME for every search (i.e every auction) and is therefore potentially variable, because of broad keyword expansion, CTR, different ad text being split tested, restricted campaign delivery, ad optimisation and rotation, exhausted budgets, time of day, scheduling, advertiser competition etc.

2. Since we’re talking realtime, you’ll only ever acquire data that pertains to a tiny snapshot of the whole auction activity over an instant of time – the next search that happens, or if you refresh your browser or go to the next page of results, and the auction has already changed.

3. So the best data you can ever acquire is going to be a series of averages over a specific time period, and the longer the better to avoid glitches. So it’s overall trends you need to follow, rather than snapshots which could go up and down quite a bit.

Maybe the only way to ensure maximum consistency and Impression Share (for an individual advertiser) would be to be in the happy position (with full comprehension of profitability of course) of being able to set a huge daily budget guaranteed to buy every click on the market (and then some), a high bid price to ensure consistently top position in the auction, accelerated delivery, for exact match only with a single ad.

I wonder if anyone’s ever been able to do that? (I bet they have). I’d love to see those reports!

Seems to me that sometimes we actually can expect “too much” transparency from Google, and that they have a highly automated machine which even *they* cannot fully explain all the results from, or offer reporting or tools which can help us dig deeper.

They are still developing and refining it after all. I cite the Ads Diagnostic tool which is a great (fairly) recent functionality, but why should it be a painful, time-consuming and bug-ridden process which you can’t run as a scheduled report? I expect (or hope) that will eventually appear, as many things eventually do (remember when we could not even schedule our campaigns? I go back more than 5 years with all this…)

So AdWords sometimes seems to me to be a bit more like Quantum Mechanics than we would actually prefer (by observing the experiment, you actually participate in it, and alter it without meaning to), and that sometimes we may need to go a little easier on our opinion of Google – after all, there’s no other system like it!

And this video by Dr. Varian *graphically* demonstrates how critically important Quality Score is in governing your Ad position (AdRank), and Cost Per Click.

So, not only is it important to optimise your AdWords performance through

• bid price management to individual keyword level (yes – all of them, and it’s easily done)
• “Peel and Stick” into ever smaller ad groups (I have Campaigns with thousands of Ad Groups, and they get up to 100% CTR)
• Ad Texts targeted to keywords in Ad Headlines, description lines and display urls

but now, Quality Score has to be targeted for optimisation also, and that involves your website and landing pages too.

Remember “Traffic is for Show, Conversions is for Dough”. If you’ve got a “concrete website” – you’re in serious trouble…

The top Quality Score of “10″ is now on your weekly optimisation “to-do list” …

Comments and feedback most welcome…

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How to use the AdWords Time Machine to save you hours of time reconstructing a damaged AdWords Account.

Have you ever spent ages making updates to your AdWords account, only to find you’ve got to somehow undo all your hard work because your numbers are now suffering?

And which change was it that did the damage?

As a rule, it’s safest to make only single changes in your AdWords campaigns.

That way you know whether things improved or not, and which change to revert or try again.

However, that can take time to show results, so, often, many of us will make wholesale changes to ads, keywords, ad groups and campaign settings, hoping to see that magical lift in CTR and conversion rates.

But when things go wrong – what then?

How do we get back to where we were before?

Is there some Time Machine feature in AdWords we could use to perform a "system restore" like on your Windows PC?

Unfortunately not.

You’ll have to check your account Change History (it’s in the Tools section) and manually go through all your modifications and undo them all.

Keeping a long-hand journal can help a lot with this, but that’s also time-consuming, so many of us won’t bother with that.

There is one built-in safety feature in your AdWords account, which is that entire campaigns, ad groups and ads can be "undeleted" if you have deleted them.

But keywords cannot be undeleted, they’re gone, so you have to enter them all again by hand if you want them back (TIP – rather than deleting keywords, take the precaution to Pause them first, before really deleting them).

But what about this Time Machine we’re talking about? Does it exist?

Yes! It’s called the AdWords Editor.

It’s a free desktop application provided by Google to manage your AdWords account offline, right on your desktop, rather than having to manually login to your account every time as you’re used to doing.

You get a complete top-down view of your entire account for vastly easier management.

Any changes you make in the Editor don’t take effect until you "post" them up to your AdWords account.

But although the Editor has been around for well over a year, most AdWords users seem either unaware of it and its benefits, or have tried it and given up.

It certainly is very different to the manual interface.

And there is quite a steep learning curve, but it’s well worth it to master the many powerful features it offers. I manage over 80 accounts and the Editor is indispensable for me to do this.

However, there’s one great function you can make use of immediately to protect yourself without having to learn the whole thing.

Step One: You can download your entire account to the Editor database on your PC

Ste Two: export a local copy of it on your PC to an "archive" file.

Step Three: if you need to to undo any changes, simply use the "Time Machine" to open an earlier saved archive of your account, and post it back to your account to undo all the changes you weren’t happy with.

Voila! "System Restore" in AdWords …

Because the Editor can potentially make enormous changes in your account, i was initially concerned about the effects on the performance history data that  Google maintains and monitors on all the keywords and ads.

This data is kept at the AdWords Account level, so any keywords, ad groups and ad texts you move around in your account using the Editor will be maintained, even though you don’t see it on the screen.

There’s a world more of things the Editor can do, and it is not 100% perfect, but at the least, I encourage you to install it, experiment, and download your precious AdWords account for safe-keeping, with regular archives.

In addition, if you’re still making manual changes online, be sure to always "synchronise" your online and off-line copies to the Editor by downloading all recent changes.

Otherwise, next time you make loads of changes and wish you hadn’t, you’ll be spending hours trying to figure out what went wrong and what to do about it.

The AdWords Editor seems to be one of the Industry’s Best-Kept Secrets.

If you’d like to know more, there’s more about the AdWords Editor, and Training here

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This Morning My PC Locked Me Out of Internet Access

Since I run an online AdWords Training and Consultancy business (with two Broadband Internet Connections, and a UPS) – this was not good. At All.

I lost 2 hours productivity just figuring out that the cause was the latest Microsoft Windows Update that I had just applied.

A System Restore was in order, and resolved the problem.

Then I saw Howie’s Post in Google Alerts.

A Windows System Restore is a time machine – it takes your PC back to a point in time when it was last working correctly.

No such thing exists for Google AdWords – or does it?

Yes, it actually does.

But, like Windows System Restore , you have to "enable" it.

It’s called the AdWords Editor.

And it’s a free desktop application tool from Google.

With it, you can download a snapshot of your entire account for archiving, and, if something goes wrong, revert back to the last known working configuration.

And a *lot* more.

The AdWords Editor seems to be one of the Industry’s Best-Kept Secrets.

If you’d like to know more, there’s more about the AdWords Editor, and Training here

Read a follow-up post to the AdWords Editor here

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How You Can See Your Posts in Google With Astonishing Speed

I just posted the "peel and stick" article.

Out of curiosity I went to Google and searched peel and stick + adwords to see who else might be listed.

Incredible!

There’s my post from just 22 minutes ago!

Now this one’s indexed too!

Now, ironically, I even outrank Perry:

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Intimidated by too many keywords? The AdWords Editor makes it a Trivial task!

Any student of Perry Marshal has heard the term "peel and stick".

He uses it to describe how to reduce your keyword lists in your ad groups to small numbers of tightly-related terms.

Often, you should only have 3-6 keywords in an Ad group, with a specifically written ad just for those keywords.

This gives the opportunity of excellent CTR for keywords, ads, and the ad group, raising AdRank (position) and reducing click costs.

Problem is, over time, keyword lists can build up into hundreds, even thousands in your ad groups.

And the whole account can become bloated with keywords, many of which should be discarded.

You know you need to "peel and stick", but the task is just too big to consider – or is it?

The AdWords editor has a unique feature which goes through your ad group in seconds, giving you a list of related keywords to put into new ad groups which you can select from, or choose your own.

It will even duplicate your ads into the new ad groups, so you can just go and edit them rather than have to recreate.

It’s time to learn the capabilities of the AdWords Editor and save drastic amounts of time and effort with your AdWords account management!

Learn more about the incredible FREE AdWords Editor in our 6 hour AdWords Editor Training Video Series

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Follow up: I discovered by accident that this article was indexed in Google in 22 minutes

"I thought I had a sound knowledge of Google AdWords …"

"Last year I heard about the Adwords Editor and I downloaded the program from Google.

Unfortunately it did not come with video tutorials or easy to use instructions and I did not use the editor as it seemed too challenging to learn.
 
Recently I teamed up with David Rothwell who has a wealth of knowledge about Google Adwords and also knows the Adwords editor back to front.

What I learned from David has been invaluable and what seemed like a mountain to climb is now a breeze as his simple instruction has made life so much easier with the editor.
 
Since teaming up with David my conversion rate has gone up by over 40% and the ability to test different ads and campaigns is now at my fingertips and very easy to do.
 
I thought I had a sound knowledge of Google adwords however David’s tips and advice has taken my knowledge to the next level and I cannot recommend highly enough."

- James Langmead, Devon UK

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