Author Archives: michellemsem

My Q&A with an AdWords Rep About the New Ad Rotation Settings

For those of you who keep reasonably up to date with the goings on in Google AdWords, you’ll know that they’ve recently made some changes to the ad rotation options. The original 3 settings were:

- Optimize for Clicks

- Optimize for Conversions

- Rotate evenly

The most recent changes have been made to the Rotate evenly setting. Now, if none of your ads in an ad group have been updated in more than 30 days, Google will automatically start optimizing for clicks.

A New Way to Look at Impression Share Metrics

Opinions on impression share are mixed. Some marketers love them and others couldn’t pay less attention. But as the impression share metrics in AdWords and adCenter become increasingly accurate, I think they’ll start to become a metric that simply shouldn’t be ignored. But not for the reasons you might expect.

I use impression share not as a metric to judge account success, but to gauge my performance as a manager. Everyone wants their ad to show up in every search that will generate a conversion, but that’s impossible to predict. A manager’s job should be to maximize the amount of impressions with conversions and decrease the number without. Since impression share is the number of impressions you received divided by the number of impressions you were eligible for, you have a built-in metric to help you reach 100% efficiency. Managing for impression share can be done two ways: cutting out the crappy impressions you know won’t convert, and grabbing the the highest percentage of the good ones that can convert.

Cut the Crap:

For every business, there are impressions you simply will not convert on. Get those out of there. As you exclude these bad impressions, the number of eligible impressions decreasing, improving your overall impression share.

Tracking Individual Sitelinks in Google Analytics

The Sitelinks Extension in Google AdWords has been around for almost two years now. In that time, it’s generated great results and advertisers are reaping the benefits across the board. But one aspect of sitelinks that could stand some improvement is tracking and reporting. The question: How do I track individual sitelinks in Google Adwords?  The answer: You don’t.

You track them in Google Analytics.

And its pretty simple, too.
It just takes a little tracking set up AdWords and some filtering in Analytics.

The AdWords Part:

When creating your set of Sitelinks, add this piece of tracking onto the end of your destination URL:

?sitelink=”descriptor”  (Or &sitelink=descriptor if this is not the first tag you have on your URL.)