Any (ad)Words to make (ad)Sense of Adwords and Adsense?

March 29, 2007 11:43 AM

Is there any 3rd-party software that is any good for managing AdWords campaigns?

Every review I've read online seems to be driven by referral links, and I've been finding a somewhat-seedy underworld of affiliate back-rubbing pervading the industry. I can't trust any of the links I find online (they generally reveal their affiliate ID when you examine the HTML), nor do I trust the recommendations of such 'gurus' as Perry Marshall, Joel Comm, etc., whose books I've been reading and who send me countless emails everyday to my junk account.

I'm looking for the sort of program that will do (m)any of the following: generate keywords, examine current bid prices, estimate positioning, reconfigure match-types, adsense arbitrage analyses, etc. I'm willing to pay a reasonable price - and if it works on my Mac, that's a great bonus. [Note: None of these links are affiliate links...]

The tool I'm most tempted by is Keyword Analyzer , but there are a ton of them: Adwords Dominator , Keyword Elite , Adword Analyzer , Adword Accelerator (which Perry Marshall seems to shill for), and, of course, Word Tracker - which I still don't get what all the fuss is about (and I've tried the free trials).

I use the Adword Editor, but I'm looking for a tool that will help me really crush this Adwords thing. I've been playing with them for several websites for about 2 months now, and either I just don't get it, or the system doesn't quite work. For example, they want me to bid $5.00 on a keyword that only has one posted ad, and which is fully optimized on my site and ad text.

Does anyone have any real, unbiased experience that can help me find the tools I need? I know Google provides a lot of them itself, but I'm hoping for some extra 'edge' and ease of use.

posted by prophetsearcher to computers & internet (5 comments total)

try posting the above question at warriorforums.com they might tell you....
posted by Izzmeister at 4:08 PM on March 29, 2007

thanks for the suggestion, Izz, but that site seems to be a placeholder. I tried warriorforums.net, but the title there is "Warriors for Christ" -- not quite what you'd be getting at with that one...
posted by prophetsearcher at 4:20 PM on March 29, 2007

For example, they want me to bid $5.00 on a keyword that only has one posted ad, and which is fully optimized on my site and ad text.

$5 per click, or a daily budget of $5? Sometimes they make you enter a relatively large daily budget, because they predict that otherwise the ads won't be distributed evenly throughout the day. And when they make that prediction, they err on the side of saving money by just not running the ad until you up the budget.
posted by bingo at 6:09 PM on March 29, 2007

no no no -- $5 a click!
posted by prophetsearcher at 6:18 PM on March 29, 2007

I can't be sure without seeing the details, but it sounds like your "quality score" is low. The lower the quality score, the higher the price of each click.

Google doesn't reveal all the factors that go into a quality score, but it's all based around "relevance." The idea is that, for purposes of maintaining the quality of their own AdWords brand, they want users to have a good experience with AdWords. So the more likely your ad is to lead users to something they're interested in, the better deal they give you, the advertiser.

Part of the quality score is based on the CTR of your ad. Part of it is based on the supposed relevance of the ad text itself, although it's not clear how this is determined. And part of it is based on how well ads related to the keywords you've chosen have performed in the past. This last bit may be the crucial factor here.

So if your keyword is "kryptonite," and historically, other people's AdWords keyed to "kryptonite" have been clicked on only 1% of the time, then you're starting out with the deck stacked against you. You essentially have to convince Google (through demonstration) that your ads are so relevant to the associated keyword(s), that they deserve a higher quality score.

Broadening your keywords may be helpful here. Otherwise, you may just have to wait until your ratio of those $5 clicks to impressions shown gets better.

Anyway, I seriously doubt that the API tool you use is going to make much difference.
posted by bingo at 9:40 PM on March 29, 2007