Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the net not a disk drive was spinning, not even in the cloud. The clicks are hung by the SERP with care, in hopes that Saint Google soon would be there. The AdWords Experts are nestled all snug in their beds while visions of new features danced in their head and I am sure you know all the rest.
Since 2008 I have written an open letter to Saint Google asking for new features for AdWords. Believe it or not I think Saint Google reads my blog because we get many of the things we ask for! This might just be a coincidence but I am not entirely sure that’s true.
Negative Keyword Search Query Report
This one has been on my list since 2008 so I am starting to think that Saint Google does not like ideas that create additional revenue for Google. Maybe at this time of year they think more of others than themselves. The concept here is pretty simple we need to see the searches that get excluded by our Negative Keywords so we can make sure we are not accidently excluding traffic we want to buy. This should result in an increase in AdWords volume since we would be putting volume back into the system.
All the Search Query Data – Please!
At the bottom of every search query report is the maddening line that reads “Other Search Terms” and it often has the majority of the searches. It is not at all uncommon for more impressions to be accounted for on this line than the rest of the report combined. The whole idea of a search query report is to find new keywords that we can pursue so the more ideas we see the better we can serve our clients.
Google Analytics -Give Back the Organic Keywords!
It has been about a year since Google started removing the organic keyword detail and replaced it with the hated (Not Provided) & (Not Set). What started out as 20% reduction in data is now up to 90% in some accounts. This used to be a rich source of new keywords for AdWords but now it is not even worth checking in most cases.
Enhance Bidding Strategies
The addition of bidding strategies is a great step forward but it is only the first step of a long journey. We need this to be greatly enhanced to include:
- Process cycle (number of days between application of strategy)
- Access to all the data in the system including current period (since last cycle), prior period, specific months, same period last year, and all time.
- Full filter function applied to keyword selection.
- Bid adjustments in layers based on the value.
Some of the current strategies are based on data that is well known to be flawed. For example the top of page estimate is so far off in many accounts that it fails the giggle test.
Geo Target Improvements
Geo-targeting works well in many cases but sometimes we want more control over this. The option right now is to target based on physical location and/or search intent but in many cases this is too crude. We need to be able to target based on search intent within a certain range. For example if I want traffic in Los Angeles I may want search intent in Anaheim but not New York.
Ad Location Setting
In the olden days we had a setting that the system actually followed that allowed us to set a specific range of locations for our ads. In this way we could set the target location to 1-3 and it either qualified or it did not but it only showed where we wanted it. We suspect that this went away because Google lost impression share to this setting but many clients loved this setting and the system actually used it.
Expand PLA Data
Product Listing Ads are newer in AdWords and they had a very bumpy ride over from the organic side but they are fully here. It’s time to have them grow up and provide all the data that we get in the rest of the system especially location and impression share. Managing these ads is way too much magic and not enough science.
Stop Moving Stuff All The Time!
We understand the development methodology of Google is to innovate, publish, then test. In the long term this causes great difficulties with staff training. We would like to see Google batch together the changes and put them out once a quarter with COMPLETE documentation in a change summary. This would allow us to properly train our staff.
Add ‘UNDO’ function to the change log
This was on my list this year and it was released while I was writing this article. So I think Saint Google really can read minds… spooky!
Well it should be exciting to see which of these gifts we find under our Christmas tree in 2014!