Here at top-secret Juice headquarters, some major new products are in the works, and we want to promote them with Google’s revenue powerhouse (also known as Google AdWords). Thus, after three weeks of self-imposed AdWords boot camp, I have emerged with a few scrapes and burns, along with some tips that I wish I had been armed with since the beginning.

The natural place to start learning about Google AdWords is the official Help Center, an expansive and neatly categorized resource. But what happens if your inhuman schedule or dwindling coffee supplies don’t allow you the luxury of navigating through the help center hierarchy or sifting through its search results? While you might be able to maintain a semblance of a campaign without answering those lingering questions, you run a high risk of letting potential viewers slip away, never seeing your ad, and wasting money on high CPCs (cost-per-click).

You are hereby invited to learn from my mistakes. I am forgoing the usual basic topics in favor of questions whose answers are more time-consuming and tedious to find. It took me a few weeks to get comfortable with AdWords and figure out these answers myself, but it will only take you a few minutes!

Read on to learn the answers to:

1. How creative should I be with my ad text?
2. How do I find out what keywords my competitors are using?
3. Why has Google’s heartless algorithm condemned my keyword as inactive?
4. How do I get bolded words in my ad?
5. What is dynamic keyword insertion, and how do I use it?
6. What is the difference between a campaign and an ad group?
7. What is the difference between keywords and placements?

1. How creative should I be with my ad text?

When I was but an AdWords newbie, I held the misconception that creative ads were all that I needed to pull in clicks. Pop psychologists might credit my right brain, starved for attention in the left brain’s home turf (programming! algorithms! programming these algorithms!), for seizing upon the opportunity to design some artistic and imaginative ad copy:

The “Viva la Revolucion” ad was my baby. But it turned out to have a face only a mother could love, as evidenced by the zero people who clicked on it. To the stunned disappointment of my right brain, Google AdWords is just as algorithm-fueled as any of Google’s other products. In fact, Google AdWords runs much like the ubiquitous search engine does, treating your keywords, ads, and landing page similar to the way it treats the 1 trillion pages it crawls while looking for content.

2. How do I find out what keywords my competitors are using?

Google won’t tell you—it’s in their privacy policy. But services such as KeywordSpy will. KeywordSpy not only gives you lists of your competitors’ (and your potential) keywords, but provides data for each keyword about other metrics, including as ROI, price per click, and number of competitors.

3. Why has Google’s heartless algorithm condemned my keyword as inactive?

Sometimes, Google will refuse to show ads for certain keywords unless you pay an absurdly large CPC. The large CPC is meant to discourage you from following any of these bad habits:

• You dumped a lot of unrelated (or weakly related) keywords into one gigantic ad group.

Try making many smaller ad groups, each with its own tightly-connected set of keywords. Ideally, every keyword in a given ad group is a synonym for all the other keywords in the ad group. This also helps tremendously with writing ads that use dynamic keyword insertion (see question #5), since forcing ads to accommodate keywords covering a wide range of topics and/or parts of speech makes the ads vague and unspecific. To find keywords that deserve synonym status, use Google Sets. It’s like a thesaurus on steroids.

• Your keyword, ads, and landing page aren’t “relevant” enough to each other.

All members of the Holy Trinity of content (keywords, ads, and landing page) need to draw from the same words to be considered related. Try making sure that they line up.

• The cost per click you set for that keyword falls below the minimum.

This is the nicer way of saying that you have to spend more money.

4. How do I get bolded words in my ad?

You can’t designate specific words to be bolded (or formatted in any way, for that matter). You can, however, make sure to include keywords (words the user types in that you have selected for your ads) in your ad title and/or body. Just as it bolds keywords in search results, Google bolds keywords in ads. Your keywords do not have to be exact matches with the words in your ad. In the example below, a search for the keyword phrase “report automation” produces an ad that not only bolds “report” and “automation,” but also their variants “reports” and “automating.”

5. What is dynamic keyword insertion, and how do I use it?

This technique (sometimes known as “wildcards”) is how eBay and Target can pull off “Buy _____ now” for every conceivable adjective-noun combination. It allows you to make the same ad apply to multiple keywords. The format is:

The word immediately following the colon (no spaces) indicates the word you want to be shown when the keyword is too long to fit in the ad. Since I chose that word to be “executive dashboards,” the ad prompted by a too-long keyword would look like this:

Here is the same ad with other keywords swapped in, thanks to dynamic keyword insertion:

You can tweak the capitalization of the keyword with Google’s guidance, in the form of this handy table and more.

6. What is the difference between a campaign and an ad group?

A campaign is made up of one or more ad groups. Each campaign has one budget (i.e., $10/day) that is shared between all of its ad groups. Each ad group can be customized with different ad variations, keywords, placements, days and times the ad is shown, etc. Therefore, most modifying and experimenting happens on the ad group level.

7. What is the difference between keywords and placements?

Keywords produce what people usually think of when they think of Google AdWords. When a user performs a Google search for a keyword you have selected, your ad appears on the side (or top, if your budget is very generous) of the results page. Placements occur in the “content network,” which is made of individual sites that get paid to show Google ads. If you sign up for a lot of placements, you’ll get a lot of clicks—but only because of the sheer volume of people seeing your ad. In some ways, placements are less targeted than keywords because people who clicked on your ad in the content network aren’t actively searching, as they are when they find your ad through natural searches. There are two types of placements:

1. Placements You Select
Google’s Placement Tool allows you to browse a gigantic list of sites organized by topic. Any of these sites could have your ad on it. The Placement Tool will also suggest sites and break down your potential audience by demographic.
2. Placements Google Selects
Google will select sites in the content network based on information from your current campaign. These sites may make up the bulk of your impressions and clicks on the content network and in general (in other words, clicks from the Google’s selected placements may outnumber both clicks from your selected placements and clicks from organic searches).

This list is by no means a comprehensive examination of AdWords, but at least now you can consider yourself three weeks wiser and three weeks closer to writing one that is.

A couple months ago, we put together a Greasemonkey tool that sucked data out of Google Analytics, and after mining it for trend information, integrated it back into the GA interface. This week's tool combines and extends Google Analytics with data from an outside source.

Here is a quick alpha of our Greasemonkey integration of external data reporting into Google Analytics for Kampyle, a "feedback analytics service." Click on the images to zoom in.

Clicking on the 'Kampylize' tab queries the Kampyle site in real-time to populate the standard GA data table.

Our friends at Kampyle run a service that allows website owners to put a feedback button on individual pages of their website. All information submitted by the user is uploaded to a central Kampyle database that compiles the user feedback with web page url and standard internet statistics such as the name of the browser. Website owners can access a server-end service that consists of a reporting site complete with summary data tables, graphs, and charts.

Since both sites are web-based reporting suites segmented in a similar fashion (individual website, date, web browser, etc.), they integrate together naturally. There is a lot of value in placing related data side by side, allowing users to get a more holistic picture of web site performance. If you have other ideas of data sources that would fit neatly with Google Analytics, let us know and we'll consider building the integration.

If you're interested in technical details, continue to Open Juice to see how this is all accomplished...

There is a new post that re-releases the script as a Firefox Plugin. Find it here.

After the warm reception for the first version of our Enhanced Google Analytics, we decided to add some new functionality. (Nothing like a few kinds words to keep us in the giving mood.) The first script created a couple new tables in the Google Analytics interface that highlight recent changes in referral visits. It uses Greasemonkey, an add-on for Firefox that allows a user to insert javascript directly into a webpage.

Our update gives you even more ability to understand the data in Google Analytics:

• At the suggestion of Avinash Kaushik, the new script works for keyword data, helping you see how organic search traffic is changing. An increase in a keyword may indicate a general change in user interests and/or improved performance on search results.
• My coworker Pete Skomoroch also suggested that I add the ability to see declines in referrals and new keyword searches.
• With the help of Paul Irish, the script is now better able to interface with the date widget on the Google Analytics site.

Who sent me unusual traffic?

(Click the above button for a simulation.)

When you click the button, your browser will download some historical data behind the scenes, and display a nice summary of the best and worst performing keywords/referring domains.

Installation Instructions:
Firefox 2.0+
Greasemonkey
googleanalyticsdownloade.user.js

If you don't already have Firefox, install it. Install Greasemonkey, and do the required Firefox restart. You should see a handsome monkey peeking at you from the bottom right hand corner of your browser. Open the script file in your firefox browser, and Greasemonkey should give you an option to install the script.

Afterwards, log into Google Analytics, and navigate to your Referring Sources or Keywords Tab. Click the button.

Configuring the script:

We spent some time trying to find convenient default settings here at Juice Analytics, so the script should work straight out of the box. Some users, however, may find it convenient to alter some of these configurations. To do so, in Firefox, go to Tools=>Greasemonkey=>Manage User Scripts..., select Google Analytics Downloader, and then click Edit in the lower left corner of the window. This should open up the script file in a text editor. If your computer does not have a default text editor configured, you may have to choose one. 'c:\windows\notepad' is a good bet for Windows machines.

This is what you should see:

The bracket labeled 'keywords?' controls defaults for the Keywords page, and correspondingly, 'referring_sources?' controls the Referring Sources page.

To change the settings, simply change the corresponding variable to your preferred default. Make sure to refresh your Google Analytics webpage, if you have it open, so the new settings are loaded.

Now for the nitty gritty configuration details:

• display_limit: This controls the maximum entries that each table will contain. This may be useful for large, sprawling sites.
• growth_tolerance: This is the percentage growth parameter. Changing it to .10, for example, will catch everything that has grown by 10%, as opposed to the default 50% and 20%, respectively.
• minimum_number_elements: This is a significance benchmark that can be used to limit what is displayed upon the screen. By default, only keywords with at least 10 elements are displayed upon the screen. Referring Sites does not have a minimum by default, but one can be set if desired.
• limit: Limit is more of an internal parameter that determines how many entries should be downloaded from Google in order to get the results that are visible here on the page. Lower the limit to increase speed. If the limit is set to a very high number, you will get the largest result set, but you will have to sit around for a while for the results to load. Since the results are downloaded ordered by volume, raising the limit from the default numbers will not actually give more significant results. You will simply get more of the smaller results, such as keywords with only 1 hit.
• look_back: This is a very important parameter. The script uses the date displayed upon your Google Analytics page to determine the full range that you want to consider in your results, but 'look_back' determines how many of those days are used for the significance test. So, say the range you have displayed in Google is March 23 - April 22 and your look_back is 7 days. The script will compare the average referrals for a given keyword from April 16-22 to the average from March 23-April 15, and will return the keyword only if the recent average is 20% higher than the rest of the time period. Thus, if you want to increase the total range of the data, change the dates on the actual webpage. Change 'look_back' only if you want to change the period of significance.

Happy analyzing!

There is a new post that re-releases the script as a Firefox Plugin. Find it here.

My boss Zach has a problem. Every four hours the craving strikes him. No matter where he is, he pulls out his shiny Macbook Pro and navigates to Juice's Google Analytics site. He pulls up the list of referrers to our site and meticulously searches for new domains. He has an freakish ability to pick out IP addresses that have never linked to us before. Even so, there had to be a better way.

I wondered whether Greasemonkey might be able to help. Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox that allows users to install custom javascript when you visit a specific website. These scripts can add a delete button for Gmail, automatically display lyrics to your YouTube music video, or do pretty much anything else you would want to enhance the functionality of a website.

After poking around the subtleties of the Google Analytics interface, I came up with a little script that can identify the new referrals that Zach so desperately craves. When navigating to the "Referring Sites" section of Google Analytics, the script add the following button to the interface.

Pushing the button downloads all the referrer data for the date displayed in the Google Analytics range, as well as a similar set of data for the range up to, but not including, the last three days. The difference between the two data sources is used to calculate all of the results. The specific number of days can be changed by editing the first line of the script. Greasemonkey then displays the results in two tables above the original Referrer table. (Greasemonkey works entirely within your browser shell, so your data should be quite secure.)

The first table shows any sites that have displayed more than a 50% increase in visits over the last 3 days as compared to the rest of the time range. The second shows all new recent sites that do not appear at all more than 3 days ago. This can be quite useful to anyone, who, like Zach, absolutely needs to know about any new and exciting inbound links.

Installation Instructions:
Firefox 2.0+
Greasemonkey
googleanalyticsdownloade.user.js

If you don't already have Firefox, install it. Install Greasemonkey, and do the required Firefox restart. You should see a handsome monkey peeking at you from the bottom right hand corner of your browser. Open the script file in your firefox browser, and Greasemonkey should give you an option to install the script.

Afterwards, log into Google Analytics, and navigate to your Referring Sources Tab. Click the button.

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