We’ve talked countlessly about the ways which AdWords is constantly changing in an attempt to give marketers more control over their ad campaigns. And not surprisingly, some have already yielded to success, as we’ve witnessed with the recent developments in Dynamic Search Ads; but we’ve also seen the rather negative outcomes of these changes, as was recently reported by Merkle’s Q2 data report. However, the truth remains that such changes will continue, and there is really no way of knowing exactly how your business will be affected, especially since there are so many variables that could potentially influence the impact. And while tactics like AdWords’ experimental features & the trial and error process can provide you with insight you need to discern what features will work best, it can still be relatively difficult to identify exactly where your account needs improvement. So it’s wise to consider learning about the new AdWords Editor Custom Rules so you can get specific advice as to how your account can be optimized.
As we mentioned earlier, the AdWords’ recent innovations are having a wide range of effects on different businesses. For example, Google recently decided to ignore word order and function words when deciding whether to trigger Exact Match for relevant search queries. The change is intended to expand marketers control over their businesses, however it can be rather disempowering for those businesses who have a lesser range of relevant keywords related to their goods and services. Not surprisingly, results from Merkle’s Q2 data presented by ‘Andy Taylor at Mad Scientists of Paid Search’ showed a 3-5% decrease in conversions when measuring the overall impact of all close variants on Exact Match conversions which could signal the beginning of a rather significant downward trend when you consider the changes were only implemented a couple months ago.
So, what does this mean?
It means that in an industry so volatile, it’s very important to understand where your account is lacking, in order to compensate for the negative impact that Google’s constant innovations could potentially have on your AdWords account.
That is where the new custom rules for the AdWords editor come in handy. The rules help align your tactics with your best practices, so you are utilizing your features in a way that will yield to the greatest possible success. The new rules have a custom section which can be found in the left navigation pane. If you don’t have at least four sitelink or callout extensions, use manual bidding, don’t have search audiences assigned to your campaigns, or do not have conversion tracking set up among many other factors, it will give you warnings. And to compensate for the standard A/B testing, there is a built in custom rule to advise how many ad-groups have fewer than three ads. This new version is also designed to bid for maximum conversions, using features like responsive ads to generate web browsers who are most likely to convert.
For any custom rule, to see which rules are in violation, you can either right click on a rule in the Custom Rules Section and select ‘Show Violations’ or select under ‘Custom Rules Violation filters’ the filters box after building a specific filter.
Clearly there are many other ways to discern how to optimize your account. But at least in understanding where you could be lacking, these rules can provide you with the insight you need to make more intelligent decisions about how you could maneuver around potential innovations that could negatively affect you. You just need to be diligent about learning how and abiding by the new custom rules in the AdWords editor is a great start.
