New Adwords widgets in Swydo

Posted on by
Reply

Today we released several new and improved Adwords widgets in Swydo.

We received some great feedback from our daily growing user community at support.swydo.com and created these new widgets based on that input. Thank you for that! You can use 3 new widgets in the project dashboards and in the reports.

Widget 1: Overall Device performance: break down metrics by device. In these enhanced campaigns transition times we thought this would be a handy widget :) .

Widget 2: Overall Click Type performance: break down metrics by Click Type: headline, sitelinks and Mobile clicks-to-call.

Widget 3: Conversion tracking details: you can display the native Adwords conversions in this widget . Important to know is that imported analytics goals are not yet supported. We are investigating that possibility. Deleted conversion types are included in the widget when there has been a conversion in the selected time frame.

Furthermore we renamed the Performance Widget to Overall Performance. Next to that we added the average position in the widgets Overall Performance, Ads, Keywords, Campaigns and Ad groups. Except for the Overall performance and Campaigns widgets we took out the through view conversions.Please enjoy these new widgets in your Swydo and start using them today!

Kind regards,

The Swydo team
Jeroen(psssss, for those scrolling all the way down here….. would you like this in the nearby future?

)

Report anything with the new image widget and the new report copying feature

Posted on by
Reply

In our continuous quest for staying the best reporting tool for online marketers we added two great new features today: The image widget and report copying.

Image Widget
The new image widget gives you great opportunities to integrate nearly anything in your reports.

Some possible deployments:

  • A screenshot of a new ad proposal
  • A banner proposal
  • A screenshot of a new call-to-action-button
  • Graphs from other tools
  • A photo of your team

The image widget can be used via the Reporting tab when you add a widget.

image widget swydo

After adding the image widget you can upload any JPG, PNG or GIF file with a max size of 5 MB and we autoscale it to fit in your reports. The widget can be dragged and dropped just like all other widgets. So be creative and use the widget to create super looking and comprehensive reports.

An example

or

Report Copying has arrived

You can now copy reports! Oh, yeah. You could already re-use drafts, but now you can copy reports very easily.

We also tweaked some extra features in the reporting section, such as:

  • Option to change the main author
  • Option to change the client (be sure to change the data sources)
  • And for the cover page we made some improvements: you can now choose which data to display on the cover page.

Example:

We are very thrilled by these new features that make your life as an online marketer easier.

Please check them out in your Swydo. Remember that in the free plan, there’s a watermark logo in the reports that disappears in all paid plans. So upgrade now!

When to exclude search partners in Adwords

Posted on by
Reply

Going through a search campaign today I fired up de Search Query report, one if my favorites. Most of the times you find new ideas for negatives and new ideas for BMM of phrase match keywords. What got my attention were some Search Queries with multiple keywords. In this case a client sells professional tools for construction. One of the search queries was ” tooling do it yourself and reconstruction”  another ” battery do it yourself and reconstruction”. They both had triggered hundred of impressions, but no clicks. Excluding them as an exact match negative was the easiest, but probably least effect solution. What about adding a broad match negative. But this particular client did not mind selling to the ‘do it yourself’, as long he was willing to pay for professional tooling. But then it struck my mind that these queries must come from the search partner network.

So I went to campaign => Segment => Network and Yup, there’s my leak:

Now I can of course stop advertising on the Search partner network, but it would be interesting to know who this particular search partner is and the best practice would be to really dive into the Search partner network. PPC Epiphany wrote an excellent post about that.

Use Adwords auction details to generate more negative keywords/ better keywords

Posted on by
Reply

In Google Adwords the Search Query Report is one of the most valuable tools to gain insight in the quality of your keywords. Especially when you use more broader keywords Google has more freedom to trigger ads based on actual search terms that differ from your keywords. So it is very important to regularly check these actual search terms and get inspiration for negatives and/or new keywords to be added as phrase match or Broad match modifier (use the + ).

This report used to be in the reporting section (as of 2007) and thankfully was made an integral element of the main interface some time later.

Important to realize: the search terms provided are the search terms used after which actual clicks occurred. So lets say you had 1000 impressions and 100 clicks, you only see the search terms used for the 100 clicks. Of course that is very useful information to generate negatives and new keywords but it would also have been very useful to see what search terms generated those other 900 views. These are maybe even more important. The 100 people actually clicked on your ads so there must have been some relevance there, but the other 900 did not click. Why were my ads served? Unfortunately this information is not provided.

I asked Google about it:

Google must have this information, like the way view-through-conversions are measured. No clicks there, but views are stored. But we will have to think of other way to get this information.

So I thought of another tool right in the same section: the auction insights. This tool gives information for the actual auctions that did occur for a particular keyword.

If you find auction competitors in this report that are no competitors for your actual products at all, you know there’s something to be optimized. Either in your campaigns, theirs or both. Here you can see that for the keyword +adwords +reporting we compete with Google, Raven tools , Wordstream etc. (and we are doing ok :) ) . What’s interesting for my keywords are the non-competitors. Wordstream is not a competitor, They offer PPC management software and services. Jumpfly is an PPC agency. They do not offer reporting software, but we are competing in the auction. I can add negative like “management”, “Agency” . Another auction competitor is spyfu. They don’t offer reporting, but keyword tools, so I can add “keywords” as negative.

Let’s say your customer offers “website security scans” and you run this report and you see auctions in which you are competing with seo companies that bid on “website seo scan ” etc. you know you forgot the negatives “seo , google, ranking” etc.

Adding these extra negatives will lower the competition in the auctions and have a positive impact on your CTR, QS and ad rank.

Hope this post helps you finding more relavant negatives using the auction insights report.

Google WMT ranking data in Swydo

Posted on by
1

Swydo now has rankings for keywords and pages derived from Google itself via webmaster tools! Get comprehensive data on where websites rank and use this data in your widgets and reports.

There’s lots of debate recently in the online marketing Industry on the value of ranking overviews. Multiple tools provide ranking overviews that are compiled out of scraped data. These overviews are derived from a computer that simulates a user query in a search engine. In such a query it is ignored that users:

  • query from a certain location
  • from a certain computer
  • have a search history
  • have maybe +1 former queries
  • have maybe blocked other results
  • search differently at certain hours of the day
  • have social actions, like sharing on Facebook/Twitter and Google plus

So an anonymous query from a computer does not mean that much. Google provides alternative, real data via the Webmaster Tools and we have that data now in Swydo. Note that you need some simple additional configuration to be able to pull this data out of WMT, that is explained in detail here.

From now on you can report from within Swydo the top queries/keywords sorted by impressions, clicks, CTR or the average position.

Continue reading →

Searching in Swydo

Posted on by
Reply

Normal search

You can type in anything and see if Swydo can find it:

Filter by user, project, etc.

This will look for users with “Jeroen” in their name.

You can also look for other things like:

  • :client, :c
  • :project, :p
  • :report, :r
  • :user, :u
  • :contact

For example, you want to find all Adwords reports:

Or all Facebook projects:

Or combine things. Look for reports and projects with “Analytics” in the name:

Find only your own things

Sometimes you’re not interested in other people’s stuff. To find only your own things, type “my ” at the start:

This will look for projects assigned to you or created by you.

Another example:

User shortcut

To quickly find a user you can use this shortcut:

Our take aways from heroconf 2013

Posted on by
Reply

Swydo was an exhibit Sponsor at heroconf 2013 , organized by the good people from Hanapin Marketing, the driving force behind the popular ppchero blog. Heroconf is a specialized conference dedicated to PPC people only. There were app. 240 attendees. The conference was very well organized, including lots of fun, drinks, food and a perfect location.

Other attendees have already given very good recaps on the most important announcements and insights given/made by a super good line up, including Bing, Google, Matt van Wagner, Marc Poirier and many others. Read here .

Next to all the great content a take away for us was the fact the a specialized conference had many advantages over a more broad targeted conference:

  • The key note speakers were performing in boost modus, because they know this audience has already a good knowledge about what’s going on in this industry.
  • The break out sessions can go way deeper because the audience is much more savvy .
  • The questions answered by the audience has more value to others and even inspire the speakers.
  • During social events you can really have good discussions with others about the keynotes and break out sessions.
  • Because of the relatively limited size it’s more easy to socialize and get to speak that person that you always wanted to speak.
  • For a sponsor/exhibitor (and PPC specialist that we are ourselves) the attendees are spot on. We provide a reporting and workflow suite for PPC people and that’s what they are!

Of course broader matched (notice it PPC people?) conferences are great for getting inspiration, getting other insights, but the advantages of a dedicated conference was really a take away for us.

Update: see for all presentations this link.

Thanks Hanapin and see you all next time.

Jeroen Maljers

 

Adjust your PPC campaigns to the segments you are really targeting

Posted on by
Reply

This a slightly adjusted version of our adjust-ppc-campaign-to-segments for the MARUG marketing presentation at the Groningen University, Netherlands of March 2013.

Marketing is all about problem solving.

What problem do you solve?

ARE YOU MARKETING DRINKS IN DEATH VALLEY?

ARE YOU MARKETING SNOW BOOTS IN JAMAICA?

Continue reading →

Google and my father in law

Posted on by
Reply

Every time my father in law takes pictures of our children he say’s: “please stand still, I can’t photograph you” or “do not move so fast, because the pictures will be unsharp”. On every such occasion we point him at the ‘super fast you can take a ferrari picture’ modus on his camera. No use. He thinks people have to stand still to be photographed. The results are boring pictures of my kids giving a fake smile. He should take pictures while they fall out of a tree, play soccer etc. Those are the best pictures. Kids move, they are the best when they are spontaneous

Things evolve, websites evolve. The best experience for the user should be the end goal, without thinking too much about the photographer, eeeuuh Google. That’s also what Google say’s on many occasions: do not worry too much about search engines, but create a unique product, unique, valuable content that gives the visitor a great experience.

When the two Google Founders started in a garage, they had to crawl the web as it was, nobody would change a website for them, so they were innovative in crawling all kinds of content. The photographer took pictures and worked hard and the ‘to be photographed object’ was spontaneous and did not worry much about the photographer.

I understand that Google does not give too much information about their algorithm. It would be like the photographer giving too much instructions. There will always be a fine balance between instruction and spontaneity.