Google AdWords software tools for easier, quicker, cheaper advertising
The Google AdWords Tool Review Site
Jane Harvey’s
AdWords campaign interface At the present time these are the only legal means of access to your Google AdWords campaigns
> Google AdWords Campaign Direct Interface
This is the interface that’s been around for years. Daunting for a beginner because of its messy layout, you can start to make sense of it after you realize that it’s structured in a hierarchy. That there’s more than one way to do the same thing can be confusing also. After a while, however, you get used to the foibles and develop your own way of working. It’s fine for individual tweaking of bids, keywords and advertisements, but very time-consuming indeed if you have many keywords in an ad group. There’s not much scope for mass changes, and those you can do are often not as fine-grained as you want, but are too global. There is, however, a very useful screen for uploading campaign data prepared off-line.
Update...
I think Google must have got the message! Google’s new 2009 interface is so much
better than the old one, particularly the performance reporting. There’s now in-line
editing; great for small campaigns. Although you can now update the bid of more than
one keyword at a time, you still have to select each keyword individually before
you make the update, and that’s impractical if you have many keywords to edit.
Go
to the Google AdWords Campaign Direct Interface now
The AdWords Editor tool was a welcome addition to Google’s online advertising tools armory. It’s laid out much more intuitively than the direct interface on Google’s web site, and is far simpler to use. There’s less functionality, however, and, although you can still tweak individual keywords, bids and ads, it’s really geared up for mass uploading of off-line data.
Specialist Google AdWords tools I found just one dedicated tool that fits in with the other tools I use without extra baggage
> Abacus - AdWords Campaign Manager
ACM is serious word- and number-crunching software for those unafraid of controlling immense power over thousands of keywords, CPC bids and hundreds of ad variations as though they were one. Minute control of such power needs a complex program interface and a steep learning curve, but the results are worth that one-time effort. There are many ways to create a Google AdWords campaign to suit any requirement. I find it easiest to collect text files of synonyms, reusable in different campaigns, and feed them into AdWords Campaign Manager. I ignore negative keywords, broad match and phrase match altogether, and just churn out thousands of exact match keyword phrases to cover every possible search term for my niche. Every bid is calculated individually per keyword phrase and, because they’re all long-tail and exact match, their CPCs are minimal. And every ad contains the relevant keywords. Sky-high CTR! It is an ideal world, after all!
Keyword formatting tools
Not to be confused with the Overture Keyword Assistant (now dead), this Keyword Assistant
is a multi-purpose keyword tool. Its primary function is to manipulate (I love that
word!) and format keywords in almost any way you can think of. Examples are: forming
plurals, adding or removing line breaks, commas, quotes, brackets, spaces, sorting
and grouping keywords, shuffling and combining keywords, and so on. I find it quicker
to use this tool to format even small keyword lists rather than do them manually.
It even does basic CPC bid calculations and generates URLs from the keyword phrases.
It also does a few unique things, like processing all the files in a folder: Create
a keyword list from filenames (useful if you have a lot of articles to publish);
Change characters in filenames, like spaces to hyphens; Global replace text in all
the files at once, such as <h2> tags to <h1> tags. Unusual, but useful because there’s
no other quick way to do such things.
Get Keyword Assistant now
Keyword generator tools
I use this tool all the time, because it provides me with all the information I need for a campaign. And it’s free! I just type in a keyword or a keyword phrase and I get a list of variations and related words. Whereas other tools assume that you want your ad in top position on the first page and tell you the CPC you should bid, I like to put my ads further down the page for a better conversion rate. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool enables me to test various bids and tells me where my ad should appear for each of them. It also tells me about advertiser competition and monthly search volume. And all this information is on the same page. Great! I click on the ‘Download all keywords: text’ link and I instantly get a plain text file of keywords that I can immediately bring into my keyword formatter for manipulation (love it!) before importing the tidied-up list into my specialist campaign creation software. A lot of software nowadays offers ‘information overload’, leading to ‘analysis paralysis’. I just like to get the job done as efficiently as possible, and that means keeping things simple.
Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool now
This software performs five tasks: 1. Create a keyword list. 2. Analyze pay per click listings. 3. Select a keyword list. 4. Analyze keyword competition. 5. Spy on AdWord competition. Although Keyword Elite task 1 creates a list of keywords related to the one you specify, it provides no information about them; it’s just a list; you still don’t know which words to use in your campaign. Task 2 shows the top few web sites using a specified keyword and the ad variation currently in use. When you click on the ad, however, expecting to go to the web site, you just see gobbledygook. The results of task 3 are just weird. Task 4 does some clever stuff, but I’m not really interested in the keyword density of the top five sites using my main keyword. Task 5 requires typing in one keyword and one URL at a time. It’s fine if you want to spy on a specific competitor’s campaign, but doesn’t tell you the best-performing ads. Keyword Elite provides very little output for a lot of input. Surely, software should do the opposite? And that output differs wildly from Google’s own figures. It’s not at all keyboard-friendly; I must use the mouse all the time. How do disabled people manage? It owes its popularity to good marketing, not good quality.
Keyword search tools
This tool helps me to decide on the subject or niche on which to start a Google AdWords campaign by generating a suggested keywords list together with some very useful information about the number of searches, the number of web sites that contain the keywords and the likely cost per click. Unusually, it also provides an “online commercial intent” figure that indicates the likelihood of a visitor buying whatever it is he’s searching for when he finds it. (I think that’s really neat.) Of particular interest also is a “strength of competition” indicator, which tells me instantly whether or not to bother with that keyword or even the entire niche subject. For me, this is all the keyword research that’s needed to come to a decision about what to include in an ad group;.simple, not cluttered with unnecessary and unwanted statistics.
> Myleena Phan - Niche Inspector
Before I bought Micro Niche Finder, I’d bought Myleena Phan’s Niche Inspector software program. I used it once, as a quick test, to see how it worked. It was a very simple program that gradually filtered out the less profitable keywords until you arrived at the keywords to include in an ad group. Unfortunately, the next time I went to use it, it didn’t work. After investigation I discovered that Myleena Phan had disappeared from the face of the Earth, owing a ton of money and leaving all her customers with useless software!
There are several Google Report types: Keyword Performance, Ad Performance, Search
Query Performance, Placement Performance, and Campaign Performance as a whole, as
well as other more specialized performance reports. For me, these provide enough
data to know which keywords to pause or increase/decrease bids, etc. I don’t bother
to split-test my ads, because I don’t need to. My campaign management software creates
every possible ad variation, and I just upload them and let Google work out which
one has the highest click-through rate. Google will always display the ad that performs
the best. Google’s new 2009 interface makes keyword tracking even easier.
Go to Google
Reports now
The most important measure of success with Google AdWords is not click-through rate
or ad positioning but the conversion rate; that is, how much return we get on our
Google AdWords advertising investment. The Google Conversion Tracking Tool tells
you when a visitor performs an action that you specify, such as reach your ‘Thank
you for your purchase’ page, and reports the ad and the keyword that led to the conversion.
These are the ads and keywords that I’d put in a separate ad group for a placement
campaign as another profit source.
Get Google Conversion Tracking now