Posted on July 9, 2010 by It’s been about a year since the Google AdWords User Interface underwent a huge overhaul.
One of the interesting new elements is the ‘opportunities’ tab. Here Google makes new keyword suggestions based on search query data, allowing you to add or exclude them directly to your campaigns.
There’s a new Beta feature just added which improves this even further, by allowing you to compare your campaign performance to those of similar advertisers.
Analyze competition
This tool looks at campaign activity over the previous two weeks, and sorts it into categories that make up the advertiser products or services. It then analyses the continuity between search query, keyword, ad text and landing page text. Based on this analysis, the tool then produces a bar graph indicating performance compared to other advertisers in the same category.
If you hover over the ‘competitive range’, you can see the median and mean performance for other advertisers in the range, and the extreme top and bottom too.
The metrics which you can compare to other advertisers include Impressions, clicks, average position and CTR.
This screen grab shows how a campaign CTR is compared to competitors:
You can also export the data to a .csv file.
Campaign Management
This tool is a powerful aid to campaign management and reporting. It allows you to prove that your campaigns are performing well against others; and gives you insights into the area which you need to work on.
For example, if you find that your campaign is getting impressions than the competitors, then you might want to take action. This is not necessarily something to worry about – maybe you’re just running your campaign on exact match – but this means that you can at least see and upper ceiling of how many more times your ad could be appearing. Want some more impressions? Then it’s time to expand your keyword list and take a look at using phrase or expanded broad match [link].
If your campaigns are under performing against competitor CTR, then without a doubt this means that it’s time to check the continuity between your keywords and ads. Are you keywords broken down and tied to matching ads? Are you giving searches the product they’re looking for? Are you selling it in a compelling way? Take a look at how others are promoting their services and test some new ideas.
Want to know more? Take a look at this video all about the new feature.
If you want to know how Barracuda Digital can help with your Pay Per Click campaign, then get in touch.
