You may have seen these new ad formats show up in your account recently. They are not in full release yet, but many advertisers are now able to run them after the latest Adwords maintenance last Sunday. These template ads, or rich media ads are for the Google content network only. The are much more content heavy ads than a standard text or image ad that you could previously run on the content network. These type of rich media ads can also be run on third party networks, but now Adwords is fully in the game.

One of the main benefits of these ads is the interaction tracking. This lets you see statistics of things like user mouseovers of images, and clicks on various ad components like next, previous, poll results etc… Which really helps you optimize your ads based on the interaction data. The interactions that you can track vary based on the ad type.

There are 7 different types of template ads that you can build:

• Showcase Template Ad
• Slideshow Template Ad
• Quiz Template Ad
• Business Locator Template Ad
• Photo Gallery Template Ad
• Site Search Template Ad
• Coupon Template Ad

These ads are easy to create, just plug your info and images into the template.

I have testing some of these ads for 3 weeks with mixed results. The formats I have tried are the Showcase, Quiz, and Coupons templates. I am having trouble getting decent volume with the ads, which is not surprising due to the early stage of the rollout. Once the formats become more widely accepted and the publisher base expands a bit more with Adsense publishers, I see this being a very good opportunity for marketers. Conversion rates have been strong with the low volume.

I am curious to hear if other people are testing these with good results.  Anyone want to share there experiences?

It’s pretty well known that the 4 main categories of quality score elements that you can control are:

• Keywords
• Ad copy
• Account Structure
• Landing pages

Volumes of information have been written about each one of these topics. But many people are not aware that there are other factors to your quality score that you have little to no control over at all.

1. First of all, the niche you are in affects your quality score. By just entering the niches, certain factors are applied to your score at the account level.

2. Your business model affects your quality score. Adwords looks at the way you are driving leads to a landing page and assigns a business model rating to your account. If they think your business model is based on affiliate sales they probably have a rating that dings your whole account.

3. Lastly, your competitors afffect YOUR quality score. This is probably the most frustrating thing to learn, but yes the competitors around you affect the score in your account in a negative way. Is this fair? I don’t think so, but that’s how Adwords rolls.

source: Adwords employees

Everyone is always looking for a secret to doing well with Adwords. The endless campaign options and quality score considerations can be a mystery to newbies and veterans alike. But Adwords success can be summed up in one sentence.

Here’s the big secret: give Google what they want.

That is a radical concept to some people who are always trying to find some trick or glitch to keep their ads running. But do you want your business depending on tricks? Sure its a pain to follow all of their rules and guidelines. Sure they have driven me crazy over the years with Google slaps. But if you want the traffic, what choice do you really have? You can either play ball on their field, or go home.

Here are just a few common sense examples of giving Google what they want.

• You know Google doesn’t like “thin affiliates” anymore, so don’t waste time building these campaigns.
• You know Google likes heavier content sites on Adwords, so give them content.
• You know Google doesn’t like inaccurate display URLs, so use simple clear links to a direct page.
• You know Google likes tight relevant adgroups, so don’t put a million keywords into one adgroup.
• You know Google likes good CTR rates, so split test multiple ads to find good CTR.
• You know Google isn’t going to give out .03 clicks anymore, so bids high enough to get impressions.
• You know Google likes quick loading landing pages, so optimize your images.
• You know Google likes the keyword to appear in the ad and your landing pages, so put them there.

Google even tells you upfront what they want!

So is Google evil? Perhaps. Do they withhold some information about quailty score? Absolutely. But all that is irrelevant. If you want to continue to run ads successfully over the long term, and ultimately make money, surrender your pride and give them what they want. It’s in your own best interest.

You often hear that direct type in traffic and parked domain traffic converts better than search. But if you don’t own a thousand domains, how can you get exposure to this traffic? Well, many people are surprised to find out this source: the Google content network. Google quietly slipped this one through a while ago. If you are running on the content network, check your placement performance reports, you probably are already getting traffic from parked domains.

If you run a placement report by URL, it shows up as “parked domains”.

There is an excellent explanation of how to run these reports if you haven’t run one.

You can also turn off parked domain traffic using Google’s “site and category excludion tool”, under the “page types” tab. But, why would you want to turn it off? I have found this traffic does convert like crazy!

I have to say Google never ceases to amaze me. Today I was reverse Google slapped!! What does this mean? I had several campaigns that were slapped down to 0 impressions, poor quality score and generally dead campaigns. I had long since moved on to different domains/accounts with the campaigns, but just left the dead campaigns as “active”. Well, much to my surprise today when checking stats on some affiliate campaigns I had huge numbers. Checking the sub IDs I found the traffic was coming from very strange old subs ids. It turns out after 6 months Google now likes those old campaigns and changed the quality score to great. This automatically switched everything back on and charged up huge amounts of clicks. Keep in mind I did nothing whatsoever to these campaigns to bring them back.

Perhaps this is a new technique, just let your slapped campaigns sit there and age, like a fine wine, then eventually Google will decide they like you again!

The only problem is, since I wasn’t using those landing pages or domains nothing was optimized and conversion rates were terrible. But nothing that can’t be fixed quickly so I can capitalize on my new surge of traffic.

Does dynamic keyword insertion hurt or help quality score? This is a question I have long wondered. In fact this post has been in my draft folder over 4 months now. I have run experiments many different times but never had any conclusive results one way or the other. For a while I was convinced that I could get getter quality scores by NOT using dynamic insertion. Then another test proved that I could get great QS using dynamic.

Today I found an interesting post about someone posing this exact question to a Googler at the SMX convention on the Revenuewire blog

“Does Google frown upon the use of dynamic keyword insertion? Does it help or hinder your quality score?”

Google: “We really have no problem with dynamic keyword insertion, our major retail clients often use it for model numbers and brands etc, but it won’t automatically make you more ‘relevant’ just because the keyword was dynamically placed in the ad text”

That’s a pretty typical Google “non-answer”. They say it won’t make your ads more relevant, but they don’t have a problem with it. Interesting because for at least a year, they didn’t even publicly document that you could use the feature. Common sense would say that having the keyword dynamically in the ad would increase CTR, and therefore QS. But would it work better to statically have the keyword in the ad? So I guess we are stuck doing what we always do, test and see what works for ourselves.

What’s your experience with dynamic keyword insertion? Has it helped or hurt your quality score?

Just when you think you have all the inner workings of Adwords and quality score down cold, they go and surprise you. None of us are immune from the apparent wrath of the Google slap, as I found out with one of my most solid campaigns. This particular group of campaigns was structured really well, good CTR, optimized ads, relevant landing pages – all the stuff you are supposed to do. Google let it run for 7 months and I thought we had a happy relationship going, but then 3 days ago - boom, $10 bids for everything. I have contacted Adwords, and am still waiting for a response. (perhaps this campaign is also too targeted?) I just kind of find it sad that Google would let something run so long, and take so much of my money, then basically tell me to get lost. It makes me long for the old days of brick and mortar business where you actually had a relationship with suppliers and vendors, and business had thing called loyalty to their customers. Of course my measly $75k is nothing to big G, and wouldn’t even register a blip on their radar. Oh well, just more to spend with Yahoo and MSN.

This will be the start of a new series of posts as I try to recover the campaign from the smackdown. It should be interesting for both reader and author

One of the big weaknesses of Yahoo and MSN’s PPC interfaces is their lack of offline editors to build a campaign. Fortunately you can build all your campaigns with the Google Adwords editor, then export those results. From all the tools I have tried, the Adwords editor is the fastest way to build up a campaign, so I start every campaign there, regardless of where it will end up. It’s pretty simple to do, but there are a few things to watch out for.

Google:

Once you build your campaign the first step is to export it as a CSV file. Once you have the CSV file, you are ready to import it.

Yahoo:

To get a Google Adwords CSV file into Yahoo you first have to convert it. I believe you need a Gold account to use this tool, but it’s not hard to get one. Simply point it to your file and click “convert”

Once you have the converted file, there may be some formatting issues. First check to make sure the program joined the 2 line Google ad text into the 1 line Yahoo format correctly. Then search/replace the content matching column from on to off. Once everything looks good you can upload the converted file.

Once imported, set your GEO targeting and other options and you are ready to go.

MSN:

For MSN, no conversion is required. Just point to your Google CSV file and choose import.

MSN magically converts your file and uploads the new campaign. But now you have a big problem. MSN imports the new campaign with all the adgroups inactive. You then have to manually go and active each adgroup. If you have a large number of adgroups (like you should) this is a huge task. I have talked with the MSN people and they say they are working on a solution, but for now it’s a manual process. This makes the MSN import process the hardest by far. But it is still much faster to build the campaign with the Adwords editor and import, than it would be to build the campaign in MSN itself.