Why This Firefox Addon Rocks!

This toolbar will display today’s basic key performance indicators at the bottom of your browser.

Double Click this toolbar for your stats to update – it may take 60 seconds to update depending on the size of your account. The data you see will be for today only.

Right click to see the tool menu and drill down into your account level statistics.

Clicks: Total number of clicks accrued today

aCPC: average Cost Per Click today

Cost: Total spent today

Conv: Total number of conversions accrued today

C/C: Cost per Conversion today

Requirements

-FF 2+ preferred while we’re confident this works from 1.5-3.0.*

-AdWords Client Center

-AdWords API Tokens

Tip: Your statistics might take 60 seconds or more to load depending on the size of your account. If you still do not see data, you may need to restart FF and test your credentials again.

How to Install This Firefox Addon

Upon download, Firefox should automatically recognize the extension and install it.

If you get any errors:

Right click the logo, click ‘save link as…’, after saving you can scan it with any Anti-Virus program, then open Firefox. In FF, click file -> Open File -> Find the file and open it -> Install

How To Use PPC Management for Firefox

Credentials

Login Email: Your Client Center login email address

Password: Your Client Center login password

Developer Token: AdWords API Token found in your Client Center (My Account->AdWords API Center)

Application Token: AdWords API Token found in your Client Center (My Account->AdWords API Center)

Client Email: The email address of the account in your Client Center that you want to see stats for

Save your credentials, then test! Load is kind of a pseudo button for now…

Tip: You might need to restart FF after saving your credentials for the tool to work properly!

Keyword Estimates Tool

This tool is very similar to the Estimates tool you find in AdWords.

You don’t have to enter a Max CPC if you want to see the absolute maximum you can expect to pay with the highest possible bid ($100).

Keyword Tool (AKA Kewyord Suggestion Tool)

Search Volume and Competition are on the old scale…1 to 5 where 5 is very competitive or very high search volume and 1 is limited competition with a very low search volume relative to other keywords in that space.

In the future we will incorporate the new real number estimates currently available at Google.

Site Keywords Tool

Enter your landing page in the Site URL field and click Generate Suggestions to see what keywords Google thinks the page is targeted towards.

Account Statistics Tool

You can drill down to the keyword level statistics to find out how your account is doing for the day!

Double click your way through and new windows will open displaying the next level of statistics. For example, double click on a campaign to see the ad groups of that campaign in a new stats window. Then, double click an ad group to see the keyword stats!

Privacy and Security

We are confident that this tool is secure and your privacy is protected. semvironment will not and will never ask for or gather the information you enter into this tool. All of your credentials are stored on your local machine, not our servers. All AdWords API calls are made via https. This project is in beta right now so there aren’t any guarantees that a site you visit might have malicious material that could crack this…or one of your buddies could borrow your computer and get your credentials, etc. Please send any privacy concerns back to us asap so we can add it to our development time line as a priority!

According to KeywordDiscovery, this phrase, “How many spiders does a person swallow in their sleep,” garners 14,912 searches per month. Nobody is advertising on this keyphrase, so initially one might get very excited about the possibilities.

But upon further analysis, this figure becomes very suspicious. Queries with related keywords like “How to kiss” and “Spider bites” get less searches than this ultra-specific phrase. In fact, “how many spiders do you swallow in your sleep” doesn’t even show up. Other variations of this phrase receive 7 or fewer searches. It seems fairly unlikely that a 10 word phrase would get 14,905 more searches than all other similar queries.

As a PPC manager, one must be prepared for anomolies in keyword data. Both in preparing to respond to opportunity and to know what not to waste time and money on.

KeywordDiscovery explains one possible reason for the spider swallowing anomoly:

“The main reason for large extremes are parked and expired domains. Parked domains account for a large chunk of the engine’s profits and are classed as searches.
For example, if you visit http://www.kazakov.info, sedo (the domain parking provider) sends a search request to Google to retrieve and display the search results for the term ‘medical software’.

“This counts as a search every time the page is visited. This inflates the number of searches for that term and this is often reflected in the Keyword Discovery data (mostly on popular search phrases). This is why you may see searches for keywords such as “online website marketing”, for which real people would be very unlikely to search for. This particular term would be likely to appear on an expired domain that previously provided SEO or marketing information.”

Upon typing the phrase, “how many spiders does a person swallow in their sleep,” into Wordtracker, zero results are returned. Obviously, therefore, 14,912 is inaccurate.

Just like people, machines and bots are not perfect. Good managers need to be able to discern and make good judgment calls on the data they receive. Moral of the story: investigate your keywords thoroughly and don’t get caught with dollar signs in your eyes, or you’ll be paying $0.02 per click on ten word phrases that never get searched.

]]> http://www.semvironment.com/how-many-spiders-does-a-person-swallow-in-their-sleep/feed/ 2 http://www.semvironment.com/visible-quality-scores-are-similar-to-tbpr/ http://www.semvironment.com/visible-quality-scores-are-similar-to-tbpr/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:29:47 +0000 jameszol http://www.semvironment.com/visible-quality-scores-are-similar-to-tbpr/ The advertisement I created as an example in my post about creating dynamic landing pages has proven to be a mini-curiosity…what I mean by mini-curiosity is that I don’t really have enough data to truly make a factual statement but I have enough data to hypothesize a little bit and feel fairly confident that the hypothesis is true. So, this mini-curiosity is simply a hypothesis that I hope rings true for you.

I believe the Quality Scores that are visible to us in AdWords are only there to give us a vague idea of keyword relevancy to everything else – which is nothing new. Perhaps the new part is that I think REAL Quality Scores are dynamic and change EVERY TIME a search query is performed – they just don’t change visibly every time a query is performed.

I created an AdWords ad group/keyword called homestar poopsmith. I only put one broadly matched keyword in the ad group and the ad group title was identical to the keyword…After testing the dynamic landing page, I was excited to note that the otherwise highly irrelevant term had a Great Quality Score and a minimum cpc of 4 cents.

The quality score minimum cpc stayed at 4 cents but I noticed my click costs bouncing around – here is the time line and screen shots of the click costs vs. the search term that displayed the advertisement (click screen shots to zoom in):

January 5, 2008

Click cost and Quality Score

Search Query

I don’t know if there is a real difference between using the %20 or the + as a space when Analytics captures this information but apparently it could matter in terms of what your click costs will be.

The click cost for Jan. 5 was 4 cents – awesome!

January 8, 2008

Click cost and Quality Score

Search Query

Here we see the + representing a space and click cost quadrupled to 17 cents per click on Jan. 8.

January 10, 2008

Click cost and Quality Score

Search Query

We see the same query again although I believe the top keyword query in the image above is from the Google Search Network so Analytics did not or could not pick up the exact query…cost per click was only 14 cents on Jan. 10.

January 11, 2008

Click cost and Quality Score

Search Query

This is a prime example of broad match – strongbad poopsmith was searched, our ad made an impression and received a click that cost 45 cents on Jan 11.

January 15, 2008

Click cost and Quality Score

Search Query

We payed 44 cents per click on Jan 15 – this looks like it came from the Google Search Network so we can’t be sure if the keyword query was an exact match or not.

January 16, 2008

Click cost and Quality Score

Search Query

None available in Analytics at the time of this publishing but that click was from my own search to see where the cost would be today for the exact term homestar poopsmith.

Cost per click so far on January 16 is 15 cents…for the exact keyword that we are advertising broadly on.

I thought this was unique and I haven’t seen a large discrepancy in broad match click costs before – we started with a 4 cent click and at times we were 10+ times that original click cost while the Quality Score stayed the same!

I assumed that it was simply a broadly matched term that can make an ad or adgroup have a variety of costs per click on the that term – and that was semi-confirmed by an AdWords rep that I chatted with about this curiosity. Here is what the rep said about it – and I agree with her:

Me: The keyword in question is broadly matched so the more expensive clicks are most likely relative to the match type.
Would that make sense? So if the match is very broad, it could cost a little more due to real time quality scoring/relevancy?

AdWords Rep: Well, indirectly it could cost more (or vary more) because someone could be searching for a keyword that is not exactly the keyword in question, but similar enough that your ad could appear, and thus could appear with other ads.

Me: That makes sense.

AdWords Rep: For example, if your broad match keyword is ‘bike,’ which normally appears with no other ads, and someone searches ‘bikes’ and see your ads, they may see other ads as well which could affect the cost.

While I knew that ad serving and positioning is dynamic, I didn’t quite make the connection that Quality Scores are dynamic too.

If that is the true, then the Visible Quality Score is similar to Visible (Tool Bar) PageRank – it really doesn’t mean anything. It is simply a visible indicator that can give you a vague idea of how relevant your keywords are. I guess there might be one catch – the Quality Score I am talking about is specific to Broad Match type keywords…at least as far as my very small, limited test is concerned.