Meet the New Boss- My Take on the New AdWords Interface

I’ve had a few weeks to try out the new Google AdWords interface and I like it a lot. In fairness, it is still in beta and there are some kinks to work out, but I find it to be very effective and intuitive. Part of that may stem from my familiarity with AdWords Editor. The branching folder system for campaigns and ad groups with tabs across the screen for settings, ads, keywords, and networks seems to have been taken directly from Editor.

Numerous people have complained about the speed of the new interface based on the Twitter comments I’ve seen. That hasn’t been my experience at all. Although there now is a small load time when you begin looking at campaign information, it’s not much longer than it was in the original interface. Other sections that used to take forever to load, like the Account Access screen or Billing Summary, now come up almost immediately.

I have no doubt that for the day to day setup and management of a PPC program, the new interface is much, much faster. It goes back to that branching structure. Instead of tabbing through every ad group to see keyword performance and make changes, you can view all the keywords in your campaign on one screen, and edit them in-line. Pause keywords, change bids, even edit match types without leaving that screen. The same goes for campaign status and daily budgets; it can all be changed from one screen. Setting up new ad groups with keywords and ad copy can also be consolidated to one screen.

They’ve even added a copy function that allows you to replicate keywords and/or ads in another ad group. This is a good beginning, though it feels incomplete to me. If Google could somehow reproduce their off-line drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, and copy-and-paste functionality, I might not even need AdWords Editor anymore.

The new interface is not perfect. Although the Search Performance Query report can now be run from the campaign management screen, without needing to go to the report center, it still results in “138 unique queries.” Rumor has it that a more detailed (read “useful”) version of this report is coming, but it sounds like it may be a slow process.

There are also some display issues. You occasionally have to scroll left and right to see all the information on screen. Some drop down menus don’t display properly in Chrome. (Explain that one to me- they work fine in IE, but not in the browser developed by Google.) For some reason, the Ad Preview Tool will not load from the Tools menu for me. These are minor complaints, and I expect them to be ironed out by the time the new interface is out of beta.

My overall impression is that the new AdWords interface is faster, more intuitive, and more functional than the previous version. It’s easy to gripe about Google’s near monopoly of the search environment, but they have consistently put out a product that is far and away better than all of their competitors combined. Yahoo and Microsoft have their work cut out for them.

Social Media Know-It-Alls?

Any respectable search marketer knows our industry is ever-evolving. Google’s introduction of SearchWiki late last year and their new AdWords interface are just two examples of significant changes in the optimization and paid search landscape.

General marketers seem to understand this, too, as evidenced by the fact that “It’s too hard to stay abreast of best practices” is the number one reason why they outsource to search agencies like DBE (according to SEMPO’s State of Search Annual Survey). Granted these respondents are already engaged in search marketing to some degree but their answers to other questions in the survey demonstrate they understand the complexities of search and appreciate the value of investing time and money to properly leverage it for competitive business advantage.

Unfortunately, it appears that the same understanding and appreciation for social media marketing is not yet manifest. Or so one would surmise from this Marketing Sherpa Chart-Of-The-Week:

How Knowledgeable Are Marketers With No Social Media Experience?

These are people saying they are knowledgeable about social media marketing when they have not yet used it in any form for their business. The obvious implication is that some personal use of Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter qualifies as “knowledge.”

But knowing how to set-up a personal profile is a far cry from knowing how to effectively manage an online community or generate viral attention for your company’s brand. That’s a task that requires an in-depth knowledge of social media tool sets, familiarity with each of the communities' individual culture, and an understanding of the most effective strategies for building a following. Remember, just like it was when blogs first arrived, for every social media success story, there are a thousand campaigns that fall silent on the web, or worse, that fall flat on their face.

So I guess until we get the kind of research that helps debunk the “anyone can do it” approach to social media, it looks like we’ve got some more explaining to do in the short term (we being DBE and our fellow search/social media marketers). But maybe the learning curve won’t be too long as people see social media is evolving at an even more rapid pace than SEO and paid search.

Subdomains vs. Subfolders – which is better?

A client recently asked us whether it’s better to set up their website using subdomains or subfolders? We get this question a lot, so I thought it would be helpful to provide the answer here, for all of our blog readers.

If you’re not already familiar with these terms, a subdomain is a way of structuring your site so that URLs look like this: http://widgets.abccompany.com/. The same destination using the subfolders setup would look like this: http://www.ABCcompany.com/widgets.

Our team likes to look at this from the following angles:

SEO Perspective:

• Search engines used to treat subdomains as distinct domains, and used to give two additional listings in the search engine results. In essence, it was possible to get 2 rankings for the main domain, plus 2 more rankings for each subdomain. However, Google changed its policy about a year ago and now treats both subdomains and subfolders the same. So where we used to give subdomains an edge because of additional visibility potential, both are basically on level playing ground now.

• It gets a bit murky here though. If Google decides that the subdomains are entirely different from each other, then it may treat them as different sites and rank them accordingly. For example, subdomains of blogspot.com like dbesem.blogspot.com and datacenterdesign.blogspot.com are treated as different sites though they are subdomains of blogspot.com. In most cases, however, Google will tend to show results from different domains to give searchers a more diverse and robust list.

Technical Perspective:

• Subdomains can be a little more difficult for a novice webmaster to set up. They can be managed separately, which can be great for organization purposes, but will consume more time.

• Subdomains also make visitor tracking more difficult, requiring some extra configuration in your analytics software to aggregrate results.

• For subfolders, usually the code is all in the same file storage space. That can make it much easier to find/edit/change code. It can also be easier to move code from one place to another.

For these reasons, unless you have distinct products or services, we suggest going with subfolders instead of subdomains.

If you do offer multiple distinct products or services, there are some marketing benefits to using the subdomain setup. Subdomains help to tie your different offerings together by pairing specific products or service lines to your main domain name (i.e. http://sneakers.shoesrus.com/; http://sandals.shoesrus.com/; http://boots.shoesrus.com/), while creating each as its own unique brand. This is a good approach if you’re trying to build a “separate, but together” theme.

DBE 90% - SEMPO Average 54% (or less)

I don’t know about you, but I found this slide from SEMPO’s 2008 State of Search Survey troubling on several levels when looked at it wearing my industry glasses.

First, what does it say about the average paid search agency if only 19% of its clients can say they are very happy with their SEA programs? And only 54% can say they are happy to some degree? With these confidence levels is it any wonder more and more advertisers are taking their campaigns in-house? Or that the ones who are still outsourcing are treating agencies more and more like vendors instead of partners?

Second, does it really make readers of this report feel better to see that these mediocre-at-best findings represent “a significant leap from” previous years? Is it going too far to compare this to the idea of a car company reporting that its crash test results improved from 2 stars to 3 stars on a 5-star rating basis?

Third, while the above covers paid search agencies (and is included in the executive summary made public), the full report includes results for SEO agencies and they did not fare better. In fact, they were actually rated a little lower in terms of the happiness quotient.

In a business where referrals and references are critical for new business development, you would think search agencies would do a better job of client service. And don’t think it’s just the nature of the business (like used car salesmen) because DBE’s Client Satisfaction Survey results revealed a 90% client satisfaction level. So client satisfaction can be achieved and until the rest of the paid search and SEO agencies catch up, we’ll keep using these results to differentiate DBE from the other average Joe search firms out there.