A little over a month ago Google announced that they were rolling out, modified broad match,  a new targeting feature for paid search advertisers. This new match type lets you create keywords with greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.  This works by adding a “+” directly before a word in a broad match keyword. Each word proceeded by a + must appear in the query exactly or as a close variant (including misspellings, plurals, etc.) This feature was originally released as a limited beta in UK and Canada. As most paid search advertisers, I was very excited about this new targeting feature; it could potentially cut back on negative keyword research and search query report craziness (which may give you minor heart attacks when you see the absurd term that Google “thinks is relevant”). In the announcement and in the AdWords help center they are very adamant on pointing out that using broad match terms that only contain the modifier will have a significan...

In June we announced the Analyze Competition feature in the Opportunities tab. At first, this feature was only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but now this feature is available to all English language accounts.Analyze Competition helps you understand how your AdWords performance compares to that of other advertisers competing on similar keyword categories. Using the data in Analyze Competition, we hope you can make more informed decisions about which types of optimization changes are right for your account.In addition to the feature’s core functionality, you can now also see the Google search terms that triggered your ad for each of the most specific sub-categories in your account. Click a category name to see more specific sub-categories. When the category name is no longer a link, you’ll know you’re at the most specific sub-category -- this is where you’ll see a "See search terms" link. Seeing the search terms that trig...

Reporting is a very integral part of search engine marketing (and digital marketing in general). Of course, it’s important to be able to show the return on investment (ROI) of the digital budget. However, by using reports to analyze performance, search engine marketers can optimize their accounts by changing bids, adding or pausing keywords, [...] *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

Have you ever sorted a report by bounce rate and seen nothing but entries with a 100% bounce rate? Have you then noticed that these entries only have 1 visit? Not only is this useless and frustrating, but it obscures the real data points that you care about behind pages of garbage. Well fret no more! We are pleased to announce a new sorting algorithm called weighted sort. Now when you sort on a computed metric, you can weight that sort by the number of data points, bringing you the most interesting and actionable rows first. For instance, in our example weighted sort will weight the computed value bounce rate by the number of visits. Let's take a look at some screen shots that will make this effect more obvious.Here we are sorting by descending value on bounce rate. Notice how all these rows have 1 visit each for a bounce rate of 100%. Useless. Now lets turn on weighted sort.Ah ha! Now this is something you can make sense of. Weighted sort took into consideration the number of visits f...

As promised, Google’s Broad Match Modifiers have arrived for use in the US! Mark your calendars, folks, this is a BIG day. Google’s graphic presents the product very clearly: By simply adding a “+” to the beginning of any word in a keyword phrase, that word or its very close relatives becomes a required element in the user search string. BMM can be used on multiple words within a keyword phrase, and using BMM on all words in a phrase gets us back to good old broad match from 2004/early 2005. Because we complained so loudly for so long, and because we have a reputation for using the tools they provide in smart ways, Google invited us to participate in the Beta test of this product (they did not, sadly, see fit to name it after me…GMM has a nice ring!) and we are duly excited. There will be a temptation among some to simply use this as a cost-cutting knife. Some will simply stick a plus sign in front of each “token” and be done with it. And, by trimming out the least ta...