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If you’re like us, you’ll have been excited and intrigued by Google’s new addition to the AdWords interface that allows users to label any or all of their campaigns, ad groups, adverts and keywords.
Not only can you now categorise and annotate the main parts of your account, you can also undertake powerful analysis and automated account management that previously was not easy to achieve. There’s even the option to colour-code your campaigns should you so choose!
We’ve been testing the functionality over the past few weeks and have started to use it in some really cool ways which we’d like to share with you. We would also appreciate your feedback on how you are using labels within your account - @jellyfishagency.
If you are regularly promoting time-sensitive special offers in ad copy, you will appreciate that turning all ads on and off at the right time can become extremely time intensive - especially if there are a lot of content variations. Not everyone has the technical ability or funds to set up an automated feed based solution. Now you can use Google’s labels and automated rules to make this task easier.
Simply mark all ‘time-sensitive’ ads with a label and an expiry date so that you know which ads to pause and when. Set an automated rule to auto-pause all ads with that label in bulk.
You can also label ad copies for any tests you are running making it much easier to interrogate against your account’s metrics.
For one of our financial sector clients, each ad needs to go through a compliance process, ensuring that it complies with legal restrictions. This process creates a receipt for each cluster of ads, providing a sign off expiration date. By marking the ads with the number and expiry date, we can now easily see when ads are approved until we are able to setup a rule which will pause ads according to compliance number, guaranteeing that we’ll never have a non-compliant ad live.
We believe having a structured naming convention at account, campaign and ad group level makes both campaign management and in depth analysis much easier to achieve. Each campaign and ad group name should reflect its categorisation to include distribution channel (search or display), device, location, language and keyword type i.e. brand, product category or event.
Trying to create the required structure with only three available levels (account, campaign, ad group) and the character limits for campaign and ad group names can be a challenge.
Labels allow you to add as many layers as required. You can have multiple labels per ad group, keyword etc. so it’s much easier to do analysis by just picking the label you want and exporting the report. This means less time is spent pulling reports and more time available to complete analysis and optimisation.
Sometimes, you will want to undertake analysis that crosses the categorisation and structure you already have in place. For example, we ran an Easter campaign for Waitrose that featured Heston Blumenthal in the ads. This was not only at brand and generic level, but also specific product level such as ‘Heston’s hot-cross buns’ (which, by the way, were exceptionally tasty).
Not all of the ads had the space to mention Heston by name, and not all of the keywords contained his name either.
By using labels to categorise which ad groups were Heston related, we could then complete analysis on specific areas of the account within existing campaigns. Before Labels this would have been very difficult.
Another useful aspect of labels is that once they are setup they can be run for whichever data range necessary. They are also automatically saved, allowing the same analysis can be completed time and again, by different people if necessary.
Jellyfish use our own bid management platform which allows us to bid manage on data gathered since the last change to a keyword, this means we’re not making multiple bid changes using out of date data.
Getting the same information out of Adwords is possible, but a real headache. However, you can mark keywords not only when you make changes, but also annotate why they were made to aid this process.
Ok, it’s unlikely you’ll want to mark why you changed every keyword every time, and if you did you would end up with a label list as long as your arm; but for strategic changes or alterations to your superior/high exposure keywords, a keyword level change history is really useful.
Regardless of how many keywords you have in your account, the likelihood is that you’re getting most of your activity from about 20% of your keywords. You should be watching these like a hawk and checking them daily. These aren’t necessarily you’re biggest spenders, so ranking by spend isn’t always the best way to find these.
Now, just mark them with a label and run the report. You can even automate the report and get it sent to you every day by email when you’re on the go, just like any other report.
Making bulk changes to labels using Adwords Editor isn’t yet possible, but it seems inevitable that it will be in the next release. What we would really like as well is for Google to integrate labels into both the AdWords API and Google Analytics. Meaning some seriously powerful analysis could be undertaken easily in GA; plus third party tools could make use of this functionality.
A flavour of this might be auto updating labels with a change history per keyword making it visible in the keyword data view…but let’s wait and see and we’ll keep you in the loop when it is.
