When to follow the recommendations on your dashboard
Google AdWords Opportunities is a controversial topic – many people love it, others find it irrelevant. However, in the recent months, especially after Google introduced a new interface for the AdWords advertisers’ platform there have been a lot of improvement.
For some of you who might have used Wordstream the re-vamped Opportunities tab would look very familiar. In fact, it seems Google is taking its turn on Wordstream which was doing great by selling a PPC management software to advertisers. The new features in Google’s Opportunities are pretty much a free copy of what Wordstream was offering for a hefty monthly cost.
How to access Opportunities
In the old interface, you will find it on the top of the page between Campaigns and Reports. In the new interface, it is on the left under Overview.
Most useful features of Opportunities:
- Remove redundant keywords. This is a life-saver for large accounts with heritage of duplicating keywords. Earlier this year the exact match type was changed to allow synonyms and reversed order of the words in the phrase. This left many accounts with 80% of duplicates in exact match. All these can be now removed with a single click. Brilliant.
- Extension reminders. No matter how hard you try to add extensions to all your ads, you might have still missed some. Extensions like location, price, review or call button can massively improve click-through rate.
- Audience suggestions. This is great when you are optimising search campaigns. Google AdWords would suggest your largest audiences for RLSA(remarketing lists for search) as they are much more effective.
Suggestions I would be cautious about:
- Enable Target CPA. Since Google introduced their AdWords 2.0 concept, Target CPA encouragements are jumping out from every corner of the platform. It’s a great strategy, but for it to work, you must have at least 30 conversions generated in the last 30 days. Opportunities would push you to implement Target CPA for any campaign which had recently few conversions. Don’t do this if you campaign does not have a high-volume history, you will end up with no conversions at all.
- Bid adjustments. In many cases, you will get reasonable suggestions to lower bids when you are expected to get the same results with lower price. When your bid is very close to the top of the page place, you will get suggestions to raise bids to get your ad on top, which might result in unnecessary high costs. Just be careful with high increases and use logic when it comes to these suggestions.
- New Keywords suggestions. The suggestions are not always relevant, or might be very close variations of words you are already bidding on. The suggestions are machine generated, so always think through what makes sense and is in line with your strategy.
Just dismiss these suggestions:
- Include Display Select in your Search campaigns. This has never been a good idea and even Googlers do not recommend you do this. Just ignore this suggestion or remove it from the dashboard.
Have fun optimising with Opportunities and feel free to share any comments on your results after implementing the changes.
