Eight Free Tools for Tuning Up Online Ad Campaigns By Michelle Megna
November 6, 2008
Managing a pay-per-click ad campaign isn't easy — it takes constant attention. And some days you're just not inspired to think of hundreds of variations of a keyword or check their density on a page, or to research the competition or to format everything for maximum performance. To help, we offer the following free tools to assist you in your online advertising efforts and help you boost visits to your Web shop.
Keyword research company Wordtracker today launched "Keyword Questions", a free tool that lets Web shop owners find the specific questions that people type into search engines. The answers to these questions can inspire you to create interesting Web copy that can help pick up additional search traffic.
According to Ken McGaffin, chief marketing officer, "People have a ton of questions about all sorts of things and people will go straight to a search engine to find the answers. Just enter a keyword and we'll give you up to 100 questions that people have asked."
The tool works by pairing the keyword with one of six question words — what, why, when, how, where and who — and then conducting a broad match from Wordtracker's database.
So, for instance, someone with a coffee Web site, could enter "coffee" and find questions such as "who invented the coffee maker", "why use cold water when brewing coffee", "how to make iced coffee" and "how to clean a coffee pot." Another example: A flower shop could enter "sorry" and find questions along the lines of "how to say sorry to your girlfriend" or "how to say sorry after huge argument." By taking these topics and writing content at your site around it, you're bound to get more traffic, as well as offer your visitors a reason to keep coming back.
The Conversion Optimizer is an AdWords feature that manages your advertising costs around specific conversion goals. According to Google, you no longer have to constantly monitor and adjust your CPC bids. Set your max CPA, and Conversion Optimizer monitors and adjusts your CPC bids based on your CPA goal.
Note, however, that to use this free tool, Google says your campaign must meet the following requirements: AdWords conversion tracking must be enabled and the campaign must have received at least 50 conversions in the last 30 days. The Conversion Optimizer requires this conversion history in order to make accurate predictions about your future conversion rate.
This handy tool lets you find out what keywords AdWords competitors are using by scanning search result pages for particular keywords and then matching them to corresponding advertisers. The company does offer more services for a fee, but the free SpyFu program still offers the small online business owner a lot: you can search by domain or keyword to find out what's happening in the online advertising sector of your interest.
For instance, a search for "long underwear" shows a list of nearly 1,000 related keywords purchased, for example, "polartec pants" and "thermal underwear." You can also see a range of the cost-per-click, currently at 45 cents to $1.21 and there is much more data you can mine.
AdWords Editor is Google's free campaign management application. You can use it to download your account, update and adjust your campaigns, and then upload the changes to AdWords. Other features include making "bulk changes," such as updating bids or adding keywords, and copying and moving items between groups and campaigns.
PPC Keyword Generator is another free tool that will help you when you've hit a dead end when brainstorming for ad keywords, as the name suggests. You add your main keywords and the generator "permutes" them to create a list of possible and most common phrases. It also comes with a predefined, customizable list of 160 sales words, supports custom text templates so you can save your common keywords/sales keyphrases and then search and organize them. It also removes duplicates automatically.
Keyword Lizard is a free AdWords keyword tool that the company says "explodes" your keyword lists by creating every possible permutation combination of keywords. To use the Lizard, enter keywords into two or more input lists, with related words appearing in the same list. With a single click, Keyword Lizard combines the input keywords in every way possible to generate a large list of keyword phrases.
The David Naylor Keyword Density tool is a valuable resource for e-tailers who want to achieve the best density for their chosen keywords. The tool will analyze a URL and return an array of results to help you assess more than just your page's keyword density. Itl also returns information about a pages server headers, links, included files and the site geolocation.
With Google AdWords, you can change keyword matching options to better target ads, according to this site, which advises visiting the Google Matching Options section for more information on keyword matching if you're not familiar with the concept.
Once up-to-speed, you can use the Google AdWords Wrapper — a tool that wraps keyword phrases in "quotation marks" (for a phrase match) and [square brackets] (for an exact match) for use in Google AdWords campaigns.
Enter a list of keyword phrases and the Google AdWords Wrapper will turn it into four separate lists: a combination of Broad, Phrase and Exact Match, a combination of Phrase and Exact Match, Phrase Match only and Exact Match only. Duplicates are automatically removed, and the list is sorted in character code order. Options include change to lowercase, remove bids, and remove URLs. You then copy and paste the lists you want into Google AdWords, a text file or Excel spreadsheet.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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