How to Audit Your AdWords Targeting

Welcome to Week 4 of Audit Month!

It’s time to review Settings and Targeting, and good thing because all eyes are on these areas of an AdWords account!

We’ve gone from big concepts (like goal setting and business growth) to the tactical issues of targeting and settings in just a few weeks, and today we’ll be unraveling bid adjustments, audience targeting, ad scheduling and more.

Transcript:

James: Amy, welcome to week four.
Amy: Hey. Thanks so much.
James: So we’re continuing audit month, and this month it’s targeting and settings.
Amy: Right.
James: This is really important. This is another foundational step to really making sure that your account is ready for any other optimizations or advancements that you make.
Amy: Yeah. Absolutely.
James: Let’s break it down. What’s kind of the first step to ease into targeting and settings audit?
Amy: Well, the first thing I thought we could really talk about is the optics of it all. Last week we were talking about how with account structure and relevancy, you’re not going to win any big points. No one’s going to get the chills when you tell them about this thing was mislabeled. That just doesn’t do anything for you, whereas this is kind of the opposite. It’s kind of funny because you could have been managing your account with just entirely wrong goals, or tracking, or set up, or structure, and for a lot of accounts it’s very likely that no one ever noticed or cared like even if you point it out, oh yeah well maybe we’ll look into that. But when there’s one thing that goes wrong with something so small with settings or targeting, just for example, like we showed up on a website we didn’t want to or we are reaching this demographic we weren’t trying to, or we showed up in this one area, it’s like people understand that a lot more.
So they freak out because this thing is wrong and they can identify that it’s wrong. So it has much more weight than frankly even matters, but it can have a lot more consequences that way too.
James: Well I also think that when it comes to paid search, very often people don’t know what’s going on with it. An account can be going on forever, and have the completely wrong settings, and people just aren’t going to see it.
Amy: Right. That’s something that I think we’re going to get into a little bit later, but it’s even hard for managers to know where did those settings come from? They were set up a certain way, so a lot of times hope it’s not killing the account, we’ll just go ahead and leave it. There may or may not be a good reason for that.
James: I mean that happened to us just the other day. Remember, I was going through one of our accounts, and I found a setting for, no it was actually day of week bin modifiers. I was like where did this thing come from. So yeah, I mean there’s a lot of stuff to explore there.
Amy: Yeah.
James: So what else. Just when it comes to optics, what are we looking for?
Amy: It’s not so much what we’re looking for it’s more just what to be aware of. Because optics, the way that’s going to play out is either other agencies that are vying for your job.
James: Which is really common.
Amy: Even if you’re working in house, you’ll always be getting pitches with someone sending an email to your manager or your boss saying, “Hey, do you know that there is this wasted spend, or this thing going on, or this whatever.” This could really affect all different parts of the account, but it’s especially prominent when we’re looking at targeting and settings. I mean copy too, but …
James: Especially if you have any decent amount of spend. Because that’s what a lot of agencies will charge off of. A percentage of spend.
Amy: Right. So it’s very likely that something like that will happen and then you’ll have to defend your POV, if you don’t have a POV, if you’re just like, “Well, it got set up like that and I don’t really know why or I wasn’t looking at it, or that thing changed. I never noticed.” That’s just not good for you. The whole purpose of this, again, is just to help people who are managing paid search accounts do it as effectively as possible and just really kind of win that game. As you are managing, this is something that’s good to kind of protect yourself from those things coming up or at least having a really smart answer when they do. Also, internally, when there’s someone new on the account, when someone new is coming on to manage it, when someone just feels like they’re just kind of snarky and they like to posture and show that they know what’s going on, they can have access to the account, and look at it, and they could be totally wrong and misunderstand how things are set up, but again, it really helps that you have an answer for why it’s set up a certain way.
James: So you’re talking about if you’re in house, or if you’re managing an account like at a client, and they have somebody new come on as your liaison?
Amy: It could really be either one. I’ve had the situation where it’s been someone, let’s say in analytics on a different, for my client when I’m at an agency, and they’ll like jump in like, “Oh well this thing,” well that’s because the destination URL is set up differently. You don’t even understand how it works, but it’s still an issue. It’s still just one of those things that people are going to be looking into. You need to know how it’s set up.
James: Well yeah, and I mean just going to that whole situation when you’re working with a client, and they have a new person that comes on. Almost invariably, that person is going to be trying to prove themselves. Unfortunately for client managers, the way that usually pans out is by them being critical and trying to find out all these things to kind of get you with.
Amy: Yeah. It happens regularly. Then one thing that we’ve seen happen increasingly as well, and I want to tread lightly on the subject because I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but it can just be negative if you’re managing an account and not being cautious is that there’s this kind of a movement from people on social media to if they don’t like where you’re running an ad, they will screen shot and be like, “How dare you?” Try to get all this media attention so that then people pull the ad. Especially in the United States, things are really politically charged. It’s just going to make sense to avoid that as much as possible, again, by being very cognizant of the placements for the websites and the videos that you’re running again, to make sure it doesn’t look like you’re tacitly endorsing something, where you’re really just had a marketing running, which is totally reasonable, but this is just extra steps of caution.
James: You’re talking about mainly on the GDN and youtube.
Amy: Yeah.
James: We can come out and say it, right or wrong, one of the big things that has come out is that there is a big Twitter effort to name and shame anybody that’s even inadvertently advertises on a site like say, Breitbart, which is a politically charged website. You could be retargeting even, these could be users that have visited another site and then just happened to go to Breitbart, and one of your ads show up there. Just, if you’re not careful, it can become a huge deal.accounts have been lost over this sort of thing.
Amy: Yeah. For sure. I think it just goes back to this is is easier for people to understand. I’ll be honest, if I’m doing an audit, even for a new business, and I’m trying to show them here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not, people don’t understand account structure. Even if that’s going to make much more of an impact. I can say, “Did you mean to be running your ads in Nigeria, because you were.” It could’ve spent $3. It doesn’t matter. They’re like, “Oh wow. Thanks for pointing that out.” It feels like this huge win, even though it’s not. I know that, but it’s just something that i know can work as a trigger. It can be to your advantage or probably detriment, just depending on how buttoned up your account is.
James: So kind of in contrast to the last podcast where we were talking about themes, basically. Like the ad group structure. Campaign structure, which people don’t tend to care about, but which is probably hugely impactful compared to some of these other things. Sometimes you can accompany something like that with a lot of these other more minor fines, but that have a lot more optic impact.
Amy: Yeah. Yeah. It just helps to kind of illustrate a point a lot more.
James: Okay. We can see why it’s important. How it’s seen and the types of things that we need to be aware of. What’s kind of the next step to easing through this audit?
Amy: Well I think the other thing that’s really important to understand is understanding what Google’s objective is, or what the objective of AdWords is, which is not to optimize your business, right? When they talk about their goals, we’re talking to and AdWords rep, they’re talking about their revenue goals, which is the revenue that AdWords makes, not the revenue that your business makes. Ideally it’ll be a win win. Ideally, they’re increasing their clicks as you’re finding new customers and new business, and growing your business. So ideally, everyone’s profiting, but what it comes down to is that Google is trying to find new ways to grow. It’s a publicly traded company. It needs to report growth year over year. The way it grows is by either charging more for a click, or by serving more clicks. When it comes to search, there’s a bit of a finite number of clicks.
So there’s only so many people who are searching for one particular item during the day, but there’s a lot more people who are on the internet who might be interested in that item, they just aren’t specifically searching for it. Just by kind of loosening up, how they’re approaching serving ads, it gives them a lot more potential to get more clicks.
James: Let’s break this out. So say search ad inventory, which is kind of what you’re talking about, that is this really finite? That’s kind of at a premium. It should be. There’s less people, frankly, that are doing it. It is just the intent is so pure, usually, on search that you really want to capitalize on that, but they have a ton of other types of ad in inventory.
Amy: Yeah. I think both of those, you’ll see some kind of crazy growth. So, in terms of the ad inventory, yes, expanding the display network. Getting more on youtube, doing more with Gmail, kind of anywhere that’s off of that search engine’s results page, there’s a lot more potential inventory. Even within the search page, you still have issues where back in the day broad was broad. Broad wasn’t someone type really random search term, that you’re like how did Google ever associate that search term with my key word. That’s because they’re trying to get that click, and they did, and they just got money for it. So they’re getting really broad with broad, they’re getting really broad with exact. They’re doing more things to kind of give themselves some leeway. Well I didn’t actually type what you wrote, what your key word was, but close enough. Because that expands their inventory.
James: But we figured they might click, so …
Amy: Right. Exactly.
James: So let’s step it back and look at their primary motivations. Right? I would break it into three different categories. The first is they have done a pretty good job at balancing user experience. User experience with their own revenue. That’s like the whole idea of quality score. That’s the whole idea of having relevance.
Amy: Right. Let’s just address the user experience side. It means that sometimes you will search and you won’t see any ads.
James: Right.
Amy: And that’s a better user experience, but it also limits the potential ad inventory, because there could be advertisers who want to show up who don’t have that chance, and Google has to make up that revenue somehow.
James: Then they have just their revenue, like you said, they’re a public company. It’s important for them to show gains. I mean, their stock price and pretty much everybody that works there, that’s really important to them. Users really don’t care what the stock price of Google is, but their executives do, for sure, and their stockholders do. Then it comes down to marketers. I think that marketers know that that’s important. Obviously, if marketers are not participating in their networks, then they’re not going to make revenue, but if I had to rank those three things in order of importance from Google, I would say maybe revenue first, with user experience close behind, and marketers feelings a distant third.
If, for no other reason, then they just don’t have to really care that much because there’s a lot of marketers they’re buying for that ad inventory, because it just comes into a business decision. But what they don’t have a problem with is kind of squeezing advertisers to get a few more cents here and there.
Amy: Right. So this is where this conversation ties specifically to targeting incentives. Because those things are true no matter what, but why is that part of our conversation today is because of the changes that Google has made and is continuing to make to find different ways to extend where clicks can show up. We’ve seen a lot of these over the years. So device types. For quite a while, AdWords was a desktop computer only platform.
James: Right. Right.
Amy: But as people get more and more comfortable using browsers that aren’t desktop, right, they’re using mobile devices. They’re using tablets, they’re using other ways to connect to the internet. As people do that more and more, all of a sudden there’s a lot more inventory that’s not just on the desktop as well.
James: Right. I mean, even before people were really totally comfortable with mobile, the ad inventory was there. It’s just that people weren’t really converting off of it very well. Right?
Amy: Right. We had a time where you were just advertising on desktop, and mobile was a little extra that you could add in, but then with the enhanced campaigns, all of a sudden it was no longer …
James: It wasn’t an option.
Amy: Right. You were running on tablets, like it or not, because there’s more searches to be had there. There’s more clicks to be had on tablets.
James: Because it increased the total amount of ad inventory that was available.
Amy: Exactly. So that’s one setting, that as marketers, if we have any control over at all, we have to be very careful of where our ads serving and how are they converting. Just looking at the big picture. Location settings is another example where it used to be that if you checked the box and say, “I want to target and around people who are interested in my product or service,” then Google would show ads to a few select people who are around or interested in your service, but a few years ago they kind of changed it so that it’s basically, I mean they just kind of like opened the flood gates. We have an article that we just published on paidsearchmagic.com that kind of deals with when this started changing, and the impact that it has. Where now, people get really quite a lot of irrelevant traffic because they left that setting checked, or they didn’t know any better and they checked it without realizing how fundamentally different it operates now than what it used to be.
James: We’re kind of talking about two different things that are going on then. We have the one type of settings, say with location targeting, where Google made a change to the setting, and all of a sudden it opened up all this new traffic. Right?
Amy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
James: Kind of the same thing with the device, but that’s also, I think has a different phenomenon that’s at work here. Because the fact is is that people over time are getting more comfortable just making purchases on their phone. They’re on their phones more often, and they expect a different experience when they’re on their phone.
Amy: Sure. There’s def something to be said for that, but the fact that you could not opt out of targeting tablets. You could not opt out of your ad showing up on tablets until within the last year, basically.
James: Until, basically, the ad inventory became rarefied again.
Amy: Yeah.
James: I know people competed for it. That it wasn’t junk traffic that they wanted to attach to other things.
Amy: I think a lot of times it still is junk traffic, but yeah. It’s that sort of ideas that they’re just opening things up that didn’t used to be opened up. So device traffic, location traffic, we saw this happen within the last year that all of a sudden budgets, you have a set budget, and Google just decides, “Hey guess what? Your budget’s a lot more fuzzy than you meant for it to be. We’re going to double it whenever we feel like. Your daily budget’s going to change.”
James: Which has been a huge deal.
Amy: Right. Because if you’re kind of used to things going a certain way, then all of a sudden you’re paying twice as much as you were expecting, you’re not always going to hit your budgets.sometimes people rely on that. I would pay up to this much, but I’m never going to. It’s never happened, then all of a sudden it starts happening. It’s just something you didn’t used to have to monitor. All of a sudden you have to monitor. Same with match types. Broad used to be broad, and now it’s a lot more broad. Even exact used to be exact, and now it’s not. The way negatives function. That has all switched and it just results in more potential inventory, and then the ECPC targeting change last year as well, right?
James: Yeah. These are all, as you know, these are all things that really bug me.
Amy: Right. It used to be up to 30% more and now it’s like unlimited more. There’s a lot more potential money with unlimited than 30%.
James: Because Google really doesn’t want you to miss out on that click that you might just get if you bid $70 instead of 3.
Amy: In the auction that they are running. Yeah. I think all of these are just areas where if you have something set it and forget it. Well Google isn’t set it and forget it. They’re looking for ways to expand your clicks, whether it’s more money per click, or more clicks total, and they’re trying to find ways, and if you’re not, again, auditing your account, you’re going to be one of the people that’s doing it in non optimal ways.
James: Yeah. I think that people really don’t get this. I mean, Google is not transparent in a lot of ways. I think that the way that they started means that we have access to probably data that they wouldn’t give us if they had to do it all over again. The fact is is that they have their main driving goal, which is to make money, and to continue to make more money over time. You can’t begrudge them for that, but that is their goal. Their goal is not to focus on your account. You have to do that. You have to pay attention to your own account because they’re not going to do it for you, and they will take advantage of it.
Amy: Yeah. I think one other thing to kind of mention in the whole area where things are changing, is as we are getting less key word targeted, because again, not everyone who is a prospect or potential customer is thinking of your key word and typing it in.
James: Right.
Amy: As we’re getting less key word targeted, we are getting more audience targeted. This is a bit of a mixed bag, but it can really be a good thing. Like this is something new that we have the chance to, again, this kind of goes back to everyone wins. If we’re able to better target our potential audience using the Google signals that it’s getting about an audience that it’s not even necessarily sharing with us, but they know that these people are in market for something, or that they had these life events and there’s some sort of change. As we’re able to take advantage of that, it does kind of present new opportunities to better reach an audience that we couldn’t reach just by thinking of the key word that they might be typing in. So I do think that that’s kind of an interesting part of, we’re looking at settings and targeting an audience. Making sure that we’re taking advantage of the options for audiences, and measuring just seeing what’s happening as opposed to ignoring it and focusing on keywords only.
James: Okay. Great. I think just one other thing that I’ve seen them really starting to change and shift on are attribution models. I know that they’re pushing people to get into, what’s the new one called. Data?
Amy: Data driven.
James: Data driven model. I mean, ultimately, they want a system where you trust them as much as possible. Unfortunately time has proven that you can’t really do that.
Amy: I mean I don’t want to make this an episode of us bagging on AdWords. Obviously our livelihood is based on …
James: I’ll do it. You be the good cop, I’ll be the bad cop.
Amy: I mean AdWords is great for a lot of things, but there are just things to be mindful of. Right? You just don’t want to put just drink the kool aid so much that you’re not paying attention.
James: No, don’t get me wrong. I think that the system that Google came up with, with having something they reworded relevance. Balancing that with an ad system that actually worked, that got credibility, I think is genius. I think it opened up basically internet advertising en masse. I really do. I just think that over time, I think marketers are kind of starting to get taken advantage of in this situation.
Amy: Well it’s not just AdWords either though. Bing has its own things that it’ll do to try to squeeze a little bit more.
James: Yeah, speaking of which. So there is a Bing setting, like most of the functions that you’ll see in Bing are in AdWords. They’ve wisely decided to duplicate most of the AdWords functionality. So chances are if you have something in AdWords, you’re going to have the same feature in Bing. One settings that is specific to Bing, that you really have to watch out for though, has to do with when you import your campaigns from Google into Bing, which is what most of us do. Usually when people traffic on Bing, it’s because they’re already run on AdWords and they’re looking to expand their traffic volume. It was one of the default features when you import campaigns is that they will turn on their content network. Their content network is terrible.
Amy: So the content network is different than the search network. It’s a little bit like the GDN, only not as good.
James: Even worse. Yeah, I mean it’s plagued by …
Amy: Wait. I just said GDN. It’s more like search partners, right? It’s not actually like …
James: Yeah. It’s more like that, but I don’t know. I see it as an analog to their content network because they’re constantly expanding it out beyond their search partners because we’re not just talking about Yahoo or AOL, which Bing partners up with. We’re talking about any of the other sites that sign up to run their ads. The way that most of those are, that I’ve seen, are just kind of scammy, ad arbitrage and search sites. Many of them, I know are trafficked by the same sort of consortium. They run a pseudo search engine that will show Bing ads and they just try to get people to click on them. The point being, you can go in there and look at them yourself. It’s worth going into Bing and running a report on placements. You’ll get to see if they’re actually on there.
I would recommend, unless it’s just killing it for you for some reason, that you just plain turn it off. It’s definitely something to look at, because infamously, most people do terribly with it and they lose a lot of money.
Amy: Yeah. Makes sense.
James: Anyways, hopping back to Google, because that’s kind of our central thesis here.
Amy: Right. Right. I think that the last thing I really want to review on this podcast is just really understanding what’s informing the adjustments and settings before we try to make optimizations. Because your settings are going to exist. What made them exist? What put them into play? It’s either going to be because the client told you to, or because it seemed like that was working better, or I guess because someone just likes to change settings around, like someone before you or you. You know, you just like to change settings around. That’s fine, but it’s important to know the difference, and sometimes it’s really hard to know the difference. It’s making me think of this story where someone’s making a pot roast, and they always cut off the ends of the pot roast. Well how come you do it like that? Well, because my mom always did. Well how come you do it like that? It’s because my mom always did.
They ask her and it’s like, “Oh because the pan didn’t fit the full roast and so you had to cut off the ends.” There are just some things that live because of some random [adahog 00:24:19] reason, or because something has changed along the way, but it just doesn’t get reflected in what’s going on. If you’re looking at your account, and you’re looking at the campaign settings, and you see that there’s some campaigns that are targeting a certain country only, and some campaigns that are targeting 26 countries, and some campaigns that are targeting only select cities, it can be really unclear what’s driving this targeting or these settings, and you’ve got no idea. Well what is right? What is correct? How do you kind of get to the bottom of it to make sure that what you’re doing is consistent and accurate. It is really hard to know why things are set up the way they are.
Most accounts don’t come with a playbook or some sort of guidelines. There’s no like brand guidelines for what does and should exist in the account. So we’re kind of making it up as we go, just assuming that things are correct, and running things, unless we find them to be super detrimental, just letting them run the way they are. What we’ll be doing next week, is to go through developing a strategic roadmap of here’s what is happening in the account and why so we’re all on the same page. In order to do that, we need to understand what is happening in the account and why. Looking at, oh these settings don’t quite make sense, or this isn’t consistent everywhere. There’s just some things that are here, some things that are there, and settings that I’m just going to go back to say are inconsistent. There’s different reasons that that could be.
Some are from performance, and some are from the client. When there are settings that come from the client. That are client mandated. For instance, where we can run ads, or what we can say in the ad copy. Sometimes, the ad copy looks horrible, but the client can’t change it because they have some sort of regulatory reason or they’re not allowed to have CTA’s because of, again, legal considerations. They can’t make any sort of promises that you might be [crosstalk 00:26:22].
James: Right. Maybe every ad has to go through a lawyer first.
Amy: Right. We don’t work on that a whole lot. Certain budgets, what the monthly budget is, or what the budget is the allocation for different campaigns.
James: Because maybe they’re willing to bid on brand, but only so much money here, something like that.
Amy: Right. We’re willing to lose money on competitors, or we won’t bid on competitors, or we’re willing to spend this much on brand or it has to be capped at this amount. Just those sorts of things. We day part because our sales floor closes down.
James: Right. Even though they have a lead gen form that’s operative all weekend long and is really good. That’s where they get most of their leads.
Amy: Right. That’s why it’s so important to one, understand what is client driven versus what is based on performance, and two, still have that conversation.
James: So what does that conversation look like?
Amy: This is going to be a challenging conversation, especially the longer you’ve been on the account.you know it’s really easy to come in when you’re new and say, “Okay, why is everything the way it is,” and expect to get answers for that, but if you’ve been managing the account for months or years, and then you’re saying, “Hey, how come these basic things are the way they are?” That can be embarrassing and there’s a lot of hesitancy around kind of asking those questions to find out why things are.
James: Sure. Sure.
Amy: I think what I found to be the most useful when you’re in a situation where you kind of uncover something that you hadn’t noticed before is basically, you want to set it up so that the client or manager, give them an easy way to tell you what’s going on. What I mean by that is to not just go and say, “Hey, why is this like that? Why is this this? Why is that? Because one, it’s going to make you look like you don’t know what you’re doing, and two, they’re not going to have answers for everything. Most likely, they probably don’t know why everything the account is the way it is.
James: So you don’t want to put them in a bad spot.
Amy: Right. You don’t want them to say, “Oh gosh, I have no idea why anything runs the way it does.” Right? So, to the extent that you can, come with sort of a POB, like, “Hey, we noticed that there’s inconsistencies here. Is it okay if we make everything targeting the same countries?” Or, “We noticed there’s this problem. Can we fix it or streamline everything.” Typically, when you do that, you will get a, “Oh yeah. Sure. That sounds great. Go for it.” Especially when you have some sort of reason for it, or else, it’s much easier to say, “No, you can’t do that because we have this legal requirement, or we have this other reason that it’s running this way.”
James: Okay. Great.
Amy: I think that it’s just a nice way to sort of help kind of guide the conversations when you have a reason to ask something, then you don’t look like, “Well gosh, why is it running like this?” You can just say, I mean for all they know it’s new that there’s this problem. That things have changed.
James: Okay. So sometimes the bid adjustment, or setting, or whatever it is isn’t because of the client, it’s because it’s just been set up that way.
Amy: Right. When that happens …
James: Like by the client manager.
Amy: Yeah. Whoever was managing it before you, or you. One of those two options is the account management setting.
James: Yeah. Anybody that’s auditing their accounts, you wouldn’t be the first person that had just forgotten something.
Amy: Right. I think the important thing to do is to look and say, “Is this still serving the account? Does this make sense in the context of what the account is trying to do.” A lot of times what we’ll see when we audit accounts is that there are some seemingly arbitrary changes that don’t reflect account performance that just are certain times of day are a bit up or down. That just have nothing to do with any sort of meaning.
James: Right. Very common.
Amy: I think what happens is that as account managers, we want to find meaning. We have all these levers we can be pulling and adjustments we can be making, so optimization feels really good. It’s nice to be able to say, “Hey, this thing was working well. Let’s go ahead and make this change.” But sometimes what happens is that we’re working with too little data. The date range that we’re using to make decisions just isn’t long enough.
James: Or there just isn’t enough volume.
Amy: Or there’s not enough volume. So if we’re trying to make decisions on what’s going to drive more leads and the account gets 50 leads a month, that becomes really hard.ther could be a lot of pushback when you have clients sort of saying, “Hey, well how come yesterday we got three leads and today we got zero.” Well you know, it’s a one’s and zeroes game at that point. It’s hard to get that consistent because it is so random. Natural variance is a bit random.
James: Right. Because they don’t want to hear well eight days every single month you get no leads. This is one of those days.
Amy: Right. It can be hard to not want to optimize, but it’s usually a good idea to optimize when you have enough data to do so, and to not just kind of come up with stories or come up with different changes that you’re making, really frankly, arbitrarily that aren’t going to help your account in the long run. Along with that, I think sometimes we tend to make assumptions about our audience. Again, this comes from a good place. It comes from a desire to kind of want to flush things out and be really strategic, but sometimes, again, we’re assigning meaning where none is there. As an example, people tend to really like to divide mobile audience versus desktop audiences.
I’ve heard trainings where people will say, “Well if someone’s looking for, just say, a locksmith on their mobile device it’s because they’re locked out of their house, but if they’re looking on their desktop it’s because they want a new set of keys.” That’s a huge assumption to not only make, but then craft ads where the only option you can have if you’re searching on your mobile phone is that you’re locked out and that’s the only [inaudible 00:31:58] it takes you to.
James: It’s appealing story, because you can look at that and like, “Oh yeah, I guess that makes sense because they wouldn’t be searching for a locksmith to open a door on a computer because they’re locked out.” I mean it makes for a great story, but it still is making assumptions that very often, probably more often than not, prove to not be safe assumptions.
Amy: Yeah. When we had Will Critchlow on the podcast a little while ago, and he made some really good points just about how fuzzy it can be. There’s no such thing as a mobile user. I think he had some really good insight about this.
Will Critchlow: We think of mobile as kind of one thing, or sometimes we think mobile, tablet, desktop. I think there’s so much more to it than that. It’s not just device, sometimes it’s context and location.there are times when I’m mobile, in the sense that I’m using my phone, but actually I’m sat at my desk, or I’m sat at my couch at home. Conversely, there’s times when I’m apparently on a desktop as in your laptop, but really I’m tethered and I’m on a train. So what does mobile mean, and I agree with you on the device side. So in the ad extensions and the ability to do direct calling and all that kind of stuff, yeah. That should clearly be tailored to the device, but just [inaudible 00:33:13], I tend to think that mobile isn’t the most helpful definition because it conflicts this device in context.
Amy: I mean, my takeaway from this is just we have such a desire for control, and a desire to be great at optimization, but sometimes being great at optimization just means letting things run long enough to discern the signal from the noise.
James: Absolutely.
Amy: That’s going to be my new tag line.
James: I mean this was something that I had to really get around to. I mean I’m technically minded. I tended to come at paid search from a technical point of view. From a programmers point of view, but the more that I got into it, the more I realized that with the different variables, the different segments, there is a lot of circumstances in which you just do not have enough data to make any sort of an intelligent decision, and understanding what those times are is a lot of the experience that goes into making a good paid search manager.
Amy: Yeah. Definitely. So I think we can wrap this up talking about just what people can find in the workbook for this week, which will be at paidsearchmagic.com/27 if you’re not already signed up for it, but we’re going through a lot of settings. There are a lot of settings that are in AdWords and we’re basically running through most of them to just get you re familiarized with what the settings are, what may have changed, and whether it’s really serving you or your account. Then we’ll also be looking at the shared library, which I think is a great tool because it really streamlines a lot of settings and targeting, and makes it at a global level rather than having to manage the setting and all of its changes at a campaign level. But it does kind of become a bit out of sight out of mind. So it can be hard to remember what was set up, it can be hard to remember to add new campaigns to it, and so just going through the shared library as well, just to make sure that you’re really comfortable with everything that’s running in there.
James: Great. Okay.
Amy: So yeah, I think this is going to be another really good one to go through, so if you haven’t downloaded those resources, be sure to go and do that and then just follow along with us.
James: Great. For those of you who haven’t been tuning in, we recommend that you go back a few podcasts.start listening from the first one. Just work through it slow and steady if you have to. It’ll be worth it. Then we’ll be concluding with this next week.
Amy: Yeah. Absolutely.
James: You excited? Are you excited to be done?
Amy: I’m excited to be done. This is more work than I thought it was going to be, but also I’m really excited that we are at a place where we can say, “Hey, here’s how we’re going to do a strategic roadmap, and it’s not super overwhelming.” It’s just like, “Yeah, that’s the next logical step.” I think we’ve done a lot of work on these last four weeks and this next week is really the pay off.
James: I agree. Thank you to those of you who have contacted us and let us know that you’ve been going through this. We appreciate the thanks.
Amy: Yeah. I really appreciate the feedback.
James: I guess, for this week, that’s it.
Amy: Yup.
James: Thanks Amy.
Amy: Yeah, thank you.

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