I’m excited to announce that I’ve been invited to speak at SMX West on 2/28 in the Power Tools For The Paid Search Pro session.  See the description below:

Power Tools For The Paid Search Pro
Building great PPC campaigns takes a lot of time, creativity and tools. In this session, we’ll look at free, nearly free and homegrown tools used by expert PPC managers, and examine 15-20 simple tools that solve a particular task and can save hours/days. We’ll also review some fairly unknown tools which help you every step through creating/managing PPC campaigns – from discovering and selecting keywords, building word lists, analyzing competitors, creating and managing both text and display ads, charting, bidding, ad testing and reporting.

It should be a great session with some great speakers: Brad Geddes, Founder, Certified Knowledge (@CK_org), David Rodnitzky, CEO, PPC Associates (@PPCAssociates), and James Zolman, CEO, Quality Scores (@jameszol).  I hope to see you there.

Speaking at SMX West 2012 in San Jose

WordStream has just released a compelling free tool targeted at SMB’s: the AdWords Performance Grader.  This new tool promises a free, instant audit of your AdWords account performance in eight key areas of PPC.  They’ve also included a best-practices checklist.  Here’s a list of the areas their tool covers:

1. Wasted Spend (Negative Keywords)
2. Quality Score
3. Impression Share
4. Click Through Rate (CTR)
5. Account Activity
6. Long-tail Keyword Optimization
7. Text Ad Optimization
8. Landing Page Optimization

The idea sounds great; auditing performance in an AdWords accounts is hard and complicated work.  The tool uses the performance and activities of other accounts with similar spend levels to your own for context.  For example: if they have observed that accounts similar to yours add 100 negative keywords per month, and you haven’t added any, then it might suggest that you are falling behind with your search query mining efforts.  If this is true you might be wasting a large percentage of your budget on irrelevant search queries.

While I don’t completely agree with everything the tool does to grade performance, I do agree that the areas that this new tool focuses on can have a profound effect on your account’s overall performance.

I would recommend you give it a try to see how you compare.  Make sure you let WordStream know what you think of the tool and the grade you receive.  Hopefully, with enough feedback this new AdWords tool could become even more useful.

WordStream’s AdWords Perfromance Grader: A Potentially Valuable Tool for SMB’s

SMX Advanced, Seattle 2011 Presentation:

Cross Ad Group Testing Excel Template: SMX Advanced Presentation

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing a series of blog post over at WordStream on how to re-create the Google AdWords Performance Dashboard.

• Part 1: Getting the right data
• Part 2: Transforming the data
• Part 3: Building the scorecard
• Part 4: Building the charts
• Part 5: Making the dashboard dynamic

Here’s the companion Excel Template file containing all the formulas, etc:

Google AdWords Dashboard: FREE Excel Template

I’m Speaking at SMX Advanced

**UPDATE** Per Aaron Luckie’s request here’s a free download with all of the formulas used int he posts.

Using INDEX-MATCH Lookup for PPC: Search Marketing Insider Guest Post

You’ve probably ran into a post or two over the last couple of years about using pivot tables to analyze your PPC data.  Some of those posts may have been kind enough to include instructions for how to calculate a weighted average position.  This is important because once you start aggregating your data in a pivot table you can’t average your Average Position or you will get a skewed perspective.

How to Calculate a Weighted Average Position in Excel

Regardless of the report you need to analyze, you will add an “AvgPos X Impressions” column.  This column will be used to create a ‘Calculated Formula’ in your pivot table.

PPC Weighted Average Position Excel Formula

Once you’ve got your pivot table going, you will need to create calculated metric by navigating here: PivotTable Tools > Options > Formulas > Calculated Field.

Now name your new ‘Weighed Avg Pos” metric and use the following formula:

=’AvgPos*Impressions’ /Impressions

PPC Weighted Average Position Excel Calculated Field

Now you will have an accurate representation of average position regardless of the level of detail in your pivot table.

How to Calculate a Weighted Average Position in Tableau

For those of you fortunate enough to have Tableau for analyzing your PPC data, calculating a weighted average position is just as easy as in Excel.  Navigate to the ‘Calculated Field’ tool by right-clicking in the ‘Measures’ area and clicking ‘Create Calculated Field…”

Again name your new metric ‘Weighted Avg Pos’ and use the following Tableau formula:

sum([Avg Position]*[Impressions])/sum([Impressions])

PPC Weighted Average Position Tableau Formula

There, I’ve written it down.  Now I can quit bothering my co-workers and just reference this post in the future.  Those of you with better memories may not need this reference, but for the rest of you feel free to bookmark this page.

How to Calculate a Weighted Average Position in Excel & Tableau

Last month I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Boost CTR.  Oddly enough, all their questions were about ad text optimization.  The main takeaway is we all need to test our ads more often, and that I place more value on copywriting skills over hard-core math skills.  Not to say that the statistics aren’t important. I just feel that there are plenty of ad testing tools to help advertisers make a decision, but a piece of software won’t make you an awesome copywriter.

If you need help coming up with some new ad copy, Boost CTR can get talented copywriters started on your ad copy for less than $100/ ad group (that’s not bad).  If they don’t beat your old ads in 30 days you can get your money back, so it’s not too risky to try them out.

Boost CTR Ad Text Optimization Q & A

Please vote for PPC Prospector in the championship game of PPC Hero’s Search Marketing Madness. I’m going up against Copy Blogger, so I will need all the support I can get.  Thanks!

Championship Game – Search Marketing Madness

In my latest post over at Certified Knowledge I explain how adding sitelinks impacted my overall search marketing mix (PPC & SEO).  There are also some great comments you will want to checkout.

Certified Knowledge Guest Post – Evaluating AdWords Sitelinks