The Most Important Element of Your AdWords Campaign is...

Over the years I've interacted with a number of people and companies in regards to their AdWords campaigns. It's always amazed me to see the varying degrees of importance different organizations assign to different elements of their campaigns.

In your mind, what is the most important element of an AdWords campaign? I know that's kind of like asking what's the most important part of your car...in reality they are all very important but some elements are critical (brakes) and other not so much so (radio).

To me it's the landing page. By simply swapping landing pages I've seen huge and immediate swings in conversion rates and overall campaign profitability. Losing campaigns can become winners and winners can become losers, instantly. The landing page is the one area of an AdWords campaign where you can really separate yourself from the competition.

Discuss & vote at Digital Point.

AdWords Editor 3.5

AdWords Editor 3.5 is now available. From the release notes:

Version 3.5
New features:
Image ads: View, add, and update your image ads on the new Image Ads tab.
Drag and drop: Copy or move items by dragging them to their new locations.
Region and city targeting: Choose additional location targeting options for your campaigns.
Other updates:
New keyboard shortcuts are listed in the Data menu.
The Delete Multiple tools and Add Draft Campaign are now accessible via the tab tool bars. Also, miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

See all the release notes here.

Download AdWords Editor 3.5 here.

Google Print (Newspaper) Setup Screens

I was messing around with Google print in an AdWords account last night and took some screenshots of the setup process.

Here's the first screen, "new print campaign setup"


After you fill in all the required fields and click the "browse all newspapers" button in the choose newspapers section you're presented with this screen:

After you pick the newspaper(s) you want to run in it's on to the 3rd screen where you choose your ad size(s) and enter your bid(s):

You can move the slider back and forth to get an idea of the likelihood of the newspaper running your ad. For kicks I moved it all the way to the right. I was hoping for an entertaining message like "snowballs chance in hell" but instead I just got "long shot":

After hitting next on that screen you're moved to the area where you can submit your creative. Since I was just messing around with the interface I don't actually have any creative ready to submit at the moment so I checked "upload files later" then just saved it as a draft.

All in all I think it's a pretty smooth setup process and am looking forward to getting a few live ads in print in the coming weeks. Props to the print team for a job well done. Wish I would have had access to this interface last year when I participated in my first AdWords newspaper test. Would have made things a heck of lot easier.

Newspapers in Google Print Program

Check out the Google Newspaper directory. It includes all the newspapers that participate in the Google print program.

The print team has been busy as that's a lot more newspapers than I expected.

Google PPA Payout %

Was just messing around in a few AdSense accounts and realized that Google shows AdSense publishers what they receive when an "action" is completed in their PPA program.

Based on what I pay as an advertiser and what I'm told I would be paid as a publisher for my own PPA ad Google is paying 77% (rounded up) to the publisher.

Anyone else seeing similar numbers?

Another interesting thing is that none of the text link ads I created a few few weeks back when I set up my first PPA campaign seem to be available to AdSense publishers. I was wondering why they were not getting any impressions...now I see why. I'll have to do some digging and see if I can figure out why those text link ads are not showing to publishers.