AdWords Lead Capture Extensions: A Double Edged Sword?

When PPC Hero first pulled the tarp off Google's newest AdWords extension beta, we got a lot of juicy details about the lead generation mechanism coming down the pipe, but few ideas of how this might impact advertisers on the whole.

Corey Trent over at Marketing Experiments recently published an article on Google's new lead capture extension where he and I discuss the impact that a feature like this will have on AdWords, businesses and PPC in general.

If you're running AdWords to generate leads, check it out. You just might catch a glimpse of the future of your online advertising!

Be Your AdWords Account Historian

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
- George Santayana

Previously tucked away under the tools menu in the old AdWords user interface, the “My Change History” tool is an account manager’s best friend and as such, has been moved to a more prominent place within the account under the reporting tab.

Why has this tool been granted such a prominent position in the new interface, alongside such heavy hitting account management tools as Google Analytics, Conversion Tracker and the Report Center? Well, sure it’s a reporting tool like the others, but it’s unique ability to track changes to your account, coupled with its performance metric graphs and visual timeline overlay make it a key weapon in any AdWords account manager’s arsenal. It’s placement under the Reporting tab is a testament to its usefulness.

While managing any AdWords account, it is common to make tens or even hundreds of changes to your account in one sitting in an effort to optimize traffic for better return on investment. Periodic tweaking of your account is essential to long-term growth and greater ROI. However, these changes are only beneficial to you if you can account for which ones resulted in performance improvements, and which ones didn’t. In fact, it is the accountability of PPC optimization that affords us confidence in the power of split testing to boost profits.

And so, AdWords has given account managers the “My Change History” tool which records all changes made to an account for 2 years prior to a given date, then categorizes those changes for easy access.

You can see from the screen shot of the tool’s controls below, the many ways by which you can filter your change history to find exactly what you’re looking for.

You can specify an exact or preset date range, filter changes by campaign and ad group, and narrow the scope of change types (ad creative, budget, cpc bid, etc.) displayed in your report. If you’re trying to find the exact date you rotated new ads into a given ad group over the past 3 weeks, these filters will isolate them for you in seconds. This makes it easy for any manager to analyze the performance results of the changes you have made without the fuss of digging through pages of detailed and itemized adjustments hoping to find the needle in the haystack.

What if you notice a significant change in performance, but you’re not sure what caused it? Was it a bid increase, or maybe some new keywords you added? The “My Change History” tool can help you find the cause of performance fluctuations even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

Let’s say you noticed a significant drop off in conversions in your account and you have no idea why your ROI is in the toilet. Just fire up the “My Change History” tool, select a date range that precedes the drop in conversions, select all change types and voila.

You’ll be given a chart showing your performance over time. The metric displayed is customizable, so for our example we’ll want to select Conversions. The real beauty of this tool though, is the Google Finance-esque points of interest on the timeline. See #10 highlighted above? Whatever changes were made on that day, the 14th of August, most likely caused our drop in conversions.

Click on the number, and the tool will display only the changes that were made on that date, narrowing down weeks, months, or even years of records. Once you have this information, you’ll be able to reverse those changes, and get your conversions headed back in the right direction.

When used methodically, you can optimize your account with precision and confidence, knowing that any changes you make can later be analyzed, isolated, and expanded or reversed based on their success or failure. AdWords’ “My Change History” tool is a major asset in managing an account.