Google Adwords Reporting for Chupacomics

I self-publish my own comic book under the trade name Chupacomics and in an effort to increase exposure to the brand I researched and launched a Google AdWords campaign. It has been an informative process that has matured my original campaign and my understanding of Google’s AdWords ecosystem which might benefit newer users. This report is broken out into the following sections: ON MY OWN, GOOGLE BUILD, SUMMARY/STRATEGIES, OBSERVATIONS & APPENDIX.

ON MY OWN

With the stated goal of driving visitors to the Chupacomics website I created a campaign and titled it Impressions #1. A large first step in the process was identifying keywords to associate my brand with; I brain mapped anything and everything I could think of, ex. the company name, the titles we publish, and general comic terms that fit our brand like comix or indie comic. I also created a list of negative keywords or words that would negate any keyword match if they are part of the search phrase (ex. our comic title is Double Barrel and there is a different publisher that publishes a title also called Double Barrel so I added that publisher name to my negative keyword list).

The text ad I created was straightforward but had room for adjustment (Appendix 1A). I elected for automatic bidding so as to not overthink my bidding strategy until I understood more of its nuances; with a limited budget in mind this seemed like an easy spot to make a costly mistake that would mitigate any value for the investment.

Any successful campaign will need to be maintained. Google encourages you to allow some time to pass for data to build before you modifying your campaign. A couple of weeks in to Impressions #1 I decided it was time to make my first modifications. I started by reviewing the keyword search matches that resulted in campaign bidding to show the text ad:

- I deactivated certain keywords that had little to no traffic- Impressions #1 had found its way to bidding on searches for Superman and Batman

comics, so I added some negative keywords- I added additional keywords related to some of my more successful keywords

The next part of maintenance was to edit the text ad. I chose to improve the quality of the ad by putting a bigger emphasis on the stronger keywords important to my brand and campaign (Appendix 1B).

Below is the raw data as reported by Business Catalyst (BC), my website host. If these numbers seem impressive in size, don’t be fooled (see OBSERVATIONS). There are some known issues with BC reporting that I wasn’t aware of at the time but that doesn’t devalue this data entirely. What’s important to note are the positive data trends.

Dates Total Visits (per day) Total Page Views (per day)Pre-Adwords 01/01/15-04/04/16

10,088 (21.883/dy) 10,850 (23.537/dy)

Adwords04/04/16-05/10/16

2,205 (59.595/dy) 2,446 (66.108/dy)

GOOGLE BUILD

Google generously provides a lot for free because they want you to know their ecosystem and actively use it. One of these benefits is a free two-week consultation on your active campaigns. I took them up on the offer and a new and sophisticated campaign was built, reviewed and launched.

Driving visitors to the Chupacomics site was still the priority but instead of a broad approach (dumping every keyword into one bucket as in Impressions #1) we defined and built three Ad Groups for the new campaign. Each group was specialized towards specific strategies to achieve the same goal. All the existing keywords were sorted under these three headings: Chupacomics (for branding), online (for market) and comix (for key keyword).

The keywords were also updated with Google radicals. Any of the keywords that comprised multiple words had the “+” radical added in front (comic book becomes +comic +book). The “+” ensures that for a necessary match on a search phrase both words must be present. So searching book wouldn’t return a keyword match without comic somewhere in the search phrase.

The Chupacomics ad was even further sophisticated and also spawned multiple ad variations. There are now two ads per Ad Group.

- Callout Extension was added to the ad. This physically ads a line of text to the existing ad and a chance for additional information

o We built the new line around two main points of Chupacomics’ mission statement: superior story-telling and pushing boundaries

o there are also multiple other ad extensions available in AdWords- there are two versions of each ad that that either emphasize Chupacomics or Online

Comic Store keyword searches (Appendix 1C & 1D)

- the title line of the ad was modified to include another set of Google radicals “{}”. These will match the title line of the Chupacomics ad with the exact search phrase that was used to cause the ad to display (Appendix 1C & 1D)

o the new line looks like: {Keyword: Chupacomics Online} – to match the phrase exactly that caused the keyword match

The very last thing was to incorporate Google Analytics into the website. To this point Chupacomics had been relying on BC reports cross referenced with click data from AdWords. Google Analytics adds a new level of detail about the actual traffic (including live information); AdWords will tell you when your ads are more successful but Analytics will provide you with information like average site visit time or page clicks per visit or location of the visitor. All handy information available for the low cost of copy and pasting the code into the website header code.

The new campaign launched May 10th and the early returns are looking good. I’m including the basic BC stats (first below) for the time same periods to show the discrepancy in volume but the validation of the trends.

Dates Total Visits (per day) Total Page Views (per day)Pre-Adwords01/01/15-04/04/16

10,088 (21.883/dy) 10,850 (23.537/dy)

ON MY OWN04/04/16-05/10/16

2,205 (59.595/dy) 2,446 (66.108/dy)

GOOGLE BUILD05/10/16-06/29/16

2,840 (55.686/dy) 3,246 (63.647/dy)

This would seem to show a slight downward trend since launching the new campaign but these are very basic statistics and not truly indicative of the quality of the interactions with the Chupacomics website. Taking advantage of AdWords sophisticated reporting we can find a more nuanced report to help measure our success. Below is the overall data of the two campaigns beginning 04/04/16 thru 06/29/16 (note the Impressions #1 campaign was paused on 05/10/16 when the Google Build campaign was launched):

Campaign Clicks Impressions CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg. positionGoogle Build 241 6,345 3.80% $0.80 $192.25 3.29Impressions #1 656 594,715 0.11% $0.19 $127.02 3.48

This is where it stands out how disorganized the Impressions #1 campaign was. The impressions in the table above represents how many times the Chupacomics ad appeared; the Avg. Position is a deceptively complex data point that represents our bid rank compared to our competitors’ for keyword matches. The Google Build has a significantly reduced amount of ad

appearances and even a higher Cost Per Click (Avg. CPC) but there’s also a very impressive click through rate (CTR).

The bottom line, however, is clicks and the Google Build just hasn’t generated as much. This is where the efficiency is a must. My Impressions #1 campaign generated 178 invalid clicks, a Google term for unintentional clicks or double clicks or bot clicking, compared to just 1 for the Google Build. This data isn’t reflected in the Clicks above but is indicative of the focus issues of the Impressions #1 campaign.

A responsible campaign should build scalable efficiency. The Impressions #1 campaign may have generated a higher amount of clicks but this says nothing about the quality of the clicks. A look through the keywords that generated clicks on the Impressions #1 campaign shows unrelated keyword matches generating clicks to our website, I would categorize these as poor value clicks.

Going one by one on the keywords list isn’t the only way to track the quality of clicks. After installing the code for Google Analytics there are a bevy of indicators to take advantage of; for our purposes Avg. Session Duration and Pages/Session (Appendix 2A) are key but the range of data available on Google Analytics is remarkable.

SUMMARY/STRATEGIES

The few keys to a successful campaign seem to be developing a scalable efficiency and a working knowledge of the unique Google terms and radicals. The “+” helped remove our campaign from unnecessary keyword bids, focusing our resources on better contextual matches; also, the “{}” customized our ads to match search phrases exactly.

The current Google Build campaign says that is now limited by budget; in essence stating that more money allocated to certain keywords would immediately improve my ad standing and number of appearances. Despite this budgetary limitation, the overall clicks are close to those with Impressions #1 with a much better CTR. Before increasing budget our aim is increase efficiency and there are a number of ways to improve right now. A few ideas that can be implemented:

- Use Google Analytics to determine what times of the day the majority of website traffic occurs and alter the AdWords campaign to only run during those hours (Appendix 2A).

o Combine this with Adwords reporting on ad clicks and CTR over hours of the day to further hone focus (Appendix 2B)

- Improve ad rank by improving landing page. Ad Rank is measured by a few factors, one of which was already dealt with in retooling the ad itself (Ad Relevance), and we can control the Landing Page Experience in multiple ways (addressing with my currently in process website redesign):

o Main keywords are clear and plentiful on the home pageo The website is scalable from desktop to mobile

Under Google’s rating system (a free diagnostic from Google) Chupacomics.com rated at 66% for mobile and tablets

Google Analystics states that roughly 35% of the web traffic comes from either mobile or tablet devices; this is an obvious place with a lot of room for improvement

- add a second campaign focused strictly on the titles Chupacomics publishes. We will be launching a new title along with the website so there is a good opportunity to combine multiple strategies for exposure

OBSERVATIONS:

This is just a handy list of observations I’ve made while going through this process for myself:

- any changes to your campaign will result in a drop in impressions over the following couple of days before rebuilding to hopefully better numbers. Google encourages campaign managers to not make changes until significant data can be accumulated; just a reminder to make any changes in rounds if possible

- Business Catalyst reporting numbers are significantly higher than Google’s. Looking at Google Analytics site visit number compared to BC’s over the same period of time is stark. There are two prevailing themes as to the extreme difference: Google and BC count visitors via different methods (servers v java) and the other is that Google is just significantly better at sifting out illegitimate traffic. I subscribe to the second ideology. Here’s the breakdown:

Dates: 05/10-06/29/16 Total Page Visits Total Page Views

BC 2,840 3.246Google Analytics 389 n/a

APPENDIX

1A. CHUPACOMICSGenre Pushing ComicsNew Issues for Sale Nowwww.chupacomics.com

1B. CHUPACOMICS – Indie ComixGenre Pushing ComixDigital Issues #1-5 Available Nowwww.chupacomics.com

1C. {Keyword: Chupacomics Online}Genre Pushing Indie ComixExplore Our Range of Comix Today!www.chupacomics.com

1D. {Keyword: Comix Online Shop}Underground Comix & ComixologyExplore Our Range of Comix Today!www.chupacomics.com

2A.

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For our purposes we are defining user engagement as a combination of Avg. Session Duration and Pages per Visit. Extrapolating that data over the hours of the day there are some clear engagement corollaries between 1-3 AM, 8-10 AM and the biggest of the group 3-5 PM. There

are tons of things that could be done with this data to targeting user engagement; Adwords campaigns can be set to not run when engagement shows to be low or Social Media posts can also be timed to run during these higher engagement times.

2B.

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identifying the key time periods from the Google Analytics report from Appendix 2A (1-3 AM, 8-10 AM and 3-5 PM). There’s little to no action on the Chupacomics ad from 1-3 AM but there are some indicators in the other time periods that show some increased clicks. These should be the prime times for our ads and site traffic. AdWords allows our campaign to run ads during specified time periods and, with programs like HootSuite, social media posts can be prewritten and scheduled to post during these engagement periods each day.