I scored better than 8% of Adwords accounts in my spend range. Wow, that’s…humiliating, and quite humbling.
Wordstream has an awesome new Adwords performance grader tool that’s free and compares your account to others in your spend range (that they have previously graded, but they say that it’s millions) using more than 60 different factors. You get a general idea of how you’re doing then recommendations, in sections, for improvement. I like.
Naturally, this all ties into their PPC management software, which is available on a free 7-day trial. As PPC isn’t my main thing, I won’t be trying that out, but I do really like comparison systems, as I think they give us a great idea for where we stand in, um, comparison to everyone else. Everyone else, that is, who has run their account through this system. Still, it’s millions!!
So in addition to learning that I’m worse than 92% of people in my spend range, what else can this tool tell me?
- I am wasting a lot of money and should add negative keywords to my campaign.
- My keywords are too broad. They are like the backside of my fattest chicken, S. Epatha Merkerson.
- I have no good longtails.
- I am neglecting my account and probably losing ground to competitors due to a full 0 recent actions in the past month. That is dedication that you don’t find with just anyone.
- I don’t have enough ads for each group. However, with my worst ad showing a CTR of over 4% (the expected average is 2.3%) I am still smirking slightly.
- I have way, way fewer landing pages than my competitors. I like it that way though, so take that! Why create a landing page just for PPC? I know people do it, but how is that any different than cloaking? OK I’m joking. That rhymes.
Good news though! My Quality Score kicks ass!! I’m better than the rest of you monkeys with a 7.4 compared to the average of 5.2. Go me!!
My CTR is also awesome!!
OK that’s really all I’m doing well here…but seriously, this is one cool FREE tool. My favorite part is the end where there are happy green thumbs up images or scary and sad red thumbs down ones. I’m 50/50.
Now, I have said many times that I love free tools…I also really like tools that spit out data in eye-pleasing ways. I may be about 6, but I do love the graphics here because it makes the analysis much less boring. Once your report is ready it emails you a permanent link in case you want to look at it over and over and over again, or, more professionally, make tweaks to your campaign, then check your performance later on.
Here’s the thing about this tool: it does not compare your campaign to others in your niche, which means that while it is very valuable, you still can’t determine that just because you don’t have the same performance for asbestos removal as you do for discounted boots, you must suck. As mentioned above, it also compares your performance to others who have run their accounts through the grader. Still, since I like to look at performance in terms of trending rather than exact metrics usually, I do think that it’s really useful. I’d also find this quite nice to show to a client who balks at making changes. For example, I don’t have conversion tracking on this account for various reasons. Yes I know it’s critical, so don’t fuss at me, but still, I do not have it. I am not always at liberty to choose the ad wording or keywords either. A report like this is helpful because then my client doesn’t just think it’s me deciding to do something crazy just because I’m bored.
So try it out. It’s free, it’s cool, and you get to either feel superior to others or you can cry into your warm cereal at dinnertime.
