Why you shouldn’t use Google AdWords new Opportunities Tool yet
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A guest blog post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, providing local advertising services to small businesses.
In the name of helping you optimize your campaigns, Google has been releasing tools to help you estimate an appropriate campaign budget, add new keywords, bid appropriately, and so forth. What you’ll notice is that all these recommendations have one thing in common.
To get you to spend more money.
I’ve never once seen the tools say “Hey, I think you should decrease your bids on these keywords,”– have you? Google recently released the “opportunities” tab, which is an enhancement on their campaign optimization tool:
For each ad group, they provide a list of new keywords you can add to your campaign and the estimated number of incremental impressions you can get by adding them. For this example, we’re looking at a Denver liposuction surgeon, so we’re looking at just folks in the Denver area– although Dr. Verebelyi does have nationwide clients for certain procedures.
You’ll notice that the Opportunities tool isn’t smart enough to determine geography in it’s volume estimation. Note that for “facial peel”, we have Denver targeted and Colorado targeted ad groups. Google’s tool lists the same volume estimate of 45,000 searches for both.
Now let’s go into the specific keyword recommendations:
Note that it has terms such as “chemical peel training” (which is not a consumer-oriented term) and “chemical peel uk” (wrong geo). When Google gets smarter about these tools, they should be able to figure out which ones are truly relevant to small businesses wanting to do local Internet marketing. But at least they put a disclaimer in the footer about how these 
recommendation may or may not improve performance. In the same light, smoking cigarettes may or may not cause lung cancer.
But I digress. What’s nice is that the tool will uncover keyword variations that you might not have thought of. And while the particular volume estimates are way off, at least it’s directionally accurate for nationally targeted campaigns. For their next iteration, Google should be able to give you an estimated Quality Score should you add those terms and even allow you to sort by impact to Quality Score. After all, if you select the terms, they will calculate the score anyway– so might as well pre-score, don’t you think?
I’d love to hear experiences you have in managing campaigns for small business clients and local PPC in general.
4 Comments on this post
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Dick Ingersoll said:
Thanks for the research! Clearly this tool is not ready for prime-time in the local market. It really is interesting because they certainly have the information they need to make their recommendations specific to your campaign. As you so rightly indicate Google’s advice is always in their favor.
October 21st, 2009 at 3:55 pm -
Sean W said:
I think it’s good for keyword expansion. It struggles to suggest the right keywords for the right adgroups though. I generally export all of the keywords for each of the adgroups to a spreadsheet and then assign them all to the correct ad groups before manually adding them.
If you’re using broad match for existing keywords, you may find that adding a whole lot of additional keywords doesn’t actually get you many more clicks.
October 25th, 2009 at 12:08 am -
Dennis Yu said:
Hi Dick and Sean,
Seems that Google has made some massive improvements here in the last few months– tools are better. Have you tried since? I especially like Search Insights and Ad Planner.
Dennis
February 2nd, 2010 at 1:38 pm -
Byron Hinterland Accommodation said:
Yes I agree, trying to keep a lid on keywords spiralling out of control once the list of “opportunites” comes up, is difficult. Like being offered more spend limit on your credit card, hard to say no, but is better for you in the long run. Agree too that the benefit is so that you can see which keywords you haven’t thought of. But the temptation is there to spend up big and go overboard on all the suggested keywords. You’d be out of business if you took on board all the “possibilities”.
April 27th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
