source:  PPCBlog

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AdWords Campaign Experiments, or ACE: a tool that will help you optimize your account by letting you accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. As part of our ongoing effort to improve your AdWords experience, we’re testing this new tool and inviting U.S. advertisers to participate in the beta.

In the past, the most common way to measure how changes to your account affected your campaign performance was to measure how the campaign performed before and after you implemented your changes. However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during the test period, including holidays, weekends, or changes to end user or advertiser behavior.

ACE allows you to perform faster, more accurate tests by executing your experimental campaign alongside your original campaign. By performing this type of simultaneous split test, we can tell you precisely if your campaign changes produce statistically significant results.

Different ways of using ACE
Use ACE to experiment with any combination of bid, keyword, ad group or placement changes. You can test and measure a variety of scenarios including:

• The incremental impact of adding new keywords to your campaign or changing keyword and ad group-level bids
• The value of restructuring your Content campaigns to use more tightly themed ad groups
• The change in volume by using different keyword match types
• The value of using an ad group default bid versus keyword-level bids
• And much more!

(Source:  Google Adwords)

Too many online marketers bounce around from one niche to the next, thinking the more they cover, the greater chance they have of making real money online or creating an quick conversions.

But as long as the niche you choose is a lucrative one, your goal should be to go deep within it to effectively mine it for all its worth rather than taking a scattershot approach.

How to Mine A Niche Online
Mining a niche isn’t a matter of guesswork. It’s a very scientific process of going after the right keywords. The traffic you generate can come from PPC, SEO, or, in my preferred case, article marketing. What most budding marketers do when they target a lucrative niche is they go after the highest demand keywords thinking that’s where the big traffic is. This is a mistake.

High demand keywords are where the potentially big traffic is, to be sure, but it’s also where the greatest competition lies. In a high profit potential niche, it’s going to be very difficult to compete against people who are dominating Google for those phrases and likely have been for years.

Success lies in going very deep, which means focusing your efforts on the mid-tail and especially long-tail keywords. This will also mean you’re going to create content on the same topics over and over. Even if it seems redundant to you, I can assure you it won’t be to your readers, and you’ll also make a lot more sales/conversions, which is what we’re all after, right?

Let me explain.

Think Small To Get Big Results
If I’m trying to drive sales in the lucrative anti-aging skin care niche, I don’t just want to target keywords like “anti-aging” or “skin care,” I want to go deep. I want to go after keywords that contain 3 or 4 phrases in them that are highly specific and less competitive, like “anti aging cream formulation” or “best anti aging skin treatment.”

These are the phrases that have much less competition. It doesn’t matter if the demand is less because I want you to target a lot of these types of keywords.

Rather than try to get more traffic from a competitive keyword that you probably won’t get a good ranking for that’s also less targeted, it’s much better to get less traffic from each article that is much more targeted. And, then, if you have enough articles out there on many of these long tail keywords, your overall traffic collectively from them will grow to large levels.

Don’t worry if you’re creating content on similar topics because of the keywords. Just remember, it’s a different person typing in “anti aging cream formulation,” that is typing in “best anti aging skin treatment” so even if you’re covering some of the same points in each, you want to rank for both phrases — and as many of these types of keyphrases as possible..

If you follow through on what you’ve just learned, you will be ahead of the vast majority of online marketers competing in your niche.

Did your smartphone suddenly start blinking and buzzing like crazy? No need to worry– it’s probably just getting excited about AdWords for mobile, our new mobile interface for Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices.

We’ve heard that your smartphone and AdWords account have been pining for each other. Over the past few months, many of you have let us know how much you’d like to have fast and easy mobile access to AdWords, which is why we’re now testing a streamlined mobile experience. AdWords for mobile gives you easy access to your key alerts and statistics, enabling you to make quick changes even when you’re out and about.

Today, AdWords for mobile will be used as the default mobile interface for a small percentage of English language advertisers, and we look forward to enabling the feature for additional advertisers and languages in the coming weeks. However, if you’d like to try AdWords for mobile immediately, simply direct your Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre tohttp://adwords.google.com/dashboard/Dashboard

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The video below will show you how a few minor changes to your account structure can make a big difference to your advertising performance.

AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consist of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. For an overview of these new reports, check out this video:

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As I watch the snowflakes and do what I do best (and that’s to try and relate my surroundings to how I do business), I cant help but think …  ”What if each of those snowflakes was a potential customer?”  There are many different shapes, different sizes, some fall faster than others and some just don’t make it to the ground, the get stuck on roof tops or tree tops and never get to the desired landing area.

The question I ask myself is … “How would I catch as many of them as possible with a bottle that just sits there waiting to be filled up?” (in this case, the bottle represents your web site)  If you think you are going to catch every snowflake, you are crazy. You will never catch all of them, and in most cases even the ones you do catch are not going to be the ones you had hoped for.

What’s the purpose of this off topic rant, you ask?  Well, in my ADD brain I can’t help but relate this to lead generation and targeted marketing strategies. When you develop a method to guide those snowflakes to the location you want them, you are creating an effective funnel that collects the snowflakes for you. Think of this funnel as your sales process, you can use targeted Google AdWords campaigns to reach out and guide these flakes towards the funnel. Once they land on the funnel they start making the trip down the tube into the bottle.  The tube being the “Auto Responder Campaign” that leads them into the bottle over a pre-determined time frame, and the bottle, being the website that encourages the sale or the conversion.

How well do you catch snowflakes?  Are you catching them with a funnel or are you catching them with your bare hands?

I will leave you with a final note:  Last time I cought a snowflake with my bare hands it melted within seconds!  WOW … that means (in my mind) I just turned that potential lead or customer into nothing.  No communication, co sales pitch, no conversion.

What’s your next move?

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