Wordstream, Adword Alternative

In paid search there are a lot of rough Adwords accounts out there. You've seen them I'm sure. I know I've worked on them. We get brought in to assess the situation and make some big decisions around whether an account has potential or whether it would be better just to start fresh. This is one of the most common questions we get asked -- how am I doing?

I'm always looking for tools that can help advertisers answer that question. Usually I have to log in and pull reports myself to get to a point where I feel comfortable enough to jump on a phone call and give my opinion. Needless to say that ends up costing time on both ends which of course costs money on both ends.

Recently, Larry Kim, founder of Wordstream, dropped by the Moz offices and a few of us Mozzers were able to explore what their team has been working on. We checked out Wordstream's PPC Grader pretty closely and I thought it would be worth running through what we found. I can honestly say it offers us paid marketers a unique snapshot that can be really useful when first getting started with a company or client.

Their Google Adwords PPC Grader tool (report w/ some blurring pictured above) runs by looking at your AdWords account and grading against averages and best practices they've seen from analyzing thousands of other AdWords accounts. To help show off some of the tool's benefits I am going to go ahead and share some actual data (and screenshots) of the tool's analysis of our Google AdWords account.

The big deliverable from the tool is a lengthy report page that shows a bunch of data about your account, but the first number you see is a rough "score" comparing your AdWords campaign's performance to other accounts in your spend range. It's worth pointing out that a concern we had with the PPC grader was the "spend range" component. The range SEOmoz fell into was "$15,000 to $99,999,999.00." Our monthly budgets run on the low end of that but we are compared to huge companies with huge branding budgets. You can see where that might affect some data. With that said, the tool is still a great way of showing a client or company the potential PPC has as a channel. It makes the case that with time and resources there is a profitable place to grow this account to.

Below are the sections included in the PPC Grader (as you can see this is some seriously awesome data!):

Account Diagnostics - An overall score and rundown of your account compenents & counts.
Wasted Spend - A look at your negative keyword list and projected spend waste calculation.
Quality Score - A graph of your quality score distribution, which is often overlooked by too many paid search marketers.
Impression Share - A share of voice view that helps you understand how often your ads are appearing for relevant searches.
Click Thru Rate - Analysis to help you compare your CTR to competitors in your spend range for both Search and Display networks.
Account Activity - A snapshot to help you better understand the volume of recent activity in your account and comparitive views.
Long-Tail Keyword Optimization - Helps you understand if you are holding your own in the long-tail arena, which holds huge potential for PPC-ers.
Text-Ad Optimization - Quick glance of how many text ads you have running, and how many per ad group to better understand how tailored your ads are.
Landing-Page Optimization - Helps you see how many this account has, and how that compares to your competitors in this spend range.
PPC Best Practices - A pass/fail audit whichs helps you quickly identify any low hanging fruit to go after on the best practices list.
Overall Grade - A reminder of your account grade and performance summary.
Phewwww. That sure is a lot huh? This snapshot is an epic first view for paid search marketers. I'm not going to go through each of the sections in depth because that would take forever, but I thought I'd run through some of my favorite pieces to start. After that I'm going to mention some other feedback and feature requests we have. Let's start off with what we think is really awesome...

PRO #1 : Depth & Breadth of Summary

A report with both such a broad view and such a deep view is really hard (if not impossible) to come by in PPC. One of my favorite sections of the Wordstream PPC Grader is the PPC Best Practices checklist. It gives you a top-level view of how well you are doing. Below you can see what came back when we ran the SEOmoz account through the Grader:

You can see we are doing well on every section, except for "Modified Broad Match Type." This is 100% accurate, we have yet to play around too significantly with match type strategy at SEOmoz, and have instead focused on long-tail expansion. This is a great reminder that we are leaving an excellent option on the table, and we can better prioritize match type expansion in 2012.