A letter to Google AdWords – Dear Sir, may we have keyword tagging please

I know Google are avid readers of our one blog post (this is now our second, more to come!) but I thought I would write an open letter to our friends at Googleplex asking them for an extra bit of functionality within the AdWords interface, so.

{insert Dear who here}

I want to talk to you about Keyword tagging, something that is not new to the web and something I remember using fondly back in 2004 when I used my first bit of bid management kit named Atlas DTM (it was a big deal back then), I think they’re still kicking about but are now owned by Microsoft.

So what is it? Well it’s the ability to be able to tag an individual or group of keywords with a different name which can then be searched for and sorted by that tag reference. Similar to what you may do with your favourite social bookmarking site like Delicious.

The benefits of this are endless, for me some primary functions are;

• Monitor keywords that are under/over performing – a quick search by tag will pull up all those terms that through your analysis need babysitting
• Promotions or date sensitive keywords can be monitored closely and a can be a catch all fail safe to make sure you are turning the promotions on and off when necessary – yes we have regulations in the UK, especially in the financial services area where strict advertising laws have to be observed. Tagging would make this a lot easier to manage.
• Tagging can work in any environment; I would like to see tags being used for behavioural profiling, user intent, conversion timings, media attribution, integrated search to name a few.

Tagging would also make the account structures more 3 dimensional which would get in-house teams and agencies all over the country world thinking more conceptually about their search marketing campaigns. Also Google you would have another layer to see how people are targeting and structuring their campaigns, I could think of several good uses for that.

Much obliged,

Neil

So if this wish were to come true in the not too distant future then maybe someone at Mountain View did read this post, maybe we should suggest some more features. Be great to hear if anyone has any other suggestions.

AdWords Tip – if you already use naming conventions for you campaign structures (if not you should at least have them for head, mid and tail terms and separate conventions for brand terms) then use tags like HT (head term), MT (mid tail term), LT (long tail term), PB (pure brand), BP (brand plus product term) at the beginning of the campaign and then use the filter within the AdWords UI to search for ‘campaign name > starts with’ as this should help you analyse your campaigns more efficiently.