The Adaptive Marketer

The Adaptive Marketer Review: WordStream

Posted on 12. May, 2010 by Robert Rose in Online Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Content

There’s a famous quote by Bill Gates talking about the usefulness of personal computers and how they’ve become “the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, tools of creativity and they can be shaped by their user”.   If you’re a marketer – and you’re focused on PPC Advertising, there’s an interesting tool that I think fits the spirit of the above quote perfectly – it’s called WordStream.

I know their CEO Rob Adler (I guess that’s also a disclosure) – and have admired what they’ve done as a startup company. I’ve been playing with an account (with real data) for a few weeks now, and their team was also nice enough to give me a deep dive tour of the product.

Get Ready To Dive In – It’s Immersive

If you’re not familiar with WordStream, they’ve got a few products. You might be familiar with their free keyword suggestion and finder tools – which can be really beneficial to your SEO and PPC efforts.

This won’t be a review of those tools (since they’re free and you can use them yourself) – but rather the paid subscription tools that they offer. These tools are WordStream for PPC and WordStream for SEO.

The focus of most of the WordStream suite is on PPC – so we’ll focus most of our review there.

Who Should Use It

If you’re brand new to PPC Advertising, or are just now getting into it in a “hands-on” manner, logging into WordStream for the first time is going to be a bit daunting for you.    The company does offer a set of professional services and education that will get you up and running most optimally.  And, if you decide to jump into WordStream as your introduction to PPC – then I’d highly recommend you take them up on that service.

The reason is that If you don’t and you just launch the tool – then you’re going to be expected to be pretty familiar with some of the more esoteric terminology and intricacies of Google PPC management.

Mostly, I suspect that this tool will be most useful if you’ve hit your sophomore slump with PPC advertising. In other words, you know the basics, and you’re ready to take your management and optimization of PPC Advertising up to the next level.

Keyword Discovery & Management Tools – The Real Magic

So, one of the biggest challenges of taking your PPC to the next level is how to organize Ad Groups and Campaigns. A big mistake that beginning PPC marketers will make (I certainly did) is to group keywords into Adgroups – by how *WE* think about our business, rather than how the keywords are semantically related.    So, for example, many times we’ll organize our Adgroups by our products, or our campaigns, rather than by keywords and phrases.

Manage Campaigns

This is where WordStream really shines. Based on your existing keywords and phrases (which it can pull from your Google Analytics, or you can upload) it will automatically do a semantic analysis on them and group them into logical “buckets” for you. You can then “approve” these to create them as Adgroups and write ads for them.

Then, and this is the really interesting part, if you connect your Google Analytics account, Wordstream will monitor your keywords ongoing – and add them to the appropriate buckets automatically. This is important, of course, because one of the things we almost never do is look at how what *we think* our important keywords are vs. how our users actually find us. Now, you, of course, have control over this – and WordStream conveniently shows you how many “new” words have been added since you last logged in.

Additionally, there are interfaces for managing “negative” keywords, as well as tools for “spying” on other Web sites to see what their targeted keywords are.

This part of the suite is really the heart of the software – and is around which all the other features are enhanced. If you’re managing a large number of keywords and ad groups – this becomes a really elegant way to organize your keywords.

Organize Your Keywords

Of course, you’re still utilizing Google Adwords and Analytics as your reporting mechanisms – and the software doesn’t really provide many reporting mechanisms. As was explained to me during the briefing – they’re really not trying to replace “web analytics” – as much as be an optimization tool for your campaigns.

I also asked the team as we were going through the product if it made more sense to just completely “delete” your old Adgroups and let Wordstream “start from scratch” or because you’ve got good Ad Quality scores should you use Wordstream to supplement what you’re doing?

As expected, there’s no easy answer here – as you might have great Ad Quality Scores – and if you “blow everything up” it might move you back a bit. My experience, however, would tend to lean toward letting Wordstream take over – and just start from scratch. Chances are, if you’re considering this tool – you’ve either got no idea there *WAS* an Ad Quality Score – or it’s low enough that “blowing up your existing house” isn’t going to be that big a deal.

Bid Management Features – Meh

Again, the heart of Wordstream is the keyword discovery, management and grouping tools.   So, if you’re after complex bid management software – this isn’t it. Unlike some other bid management tools out there that let you assign complex bidding rules such as bidding to a particular position or other complex algorithmic functions, Wordstream keeps it simple and basic here.

Also, unlike other more complex bid management systems there’s no reporting on previous bids or a “bid history”

They have the basics of course (you can put in your bid) and they have a nice “aggregate” bid manager where you can up your overall bid by a certain percentage – which is a nice time-saver.

SEO Features – Simple But Effective

The SEO side of the equation for Wordstream is simple. It’s a Firefox plugin that gives you the power to analyze and aggregate (using their semantic analysis technology) the keywords in your site (or any site really) into groups. Then, (and this is the interesting part) if you open up your content management system (they claim compatibility with most WYSIWYG editors) as you put in content – you can see the count of those keywords as you put in content. So, you can make sure that you’re not adding too little (or too much) keyword density into your content – and of course make sure you’re hitting all the right words.

Now, I’ll quibble that I’d like to see a Google Chrome extension (as I’ve now come to not love Firefox – especially for us Mac users). But overall this is really easy and a powerful feature.   The only other quibble is that the entire interface is in Flash.  We don’t have to go over that debate here.   But for you Mac folk,  it can definitely tax your machine.

Overall – A Really Effective Tool

Overall, I’m really impressed. I got to see an early iteration of this product last year – and (as you might expect) it was really focused on that keyword grouping suite.    The little touches that they’ve added over the last five months have really made it into a mature product – that can be extraordinarily useful.

As the Bill Gates’ quote closes – the power in a personal computer is that it is a tool that “can be shaped by their users”.    It’s clear that WordStream is a tool that has been built by people passionate about PPC and SEO – and that they are listening to customers when it comes to adding new features.

Pricing is quite reasonable – with both Agency and End-Client pricing – if you’ve got one web site, and for the whole set of tools, you’ll spend $500 to get up and running and aout a hundred bucks a month or so for the tool(s).

Overall – a big Adaptive Marketer thumbs up.

Tags: PPC, SEO, Software Review, Wordstream