New

Opteo has always suggested negative keywords by analysing your search term report for search terms that have already spent a lot of your budget, and had zero conversions.

The new Add Industry Negative Keyword Improvement uses machine learning to predict negative keywords, before irrelevant search terms have a chance to accumulate any significant spend.

Where Opteo find words in your search terms that are frequently used as negative keywords in other Google Ads accounts in your industry, it will suggest adding that word as a negative keyword. You can learn more about how this Improvement works in the help doc here.

New

Today we're excited to announce the release of Reports — one of our most requested features to date. Reports is a new way to turn your performance data into beautiful, informative Google Ads reports that people love to read. We built Reports because we know that communication is the key to happy clients and managers. Unfortunately, most reporting tools focus on dense, data-driven dashboards that fail to provide meaningful context, or communicate with stakeholders in a way that speaks to them.

So we built a reporting tool that does things the right way.

Here's what you can do with Reports:

Create beautiful reports in minutes

No more starting from scratch, staring at blank pages, or sorting through mountains of drag-and-drop widgets. Simply add your branding, select a template and hit Create Report. Opteo will generate a set of slides populated with graphs and comments, all you need to do is review and apply changes.

Get automatically generated insights and advice

Opteo generates insights and advice unique to each report. For example, if an account is over budget, Opteo might tell you how much closer you are than last month, which can be used to reassure clients and managers that things are heading in the right direction. You can either copy and paste insights directly into your report, or use them as inspiration for your own comments.

Show the value of good Google Ads management

Reports are geared towards showcasing business value. Whether managing spend sensibly, or making dozens of bid adjustments, Reports surface the hard work that goes into a successful Google Ads account.

Retain clients and keep managers happy

Transparent, proactive communication is key to building healthy relationships with clients. To help you stay on top of a growing client portfolio, you can automatically generate reports on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. Opteo will then send you an alert via email or Slack whenever a new report is generated.

To try Reports out for yourself, head to the Opteo app, open an account, and click Reports in the top navigation bar. We hope you find Reports useful. If you have any questions or feedback, don't hesitate to send us a message.

New

Today we're excited to announce three new Improvements!

Adjust Device Bids

Device bid adjustments has been one of our most popular feature requests so we're really excited to share this Improvement with you!

The Adjust Device Bid Improvement allows you to show your ads more or less frequently to searchers using specific devices: Desktop, Mobile, Tablet, or Connected TV.

Opteo uses Google's bid simulations and our own machine learning to calculate the perfect bid adjustment. This will help you to reduce costs and capture more conversions for your budget. You can read more about the Adjust Device Bid Improvement in the help doc here.

Adjust Conversion Attribution Model

By default Google Ads uses Last Click attribution. This tends to overvalue bottom-of-funnel campaigns (like Brand or Remarketing), and undervalue top-of-funnel campaigns containing high volume, generic keywords.

If you have a conversion action which uses Last Click attribution, Opteo will recommend that you switch to Position Based. This should give you a better understanding of ad performance and help you optimise ad creative across different stages of your funnel. More details on how this works here.

Add Location Name as Negative Keyword

Opteo checks campaign search term reports for search terms containing location names. If the campaign isn't set up to target the location mentioned, Opteo will suggest adding the location to your negative keywords list.

For example, if you're selling blue roses in Italy and your ads are triggered by a search for ‘blue roses Canada’, it's highly unlikely that the searcher will find your ads relevant to them. You can learn more about how it all works here.

Enhancement

On September 30th Google sunset average position, replacing it with Impression (Absolute Top)% and Impression (Top)%. To account for the change, we:

1) Updated the Adjust Keyword Bid algorithm

In the past, Opteo would only recommend increasing a high-performing keyword's bid if the average position was below 1.15.

Now, we use Impression (Absolute Top)% instead of average position. If the keyword already has a very high Impression (Absolute Top)%, we won't recommend increasing the bid.

2) Display new metrics in Improvements

When Opteo generates an Improvement, we display any relevant statistics to help you decide if you'd like to push the Improvement.

Keyword bid Improvements will now display Impression (Absolute Top)%, to help you estimate how adjusting the bid might impact impressions. For example, if a keyword is performing well and Impression (Absolute Top)% is low, it makes sense to increase its bid to drive more volume.

You'll also see Impression (Absolute Top)% and Impression (Top)% in our Write New Ad and Pause Ad Improvements. These new metrics add context to CTR. For example, you wouldn't want to compare the CTR of two ads with drastically different Impression (Absolute Top)% because, typically, a higher Impression (Absolute Top)% means a higher CTR.

3) Removed average position from Performance and Manage

Since average position is now unavailable, you'll no longer see it in your Performance graphs or the Manage table.

New

Before we begin, we know it's been a while since our last update. We've been hard at work behind the scenes, prepping for a big release which we're excited to share with you. Thanks for bearing with us — we'll have a few big announcements coming really soon!

In the meantime, we have a brand new Improvement for Display campaigns, and an updated Create SKAG Improvement task to share with you.

New: Sync Campaigns to Exclusion List

Applying placement exclusion lists can be easy to miss when creating new Display campaigns.

If any of your Display campaigns are missing a placement exclusion list, Opteo will create a Sync Campaigns to Exclusion List Improvement to make sure all campaigns are covered.

This should help to reduce spending on poor-quality placements. You can see more details on this new Improvement here.

Updated: Create SKAG 2.0

In the past, when you pushed a Create SKAG Improvement, Opteo would create an entirely new campaign with the same settings, budget and best-performing ad from the keyword's original campaign. Then, we'd add that keyword as a negative to the original campaign, ensuring any searches would now trigger the new SKAG.

However, we've since seen that this way of doing things can lead to complex account structures, inflated daily budgets, and outdated ad copy.

With this in mind, our updated Create SKAG Improvement adds the SKAG within your original campaign, to help maintain a clean account structure.

We've also made it easier for you to take advantage of one of the main strengths of SKAGs: hyper-focused ad copy, crafted around a single keyword.

Create SKAG now lets you write and push a new ad when creating your new ad group. As before, we'll also add your top-performing ad to the new SKAG, so you'll have an ad test live too!

New

Our latest update introduces two new improvement tasks.

Fix Below First Page Bid

Many of you have requested this feature via our board, so big thanks for your thoughts and insights.

When keyword bids are below the first page estimate, ads often get little to no impressions. Opteo will now flag keywords with insufficient bids — then, taking your current bid and the estimated first page bid into account, Opteo will calculate a bid increase to get your ads showing again.

Add Extensions to Campaign

Adding campaign-specific ad extensions can make your ads more relevant, often improving CTRs and increasing conversions.

Opteo will check your highest-spending campaigns for campaign-level ad extensions. If we find any opportunities, Opteo will invite you to create and push extensions live, directly from the app.

You can learn more about Fix Below First Page Bid or Add Extensions to Campaign in our help docs.

We're always keen to hear your feedback, so let us know via the chat bubble inside the app or email support@opteo.com.

New

Our latest release (1.0.0) introduced a number of significant changes. These changes helped to build a solid foundation for new features and future improvements to the Opteo ecosystem. We appreciate your help squashing any bugs we might have missed — things are looking stable and performance should continue to improve over the coming weeks.

Now, on to the updates!

Improvement Queue

Listening to your feedback, it quickly became clear that the "Improvement Pushing" process needed to be quicker and more efficient. So we made the Improvement Queue, a quick way to push multiple improvements at once.

(1) Select the Improvements you'd like to push.

(2) Click the Push Improvement(s) button.

(3) Watch as each Improvement is pushed to your Google Ads account.

When pushing a single improvement, you can now set the confirmation window to close automatically on completion. This lets you quickly move back to your list of Active Improvements and on to your next task.

Also worth mentioning, a few new keyboard shortcuts:

q to show/hide the Improvement Queue

esc to clear all Improvements from the Queue

shift + click to add multiple Improvements to the Queue

Ad Writer Updates

In keeping with Google's latest changes, we've updated our in-app ad writer to include a third headline, second description, and 90 character limit for description text. You can choose to fill every field, or stick to two headlines and one description if you prefer.

Campaign Alerts

We're also excited to introduce Campaign Alerts. When overall performance appears stable, it can be difficult to stay on top of individual campaign performance. Opteo now alerts you to any major KPI fluctuations at the campaign level, so you can choose when to investigate further.

We've added more detail to Account Alerts, highlighting which campaigns have contributed to any unexpected changes. This extra information should help you pinpoint the source of any performance issues.

Disable Locations of Interest

In addition to Improvement Queue and Campaign Alerts, we've added a new improvement type: Disable Locations of Interest. It compares the campaign costs of searchers interested in your target locations to searchers actually present in your target locations.

If performance is significantly worse for those merely interested in your target locations, Opteo will suggest disabling your ads for those searchers.

Notes Export

Last but not least, a number of users asked for a feature to export their Notes for use outside of Opteo. Use the new Export Notes button on the Notes page to download a .CSV file containing all notes from the selected account.

That's all for now! Please do send feedback our way using the chat bubble inside the app or via email to support@opteo.com. As always, we hope you find the new updates useful. Thanks for reading!

New

This is a big update, so we’ve grouped changes by where they appear in the app. Scroll to find out about the new things you can do in Account Centre, Improvements, Performance, Manage, and a few other places!

Account Centre

• Fit your AdWords management around your schedule — Opteo is responsive across all your devices! (This one counts for Improvements, Performance and Account Settings too.)

• You can now view your accounts in either grid or list format. Switch back and forth with the Grid and List buttons in the Account Centre sidebar.

• We heard lots of users asking for more control over how Accounts are organised inside the app. So, you can now sort your accounts by name, number of available improvements, or spend.

• Don’t see the account you need? Quickly access Linked Accounts right from the Account Centre, using the new Linked Accounts button.

Improvements

• Introducing two new improvements — Adjust Locations Bids allows you to adapt bids to different geographic areas, while Add Negative Keyword to Shopping Campaign kicks off our support for Shopping campaigns.

• Improvement tasks now pop out on their own, distraction-free page, allowing you to focus on the task at hand.

• Active Improvements can now be sorted by priority, type, or date created. Plus, improvement types are alphabetised for easy scanning and filtering.

• Brand new Improvement Statistics shows you information about your completed improvements in the past week and over all-time. Useful for monitoring your activity over time.

• See Dismissed Improvements grouped by date, open each improvement to view details and data, and see when they're due to revert to active.

• New icons and colour schemes for Improvement buttons clearly indicate when and where Opteo will make a change to your AdWords account.

Performance

• We get a lot of export-related feature requests, so we’re excited to introduce the first of many export features to come, Export Scorecard. With this release, you can download an account's Scorecard as a neat .PDF file with clear, descriptive, client-facing copy.

• Brand your Scorecard with a company logo, and use the Filter button to choose which pages to feature in the final document.

• Type in dates directly or select from the calendar, go backwards, and use new Cancel & Apply buttons to firm your selections.

• We’ve removed graph annotations, making way for a big-time future update to Notes and Graphs… watch this space.

• Users with large accounts, you’ll find Scorecard now loads where it didn’t before. Sorry about that one — we hope you love it!

Manage

• More loading fixes and smoother scrolling for large accounts.

• Compare account stats at the campaign group level, with new power to collapse campaign groups.

• Under Campaign Groups, we’ve replaced the manual Save Changes button with an auto-save function, so your edits are always safe.

Linked Accounts, Billing, etc.

• When linking or unlinking accounts, hover over the spend of any account to see it converted into USD, for quick calculations. It’s our first step to providing an easier understanding of spend across your accounts.

• Take control of all invoices and their details in one place, with the new Invoice Settings button.

New

We just released a couple of new alerts to help you keep up to date with account performance:

• Zero Impressions: If an account's impressions fall to zero, we'll email or Slack you so you can fix any potential payment issues or errors in a timely fashion.

• Conversion & CPA Records: If you improve an account's conversion or CPA performance and it hits a peak we'll ping you to let you know 🥂

New

Connected Accounts shows you all of the AdWords accounts you have connected to Opteo. Making changes to this list is now much simpler.

• Connect and disconnect accounts individually or in bulk.
• Sort by AdWords spend, last login date and connected team members.
• Check which team members have access to which Adwords accounts.
• Click on the avatars to add or remove team members from each AdWords account (admins only).