Day 4 of the #30DC The missing AWA in Market Samurai

Getting back into the 30 Day Challenge and making sure I can do the Day 1-4 quickly and thoroughly I noticed that the AWA (Adwords Advertisers) functionality has disappeared from Market Samurai. Here’s what you can do…

In Day 4 of the 30 Day Challenge you are really trying to ascertain whether there is enough competition existing in a market to show that there are possible customers buying there. In early December Market Samurai removed the tick box that selected AWA in the Keyword Research module that showed the type of ads that would appear for a chosen keyword. Google themselves have removed this feature from there site so a workaround is needed.

Now simply you could just search in Google using your keyword in quotes to see what ads appear and refreshing will bring probably bring a new set ads for you. But to be fair on the advertisers you will not be able to click on them to see what is behind each one. If you are in a different region from the USA then you will also only see ads targeted to your local countries domain of Google.

The Google Ad Preview tool still works from inside of Google Adwords but it still doesn’t allow you to click through to the relevant ad pages.

If you do want to see this anyway then remember that if this is the first time you set up your Google Adwords account then you are likely to receive your Adwords money off coupon with the week – so be prepared to use it within the next month or so. Once inside your Google Adwords account then click on the ‘Opportunities’ tab at the top and down the left hand side you will see the link to the ‘Ad Preview Tool’. A new Google search preview page should open with the options to put in the keyword (in quotes), the Google Domain from which you want to search i.e. Google.com and some more settings to show which country or coordinates you want the ads selected for i.e. United States, All regions within this country. When you click on the Preview ads button you will get a preview style Google Search page, which will show you the relative positions of what ads will appear.

The solution for now – until anyone can come up with a better idea

It’s a bit techie and it’s one of the old SEO way but it will get you the results. We’ll use “used solar panels” as an example.

Do a normal search for the keyword – you’ll see something in the browser like this:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22used+solar+panels%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGGL_en-GB___GB355

Now, don’t worry if it is different to yours, let’s assume you then want to return US results,  just do two things:

  1. change the www.google.co.uk to www.google.com
    This will select the server used in the US
  2. just add   &gl=US   to the end of the address
    This will ensure results will come from the US geographical location database

You should have something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22used+solar+panels%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGGL_en-GB___GB355&gl=US

The results returned will then show ads that are displayed generally in the USA.


Right, you still have the problem of seeing the ad pages without actually clicking on the ads themselves. This can be sorted by hovering your mouse over the ad you are interested in, right-clicking it and selecting ‘Copy Link Location’ (in Firefox) and pasting that into the new tab or window in which you want to see the ad page.

Then you need to edit out everything up to the ‘…&q=’ near the end. So for example if you have this pasted into your address bar

http://www.google.co.uk/aclk?sa=L&ai=C5xcmhy5oS7PZNc6DjAfuzLz3Bv2nsqgB9aaR2xGc6uMEEAEgtlQoCFDdytXk-f____8BYMkGyAEBqgQZT9AqNuYsgZ7utfhXVZRSI-nQUCZuOc8d3g&num=1&sig=AGiWqtx4duzeoeCtHLXr699mHNGJAWpxKg&q=http://www.integrityhvac.com/solar.asp

Just delete everything up to and including the ‘&q=’ to get this:

http://www.integrityhvac.com/solar.asp

and that will give you the page you are looking for.

There is just one complication – you might end up with a final address that has %.. codes in

http://store.altenergystore.com/Solar-Electric-Panels/c541/%3Futm_source%3Dadwords%2Bad1%26utm_medium%3DWSP-solar%2Bpower%26c1%3DWSP-solar%2Bpower%26source%3Dadwords%2Bad1%26kw%3Dsolar%2Bpanels%2Bfor%2Bsale

This used url encoding and the way to get round it is to change each occurrence of it for the right character. This table should contain everything you need.

Character Code
Dollar (“$”)
Ampersand (“&”)
Plus (“+”)
Comma (“,”)
Forward slash/Virgule (“/”)
Colon (“:”)
Semi-colon (“;”)
Equals (“=”)
Question mark (“?”)
‘At’ symbol (“@”)
Space (‘ ‘)
Quotation marks
‘Less Than’ symbol (“<“)
‘Greater Than’ symbol (“>”)
‘Pound’ character (“#”)
Percent character (“%”)
Left Curly Brace (“{“)
Right Curly Brace (“}”)
Vertical Bar/Pipe (“|”)
Backslash (“\”)
Caret (“^”)
Tilde (“~”)
Left Square Bracket (“[“)
Right Square Bracket (“]”)
Grave Accent (“`”)

%24
%26
%2B
%2C
%2F
%3A
%3B
%3D
%3F
%40
%20
%22
%3C
%3E
%23
%25
%7B
%7D
%7C
%5C
%5E
%7E
%5B
%5D
%60

So the above address would need to be changed to

http://store.altenergystore.com/Solar-Electric-Panels/c541/?utm_source=adwords+ad1&utm_medium=WSP-solar+power&c1=WSP-solar+power&source=adwords+ad1&kw=solar+panels+for+sale

OK – I know that all looks a little tricky but it is usually simple to do. Just be glad of all the modern SEO tools, the arcane methods of SEO used to be like this 🙂

I noticed there might be a Firefox Google Global plugin that might help with the first bit – selecting the correct country but I haven’t tried it. If anyone knows of any easier ways of doing the above then please comment 🙂

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