March 28th, 2008 admin
Well, another exciting release - video ads within paid search results. If you want to have a look click here. What will this mean exactly?
Well it seems clear that you can have individual landing pages for both text ad and it’s equivilent video. If someone watches a full 30 second advert then clicks, this is a significantly more qualified link than a pure text click. Will the pricing structure change? Most likely.
Additionally, adverts within the top three decisions display a significantly larger video bubble than a normal text ad. So large that it takes up approximately 30% of the page. This is an extremely powerful tool moving forward I imagine.
How valuable will these ads be when the page becomes fully saturated? Well, I think it will separate the men from the boys in terms of quality ads and qualified clicks.
What I haven’t seen yet is the mixture of both ‘Click here for video ad’ entwined with ‘Google Checkout image’. This could be extremely enticing on the eye and have a significant effect on the click through rates for the advert. It’s an exciting time…
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March 14th, 2008 admin
So over the past couple of days, Google Spam Guideline document has hit the internet. You can download it here for free, rather than pay somewhere else. However - I’m not too sure about it’s authenticity. It’s lacking appropriate formating that you would expect for a document of this type. Anyway click here to download:
spamguide1.doc
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March 13th, 2008 admin
If you’re using expanded match within Google for any campaigns, then a good way to find which terms Google aggregates is the following:
For a client selling BLINDS (i.e. Window Blinds), there are obvious connotations that could be followed that are clearly irrelevant. By entering the search query: ~blinds -blinds into google you will see in bold all the terms that Google has equated. For example:
visually impaired
treatments
shades
Drapery
Curtains
Coverings
Try it for yourself - it could provide you with significant new keywords or negative keywords to optimize your account.
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March 13th, 2008 admin
Google have launched Ad Manager which allows a website to sell ad space. This ad space does not have to be sold to Google exclusively, but clearly it is designed to plug into Adsense:
- Does Ad Manager require exclusivity?No. Ad Manager doesn’t require exclusivity. You’re free to use other ad management and ad serving products along with Google Ad Manager or switch to another provider at any time.
- Will I be restricted to AdSense as my ad network?No. You can use any ad network you like. With Google Ad Manager, you can optionally enable AdSense to deliver the best-paying ad source for each impression.
So what does this mean? It’s symptomatic of Google’s assault on display advertising. This method will allow them inside information into display advertising networks via this management tool which will be invulerable. Additionally, this movement goes hand in hand with the DoubleClick buy out which happened around July last year. With the YouTube buy out and a possible purchase of Digg, the roll out of display advertising on these hugely popular sites could push the Google display advertising market share through the roof. The double click purchase already enabled them to get more than a 50% market share, so this is purely the beginning.
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March 13th, 2008 admin
So, google checkout has really taken off in recent months, with large companies such as Vodafone using the conversion option - probably because it has been found that the Google Checkout image next to your PPC ad is a good way to increase click through rates, and thus improve the quality score and performance of your campaign.
But is there a downside? There always is with Google, in some form or another. In the United States retailers found that Google had increased the minimum bid prices for top converting terms shortly after Google Checkout was released. Essentially, this means that Google used google checkout data to discover the margins being made on the conversions passing through certain keywords. Armed with this information, they knew exactly how much blood they could squeeze out of the proverbial stone.
The moral of the story is- if you have already seen the impact of Google checkout on your keywords, and you want to integrate it into your online retailer, then it is a quick way to increase performance in your campaign.
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March 12th, 2008 admin
Recently, multiple blogs have posted on brand bidding. Stating it’s a good idea, it’s a bad idea. Everyone has an fairly stringent opinion of brand bidding. Some say always bid, some say sometimes bid. Nobody says never bid!
Here’s a few reasons to brand bid, allow affiliates to bid on your brand or to not brand bid at all. It is situational.
Display a message
- Sometimes you need to alert customers to a vital product, sale or event and what better way than to alert them in your PPC ad text. This can inspire customers to purchase quickly - particularly with an excellent landing page.
- Some typical events could be: 20% sale today only on xxx item. Or Bet on the Grand National now.
Defend the search space
- If you haven’t trademarked your brand term, then allowing affiliates to bid on your brand term will help push out competitor bidders ensuring that you will still generate leads. If this is your situation however, I suggest you trademark your brand term as quickly as possible otherwise you will be wasting vast money buying leads you should have delivered to yourself dirt cheap.
- Additionally, this strategy can be employed in a blackhat PPC method providing each site you bid for the brand term with has individual credit cards, addresses and setups.
Even if you rank well for your brand term (top)
- If you rank top for your brand term but competitors/affiliates land on the first page of organic then bidding on brand term is still advisable. This will push your competitors further down the page - which is always good.
I probably missed alot, but i’m in a rush. Game on brand terms.
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March 7th, 2008 admin
So google confirm that landing page loading time will be used in advert quality score calcuation. What does this mean generally? Well, if you site has a bad day when the googlebot hits you, your quality score is going to take a beating.
It seems clear that this happened on the back of Steve Souders moving from Yahoo to Google. He is well known for doing research and writing a book on speeding up website performance. It’s a logical extension to apply this research in his new position, to make his mark so to speak. But is punishing the quality score really the best solution to this problem.
The PPC Blog states the option of pausing a keyword automatically if the response time is extremely bad. This is a reasonable idea, I suppose. But does all of this not mean that, once the bot scanning regularity for loading time is established - that some blackhat methods could be used to kill your competitors quality scores? A quick DDoS of a site during a scanning period, perhaps late at night so nobody can turn off the Adwords account in time, could potentially caused some big problems.
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March 6th, 2008 admin
Okay, third post in 3 hours. But this one is particularly interesting. Follow my customer journey on this one;
Customer plans to buy a Satellite Navigation system from Maplin; and therefore searches for ‘Maplin’ in Google.
Customer searches for Maplin, then fills in the satnav into google search extra.
(Click image to see the adsense ads).
The maplin satnav results show google adsense on the side, showing competitive prices. You WILL bleed customers here.
Terrible. I see amazon has already opted out of the search.. how long until everyone doe
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March 6th, 2008 admin
Okay, so i’ve calmed down slightly. We’ve had a lot of inhouse discussion here about the ramifications of the search box for brand, and what it means. How is google planning to use this?
One opinion here is that this is another attack similar to the November Florida changes in that it is an affiliate attack, and Google plans to reintroduce Froogle in the way that they did several years ago - directly involved in the search text. To quote my colleague exactly;
“My view is that they are ultimately trying to fill the first page of natural listings with these site search boxes for product searches, with the objective of adding maybe a tick box option where Google will compare the product being searched for on all participating sites thereby functioning as a comparison engine.”
Now, i’m not too sure on this one. Is this a mess that google really needs to get into? The ramifications of a censorship approach like this to increase their own products competitiveness is something that google is yet to do; although they could have done it years ago, and become incredibly powerful because of it.
Google blog has posted on the issue. They appear to be confirming what I thought the search feature would be used for. If someone searches for a big brand name, it is highly likely that they want to investigate further into the page. Therefore; it’s googles discretion whether or not to enable the feature for a site based on click through performance. Similar to the top spot occupation for ppc campaign - it only appears if your site is that relevant.
What does this mean moving forward? An extention away from brand term would probably be the next logical step. If a natural listing gets an incredibly high click through rate on a generic search - why not add an additional search box due to its relevancy? This will eventually be the holy grail of generic search results, if it is rolled out to generic terms.
How about placing this feature on extremely high click through rate performing ppc adverts? I don’t think this will happen, but it would make things very very interesting in the future..
Google IS willing to mess with the natural listing display.
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March 6th, 2008 admin
So, the natural listings in google have another google search box now, when you search for brand term. A quick search for Wikipedia will show the search box appearing. However this search box only appears when the site is ranking first (and possibly only for brand); is this a sitemap option..?
It is currently running for Wikipedia, John Lewis, Amazon and probably hundreds more.
Try it for yourself; google search for wikipedia.
Edit- Upon further examination, it is only appearing for brand term searches for major retailer & large companies (microsoft, tesco.. etc)
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