See the above picture - displaying a location under the display URL. This stretches the ad from standard 5 lines to 4 lines. So, how do I turn this on? Apparently it’s a function of geo-targeting. I intend to roll it out on an account and see what happens to click through rates.
How does it react if you have this enabled and you’re in position 1? Push entries further down the fold?
I’ve just heard whispers in the wind.. Google brand trademarking is to be a dinosaur from may 5th 2008.
What does this mean?
Most likely if it’s true that i’ll be driving a ferrari in 6 months 
Also, those search companies with affiliate companies are about to become a whole lot more important, as managing a brand bidding affiliate campaign is going to win the day..
Official line to be announced today:
As of 5th May, we will allow open keyword bidding on all terms in the
This means, that as of next month, it will be possible for more than one advertiser to appear in the sponsored links after a user has typed in a search query using a trademarked term.
I want to make it clear though, that this revision only affects keyword bidding.
Advertisers and Agencies are accustomed to the fact that users typing in their trademarked term as part of a two, three or four word search will have always resulted in competitor ads running.
For example, someone typing in ‘Acme credit cards’ in the search box will see lots of different, relevant credit card ads because broad matching will bring up ads for those advertisers bidding against the keywords ‘credit card’. So, we hope this will be a familiar step for agencies and advertisers.
However, despite this trademarked keyword change, our strict ads text policy remains unchanged: unauthorised advertisers will not be able to use a monitored trademarked term in their ad text.
So, ads of trademark owners are still likely to have the edge over those of non-trademark owners because these ads can use the trademark terms in the ad text: they are likely to have higher click through rates; and therefore more likely to achieve a better position in the sponsored links.
This change brings the
A good proportion of users in the US and Canada have been clicking on competitor ads even when searching against trademarked terms, suggesting that they find the greater number of ads relevant and helpful when researching or making a purchase.
The rest of Europe will not be affected by this change and we will not allow advertisers to bid against monitored trademark keywords outside of the
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…
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
Defend the search space
Even if you rank well for your brand term (top)
I probably missed alot, but i’m in a rush. Game on brand terms.
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.
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