AdWords ads are seen whenever your keywords (and those of your competitors, both directly and indirectly) cause your ads to "enter the ad auction".

This auction is triggered whenever a keyword search is carried out, or a browser refresh.

The resulting ads delivering impressions (being shown on your device screen) can vary widely depending on a number of factors, including budgets, schedules, bid prices, click-through rates, campaign delivery, ad rotation, keyword match types, negative keywords, campaign targeting and networks, language selection, geographic location, device type, and so on.

In fact, to the experienced AdWords Manager the ads which show reveal a lot about the advertiser at a glance, including whether he or she knows (or cares) about what they are doing with their AdWords campaigns.

What you don’t want to have your ads show for are highly irrelevant searches.

This reduces your clickthrough rates and consequently increases your bid prices, click costs, and minimum bids.

This can prevent your ad showing on the front page, or even showing at all.

So, in these days of constrained finances and shoppers looking for deals and sales, we find that Google’s keyword tool indicates about 40,000 searches a month for people looking for a "sale". (This is for the UK).

Not a specific sale, like "house for sale", or "tv for sale" – just a "sale".

Any old sale.

This is shown by the match type of the keyword, which is [exact] as denoted by the square brackets.

That means 40,000 people a month are typing just the keyword sale into Google (I wonder what they’re really looking for? And shouldn’t you?)

Care to guess how many advertisers are competing (knowingly or unknowingly) on that keyword?

Yes, that’s 21,230 AdWords advertisers.

I’ve never seen so many.

Are you among them?

I’d suggest you don’t want to be…

Out of curiosity, I checked the USA also, which is even more interesting…

673,000 searches on the exact keyword [sale] – and 112,502 AdWords advertisers. WOW!

So if you want to know more, just get in touch

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More visitors, more sales, lower advertising costs, and increased profits – Enhanced Product Advertising Using the New Google AdWords PlusBox.

If you own an ecommerce store selling retail products using Google AdWords, you want to maximise your opportunities of being seen when people look for you on Google.

You also want to increase the likelihood of people clicking through on your ads, and buying your products when they do.

The PlusBox turns your current text-only based AdWords ads into a selection of compelling image-based ads displaying much more detail and pricing information, taken in real-time directly from your product catalogue.

Very few advertisers are currently aware this service exists, and it is currently only available in the United States.

But, as a selected Agency Partner, we have been invited by Google to participate in a limited implementation of the new service in the UK.

What is the PlusBox?

Immediately underneath the usual text-based ad, you can see a small plus sign, which when clicked on, expands to show full details of your top related products, including your images, description and pricing.

Interested Google users can see full details of your products, without you incurring a click charge, and preselect the items they are interested in to view in full detail without losing time exploring your website, possibly leaving before making a purchase or enquiry.

(click this link to reproduce the search, but be aware your results may differ due to the advertisers campaign settings)

This makes your ads stand out hugely on the page, increasing clickthrough rate, increasing your Quality Score, lowering your Cost per Click, and increasing the chances of converting the click into a purchase.

How does PlusBox work?

Your AdWords account can now be linked to an existing or new Google Base product feed account, and it’s free!

This exciting new feature gives you all this:

• Stronger image-based ads to supplement your usual text ads
• More strongly product-focused ads
• More products listed from your website on the results page, both from AdWords Sponsored Links, and from Product Search Results
• More targeted visitors
• Higher Brand visibility
• Stronger clickthrough rate
• Better Quality Score
• Enhanced visitor experience
• Increased chances of conversions to sales and enquiries

Many of the major shopping comparison websites, including Kelkoo, offer a similar feature.

This makes Google Base (formerly “Froogle”) a critically important factor in your Search Engine Marketing strategy.

This is a groundbreaking change in Google AdWords, giving you a huge first mover advantage.

So be sure you’re not missing out …

If you have an ecommerce store, talk to us right now – before your competitors do.

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Our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and quality score determine how much you pay for a click on Google.com.

So you put your AdWords bids up to raise your Ad position, and your AdRank (position) actually falls – what’s going on?

Google’s Chief Economist, Dr. Hal Varian, demonstrates eloquently how AdRank and Click prices (CPC) are computed, and why Quality Score and Click Through Rate are so important whenever your keyword triggers your Ad to enter the Ad Auction.

The video is insightful and revealing, watch it in full at the bottom of this article.

And I now (as of today) also believe the point Dr. Varian makes about increasing bid prices and actually appearing in other auctions with lower positions as a result, although I didn’t when I first saw the video.

This afternoon I’ve just been doing some advertiser research, which involves typing a keyword, seeing what ads appear, and going through all the pages of search results carrying ads for this keyword (tents) – there were about 140 advertisers (UK).

I noticed several things, some of which I’d seen before, but which now “seem” to gel and make a bit more sense against this backdrop.

Firstly, to confirm I had actually reached the end of the advertiser results, I noticed the See your ad here » link which shows when all ads have finished, before starting over with the top AdRank ad again (rather than More Sponsored Links >> which indicates additional ads to come on subsequent pages).

When I was going through each page, sometimes I would see the same advertiser ad that I had seen on an earlier page, but now in a lower position – a different auction, presumably triggered both by me (since I refreshed the search by going to the next page), and by other users who are all searching just like me.

Some advertiser ads also had disappeared from the auction when I had visited their website, and then gone back a page to the results page carrying their ad which I had previously seen and clicked through on.

(Perry Marshall’s observation of the “search and search again” phenomenon where ads quickly disappear and change position if you repeatedly refresh your browser may also be implicated in this auction discussion).

What I think we need to consider are several points:

1. Quality Score which governs the AdRank position is computed REALTIME for every search (i.e every auction) and is therefore potentially variable, because of broad keyword expansion, CTR, different ad text being split tested, restricted campaign delivery, ad optimisation and rotation, exhausted budgets, time of day, scheduling, advertiser competition etc.

2. Since we’re talking realtime, you’ll only ever acquire data that pertains to a tiny snapshot of the whole auction activity over an instant of time – the next search that happens, or if you refresh your browser or go to the next page of results, and the auction has already changed.

3. So the best data you can ever acquire is going to be a series of averages over a specific time period, and the longer the better to avoid glitches. So it’s overall trends you need to follow, rather than snapshots which could go up and down quite a bit.

Maybe the only way to ensure maximum consistency and Impression Share (for an individual advertiser) would be to be in the happy position (with full comprehension of profitability of course) of being able to set a huge daily budget guaranteed to buy every click on the market (and then some), a high bid price to ensure consistently top position in the auction, accelerated delivery, for exact match only with a single ad.

I wonder if anyone’s ever been able to do that? (I bet they have). I’d love to see those reports!

Seems to me that sometimes we actually can expect “too much” transparency from Google, and that they have a highly automated machine which even *they* cannot fully explain all the results from, or offer reporting or tools which can help us dig deeper.

They are still developing and refining it after all. I cite the Ads Diagnostic tool which is a great (fairly) recent functionality, but why should it be a painful, time-consuming and bug-ridden process which you can’t run as a scheduled report? I expect (or hope) that will eventually appear, as many things eventually do (remember when we could not even schedule our campaigns? I go back more than 5 years with all this…)

So AdWords sometimes seems to me to be a bit more like Quantum Mechanics than we would actually prefer (by observing the experiment, you actually participate in it, and alter it without meaning to), and that sometimes we may need to go a little easier on our opinion of Google – after all, there’s no other system like it!

And this video by Dr. Varian *graphically* demonstrates how critically important Quality Score is in governing your Ad position (AdRank), and Cost Per Click.

So, not only is it important to optimise your AdWords performance through

• bid price management to individual keyword level (yes – all of them, and it’s easily done)
• “Peel and Stick” into ever smaller ad groups (I have Campaigns with thousands of Ad Groups, and they get up to 100% CTR)
• Ad Texts targeted to keywords in Ad Headlines, description lines and display urls

but now, Quality Score has to be targeted for optimisation also, and that involves your website and landing pages too.

Remember “Traffic is for Show, Conversions is for Dough”. If you’ve got a “concrete website” – you’re in serious trouble…

The top Quality Score of “10″ is now on your weekly optimisation “to-do list” …

Comments and feedback most welcome…

Start making AdWords – WORK

Contact me today.

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"I notice that some adwords ads have bold words in their headings. How do I achieve that?"

a good question with an easy answer – include your keywords in the headline.

In fact, without overdoing it, it’s very important to include keywords wherever possible and appropriate in your ad.

They are then bolded and invite a higher response rate from users seeing your ad.

You benefit from a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) and Google will reward your ad with higher positions, meaning you can pay less.

So always ensure you have keywords somewhere in your ad, and experiment to see what works best – sometimes even small changes have big improvements.

Oh, and don’t forget to always test at least two ads against each other to see which works best for CTR – make sure you set your campaign to ad delivery Rotate (not Optimise) so the statistics are accurate.

Read all Google AdWords Tips here

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Q. When is a Keyword, Not a Keyword?
 

A. when it’s rare and exotic!

You Can’t See Your AdWords Ad.

Why Not?

You just uploaded new keywords. Often there will be a short delay while Google analyses them

If they are "rare and exotic", Google may pause them before running.

By this, I mean phrase and exact match types with 3, 4, 5 or longer words in them ("long-tail" keywords).

This is based on their match types, and what Google already knows about their historical performance with other AdWords users.

It’s best to quote Google directly.

This from my Google Account Manager:

"Many of the keywords you are using in other campaigns have been flagged as low-traffic keywords and have temporarily stop entering the ad auction. This state is only temporary and these keywords will be reactivated automatically if we find that they could start delivering traffic.

Often long keywords in phrase or exact have low search volumes. You may wish to consider editing your keyword lists. "

You can always view keyword status by hovering your mouse over the magnifying glass to the right hand side of the keyword when logged in to your account.

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Q. When is a Keyword, Not a Keyword?
 

A. when it’s a negative!

You Can’t See Your AdWords Ad.

Why Not?

One of your Negative keywords is suppressing it.

You’re using negatives – right?

If you’re using any broad or phrase match keywords in your Campaigns, this is seriously important.

Only exact match keywords are exempt from this.

Negative keywords are a highly advanced area, since there actually exist 8 different types of them.

Yes, EIGHT different types of negative keywords, with extremely subtle effects.

I will be writing an advanced user guide about them in the future.

Get an overview with this article about AdWords negative keywords.

If you want to know more, contact me at the Help Desk

You can always view keyword status by hovering your mouse over the magnifying glass to the right hand side of the keyword when logged in to your account.

This will clearly indicate if a negative keyword is suppressing your ad.

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Q. When is a Keyword, Not a Keyword?
 

A. when it’s Inactive!

You Can’t See Your AdWords Ad.

Why Not?

If your keyword Quality Score is Poor, your bid price will be inflated.

Quality Score was introduced to weed out people trying to game the system and building automated, rubbishy websites with no real value.

Google prizes relevance – always, and above all.

What’s bad for uusers, is bad for Google, and they won’t tolerate it. Even at the expense of income.

If you don’t bid enough on the keyword, or at Ad Group default level, the keyword is flagged Inactive and you have to meet the minimum bid to revive it.

Quality Score has many factors, not all public knowledge, and Google introduce revisions to it all the time (like their patented Search algorithm).

You can turn on the Quality Score indicator in your ad group display.

Generally, if you have a decent and authentic website, with good, original content, inbound and outbound links, things will be ok.

But you must then carefully match your keywords, ads, and landing pages.

That’s in everyone’s interests.

You can always view keyword status by hovering your mouse over the magnifying glass to the right hand side of the keyword when logged in to your account.

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Q. When is a Keyword, Not a Keyword?
 

A. when it’s invisible!

You Can’t See Your AdWords Ad.

Why Not?

If your bid price is too low, your AdRank will suffer.

So your ads will languish low down in the list.

No one will see them if they are too low down.

So no one will click and your CTR will suffer.

This is a downward spiral to disaster, unless you’re using it as a deliberate strategy for keyword research, as I teach here).

You can see each keyword position showing in the statistics.

Generally you don’t want to be below position 6, or you’re then "below the fold" and people will have to scroll down to see you.

Google Analytics can tell you what each ad is earning at what actual display position – highly recommended (and free).

I once saw an ad at Position 401 (really). Who’s seeing it and clicking? No one!

You can always view keyword status by hovering your mouse over the magnifying glass to the right hand side of the keyword when logged in to your account.

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Q. When is a Keyword, Not a Keyword?
 

A.  when it’s a cheap-skate!

You Can’t See Your AdWords Ad.

Why Not?

If your daily budget is too low, your ad delivery will be "throttled" to space your ads out evenly during the day for maximum exposure (unless you deliberately set your campaign to "accelerated").

This will be exacerbated if you’ve also used Position Preference.

So sometimes your ads will show, sometimes they won’t.

You can check your Budget is OK (or not) by editing your campaign settings and checking Google’s suggested Budget.

If there’s a major Budget discrepancy, you will get a Budget Alert showing up on your Campaign overview page.

You can always view keyword status by hovering your mouse over the magnifying glass to the right hand side of the keyword when logged in to your account.

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Q. When is a Keyword, Not a Keyword?
 

A. when it’s Politically Incorrect!

You Can’t See Your AdWords Ad.

Why Not?

Google’s url policy is now being rigidly enforced.

You have to be using the same root url in your display url as your destination url.

No more redirects

Your ad will be Disapproved if you are trying the old Affiliate method of not owning your url, but redirecting to another.

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