Google AdWords Proves Santa is Real.

Father Christmas is real – according to Google AdWords he is a TradeMark.

We know Google is really useful, but this takes Market Research to a whole new level…

Wait until I tell my children it wasn’t Grandma after all…

OK , come on Google – you can’t be serious!

Santa is a TradeMark? No one else can bid on "Father Christmas" as a keyword?

Say it ain’t so…

Have you been ripped off?

How to tell, and what to do next…

If you are approached by any business claiming to be able to get you a fast, guaranteed ranking on Page One of Google, and get unlimited clicks for a low, fixed monthly budget, you are being deceived.

Here’s why:

• yes, you can get on page one of Google, quickly, but on the left side of the page only if you have a website that conforms to strict search engine optimisation structure in line with google’s ranking algorhythm – that excludes most websites, and many of the rankings you see are accidental and usually easy to do better for
• you must have a well-structured site that people and search engines alike will find useful, relevant, and easy to use to solve their problems
• yes, you can achieve a page one listing with adwords sponsored links, and if you bid high enough for your keywords you will be shown on the first page on the right hand side or at the top

But some unscrupulous parties are offering deals which, if they sound too good to be true, probably are.

Don’t fall for them if:

• they don’t provide a qualified individual or qualified company link from Google’s website (example here)
• they offer guaranteed first page ranking without stating which side of the results page you’ll be seen on
• you don’t open the adwords account yourself and can see how its set up
• you don’t choose and agree your own keywords with their help
• you aren’t shown how many searches are likely per month
• you don’t get shown estimated click costs for your keywords
• they make claims about profits (they don’t own your website or your business, you do)
• they accept you into their program without reviewing your website
• they don’t tell you what data you will be shown
• they make any claims about getting cheaper clicks from google for some reason
• they make any claims about ranking better on the left hand side of the page as a result of paid advertising on the right

Researching and setting up a paid advertising campaign is a serious undertaking, not to be entered into lightly.

The market activity data it will generate is just as important as any tangible or perceived results from website visitors like leads and sales.

So to think you may get something of value for just £5.00 in terms of advertising online, is in our opinion, a little far-fetched. Often, just a few clicks will cost you more than this.

If you have a website, you need visitors – it’s that simple.

Google AdWords is the best way to get them. But only if done right.

Right?

For a review of your marketplace, your website, and insider online advertising intelligence, contact us today.

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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What is the AdWords Daily Budget, how does it work, how much do I pay – and how much will I earn?

Every campaign is governed by it’s own Daily Budget, an amount of money you are willing to spend with Google every day the campaign runs.

There is no minimum amount, although it’s sensible to buy enough clicks per day that will stand a chance of creating a meaningful conversion event (lead, sale, enquiry, phone call, download) on your website within a reasonable timeframe.

Or it could take you ages to find out whether your website converts at an acceptable rate.

The value of the conversion is, of course, totally down to what your website is selling.

And the amount of clicks you can buy is dependent on how much each click costs.

If the average cost per click (CPC) is £1.00 and your daily budget is £10.00, you can buy up to 10 clicks (10 visitors).

When your daily budget is used up, your ads stop showing until the next calendar day, as determined by the schedule settings on your campaign.

How much you pay per day will vary – some days slightly less than your daily budget, some days slightly more.

But Google guarantee that, over a 30-day period, you will never be charged more than 30 times your daily budget.

If they overshoot, you get a credit back on your account.

So this puts you completely in control of how much you want to pay Google per month.

And why it is so important to know your numbers and make sure that what you spend comes back with friends attached.

In this game, he who knows his numbers – wins.

The formula we follow is simple: "Traffic + Conversion = Profits"

Once you get more money back than you put in, how much money are you going to put in? (Answer: "all of it").

Then the concept of "budgets" goes away.

For most advertisers (and marketers) that’s incomprehensible.

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

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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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AdWords – otherwise you just wasted money and time trying to get traffic for untested keywords, and on an untested website.

Everybody seems to think that getting "free" traffic from natural or organic rankings in Google, by using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques is the best thing to do.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. They are completely complimentary.

Firstly, SEO is not "free traffic" – you still have to invest time and money either figuring it out for yourself, buying software tools to help, or hiring someone (and there are a *lot* of shady organisations out there preaching this, so be warned, and be careful!)

Next, if you have not tested your keywords, your ads and your website’s ability to convert a visitor into a profitable action – what on earth is the point?

You can’t guess this stuff, you have to track, test and improve on it first. Only AdWords can give you instant, targeted traffic on demand to try things out with to see what works, and what doesn’t.

Yes – organic rankings *are* the final destination, but ONLY when you know they have value (or can achieve them in 6 minutes with no effort – see the header graphic for this article).

Finally, no web page (not "website", there are only web pages to the Search Engines) in the world can be optimised for every possible keyword out there, and AdWords serves to plug the gaps that SEO cannot completely address.

And if you can (profitably) occupy TWO positions on Google’s prime Real Estate, rather than just ONE – whyever would you not?

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My keyword search was "trilby hat ebay" – so what’s this?

This is a generic ad "dressed up" (pun intentional) and pretending to be relevant when it clearly isn’t – and caught in the act due to advertiser incompetence.

In fact, due to keyword expansion, both Google and the advertiser are guilty by association, but – one knows what’s going on, the other doesn’t.

Love eBay? I don’t think so…!

Read all Ad Bloopers here

Indexed in Google in 8 minutes

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How to display your AdWords Ads anywhere in the world you choose to – from Countries, to Metropolitan areas, Cities, Towns, and Customised areas.

It’s not always realised how much control AdWords gives you over where your ads can appear.

Many new advertisers simply want to get as much visibility of their ads as quickly as possible, but this is often a mistake as different locations have quite different responses due to:

• time zone
• language
• vernacular (think "vacation" rather than "holiday")
• culture

To choose specific locations to show your ads, in your Campaign settings you can browse, set or search, set a map point, or even draw a desired area.

Location targeting works by determining the user’s PC IP address; it’s not 100% infallible, but it’s the best system there is and highly reliable.

With it, Google AdWords becomes the ultimate in Local Classified Advertising.

If you’re paying good money for Yellow Pages or local newsprint ads, with indetermine results, you may want to reconsider your strategy.

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Google Local Business Centre Becomes More Important Than Ever Before for Advertisers with Location-Based Businesses Who May be Using Traditional Yellow Pages Advertising.

Launching in the UK within the next week or so, Google’s new extension to AdWords advertising dynamically transforms your text ads into local ads carrying your relevant addresses.

With multiple addresses, you can have additional highly-relevant ads targeted exactly to your location for a local search audience.

This means your advertising reach will increase to Google.co.uk, Google Maps, and Google Earth.

Your ads can show anywhere your campaigns target geographically, depending on the user’s search and location, and displaying your ads with any of your relevant office locations (or without if you choose).

To set this up, either enter your addresses into your Local Business Centre account, or put them directly into your AdWords Campaign settings

Benefits of Location Extensions include:

• Increased ad relevance by effortlessly adding location information
• Scale your Campaigns by letting Google create multiple variations from a single text ad
• Save time by letting Google do ad editing automatically
• Fine tune extensions to work at Ad or Campaign level

Use Location Extensions for your Campaigns if:

• You want to use the same ad text for all your business locations
• You want to direct all your ads to the same landing page
• You want to create a lot of ads quickly
• You want to see statistics aggregated across your locations

Use Location Extension for your Ads if:

• You want each ad to direct to a specific landing page
• You want to associate a single address with a specific message
• You always want the business location to appear with your ad
• You want separate statistics for each ad and location pair

Overriding Location Extensions Settings

• You can override location extensions when you create a new text ad
• Ads will default to showing to a 20 mile radius around your chosen address. This radius is customizable
• Override settings to use location-specific messaging and to direct users to specific pages on your site

This article indexed in Google in 11 minutes

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Since June 15th 2009, Google is allowing advertisers not only to bid on Trademarked keywords, but also to allow them in the ad text itself.

For many years, Google AdWords advertisers have been able to bid on keywords which were trademarked terms owned by well-known brands.

This has been a highly contentious issue with many court cases along the way.

We read of another recent one on July 10, with Rosetta Stone suing Google for trademark infringement.

So why has Google recently relaxed its trademark policy to allow advertisers (in the USA) to include keywords not only in their lists but in their ad texts as well?

As with everything they do, Google believes that this is in the interests of the users, who now benefit from a wider range of choices when looking for goods and services online.

Unless I am "married" to the brand I am looking for, I am usually going to be interested in alternative products from other suppliers — and I’m probably not alone in that.

So when I’m looking in the search results I’m interested in seeing more than just categories of products, but also actual products and others I might be interested to learn more about.

Restricting advertisers from talking about specific brands is not in the user’s best interests as he wants to make an informed decision about all the alternatives.

So I believe that only "insecure" brands need have anything to worry about.

And also, if I’m an authorised reseller of the products and services, why should I not be able to specifically advertise them on the trademark owner’s behalf — don’t they get more sales that way?

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