Posted on January 29, 2012 by Cindy Wilson
It's an update!
Enhancements or Detractions
Most businesses work hard for their customers. We aim to make our clients happy with the products and services we provide. This means we sometimes make exceptions, work extra hours to meet deadlines or provide extra personal time and training. But overall, we try to be consistent in what we do and when we have to make a change to a policy or procedure, we let our clients know about it.
Google doesn’t seem to work that way. We are amazed at how often tools, procedures and functionality just change without any notice. Sometimes it’s for the better such as the Google Ad Preview Tool discussed in a previous blog post. But most of the time, the change provides less functionality and just makes us frustrated. Within just the past few weeks, here are just a few of the different changes we’ve noticed:
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Posted on December 22, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
If you advertise using Google AdWords, you want to know where your ad will be positioned and how it looks on the search results page. Typing your keyword into Google Search will allow you to do this. However there is a “cost” associated with this action, even when you don’t click on your ad. If you look at the page showing your ad, you generate an impression for your ad. When impressions go up but the number of clicks doesn’t, it reduces your Click-Through-Rate (CTR). A reduced CTR negatively impacts your Quality Score, which can cause Google to raise your Cost Per Click. But if you click on your ad, in order to improve your CTR, then you will have to pay for that click.
As an advertiser, you also may want to see how your ads appear in different locations, such as other parts of the country, or even in a different country.
In either situation, the best way to see your ad is to use a free tool that Google provides; an online tool aptly named the Google Ad Preview Tool. This tool allows you to “search for your ad just like you would on a regular Google search results page, without accruing any impressions.”
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Posted on May 6, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Privacy Requirement
Google has announced a new set of requirements for AdWords advertisers that go into effect on May 17, 2011. If you use AdWords to drive clicks to your website and you collect any kind of personal or financial information on your website, then these rules will apply to you.
Google will require AdWords advertisers to disclose the following before a person is asked to enter information on the site:
- How personal or financial information will be used.
- How users can opt-out later.
- That you use SSL security for collecting certain personal or financial data.
Google provides examples of what they mean by personal and financial information here.
You can read Google’s announcement, dated May 4, 2011, regarding the new policy here.
Posted on May 2, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Many Google Adwords advertisers have improved their Adwords ROI using Google’s Display Network because it allows them to extend their advertising reach and target prospects on contextually relevant websites that display Google ads. However, the contextual targeting has always been far from perfect and advertisers are often shocked to discover their ads appearing on non-contextually related web pages, parked domains and low quality sites. By “low quality sites” we mean MFA or Made-For-AdSense sites where the sole purpose is for the website owner to get a portion of the cost per click the Google advertiser pays. The more clicks, the more money they make. As you can imagine, the quality of traffic from sites like this is poor.
On the other hand, if a Display Network campaign is setup properly and with on-going optimization and vigilant blocking of poor quality sites, it can be quite profitable for the advertiser. Some of our clients have received more leads, at a lower cost per lead, from the Display Network than from Search.
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Posted on February 24, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Parked domain?
People who place ads though AdWords or Microsoft adCenter typically do so primarily because they want the chance to bring someone who has typed a relevant search query into Google, Yahoo or Bing to their website. What is not so well known is that roughly half of the money that is spent on AdWords or adCenter goes for clicks on ads that do not appear on search results pages, but instead appear on other websites.
AdWords and adCenter show ads on these non-search websites by default unless this feature is manually disabled. This approach, known as Contextual PPC, provides many more opportunities for ads to be seen and clicked than if they just appeared on search results pages, so it drives substantial revenue for Google and Microsoft, gives advertisers greater exposure, and helps website publishers monetize their content.
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Posted on February 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
place your effort on the overall goal
Improve Conversion Rates Through “Reverse Engineering”
Whenever we have been asked to troubleshoot an online campaign that isn’t working, the #1 problem we see is that most of the effort has been placed on driving traffic rather than the overall goal. In other words, instead of focusing on keywords or ads, you should begin by defining the desired result of your marketing activity or campaign. Is it a highly qualified lead? A sale?
Start at the end and work your way backwards. That’s what we mean by “reverse engineering.”
Let’s break down the process into a sequence of logical steps you can follow.
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Posted on January 6, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Who's clicking your PPC ads?
There are various types of click fraud in online advertising. One form involves competitors clicking on your Pay Per Click ads. They do this to waste your budget on worthless clicks, discouraging you from continuing to advertise online. With typical per-click charges ranging from a few dollars to tens of dollars, it doesn’t take long to burn someone’s daily budget and take their ads off the air.
While both Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter claim to refund charges for “suspicious” clicks, we have seen instances where consistent clicking by competitors has required manual requests for refunds. Both platforms allow IP address blocking of ads. Let’s review how this works to understand what can (and can’t) be accomplished with IP address blocking.
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Posted on December 16, 2010 by Hans Riemer
Are you trapped?
Recently we were called in to investigate a PPC account that had been migrated from Yahoo
Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter. Since moving to adCenter, the account experienced a significant drop in ROI. They were still getting plenty of clicks but those clicks weren’t converting, which was badly hammering their cost-per-acquisition.
The company sells Christmas decorations from their website. They have an excellent web analytics tool that can track individual incoming visitors (which Google Analytics does not do) so it didn’t take us long to spot quite a number of paid clicks that spent almost no time on the site. We looked at the referring URLs to see where the ads were appearing that sent these visitors and discovered something very interesting about Microsoft adCenter PPC that’s potentially costing advertisers some real money.
In a moment, we’re going to explain what is occurring and tell you how to fix it if it is happening to you. This affects advertisers using adCenter as well as those who previously used Yahoo Search Marketing, because YSM is now managed through adCenter.
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Web Analytics Tools – Which Tool Should You Use?
Posted on December 2, 2010 by Hans Riemer
In the first part of this series, Your Website is Talking to You – Are You Listening? Part 1 , we gave a brief introduction, history and description of different web analytics tools and explained the two main mechanisms by which they gather data from your website. In the second installment, we reviewed the main metrics and key features that various web analytics tools can provide. If you missed those articles, it might be wise to spend a few minutes reviewing them to come up to speed on the terminology before you dive into this analysis.
In this third and final article, we’re going to help you decide which web analytics tool is best for your needs. We will focus on three inexpensive (or free) tools: Google Analytics, IVA, and PhoneTracker.
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