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Its Friday afternoon, no one’s blogged on here for a while and I’ve been asked to step up to the plate without mentioning SpyFu. I should’ve been thinking of what to post for a few days now but I’m afraid I’ve been a bit distracted…

So, I’m sitting in a bar with a nice cool pint. I lean back in my chair and look around; what do I see?

That guy over there, he’s got one friend opposite him but he’s talking so the whole room can hear.”He’s not targeting his efforts” I think to myself, “expensive strategy but I guess he’s making a lot of impressions. I suppose his CTR can be quite low and he can still have a lot of success.” At this point I realise that AdWords has ruined my life but I can’t stop myself…

Thin skinny guy, black coat, black hair, band t-shirt. Leaning against the bar, nearly finished his drink. Looks like he’s watching the girls in the booth by the window.But he’s too slow, they’re leaving. Hang on, they’re not, some of them are just going to the toilet. But not all of them. Black haired guy finishes his drink and walks nervously over. There are two girls left, one them’s wearing a band t-shirt. I can’t hear what he says but I think “That’s more like it. He’s targeting his market”

Now who’s that? One guy, group of girls. The leggy blond doesn’t look particularly interested but one of her friends is flicking her hair and touching his arm. The guy is slowly ignoring the rest of the group and turning to face her. “Bidding too low” I remark, “he can’t keep his position with blondie.” Then I give him the benefit of the doubt; “placement targeting; he knows what converts best for him.”

Back to the skinny guy. He’s sitting on his own now; “high bounce rate?” I think as he gets up to go to the bar. But maybe not; band girl is coming out of the toilets, she looks at the booth where her friends are and then scans the rest of the bar. “Rookie error, he should’ve 301′d to his new location.” The girl pauses, lonely by the toilet door but not for long; “Are you looking for someone?” I hear. “Is that bidding on a competitors keyword?” I think. Skinny guy comes back around the bar with two drinks, his new friend smiles and walks over. “Brand recognition in action. And he gave her an incentive for a repeat visit.”

I see my own date in the door so I stand up and wave. I’m unusually tall, so my ad copy stands out from the crowd. I know she like this place, one of her friends told me, I hope just being here is good enough landing page optimisation. How forward should I be? Calls to action are good right? Perhaps it is at this point that my analogy breaks down, I don’t want to be too forward. Still, I hope I get a conversion.

I was doing some keyword maintenance today and noticed something new when I hovered over the magnifying glass tool beside a keyword:

It looks like Google are being more explicit with their quality scores. I haven’t noticed this before but rather than being an accidental leak this time it’s been integrated into Google’s changes to make quality score more transparent.

I’m not sure how much this will change advertiser behaviour. Perhaps knowing that a keyword is nearly “Ok” will encourage people to optimise their landing pages and ad descriptions further, rather than just pausing.

More information is also given for keywords with poor quality scores:

In this case we are told that no ad will be run on broad match, but that the ad can be triggered on a phrase match.

How will this new information affect the way you run your AdWords campaigns?

Following XL Airways going into administration last week and yesterday’s announcement that Lehman Brothers are filing for bankruptcy, many competitors have quickly setup PPC ads targeting brand queries to take advantage of this.

Below are the ads appearing on Google for XL and ads have quickly started appearing today for Lehman Brothers as well:

This obviously wouldn’t have been possible before Google opened up brand bidding, but is this a good thing? Personally I’m quite impressed with how quickly competitors have acted and surely for people searching for alternative flights to XL this has to be useful.

Hi, I’m Richard Fergie, the newest guy at SEOptimise. I’ve been with the company a week now and I’ve just taken (and passed) the Google AdWords exam. I’ve been asked to do a blog post about it so (in the best SEO blog tradition) I decided on doing a top 10 list of things I’ve found useful. Here goes…

1. The Official Resource
The AdWords Learning Centre. If you are a visual or aural learner head straight for the multimedia lessons. If you’re in a hurry, need a quick reference or learn best by reading there are also text lessons. The AdWords learning centre is Google’s own training tool for AdWords so I’d say it is the best resource for presenting information on all of Google’s ad policies in a clear and concise way.
The Learning Centre breaks its course down into short sections (the longest unit is supposed to take 15 minutes) so it is easy to just do a bit at a time and there are also handy quizzes on each subsection.

2. More from the Horse’s Mouth
It’s also worth having a browse through the official AdWords blog to see what’s new in the world of PPC. As Google’s official mouthpiece this blog gives an insight into what Google thinks is important about AdWords. Pretty useful when you remember who sets the exam…

3. O’Reilly Books: Is There Anything They Don’t teach?
Google Advertising Tools published by O’Reilly. Most of this book is aimed at AdSense users; people trying to make money by allowing Google to place PPC ads on their websites. However, the final two sections are entitled “Working with AdWords” and “Using the AdWords APIs.” The APIs section is a lot more detailed than the AdWords Learning Centre and I have to say that most of it went over my head but the “Working with AdWords” section is very good for running you through all the basics of using AdWords.

4. Learning by Doing
I’ve been quite lucky in that I’ve been able to play around with SEOptimise’s own PPC campaign. Messing around like this is a great way of learning so if you do get the chance to even just look at someone else’s already running account I’d jump on it. Expect to see the SEOptimise campaign go from strength to strength now after Kevin actually reviews the ads and keywords for the first time in ages in order to check on my ‘improvements!’

5. Learn. Rank. Dominate. I’ve Got the First Part.
seobook.com turns up sooner or later whenever you are looking for SEO and PPC resources. They have a whole PPC training section of which I think the Pay Per Click 101 video is the most useful.

6. PPC Podcasts
More resources for those of you who are fed up with reading; check out webmasterradio.fm’s PPC-Rockstars which has short podcasts on a variety of PPC issues.

7. A Heroic Resource
The PPC Hero(s) promise “Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management.” Check out their best posts for some great tips and things to watch out for. They also have a very detailed quality score handbook.

8. More on Quality Scores
And speaking of quality score, there is a simple AdWords Quality Scores Factors Chart at the bgtheory.com blog. I had a few of questions on my AdWords exam about what sort of things influence quality scores and what sort of things are influenced by quality scores. This chart clarifies this in a very easy to read way.

9. Even More on Quality Scores
Another good quality score resource is from Redfly Marketing who do a mini case study with 10 Ways to Increase Your AdWords Quality Score. 3 out of 10 posts about quality score might seem excessive, but I think it’s fair to say that any aspect of AdWords that does not affect the quality score is affected by the quality score so getting your head around all the interlinked factors is good exam preparation.

10. And Finally…
I’ve got to mention ppcblog.co.uk, mainly because straight after my test I visited their trademark policy change post. I think the exam was slightly out of date in that it did not group the UK and Ireland in with the US and Canada with regard to trademark policy and after reading their blog post I know that I was right in thinking that the rules about bidding on restricted trademarks are the same in all four countries. Unfortunately I don’t know if I got the question right (by assuming the test just wasn’t up to date) or if I was barking up the wrong tree or even being led astray by a tricky examiner.

That’s all for now folks. Let me know what you think or if you have any other good resources for me to learn from.

The big talking point over the last week has been about Google’s decision to allow trademark bidding in the UK.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether allowing trademark bidding is a good or bad idea, I understand why Google would want to keep a good relationship with advertisers by preventing competitors bidding for their brand, like they did with Marks and Spencers in February. But from the perspective of an online retailer like Argos who previously had to sell products without being able to use trademarked terms such as iPod or Sony in their ad copy the new rule does make sense. Just imagine how difficult it would be to avoid using these terms in offline print advertising!

But despite what anyone else thinks it is Google’s policy, so whether advertisers and brands agree with this or not they will need consider the implications this has upon themselves or risk losing sales and traffic. The decision now lies with advertisers as to whether they choose to bid upon their competitors, but what can you do to protect your own brand?

SEO
You obviously should be ranking #1 organically for your brand name, but if in addition you can build the strength of your site so that it displays Google Sitelinks this is going to take up more valuable on-page real estate and distract users from clicking competitor ads.

Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management is possibly even more important now, if you can the control the top 10 natural listings with interesting content about your brand you can potentially reduce the clickthrough rates to competitors ads.

Bid for your own brand
If you didn’t previously bid on your own brand you probably should be now. As soon as you notice competitor ads appearing it’s important users find the brand they are looking for, clearly labelling the ad text as “Official Website” should also help to increase the CTR of your ad.

Set your own affiliate brand bidding rules
Affiliate websites generally don’t pay out on brand search referrals, this is because the likelihood of this leading to a sale is much higher. They now face the dilemma about how to deal with brand bidding on Google AdWords themselves, for example gadget website iwoot have taken an early step to announce they won’t payout on brand traffic.

Bid on your competitors
Many brands will take the stance “if their bidding on us, we’re going to bid on them!”. With the new rules there’s no reason you can’t do this, but perhaps if no-one is bidding on your brand you should be careful about who you annoy before bidding on popular brands as it may backfire.

So are you planning ahead for the trademark policy update? Are there any other strategies I’ve missed which can help a brand protect themselves or take advantage of the rule change?

I missed the official launch of Google demographic bidding last week, but noticed the option in my accounts campaign settings this morning.

This feature is available for UK advertisers and I’ve actually been able to set this up for a UK geo-targeted campaign, although as far as I was aware it’s only US data which is available for demographic bidding on US geo-targeted campaigns, maybe not?

Here’s a screenshot of the demographic campaign I setup (click for full-size image):

There’s also screen captures on Search Engine Roundtable to show the demographic targeting campaign setup for a US geo-targeted campaign.

I’ve only just set this up but I’ll run off a report and update this post in a couple of days to show any data and see if this is actually working in the UK too.

The Guardian newspaper have today written an article titled Is Google a Grinch or a good guy?, which asks many UK SEO’s (myself included) for their views on the recent Google paid link debate.

In my opinion the Google AdWords landing page quality score and PageRank paid link updates were definitely necessary and will only help to improve the relevancy and quality of both organic and sponsored Google listings. But perhaps the timing of the updates are questionable, the Google AdWords change in particular caused many advertisers a major loss in profits just before the Christmas period with many campaigns unable to stay cost-effective due to large increases in minimum bids.

The major issue I feel is that while Google have the right to prevent MFA (Made For AdSense) websites and paid listing directories from clearly profiting through their algorithm and PageRank indicator, they also catch some of the people who are not intentionally doing so. The roll-out of these changes takes time to perfect and in many cases the more selective paid “review” directories will be penalised initially, as could AdWords advertisers using Google AdSense as a secondary source of income, and with Christmas around the corner it’s probably not the best time of the year to be facing these sort of problems.

I’d be interested in hearing comments from anyone else regarding these issues, should Google consider it’s timing of updates more carefully? Can the short-term issues affecting websites within Google’s guidelines be prevented in the first place? If they delay necessary improvements will this harm the algorithm? Is there actually a good time to apply these updates anyway?

Google AdWords have today released a new feature which allows My Client Centre account managers to create campaign templates and share them with managed accounts.

The Google help centre has some information about the campaign templates, I’ve only created a very basic template but this does look like a very useful feature to speed up the setup process for new client accounts or similar campaigns.

I’ve created a quick guide to show how you can create and share campaign templates. The template setup follows the same process as creating a new campaign, it’s just created though the MCC account instead of the individual account. Each template can then be applied to quickly create a new campaign for a selected client account.

1) Create Campaign in Google AdWords Template Center
Please click all images for full-size versions:

2) Publish Campaign
Once you have created a campaign template you need to publish this by clicking into the campaign and selecting the publish button, changing the status from draft to published:

3) Select client and click “Template Library”
And once the campaign is published this will be available to apply to managed client accounts as part of their new template library:

4) Create Campaign from Template
All you need to do is set the campaign name, geo-targeting, URL, budget and start/end dates:

5) Save Campaign
Once the setup is saved, the new campaign will be added to the account and you’re ready to go!

Google AdWords seems to be rolling out some useful features recently, last week it was the snapshot date range comparison and today’s is the option to change number, date and time formatting.

This is a great addition for UK users to avoid any confusion between US and UK date formats.

Here’s the Google AdWords account alert (click for full-size/readable image):

Until now if you’ve heard about the Google AdWords dynamic keyword insertion it’s likely that it’s through a blog or forum, but last week the Google Help Centre added information to answer seven common questions about keyword insertion.

Personally I’ve found keyword insertion can be a great method of improving an adverts clickthrough rate by dynamically inserting the exact query string into the ads title, description or URL. The keywords searched for are also highlighted in bold which helps to draw further attention to your ad, potentially boosting it’s CTR.

The new information from Google is great as this clears up any misconceptions which people may of previously had about keyword insertion, making sure that advertisers have all the details they need to use this method effectively. One concern I had was how keyword insertion affects your ads quality score, for example if an ads quality score is calculated using the default text rather than the dynamically created version, but Google explains that “each keyword’s Quality Score is determined after the keyword is triggered and inserted into the ad seen by the user”.

There’s plenty more information in the Help Centre which is well worth a read even for people who have been using this tactic for a while.