SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

I heard a story last week about how someone has setup an AdWords campaign to advertise a charity website without the charities knowledge. The sole intention of the campaign is to gain a high CTR for non-competitive keywords in order to increase their own account’s overall quality score!

While this is quite a sneaky black hat technique it’s clear how it can be very effective. The charities landing page should have a high quality score anyway and if fairly non-competitive, brand name/relevant keywords are bid upon it’s possible that well-known brands will achieve a CTR in the region of 40%+ at a very low CPC. In the long-term the ad spend for this should easily be covered by the overall CPC savings.

This does sound unethical but at the same time the charities are benefiting from extra free traffic and this does seem to comply with Google’s link policy so is it actually that bad? Personally I think the charities should be made aware of this by the advertiser and if there are no complaints it shouldn’t be a problem.

I found this Google ad on LinkedIn today which is an excellent example of why you shouldn’t use dynamic keyword insertion in your PPC campaigns:

TripAdvisor are obviously using the content network (either site or keyword targeted) to display their ads here but the ad title was generated from the page content where the word “Stuart” appeared on my profile page. The content network generally has a very low clickthrough rate anyway but having so little control over the ad title is likely to see this drop much further.

This looks like another one to add to the list of content network mistakes.

I’ve just started running a Google AdWords campaign again for SEOptimise and noticed that there are some inactive keywords. What I found surprising is that one of these keywords is the exact match of UK SEO services, a term which has a poor quality score despite being used within the ad title and also ranking at #18 organically on Google.com with UK SEO services at #4.

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be enough for Google though, perhaps this is a result of the new top ad placement formula as some people have spotted “keywords that have a very high max CPC”.

I’ve rearranged the homepage title tag slightly to use “SEO Services UK” rather than the previous version which separated these keywords, hopefully this will be enough to pass the landing page quality score check and get this upto at least an OK quality score instead!

I just noticed this new suggestion on Google AdWords:

Google Maps is a great way of getting your ads displayed online to a local audience so I’d recommend taking advantage of this and setting up your own local business ads.

I’ve found the content network is an excellent method of getting large quantities of cheap traffic converting at a positive ROI. But in my experience most pay per click campaigns I’ve taken over have not maximised their performance on the content network, below are the main reasons why I’ve found accounts seem to under perform.

• Disregarding the content network completely
  Many advertisers focus only on the search network, I think Anton Konikoff’s quote about getting traffic from contextual ads at SES San Jose yesterday sums up why it’s always worth trying to target this audience; “Provides access to everyone who reads online (not just those who search)”.
• Not setting individual content network bids
  Some people don’t check the “Let me set separate prices for content clicks” campaign setup box, the quality of traffic from the content network is never (or at least very rarely) as high as the search network so you should definitely be setting separate bids here.
• Targeting all worldwide locations
  Click fraud for contextual ads is a commonly discussed issue and is one of the main reasons people choose to stay away from the content network completely. I normally begin by selecting the main English speaking countries (US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia). For high budget account’s it also makes sense to separate countries and regions into individual campaigns so that it’s performance can be tracked and managed individually.
• Not splitting keywords into small ad groups
  This has obvious advantages for the search network as you can use more specifically targeted ad descriptions for each keyword, but it also helps to monitor the cost per conversion of content network clicks more closely.
• Failing to test, test, test
  This is probably the final rule in every search marketing list but trial and error testing is very important to monitor how new changes have affected the account. Keeping a close eye on the cost per conversion figure will help you to set bids based upon it’s performance to keep the campaign cost-effective.

These are all fairly basic tips but I’ve found these changes have a positive impact upon many account’s advertising on the content. To improve this further you could also exclude negative sites and setup pay per action (PPA) and site targeted campaigns.

There was an alert on my Google AdWords account this morning informing me that you can now “Choose to pay by direct debit to have your AdWords payments debited directly from your bank account.”

This is great news for advertisers who don’t qualify for monthly invoicing as creditcard payment problems seem to be quite common. Here’s some more info about switching from credit card to direct debit from the Google AdWords help centre.

I’ve noticed a significant drop in UK web traffic stats this week which seems to be a result of the country being hit by floods.

There’s been an obvious difference for a couple of websites who’s traffic is largely from England and many of my AdWords clients have also seen a drop in clicks for UK targeted campaigns due the lower search volume this week.

Floods in Ock Street, Abingdon:

Being in Abingdon, right on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, we’re in one of the worst hit areas and a lot of people here can’t get into work so that’s obviously affecting things, I still have internet access so can’t use the same excuse! The floods are supposed to start clearing up now so hopefully it will improve for everyone affected and the UK internet traffic should pick back up soon.

I find it strange that Google AdWords Website Optimiser, which was launched back in October last year isn’t accessible via a client manager login. Perhaps this is because it’s still in beta but I think both advertisers and account managers could find this useful to improve the performance of an account.

Here’s the current message which is displayed when I click on a client’s Website Optimiser tab:
“Website Optimiser: Not accessible
You are not able to see Website Optimiser because you are signed in to AdWords with a My Client Centre master account. In order to use the Website Optimiser tool, please sign in with your client account.”

Do Microsoft have a UK internet strategy? If you search for any of their products on Google.co.uk (with the UK filter applied) it certainly doesn’t look like it! Below are some fine examples of where Microsoft should be at the top for both natural and paid search listings but surprisingly appear in neither. This is happening because they use a .com domain suffix hosted in the US, making use of www.microsoft.co.uk would get them listed naturally for all of the below searches and very likely #1 for each term, saving them money on both AdWords clicks and the direct sales from retail websites!

Google UK search for Microsoft:

Google UK search for Microsoft adCenter:

Google UK search for Microsoft adCenter:

Google UK search for Microsoft Office:

Google UK search for Microsoft Windows:

And it doesn’t end here, Overture’s UK keyword research tool shows the huge popularity of Microsoft searches in the UK. But instead of seeing Microsoft.com listed, users are given the choice of review or e-commerce websites instead. In many cases Amazon ranks #1 (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) so people may choose to buy second-hand software from Amazon Marketplace or eBay instead, costing Microsoft thousands if not millions of income from new sales.

While generally it’s good practice to use one domain name (consolidating all inbound links) in this case using www.microsoft.co.uk could have a massive impact on the UK search market, redirecting to www.microsoft.com/en/gb does little for their UK search traffic as the domain is hosted in the US.

The UK search traffic is obviously converting sales, you just have to look at the sponsored links to see how many sites bid upon Microsoft keywords. Interestingly many of these use the trademarked term “Microsoft” within the ad title or description, this seems to be appearing because the ad’s are using dynamic keyword insertion to get around the Google AdWords trademark policy but if Microsoft aren’t even bidding on the keywords themselves they’re less likely to be concerned about the sites which are.

Perhaps Bill Gates has made far too much money by now to be worrying about Microsoft’s UK sales and search traffic!

Google began making changes to FeedBurner today by making TotalStats and MyBrand free, this is great news and I’ve requested the MyBrand RSS domain control change.

What I’m interested on seeing is if the next step is to integrate Google Analytics with FeedBurner Stats. I posted back in February about how FeedBurner will add RSS conversion tracking in the future so hopefully this will be released shortly as it would be an excellent feature for marketers. Tracking RSS subscriptions as conversions using pay-per-click is currently very difficult to estimate but this could become much simpler if Google Analytics is combined with FeedBurner Stats, especially seeing that the Google AdWords/Analytics integration has improved greatly since the recent update. This feature would also be a nice addition for Google too seeing that it’s something Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft adCenter couldn’t offer so easily.