Who Am I, According to Google Ads? Who Am I, According to the Web? Who Do I Want to Be? Over on Hacker News, I noticed this headline: See what Google knows about you.
Now that’s a pretty compelling promise, so I clicked. It took me to this page: Ah, the Google ad preferences page. It’s been a while since I’ve visited this place. It gives you a limited but nonetheless interesting overview of the various categories and demographic information Google believes reflect your interests (and in a way, your identity, or “who you are” in the eyes of an advertising client). Google Introduces “AdWords Express” for Local Businesses. It’s a known fact that Google is pushing to get into the local advertisement ring.
After their massive offer to Groupon was declined last year, Google went on to create “Google Offers,” a service that – well, looked shockingly like Groupon. Additionally, Google’s AdWords and Places have been pushing for new features and pitching to local businesses, all in the hopes of getting a foothold in the local business arena. Google Study: PPC Ads Do NOT Cannibalize Your Organic Traffic. Does Paid Search Really Cannibalize Your Organic Traffic?
Though I’ve never met him personally, I admit to being a big Hal Varian fan. For those who don’t recognize the name, Dr. Varian is the Chief Economist at Google and like me, one of the oldest guys in his company. Over the past few years, he and his team of researchers have made my life simpler by providing pithy answers to some of search’s mythically difficult questions, like “How do search auctions work?”
And “Does ad position effect conversion rates?” Last week, his team at Google released the results of their research that answers a question that paid search managers across the world get asked on a regular basis: “Why the [bleep] are we advertising on our own [bleeping] brand terms when we are ranked #1 for those [bleepety-bleep-bleeping] terms already? What Are The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords? Google makes a heck of a lot of money from online advertising.
In fact, 97 percent of Google’s revenue, which totaled $33.3 billion in the past twelve months, comes from advertising. WordStream, a venture capital-backed provider of hosted software that automates most of the manual work involved with creating and optimizing both paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns, has done some research to discover which keyword categories fetch the highest costs per click (CPC) in Google’s AdWords solution. Google Soliciting AdWords Clients To Yellowbook. A WebmasterWorld thread has AdWords advertisers complaining that they received emails from Google pitching the services of an AdWords reseller named Yellowbook.
The email reads: Hello from Google! For a limited time, Yellowbook will set up a new AdWords account just for you and build your online advertising campaigns at no charge.* And even better, you get a $100 Google AdWords credit to get started. This is a great opportunity for you to have Yellowbook professionally manage your AdWords campaigns. Professionally managed AdWords campaigns created and built by Yellowbook Pay only if you exhaust your $100 credit and choose to continue with Yellowbook*No up-front costs and cancel at anytimeOffer expires July 31, 2011 Just call Yellowbook at 866-306-9060 or visit [webreach....] yellowbook com/tryus to take advantage of this offer right away. Is Google Soliciting YOUR Clients to Yellowbook? Google AdWords forum at WebmasterWorld. There’s a perfect ad for everyone. It’s been an exciting year in the display advertising business—the movement of media online and the emergence of new technologies are causing incredible growth, and we’re investing significantly to help improve display advertising for publishers, advertisers and users.
But I believe we’re poised to make even greater advances in the years ahead. We’re at the beginning of a user-focused revolution, where people connect and respond to display ads in ways we’ve never seen before. This was the subject of a keynote I gave this morning at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Innovation Days @ Internet Week entitled “There’s a perfect ad for everyone.”
You can view the recording at google.com/watchthisspace. In the speech, I made six predictions about how display advertising will change for the better by 2015: The number of display ad impressions will decrease by 25 percent per person. Google Offers Fact Sheet Favorites. Google AdSense Now Forbids IFRAME Use. How Mobile Searchers Are Changing Keyword Research. Many analysts are making the case for separate device targeting in mobile paid search these days, but due largely to the subtlety of the differences in natural search results, too many SEOs are under the mistaken impression that desktop and mobile SEO are one in the same.
Because this ignorance affects all of us by not giving us the tools we need to target mobile users effectively, I’m using a few columns to make the differences crystal clear. In my last column, I started to make the case for how SEO changes when targeting mobile searchers, starting with the 14 differences between desktop and smartphone search results in Google that I was able to spot easily. Today, I’m going to focus on keyword targeting, and how mobile searches could be affecting your bottom line today. Searches Without Keywords First, a scenario to consider: a business traveler is having a beer in the hotel bar after the first day of a conference. Absolutely not. Context Changes Meaning Of Queries. Google To Begin Charging For Directions Location Extensions. Google announced they will begin charging for searchers clicking on the directions of the location extensions found on some AdWords ads.
Location extensions add an address and phone number to your Google AdWords ads. In the past, clicking on a phone number via your mobile phone to call the advertiser or clicking on an address to bring up directions to the advertiser cost that advertiser nothing. Yes, clicking on the phone number was one thing Google eventually started charging for but not for driving directions. The Unexpected Consequences Of Higher Quality Scores. Quality score can drive the success or failure of your paid search keywords, and the two best known impacts of quality score are the effect it has on text ad position and cost-per-click: Ad position is determined by Ad Rank which is calculated as bid x quality score.CPC is calculated by dividing the Ad Rank of the next highest advertiser by your quality score (and rounding up to the nearest $.01).
But before fighting for position or even worrying about CPC, each keyword must earn eligibility into the real-time auction that takes place when someone enters a search query that Google deems potentially relevant to your keyword. There are some interesting dynamics in that part of the process that are worth understanding if you really want to optimize your AdWords account and maximize your results. In part 1 of this series, we looked at how quality score helps you to focus on resolvable issues in your account, and warn you about keywords where success may be difficult.
YouTube “First Watch” Creates Massive Reach For Video Ads. A very long time ago Google was trying to find alternatives to pre-roll to monetize YouTube videos.
Google-sponsored consumer research in 2007 found that users don’t like pre-roll. But that’s ancient history. Today Google is trying to find more ways to generate and capture display and video ad revenue, which it views as a massive growth opportunity for the company. And YouTube is in the center of that opportunity. Google AdWords Enables New Account Creation Without Email & Passwords. Facebook Like Button Bug Caused Surge In Google AdSense Income? A month ago there was a bug with the Facebook Like button. It was reported to have an impact on some user's analytics packages but I didn't hear much from AdSense publishers on this topic.
A WebmasterWorld thread has one publisher claiming he saw a huge spike in AdSense income when the bug was happening and then a huge decline in that earnings once the bug was fixed. He shared a chart showing the traffic just from the Facebook Like button: Confirmed: Google To Begin Charging For Some Calls From PC Ads. After getting many advertisers hooked on reports on phone calls originating from their AdWords ads, Google will begin charging $1.00 for calls completed using the unique number it provisions, but solely when the call originates from someone using a computer who dials the number themselves from a phone. When the call is from a mobile device, or someone on a PC calls from the computer itself by clicking, the standard click charges apply. Previously, the calls dialed on a phone were free, as they didn’t involve a click, per se. Only advertisers using call metrics have their phone numbers appear on PCs, otherwise click-to-call ads exclusively appear on mobile devices.
Google had sent out an e-mail to clients telling them about this change, and also confirmed to me that it will begin charging. A company representative told me more details would be released when the new pricing policy is formally announced. Google AdWords Mass Suspending More Accounts? Search + Social Media Increases CTR By 94 Percent: Report. A new report from agency GroupM and comScore details the degree to which search and social media have become intertwined in the purchase path that consumers take across the Internet. The report is a follow-up to a similar study done in 2009. GroupM and comScore looked at consumer behavior associated with purchase decisions in the electronics/telecommunications and consumer packaged goods categories. They found that while search dominates social media among consumers making buying decisions — nearly 60 percent of cases that end in a purchase begin with search – social media play an increasingly important role during consideration and especially after a purchase is made.
The report found that “40 percent of consumers who use search in their path to purchase are motivated to use social media to further their decision making process.” Step-by-Step Instructions For Testing Low Volume Ad Copy. Ad copy testing is essential for anyone running a paid search account. Testing ad copy in accounts in high traffic accounts is fairly easy, as you can add new ad copies to existing ad groups, wait, and then examine the metrics. However, in low volume accounts, testing is not nearly as easy, as it could take years to collect enough data to make statistical significant choices.
Therefore, you need to employ specific testing methodologies to understand how aspects of ad copy behave across multiple ad groups at once. Google’s Advertising Policies: A Plea For Understanding. Google Offers Beta – More Details. AdWords Advertisers Can Now Optimize By Conversions. Not All Google AdSense Publishers Are Crying Poor. We have been known to cover AdSense earnings complaints and earnings polls over the years. Most of the threads I see on AdSense are complaints that the publishers are not earning enough money. Truth be told, I skip 99% of them. So instead of covering a complaint thread on low AdSense earnings, let me cover a thread that complains about all the complaints.
Adwords Is Dying and Google Knows It (and they are doing something about it) Before you say it, I know what you're thinking. Mobile Searches Grew 130% On Google. Google: Mobile Growth Occurring Faster Than Expected. Google CEO Eric Schmidt says consumers’ adoption of the company’s mobile services has happened more quickly than executives expected. Schmidt, who is set to step down as CEO in April, spoke at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs. “It’s happening, and it’s happening faster,” he said. “We look at the charts internally, and it’s happening faster than all of our predictions.”
As an example, Schmidt told the audience that Google sees 200 million mobile playbacks of content on YouTube per day. Google Partner Brings Big Data To Product Search. Google Adwords Qualified Individuals Group News. How To Use Automated Rules In Google AdWords. When I first started down this 6-lane highway called Online Marketing over six years ago, we used an absolutely archaic bid management software whose name escapes me. The Google AdWords Ad Marketplace Is Not Rational, But You Should Be.