Profits have been announced at $1.3 bn, with pay per click sales up a huge 42% to $5.2 bn. The volume of clicks on the PPC links has slowed in growth from 25% growth at the end of 2007 to only 1.8% growth in this first quarter. This announcement from Google is also the first occasion that more than half it’s PPC revenue comes from sources outside the US. This demonstrates that the European pay per click markets and competition are growing faster than the US. It would also point to some strong growth in some of the developing e-commerce market, as more businesses take up PPC campaigns and realise the potential of qualified traffic from pay per click.

The strong last quarter performance could shake Microsoft in to taking swifter action in their potential Yahoo take over. If Google’s dominance in PPC advertising continues, Microsoft may find themselves frozen out of the pay per click market completely.

Yahoo are continuing to hold out on the Microsoft bid, serving Google ads for some of their searches. While most see this a toying with Microsoft, proving they do have other options, it is still putting more pay per click sales and revenue in Google’s bulging pockets!

Bookmark to:

As the threat of recession looms and businesses watch their outgoings like a hawk, you may want to consider the following before taking an axe to your PPC budget. If a PPC campaign is underfunded, your ads will not show consistently, but rather they will show intermittently throughout the day. In this instance, you may see your ad for 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 searches on Google, Yahoo or MSN. Alternatively, if your PPC campaign is under-budget, your may blow your entire daily budget by four in the afternoon (or sooner) and, therefore, you will miss the surge of traffic in the evening, as people return home from work and go online.

Although a business may be cutting back their PPC budget to save money, this may self-defeating and have completely the opposite effect. By not showing your ad for every possible search, you have to hope that when your ad does appear, it will show to a person who is at the very end of the buying process and eager to make an online purchase or enquiry. Showing your ads sporadically and hoping for a converting click is a dangerous, unpredictable game to play.

Let’s say there is 10,000 impressions for your keywords. Out of the 10,000 searches, 100 people are ready to buy something or make an enquiry. If you meet your budget obligations with your PPC campaign, you know that your ads will definitely appear to every one of these valuable 100 customers. If you only have the budget to appear for 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 of the 10,000 searches, its pot luck whether or not your ad will be seen by these 100 people.

No one will argue that cutting your PPC budget will save you money in the short term. However, if you miss out on too many conversions by not funding your campaign fully and maintaining a continuous presence in the search results, you may lose more money that you save.

Bookmark to:

On Thursday last week I was using Google but suddenly it stopped working saying that the internet couldn’t connect to the server. I checked Yahoo and MSN and they were both working and so was this site. Not only did Google.co.uk not work, but neither did Google Analytics or Google Maps. The strange thing was that Google Groups was still working - is this because it is on a different server?

On Friday I heard reports from another office that at 11am Google had gone down again. I was on the tube at the time so I didn’t notice it myself, however that was twice in two days.  I am not an SEO expert and I don’t proclaim to be but could it be something to do with a page rank update? According to my sources, when Google update their algorithm they have no way of doing it on a test server and have to do it live. If there are any bugs in the system it will go belly-up and this will affect usability for the 65% of the world population who us it.

Yesterday, Google’s PPC platform Adwords wasn’t updating the data for the day’s spend which is also strange. We have very seldom problems with the PPC platform but yesterday, the data didn’t update past 0930 and made the daily management of PPC difficult.

So is Google crumbling, or is this just part of the ever expanding Google empire? Your thoughts, please….

Bookmark to:

1.    Brand association against the information. I was searching for ‘property Wirral’ today and did so much fact finding. From the clicks that I have made today, I have taken the information away from the sites to use further down the line in the buying process, but there is little chance that I will go back to these sites that I clicked on to make a purchase. Why? Because by the time I understand what I am looking for I don’t know which site to thank for the information that has helped me get here! Another example, promotional merchandising is another very generic term which people will search to find out what promotional merchandise they are really looking for. Once they have used the information and help from people appearing under generic searches they then refine their search further and further down but very little chance it is with the information site that helped them understand things. Therefore, make sure your brand identity is strongly liked with the information provided on landing pages for generic searches.
2.    Quick enquiry form: With generic searches the searcher has a rough idea of what they are looking for but need guidance. Someone looking for ‘promotional merchandise’ will want merchandising of some sort but there is reason they have searched this instead of ‘promotional mugs’ – the reason is they don’t know what type of merchandising they want. So, put a quick enquiry form so that the company does the leg work in finding the searcher the best solution.
3.    Big telephone number: same as point 2 above but if someone comes through a PPC link and doesn’t want to enquire through the quick enquiry form they may well just want to pick up the phone. A generic search is a plea for professional help – “I know what I want but I need advice!” PPC landing pages for these searches need to be better to drive return, especially as you are paying per click. Get a bigger phone number on the site at the top and let the phone do the work.
4.    Give the searcher the information they are looking for – concisely! Generic searches are a plea for advice. Someone searching for ‘promotional merchandise’ could want anything from baseball caps to mugs and pens. They may also have a price range in mind, a number of units in mind, timelines for getting the goods etc. All of these need to be concisely displayed on the PPC landing page to gain maximum benefit in return. Keep it simple and give the user the info they are most likely seeking.
5.    Negative Research: continually running Search Query Reports on a weekly basis will always improve the targeted nature of the ad appearance. With this done the CPA will continually improve and you get better value for money.

These are the major points that have been brought up when managing PPC recently in the office, but is there anything else missing?

Bookmark to:

I was under the impression that Google’s system of servers was fail safe and could possibly have failure in up time.

I am sat in the Premier Inn Putney, London on a WiFi connection and Yahoo works, MSN works but Google.co.uk and Google.com don’t.

Not only this but none of Google’s sub pages work, including Adwords, Help Centre, Maps and Analytics!!

It is strange because the none important pages like Google groups are still working….

How will this affect Google’s revenues this evening through it’s PPC platform?

Is it me or has anyone else noticed Google is down this evening?

Bookmark to:

Aside from these points, the basis of Phorm appears to be wholly floored. The System claims to serve ads relevant to every web user based on historical search, but surely rather than serving ads relating to what a user has looked at before. It would be more beneficial to serve ads relating to what a user is looking at now.

Content advertising though Google adwords can do just that.

By using well researched keywords to actively target the sites know to be used and associated with a target customer group, ads can be placed along side the content that your potential customers are looking at.

Rather than displaying ads for wedding dresses 2 days after a wedding, start showing ads for honeymoons or baby grows! Content advertising allows the targeting of users much earlier in the buying phase, but while they are still interested in the areas you target.

Content advertising can be easily controlled in terms of spend. Much the same as paid search, the pricing can be based on cost per click (cpc) models. As the campaigns progress it can be made more aggressive, targeting specific domains, sites or pages that perform well with either cpc or cost per thousand impressions (cpm).

The ad variants are also optional. As well as the ubiquitous text ads (3 lines of text and a URL) that have made Google so mighty, Image ads in a range of IAB standard formats and video ads can all be utilised. Video ads, the newest option have shown some promising success rates, that have lead to the addition of Google gadget ads that can be spread virally.

The performance rates of any content campaign will struggle to match a well built search campaign, but the combination effect of search and content along side each other can be very strong. From past experience, a good content campaign will show in greatly increased searches of brand terms and also increases in direct traffic. Recent stats show up to a 22% increase in search campaign conversions when content targeting is used.

While Phorm may be on it’s way, content targeting is here already and proven it’s self to be worth while for online advertisers.

Bookmark to:

The way to do this is to run search query reports on your pay per click campaigns and find out which phrases have been searched for by users to view your ads. In many cases you can find your ad being served on expanded match for phrases that bear no relation to the target of your campaign, these need to be added in as negatives.

As ever, no system is fool proof. In many instances the reports will contain data match up to keywords with the response ’12 other unique search queries’. Having spoken to Google employee’s on a number of occasions they tell me this is usually the case when the search volume is so low that the system merely collates this data together to work more efficiently and in most cases the data that isn’t being shown would be of no benefit to optimising the pay per click campaign.

However over the last few weeks I have run reports on client’s pay per click accounts to find out why a particular ad group was achieving a low CTR. I took the time period from the beginning of the month, spanning a ten day period, the low CTR keywords were ‘10 other unique queries’. Is this down to low volume? I think not, 2049 impressions over the ten day period were accrued, hardly low volume traffic. This leads me to believe that a term within these ‘10 other unique queries’ is triggering the ads with no relevancy. Hardly of any benefit to the campaign!

All in all, I value the findings of search query reports. They do provide you with good data to improve your pay per click campaign negatives. Just a shame it’s not a perfect system!

Bookmark to:

When I mention the AdPreview Tool, clients always say “Why should I use this? Why shouldn’t I use what my customers are using?” They mean, of course, the plain old www.google.co.uk/www.google.com search engine. The answer is very simple. As a client looking for your ads, your search behaviour is different to that of the average Joe Bloggs, who is searching Google for a product or service. If the Google system notices any irregular search patterns from a particular IP address, it will begin to show bogus search results to this user. Ads may appear in lower positions or not at all. This is designed to be a safeguard against Click Fraud – if somebody is searching Google in an unusual manner, you don’t your ad to be exposed and vulnerable.

So, if you can’t find your ad on Google, make sure you have tried the AdPreview Tool before you pick up the phone and complain to Google Customer Services or to your PPC Account Manager. The AdPreview Tool can be found at www.google.co.uk/adpreview … bookmark it now!

Bookmark to: