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Google Product Extensions

admin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:09:19 +0000

You may have noticed product pictures appearing in Google ads recently. This is because Google created a feature called Product Extensions that allows advertisers to feature specific products in their AdWords ads. At the same cost per click, searchers can view your product images and prices directly from the search results pages.

In the form of a plusbox, Google will include the most relevant products from your website to show within your AdWords ad. The product picture, title and price are included and link to the specific product page on your site. There is no cost if the searcher views your products by expanding the plusbox. If they do click, either in the ad or the product section, you are charged the same cost per click.

Many advertisers are finding that Product Extensions are improving their clickthrough rates (CTR). For example, Google reported that one of their advertisers, SonyStyle.com, saw a 10% CTR increase while using the feature during beta testing. We also expect to see improved conversion rates because of better targeted landing pages.

Product Extensions is available to all US advertisers and is currently in a limited beta for international users. All that is required is a Google Merchant Center account and active product feed. No new campaigns or ad groups are needed as the integration is seamless within AdWords.

This is a great new feature and has some obvious advantages for product-oriented advertisers. The effects of Product Extensions will diminish, however, once it becomes common among AdWords users so it’s smart to act fast.

Facebooks ‘Like’ Feature – Will it Work?

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:35:53 +0000

Years ago my brother and I worked with a friend of ours to create a web startup based on doing Movie, Music, and Book recommendations.

The fundamental technology behind the idea was the brain child of our friend and business partner, Owen.

He wrote a guest blog on Facebook's new 'Like' feature that I think is very good.

There are some fundamentals the even companies like Facebook can misjudge occasionally. Give it read! Facebook like feature.

PPC Scams – Be Careful Out There!

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:21:28 +0000

I ran across a company this week that promotes ’Web Placement’. Here are some of the claims on their site:

Placing you on the top half of the page on Google search.
Get listed in Google in 5 days.
Getting placed on the first page on Google.
Etc

They also make sure they use the terms SEO and PPC on the same page and in the descriptions. They have a good looking site and to the novice site owner looking for a web presence, they sound pretty compelling.

But their real business model is this — they take your money and then run a few Pay Per Click ads that link to your site. They don’t care how much they spend for the ads…they just promised that the ad would show up on the first page or on the top half of the page. They may have thought they were getting SEO, but they are really just getting over priced PPC.

The customer doesn’t know how much they are paying per click or even how many times the ad shows up in a month.

And of course the customers ads will stop showing up as soon as they stop paying….no real SEO here.

So, how did we hear about the site? They contacted us to run their PPC campaigns for them…..they were doing such a poor job that Google was going to shut them down. Of course, we passed on that opportunity!

Be careful out there!

Here are some other points you may want to consider if you are shopping for PPC Management -

www.siteproppc.com/adwords-management/shopping-for-ppc-management-watchout-for-these-pitfalls/

Here are a couple of downloads you might want to read if you are considering PPC Management.

www.siteproppc.com/download/

AdWords Negative Keywords – Stop Being Robbed!

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:46:29 +0000

A lot of articles and blog posts have been written regarding the importance and use of negative keywords and I guess this is just one more, but we took on a client over the last few weeks that provided some incredible examples of two things:

How loose the AdWords algorithm can be when matching a search string to actual keywords.
How often those clicks can cost you big money.

OK, so let’s use what is hopefully the most outrageous example in this account, but one that should really get your attention.

Our client sells package ecommerce storefront solutions. One of the keywords we bid on is ".net store".

For those of you that don’t know (and this may in fact turn out to be Google) .Net is a software framework or code that was developed by Microsoft and used by web developers all over the world.

As part of our normal PPC campaign management, we run frequent checks on which search strings are actually causing our ads to appear.

AdWords provides a very handy tool for this, all you have to do is go to the Keyword tab in a campaign and click on the See Search Terms button.

When you click on that button you will get a choice to look at all terms or selected. In this example I chose selected and clicked the box next to the ".net store" keyword.

The next page will show you a report that looks like this:

Incredibly these are some of the terms that AdWords felt were close enough to the keyword ".net store" that they showed our ad. BTW, this was in just one week and this is only a partial list of these types of words.

The second part of this is probably more incredible…at least to me. Larry Winget wrote a book called "People are Idiots and I Can Prove It" (http://www.amazon.com/People-Are-Idiots-Can-Prove/dp/1592404375).

Maybe this will be in his sequel…..anyway, some software at AdWords might have matched up these keywords to our ".net store" keyword, but then someone actually clicked on the ad when they saw it.

Remember, someone types "ross department stores com" in the Google search engine and then clicks on this ad when they see it:

*I have the customers permission to use this data, but I covered the URL.

It’s hard to believe….but that kind of traffic was costing our customer $30/day…or $10,000 per year! So check your keyword traffic regularly, use negative keywords to block this traffic and don’t let trash clicks steal your profits!

AdWords Quality Score…. What is Relevance Anyway?

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:30:14 +0000

Occasionally I can actually find time to work on my own AdWords campaign. And like everyone else I have to work with, in, and around the infamous Google AdWords quality score.

And like everyone else I come up with some real head scratchers occasionally. Here is a good example.

I have a FaceBook keyword campaign. In one of the ad groups, I bid on the keyword(s) — [facebook ad management]. So obviously I was disappointed and a little irritated when I saw that Google had determined that my quality score for that keyword was 2.

Hang in there, I promise this will get interesting in just a couple minutes.

Here is the basic information that I saw:

As any Google rep will tell you, the quality score is primarily influenced by CTR, but is also affected by ad copy, and website landing page. Since the CTR for this one was pretty good (11.11%)…the ad copy and the landing page must really be bad….well take my word for it, the ads were OK and in fact one of them actually had the terms FaceBook Ad Management in it, so we are probably not too far off there.

Normally when you get a 2 quality score something has to be really bad. So I slid my mouse over the little dialog box in the status column and got this typical message:

So the Google AdWords algorithm has determined that the relevance for that keyword is poor. It must be that the relevance for that keyword to my landing page is very poor….right? (Remember that the CTR was pretty high, so the ‘relevance’ to the searcher must be OK).

Here comes the head scratcher…..if you do a Google search on the exact term FaceBook Ad Management you will see that my site comes up high in the organic search results….in fact at the time I wrote this blog it was in the #2 spot.

Like I said, I am still scratching my head….if anyone has a good explanation, I would love to hear it!