We’ve seen some recent behavior in Google AdWords markets where a new ad campaign immediately gets a quality score rating that forces minimum bids into the $5 range. There was a time when you could launch a campaign and immediately count on a few inexpensive clicks to get you started, but that day appears to [...]
Category Archives: AdWords
Improve your conversion rate - with one click!*
February 20, 2008 – 1:12 pm
*If you’re opted into Google’s content network, that is.
The Content Network is a pretty good product, but it’s challenging to understand and use. As a result, it’s a source of major waste for PPC beginners. Almost without exception its clickthrough rates and conversion rates are uniformly lower than the Search Network. For most advertisers, the [...]
Internet Yellow Pages vs. Google AdWords: Getting the most from whole Sales Cycle
January 14, 2008 – 4:39 pm
Thanks to Jon Battelle for getting me thinking about this again. Jon argues that Google has “no reason” to buy a Yellow Pages company. Actually there is a very good reason for Google to purchase a Yellow Page company: visitors coming through Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) sources have different behavioral characteristics and expectations than visitors [...]
Google’s Quality Score Rankings
December 20, 2007 – 3:50 pm
So you may have noticed that in some of your AdWord’s ad groups a column appeared called “Quality Score.” In the quality score column you will see that each of your keywords gets ranked either poor, ok, or great (also a minimum bid is named.) A “poor” quality score can result in lower ad placement, [...]
3 Tiers of Conversions
November 28, 2007 – 2:59 pm
Low Awareness- This customer never heard of the brand and has never been on the website. These customers typically have the lowest conversion rate on their first visit. These customers may come back later and then will convert higher. For companies looking for branding not ROI the “Low Awareness” shoppers are the best to target [...]
The AdWords Content Network: Worth Your Time?
May 17, 2007 – 3:52 pm
The inexperienced AdWords user often leaves the default settings active, a good idea or big mistake depending on the feature in question as well as the nature of the account. When it comes to the Content Network, many SEO experts advise turning it off entirely, claiming it a waste of resources better spent optimizing [...]
AdWords, Amazon, Google Base, and the Long Tail
February 24, 2007 – 1:01 pm
Accurate delivery of long tail items through a integrated search tool is the next step in online search engines. Google is WAY behind. Google Base is supposed to deal with that, but I get the sense that Google Base is Google’s bastard stepchild. The frustration of contributors to the Google Base’s user forum has gotten [...]
Why AdWords Makes Advertising Possible For Small Companies
February 13, 2007 – 4:26 pm
Keyphrase cost inflation has happened faster than we expected, but we still think that small companies should invest heavily in Paid Search relative to other traditional media forms.
The reason for this is that Adwords subverts the typical advertising paradigm. In most advertising spaces, companies get to a size where advertising is as much an exercise [...]
Google’s Adwords Keyphrase Matching Bug: The deadly hyphen
February 13, 2007 – 4:12 pm
This is an interesting adwords problem that has an impact for keyphrase matching for industries where terms are often hyphenated, something often found in the product titles of many industrial goods.
Here are three ways to spell the company name Allen Bradley:
Allen Bradley
AllenBradley
Allen-Bradley
We are the KeyWord matching algorithm in our copy.
What we’ve found is that if [...]
Google AdWords Bug Creates “Invisible Links”
February 7, 2007 – 3:47 pm
It looks like Google had a bug that allowed invisible titles to be created for ads. We saw this on Monday and Tuesday of this week; it’s been fixed now. But the bug created an interesting set of conversations around here.
People here at Pure Visibility were of two minds about it:
1) This is great! You [...]
