Yesterday I was doing some research and came across the following set of ads in the 1-3 positions:
All I could say was “How did they get that phone number to appear next to the title?” The phone number in question was plain text, not clickable or anything.
Anyone have an answer?
This past weekend I had the opportunity to visit Florida. The weather was beautiful and sunny so my friend and I decided to go snorkeling. This was my first time and I had a great time. If you’re in Florida and have even a couple spare hours, this is a must-do activity. However, as I thought about it on the plane ride home I realized it provides a good parable for PPC.
Here are a few things I noticed about snorkeling:
The same can be said for your PPC efforts:
I’d love to hear about your snorkeling experiences or other parallels that you see between snorkeling and PPC. Just leave a comment.
Last week Google moved the MCC link and drop-down box up to the top of the screen and now I’m seeing these cute little icons in their own column of the MCC dashboard.
The red one is for critical alerts in your individual client accounts. In this case, a failed payment method.
The yellow guy is for the annoying less important alerts, such as a campaign that has ended (even though it was set to end and ended right on time).
Looks like the all-seeing eye of Google has decided to focus its gaze on the MCC interface yet again.
As usual, Google continues to change and modify their AdWords platform and policies. The newest change (announced via the AdWords blog) was the topic of a Brad Geddes post on Search Engine Land that very clearly laid out the good and bad of the policy change. However, here is my take:
A lot of PPC providers out there take your money and give you back the leads/phone calls that result from the spend. If the results justify the cost they keep paying. However, these aggregators don’t usually report how much was spent on clicks and how much they pocket for themselves. Hence the policy change.
Google is just requiring that the end client know how many impressions they got, how many clicks and the total spend. This way the advertiser will know if an agency is pocketing a large chunk or not.
In a word: Transparency! Agencies that are afraid to disclose their cut should be culled from the herd. If you’re good then your clients should be willing to pay the fee because you produce results. Pretty simple if you ask me.
The other day a buddy of mine sent over the following screenshot:
While the occasional PPC fail is humorous, this garners special consideration because the offending firm, eFrontier, actually provides PPC services. From their own site we read:
“Competition for market share is fierce. And campaigns are more complicated than ever with millions of keywords, geo-targeting, content options, and copy testing. For close to a decade, Efficient Frontier’s technology has helped some of the largest and most complex advertisers in the world lead successful SEM campaigns.”
I guess that their own PPC campaign was just too simple to justify using their awesome tool. #FAIL
Below is a screenshot from a display network campaign that was running for about 16 hours. All the default setting were in place, meaning that ads were set to optimize instead of rotate.
So unless Google is omniscient (and the algorithm may be approaching that level) I’m pretty sure they should have showed the other ad at least a little bit before making that determination. Has anyone else seen this?
If you haven’t seen it yet, just run a Google search. Most likely you’ll see the new light purple background on the ads directly above organic results. It looks like this:
Subtle, isn’t it? On my monitor it’s so subtle that I didn’t see it at first glance. However, after sliding Firefox over onto my laptop screen I saw it more clearly. Rimm-Kaufman actually got the following quote direct from Google:
“Starting today and ramping up to 100% globally by the end of this week, we’ll be changing the background color for ads that appear above the search results on Google.com as well as our local domains. The ads, which currently have a pale yellow background, will change to have a pale purple background. This change is part of the ‘look and feel’ update to our color palette and logo that we made back in May of this year to keep the Google results page looking fresh and modern. This is purely an aesthetic change to our ads and won’t have any impact on the way we target or serve advertisements on Google.com.”
Look and feel? Here’s why I think they did it?
Don’t forget that Google makes billions of dollars in advertising revenue EVERY MONTH! Even the smallest change can have a huge impact on their bottom line and they test a lot. Based on what I see, this helps the top ads blend into the organic results. That means more people, even ad-averse people, will click on search ads, thus padding Google’s pockets.
As a PPC advertiser I like it a lot. Accounts with high QS will get rewarded even further by showing above organic results and getting an even higher CTR. For companies in competitive spaces (where high bids are also needed to hit the top 3) it sucks. They’ll have to work that much harder to make their PPC work.
But make no mistake, even though Google says this is “purely an aesthetic change”, I’m sure that dollars and cents made a difference.
On a point of personal privilege, I wanted to take the opportunity to announce that Righteous Marketing is now an AdWords Certified Partner. According to Google, “This qualification demonstrates that the company employs individuals with deep AdWords knowledge, and has experience in assisting clients with their AdWords campaigns.” The small print says that I’ve managed over $10,000 in spend over the last 90 days and have passed the new, more rigorous certification exams.
(Imaginary award speech)I’d like to thank Paul Allen for getting me started in PPC during my college internet marketing class. I’d also like to thank Robert Stevens of WriteExpress for taking me on as an intern and then giving me great experience managing a large PPC account, Vizad for letting me manage multiple accounts, and all my current and former clients for trusting me to spend their money (and lots of it) wisely. Oh, and my mom and dad, and my friends, and God for giving me this talent. (Queue music that kicks me off the stage)
Google announced the feature back in May and today the Rimm-Kaufman Group is announcing that broad match modifiers are now available to all US customers. So what’s the big deal?
Ever since AdWords went to expanded broad match (that’s Google-speak for “we’ll show you ad if we feel it is within 100 miles of being relevant to a search”) advertisers have been adding using more phrase match, exact match and negative keywords to avoid less qualified impressions and clicks. Frankly, experts have been bitching about this since it was pushed system wide. Of the 13 Deadly Sins of PPC, I rank it #3. Broad match modifiers is Google’s response to all the complaints.
This visual should help explain, but basically you add a plus sign to let Google know which word(s) are required.
Basically, if you add a plus sign in front of every word you can revert to the basic broad match. While most most beginner/intermediate users will go this route, advanced users will continue to test and optimize to find the best combination. I hate on broad match plenty, but Google has a lot of data and may help you discover profitable keywords you might have missed.
AdWords is famous for saying that you can reach millions of potential customers in just 5 minutes. They have taken every step possible to make signing up easy. Now, they appear to have taken it even further:
As you can see, Google is actually giving you a phone number for a free consultation and offering to set up your first campaign for you, FREE!
Google is somewhat famous for not having good customer support. Sure their products are free, but if you needed help good luck actually getting a person on the phone (unless you had an account rep, which translated to “if you spend enough money”). Now they are volunteering to talk to you and even lend a hand?
This is all about the money. AdWords is the engine that drives Google’s profit. Google obviously is looking for some more revenue, so they will help advertisers set up new accounts. Pretty simple.
My only concern is the quality. I have gotten quite a few campaign and ad groups from Google reps and I haven’t been impressed with the results. They group the keywords tightly (good) and use the keywords in the ad copy (also good) but they don’t usually do enough research to write compelling ad copy. You get cookie cutter ads that get decent CTR and send generic traffic to your homepage. Not a real recipe for success.
Has anyone out there took them up on this deal? How did it go?
Conversion rate optimization and PPC wizard. If I'm not out playing ultimate frisbee or golf you may find me hiking, skiing or mountain biking. [Read More …]