Remember how, when you buy something on Amazon they are always quick to tell you that people that bought that particular gadget, book, DVD or special gift, also bought these other vaguely (sometimes curiously remotely) similar items? It's called the upsell. Whilst I've got you buying one thing, I'll sell you another. I was reminded of this when looking at Custom Affinity Audiences which we are actively encouraging our clients to consider in their accounts. We're seeing some strong results, and the reason seems to be quite simple...

A couple of weeks ago I sent out a simple tweet about how I had stopped using phrase match in my PPC campaigns. Which is strange, because my campaigns were almost exclusively built on ranks of phrase match keywords covering a multitude of search queries relevant to my clients' products or services. A few people asked me why... the reason is the launch of broad match modified keywords. I hated broad match - it just seemed like leaving your car parked with the door open, the engine running and the keys in the ignition. Hey, Google - over here! Come spend whatever you like! And, oftentimes, advertisers were surprised by just how quickly a budget could be depleted. Ta-Daaaaa! No you see me now you don't! But with broad match modified, you can often get all the coverage you were hoping to get with hundreds of phrase match keywords - without the wastage that came with pure broad match - and without the bloating...

This week we have taken over the management of a Google AdWords account that was floundering. This is not something new... often, we are contacted after a small or medium business has taken the plunge into the inviting waters of ppc only to find that the water is deeper, colder and a lot murkier than it looked to be from the shore. But this particular account led us to consider some fo the default settings in a new account set up. Some of them we have complained about before: why, for example, is the keyword quality score column not activated by default in the reports? Or why is auto-tagging "yes, please" not the default setting? but neither of these directly affect the costs of the advertising. The default setting double whammy we discuss today does.....

One of the big selling points that Google give to potential AdWords advertisers is how their platform "levels the playing field" and allows small and medium businesses to compete with the big boys. And this is true. You can set up your ad campaign, select your keywords, set a bid and enter your credit card details and away you go... someone searches for "blue widgets" and your ad appears right next to the ad from Big Blue Widget Corporation. So, yes, you are competing with them and Google has levelled the playing field. Or have they? The truth is, they haven't...

I can just about remember my first Adwords campaign. It was for my own business and I was spending my own money. In my opinion, this is the best way to learn the platform - there is no better motivation to learn the subtleties (and not so subtle pitfalls) than knowing that every wasted click is money straight out of your own pocket. In fact, for everyone wondering how best to learn AdWords, I would always suggest they look to get some skin in the game. Looking back, I now realise how green I was and how much money I probably wasted, but that is not the theme of today's article. Instead, today, I am considering the way in which the KPI's change over time as your Adwords knowledge develops...

We all appreciate the importance of keyword Quality Score in AdWords. We know it is something we should be striving to improve with the aim of having 10/10 scores for all our main keywords. But, whilst we understand the importance, in practice QS is still something of a mystery...

A couple of years ago we were discussing bid adjustments by device on the weekly #ppcchat twitter tag, and I posted a screenshot to voice my frustration at the inability to split desktop and tablet traffic in my AdWords campaigns. Others were equally frustrated by the inability to effectively target mobile only traffic - you had to implement a clumsy workaround which would reduce mobile traffic, but not eliminate it. The solution seemed so simple - have a "base" bid and then allow all device types to have a bid adjustment - that you had to conclude that Google had simply decided that they knew best and that we were not going to able to filter our traffic the way we wanted to. And then Google announced a change...

There's a strange thing that sometimes happens with CPA bidding in Google AdWords. Following a few days of fluctuation, the ad impressions drop to almost nothing. There doesn't appear to be any change to the settings and the billing is OK - so what's going on? In most cases it appears that Google's algorithm simply gets nervous - you might even say it panics! To understand the phenomenon in practice, we have to understand how CPA bidding works in principle...

Imagine for a moment that you are buying ads in a magazine. Full page, full colour ads. Nice. The salesman at the magazine tells you that you're getting a great deal. For only $10,000 dollars your ad is going to be in 150,000 magazines. You think that's a great price. You book the ad, give them your money and run back to your office to wait for the phone to start ringing off the hook. But the results are less than spectacular, and you start to question why. So you get back in touch with the salesman. "How many magazines does my ad appear in?", you ask. "150,000," is the happy reply "but we actually only sell 50,000 of them, the rest we just recycle and pulp." Would you be upset? You betcha. Welcome to the Google AdWords display platform...