One of the keys to a successful AdWords campaign is getting your ad noticed in the search results. There are a number of ways to do this - its good to include sitelinks and location, call and social extensions, these are all part of the normal campaign set up and if you are not adding these as a matter of course, you should be. but these extensions aside, the ad copy you present is the most important feature of how you bait your hook. Most blogs will tell you about using triggers - calls to action that induce the click include words such as Now, Today, Rush, Don't Miss, Claim, etc. all designed to encourage the reader to click on your ad...

Sometimes the most innocuous of changes can have ripples that become surfing waves before you even realise. Google have just released news of a change that is to be rolled out during February that will subtly change the way in which conversions are reported in Adwords. Here are the bones of the changes:..

If you've installed Google Analytics code on your site it's always good to know if it's working... If you have Chrome you can install the Google Tag Assistant extension - or you can wait a few hours and check if there have been any visits - but how would you like to know immediately if the code is working - especially if you need the code to be checking across sub-domains, for example?..

One of our clients has a cancer facility. In Canada. We have been running some effective remarketing campaigns for them for a couple of years based on a simple combination list of All Visitors less Converted Visitors - we have also been running an RLSA campaign and a campaign to the "Similar to" lists - pretty standard stuff. Yesterday our lists got disapproved and closed. Not the ads, not the campaigns - the lists themselves. The messages on the campaigns referred to the fact that the lists could not be used...

So you're running your business. You've put everything into getting it to this point. And now you're ready to embark on the next step - getting more customers. Everywhere you look people are talking about Google AdWords - Heck, you even got a voucher through the mail.... if you spend $25 Google are going to give you $75! How can that be a bad deal? And it's simple. Google are going to walk you through it... So you open the box...

Here at Advent we manage Google AdWords accounts for clients all over the world. Principally our clients are in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. We even have a few clients here in Spain (gasp!). One would think that this would be just the kind of business that Google would welcome - the global village in action. Strangely, however, it seems to be a case of do as I say, not as I do...

A few days ago there was a debate on the Spanish Google AdWords Community Forum about ad scheduling. Some of the comments were misleading, others simply incorrect. I weighed in - after all I had spent some time getting my head around this issue a couple of years ago. So here's a break down of the problem.....

As we build our remarketing lists, so we develop audiences to whom we can present our ads as they later surf their favorite pages. We have previously referred to these ads as "the ads that follow you around" - we are all familiar with them, and they walk the thin line between welcome and stalking - often failing to stay on the right side of a searcher's sensibilities. The advantage of remarketing campaigns is that we know that these people have previously visited our site - presumably they have an interest in our product or service. And if we have segmented our lists then we can target our campaigns effectively. But there a couple of factors that take away from the effectiveness of remarketing...

Bounce rate measures the percentage of people who leave your website having visited only one page. Basically, they arrive on your site and don't visit any other of your site's pages - they simply leave. For many marketers, this is the number they focus on the most - after all, you want engagement - and someone who arrives at your site and then leaves hasn't engaged - or have they? Let's look again at the definition...