Category: Google

If there is one question that is always asked when speaking to a potential AdWords advertiser - it is this : How Much Should I Budget for This? With traditional advertising things are clearer. Radio spots, and 20 seconds of TV space have a price. So do newspaper and magazine ads. They have a price and you know what you're buying... at least you think you do. You're buying a space in which to run your ad. What you're not buying is any result. You hope to get a result. You expect to get a result. Experience tells you that you should get a result. But all you are actually buying is the space...

In the olden days... long before the internet... advertisers had a term for ads on the front page of a newspaper that would not be seen when the paper was on the newsstand or left on a table - below the fold. Generally, if you were paying for a front page ad, you would pay less if your ad was to be positioned below the fold. Makes sense. Online advertisers have borrowed this term to describe ads that are on a web page, but that are not visible to the user unless they scroll down to it...

Recently I've read a few articles about just how poor the Google Display Network works for advertisers. Many of the writers question whether it should be used at all. And, as if this is not bad enough, Google are testing a paid version of the web experience where the ads are pixelated, so your senses needn't be assaulted and offended by their gaudy messages. But, just perhaps, the GDN is an Ugly Duckling - just waiting to be recognised as the swan it really is...

I've been quite happy over the past few months. I discovered that I could get most of the traffic I wanted with a minimal amount of fuss using Google's new Broad Match Modified (BMM) match type. I felt like Baby Bear from Goldilocks - BMM isn't too loose, nor is it too restrictive. It's just right! And like a happy bear, I was gradually replacing most of my phrase match keywords with their BMM counterparts. I had never really used broad match - that was like putting all my money on the desk and telling Google to just take what it wanted. So I ended up with basically two types of campaign. Those using BMM and those using exact match. I like exact match... not quite as much as I like BMM - but for different reasons - It's badass. You put a keyword in exact match and that keyword is like a grumpy bouncer at a popular night club. You don't have the exact keyword, you ain't coming in. Period...

  A couple of months ago Google AdWords introduced a drag and drop function for adding image ads to campaigns. I love it. It saves a lot of time on one of those functions that cannot be automated and must be done on a "one by one" basis. They recently made a further improvement to this feature but I'm not quite as pleased with this one.... Want to add a new image ad - just click on the new ad button and a new drag and drop window open. A big window - I could probably click and throw and still get my ad uploaded! But that's not a problem... big is good.   So I upload my ad and have boxes to enter my display url and my destination url - perfect. But, wait.... I have nowhere to add a name for my ad. Whaaaat?     Instead Google names my ad for me. In this case 160 x 600 swf - and offers me the option to save.         This is not a particularly..

Google have just started sending out emails about the new dynamic sitelinks that are being rolled out globally. Essentially, Google is going to add sitelinks to your ads unless you opt out. and these will replace your current sitelinks if the system deems that "their" sitleink is more appropriate than "yours". As yet these have not shown up on any of our accounts (as far as we can tell") - but there are a couple of things that concern us...

I'm lucky. Luckier than most. It takes me 5 minutes to drive from my house to my office. I can stay in bed until the very last minute and still get to work on time. And yet my office is 625 kilometres from my house. OK - not completely true.... it's true that my house is a 5 minute drive from my office. And it is true that I stay in bed until the last possible moment most mornings...

Clutter. It's what stops us from achieving our goals. Clutter on our desk. Clutter in our heads. And clutter in our PPC accounts. When we take a step back from the day to day micro-management of ppc campaigns we can sometimes catch a glimpse of the bigger picture. The one where the fundamental principles shine through. PPC management is simple and the secret is.......

Below the fold... it's a term borrowed from newspaper advertising. When a broad sheet newspaper was folded in half and then stacked on a newsstand, you could only see the top half of the front page. Everything else was, well... below the fold. The internet has borrowed this term to describe ads which are on the web page being browsed, but not visible unless the user scrolls down, and there has been a lot of talk over the past few months about whether Google should count an ad which is never seen as an impression. It's along the lines of trees falling in forests and no one hearing them......

It must be frustrating to search for your own name on Google and find things you would rather not be in the public domain. This is what happened to Mario Costejo González in Spain, when he discovered a newspaper article about his eviction in 1998 online. Taking his complaint to the court, he has won the "right to be forgotten" online - and his complaint was not against the newspaper, but rather against Google. The implications of this for the search giant are enormous - and the true scale of the issue is to be played out over the coming months. Whilst this decision has been celebrated by some claiming to defend the rights to privacy, others are seeing this as the tip of the iceberg for internet censorship...