Just keep a heads up on you budgets and CTRs over the next week or so. Google Adwords is rolling out the reported changes from changing the paid ads on the search results to a yellow background. They have been testing this for a while and more and more people are coming to me with notices that they are constantly seeing yellow backgrounds on SERPs.

This is significant for advertisers and account managers because I expect to see an significant increase in clicks as the change from blue to yellow will temporarily suspend the average users “ad-blindness”, ie the mental blocking of ads on SERPs. Budgets can get eaten up quicker than expected but should eventually level back out but everyone should be aware of this upcoming change.

Some people have claimed that my complete loathing for the content networks is unjustified, well here is my justification or at least some of it.

Yahoo’s most recent study claims that 3 out of 4 Blogger URLS are spam blogs!

Anyone brave enough to type “cheap tickets” in a search engine can find a plethora of one-page Web sites designed to drive traffic to other Web sites and generate click-through advertising revenue.

Three out of every four unique Blogspot.com URLs that appeared in the top 50 results for commercial queries were spam, the study said. Blogspot is the hosting site for Google’s blogging service. Blogs created for marketing purposes are sometimes referred to as “splogs.”

*if your interested here is a WebMasterWorld thread with a whole bunch more people who share my feelings for SPLOGS. In protest of blogger, I even moved my personal blog (Evan Roberts) to WordPress!.

The question of whether or not an advertiser should bid on branded terms is a debate that has been going on for a while. The argument against it is the fact that Google is doing such a good job ranking branded terms that its not needed to bid on them.

Well, Johnathan Mendezs has a 3 part post with an overly-elaborate study trying to answer the branded terms question. It is an interesting read, but I think a big unnecessary. Branding terms are some of the cheapest and highest converting terms you can bid on, not doing so would be relying too much on Google’s organic ranking algorithms.

Any good marketer will tell you they want to maximize exposure to a targeted audience. How can branded terms be any more targeted?

To help you understand the process I broke it down into two simple steps:

• 1. Bid on Branded terms
• 2. Profit!

  

With the ever growing competition it is more important than ever to make sure your accounts are lean mean ROI machines. I’ve seen a lot of accounts that make very common mistakes that you just can’t get away with anymore.

Content Network management - I know I’ve beat the dead horse about my dislike for the Google content network but its the truth. It is one of the first things that I disable because without the proper attention, it is one of the biggest bloats to an accounts ROI. If you insist on using the content network than proper management is required. One of the first things you should do is modify your bids, by default content network bids are the same as your search network bids when in actuality the impressions can be had for a fraction of the cost. Lower the bid to the threshold where you don’t see any loss of clickthroughs and are paying a fraction of your initial bid. Another necessary management move is to selectively choose which sites your ads will show up on. This will help you avoid click fraud from splogs and unethical Adsense sites.

Failure to implement tracking - Google Analytics is free, use it! PS- the conversion tracking is excellent.

Not Utilizing a USP - Every company should have a USP, unique selling proposition, it helps you stand out among your competition. Whether it is Free Shipping, Easy Returns, or something else, conveying this in your paid search ads is ridiculously important.

Untargeted Keywords - When paid search first started it was pretty common thinking that you want to bid on as many words as possible and I saw tons of accounts that were bidding on completely irrelevant words. Well, that doesn’t fly anymore unless you don’t care about ROI. You need to be bidding very relevant words and the less broad you are, the more likely you will have a better ROI. I’m sure in your industry there are some broad terms that are highly relevant, I would bid on these with discretion. They are important but if not managed properly they can eat through your budget quickly.

Not Using Keyword Rich Ad-Text - Whether you want use keyword insertion or highly targeted adgroups/keywords/ad-texts, you will see far better CTRs with keyword rich ad-texts. Your ads will have bold text which will catch the users attention but it will also include relevant keywords which helps to build a trust with the user that your ad will deliver what they are looking for.

Not using proper landing pages - One of the biggest and most common faux paus possible is directing all of your ads to your home page. If you don’t have paid search specific landing pages, use internal pages that are relevant to your ad copy and the words you are bidding on.

One Campaign, One Adgroup - You wouldn’t organize all of your wardrobe by putting your clothes into one drawer, so why put all of your keywords into one campaign and ad group? Campaigns let you control your budget more precisely and multiple ad groups let you target your ads better to your keywords. Group similar keywords into specific groups and create ads that tailor to those keywords.

No Keyword Negatives - there is without a doubt at least one keyword variation of your broadest term that is completely irrelevant to your account and it wastes your money. For example, lets say you sell sport nets (Basketball goal nets, soccer goal nets etc), you probably don’t want to show up for people searching for the NBA team the New Jersey Nets. In this case you should include -New Jersey and maybe -New Jersey Nets into your negative keyword list. This will prevent your ad from showing on these irrelevant searches and save your budget.

The point of this post was to help you eliminate some of the common mistakes so easily overlooked by people new to PPC and Paid Search professionals.

My previous premonition about the Google Phone looks to be coming true.. A venture capitalist has a post on his blog where he claims he’s an insider on the hotly anticipated Google Phone (codename Switch). Now there is no official word from Google on it or if the service will be ad supported like I suspect but only time will tell. Move Coverage on Techmeme

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Just so Adam doesn’t get in a tizzy when trying to log into his Yahoo Account this weekend, here is the email Yahoo sent out about their systems wide upgrade.

Dear Yahoo! Search Marketing Advertiser,

You will be unable to access your Yahoo! Search Marketing account for approximately six hours this coming weekend while we update our systems. The outage will begin at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, March 2, and is scheduled to conclude at 2:00 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, March 3.

Please be aware that during an outage such as this, all advertiser accounts are frozen, and you will not be able to change bids, add or remove keywords, etc. Thus, if you have changes you need to make to your campaigns, please get them in place well before the beginning of the outage. Additionally, if your daily spending limit has been
reached prior to the systems update, your ads may remain offline for the duration of the outage.

Should there be any updates to the timing of this outage, a notice will be posted on the Dashboard page in your account.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to improve our service.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

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CNET.com is reporting that next month Google will allow advertisers to block specific IPs.

Beginning next month, Google plans to give advertisers the ability to prevent their pay-per-click ads from being shown to competitors suspected of repeatedly clicking on the ads to drive up their cost.

This will be a great tool for those who suspect their competition is clicking on their ads and costing them advertising revenue and opportunity to gain new customers. The official announcement is set to be posted on the Adwords blog later today.

Google also has an elaborate explanation of what they consider ‘Invalid Clicks’ on the adwordsa Blog.

As part of our effort to provide you with more information on invalid clicks, we wanted to give you some additional background on how our systems, processes, and teams work together to manage click fraud for our advertisers, while also sharing what the overall landscape of invalid click detection at Google looks like.

While I love that Google is taking a proactive stance on click fraud but its funny they keep implementing new click fraud preventions when they say that click fraud is only 2%.

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My favorite tool that I reported as being broken last week is fixed and upgraded with a vengence!

Before I go into the new features heed this warning: Make sure you Upload all your pending changes before you upgrade!! (IE. All pending changes will be lost during the upgrade process since AE re-downloads all your data.)

SERoundtable reports some new features:

• * Site targeting: AdWords Editor now provides full support for site-targeted campaigns.
• * Negative sites: Add or edit negative sites for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns.
• * Edit while you wait: If you manage multiple accounts with AdWords Editor, edit another account while your changes post.
• * Count your selection: The status bar now displays the number of rows you’ve selected in the data view.
• * Pause or resume ads, keywords, and sites: Use the Status menu in the edit panel to change the status of selected items.

And these “upload features”:

• * Export to HTML: Your HTML export will show or hide deleted campaigns, depending on how you’ve configured your preferences. The HTML export is ideal for showing your account to someone who doesn’t use AdWords Editor.
• * Export to CSV: In addition to account, campaign, and ad group snapshots, you can now export custom views. The CSV export is ideal for spreadsheets or other applications that can read structured data files.
• * Paste to multiple ad groups: Select multiple destination ad groups via the Edit menu > Paste Special.

Any other features you notice or would like to request?

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In a recent NY Time article, Google let the cat out of the bag that in the upcoming months they will now show the URLs where your ads appear if you are part of the content network.

Jensense has good thoughts on the topic from multiple perspectives but from an advertisers point of view I think this is great. Given the low quality of Google’s content network (anyone can get approved for Adsense) and the fact that you have no idea where your ads will be showing, the chance for click fraud is extremely high. It is one reason that I have contended that MSN’s Content network would be more successful from an advertiser point of view based solely on the quality of sites the ads will appear (mostly MSN owned sites).

This is a big step for Google because it is shortening the time needed to run a quality content network campaign which will allow more advertisers to utilize the content network (ie Adsense). Something I would never consider until this report comes along. More on TechMeme

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The adCenter blog announced some new features being launched for adCenter beta. The upgrades are

Easily go to any Campaign or Ad Group in your account via our improved navigation
? Import your other search campaigns, including third-party campaigns, into adCenter with one Excel spreadsheet or comma-separated values (CSV) file.
? Delete poor-performing keywords right on the keyword performance page.
? Download all adCenter data into Excel.
? From any page, find campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads that contain all or part of a search query string.

These are all very important features and much needed upgrades. I thank MSN for finally support bulk uploads and downloads of account information via spreadsheets. For those that are not familiar with this, it is essentially an account dump into a spreadsheet. A very useful feature that Google, for some reason just disabled. This will make it a lot easier for people like myself to make mass changes to account and even import account setups from Google. I’m sure a lot of account managers will appreciate this, I know I sure do.

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