Google AdWords Features From 2011 You Should Be Using In 2012

Welcome to my first post as a full time blogger for State of Search. In this post, I am going to recap on some of the features within Google AdWords that have been launched over the past year which we should all be considering when managing campaigns in 2012.

With Paid Search (PPC) costs continuing to rise, it has become more important than ever to pay attention to how you are managing PPC campaigns. Google AdWords in particular has seen Cost per Click costs increasing significantly over the past year and this is set to continue as more advertisers start joining the PPC marketing game.

In addition to rising costs, PPC platforms are continuously adding new features and tools, which we all need to be aware of to ensure campaigns are running efficiently and are not wasting money. … Continue Reading

What Google Revenues Might Mean to the SEO Industry

Last week Google announced that their Q4 revenue in the UK surpassed $1 billion. While this didn’t impress Wall Street a great deal it does show that ad spend in the UK search sector is very healthy indeed. See a breakdown of international numbers here. Another interesting stat that was corroborated widely by many PPC agencies was that the number of clicks rose significantly in the fourth quarter yet the amount they charged per click fell by 8%. So what does all this mean to the SEO industry?

In my opinion SEO is still very much the poor neighbour of the search market. SEO traffic is often viewed as “free” traffic which simply isn’t the case, it needs budget to deliver outstanding results. The fact that you can measure the ROI similarly often also lands on deaf ears. Adwords, it seems, is an easier sell yet in most cases a solid SEO campaign will deliver far more ROI than a similar budget placed in PPC. A client may not get full value in the first month but once the traffic intersects it keeps growing unlike the fairly flat curve that a PPC campaign often generates. I’m not going to turn this into a SEO vs. PPC post though, they both work. … Continue Reading

Using The New Adwords Landing Page Algorithm to Improve Onpage SEO

It’s been a few weeks since Google announced changes to the Adwords Quality Score algorithm, and although PPC isn’t my main discipline, I can certainly see the effect that update has had on the five PPC accounts I’m involved with. Some keywords that previously had a Quality Score (QS) of 5+ have dropped to a score of 2+, and this has had a direct effect on their placement, despite the same amount of budget spend. I know there’s still a huge school of thought that insists that PPC and SEO are separate entities and never the twain shall meet, but the latest move by Google is forcing the gap between the two to close even further. So, what is Quality Score and why is it so important? Well, if you’ve ever had working experience of Adwords, you’ll know that Google uses QS to ascertain both the relevance of an ad as well as the relevance of the keywords and landing page of the destination URL of that ad. Other determining factors include a decent Click Through Rate (CTR) as well as the ad/campaign’s historical performance. … Continue Reading

Social Extensions for Adwords: the new +1 Annotation Segment

Connect your +1′s with Social Extensions

Following on from the launch of Google+ Pages for business, Google also announced that it was going to be possible to connect +1′s so that all of your +1 data from pages, ads and search results are pulled together to form an overall +1 total.

Connection was launched late last week when Google rolled out Social Extensions for Adwords. As with organic search results and more recently display ads showing annotations, you will also start to see personal annotations alongside Adwords ads if any of your friends or connections have recomended an ad using the +1 button. … Continue Reading

The Future of Paid Search – Google, Bing or something else?

In some cases it is highly underestimated: the power of paid search. A remark you often hear is “who actually clicks on those links?? I don’t!”. Still there is a huge amount of clicks, and money, going around in paid search. It is successful, no doubt about that.

But what about the future? Will it remain successful? And who should we be with, Google? Bing? Or maybe somebody else? Kissmetrics took a good look at the future of paid search. … Continue Reading

Branded AdWords advertising boosts total site traffic

Whenever a company publishes research that casts its own products in a positive light, my sceptic-alarm goes off. Often this type of ‘research’ is just poorly veiled PR spin disguised as a scientific study.

There are some exceptions fortunately, and Google is one of them. For all the criticism I often levy against the big G, I have to admit that their computer scientists regularly come up with some fascinating stuff. … Continue Reading

Google simplifies Adwords for small businesses with AW Express

Yesterday Google announced a new way to do Adwords, aimed specifically at local businesses. In Google’s own words:

“AdWords Express is designed to help local businesses that aren’t already AdWords advertisers create effective campaigns.”

… Continue Reading

Above The Line, PPC and SEO – It’s a “Brand” New Game

First up, an apology. This is less of a informative post and more of an open-ended question to all marketers, and not necessarily for just those that focus on online or search marketing. I’m looking at brand, budget, media and ROI. And testing. Lots of testing.

Being an SEO at OMD, a full service media agency born from a purely offline media buying and planning service, for the past 11 months has been an eye-opening experience. Only half the people in the agency work in “digital”, so getting down on a campaign level as far as  ”search” or even more granualar “SEO” can be tricky.  I hold my hands up, I understand next to nothing about how offline or “above the line” marketing works. It’s too easy to become siloed and work almost completely separately. You get so used to assuming that my link building has no relation to their outdoor advertising that integration is something that needs hard hard work, daily hard work, in order to make it happen. … Continue Reading

Text Advertising on the Google Display Network – International Search Summit

This session covered the best practises for the display network and was presented by Biren Kalaria from Google.

Reach consumers at scale through YouTube, Blogger, DoubleClick and various publisher networks. Use Ad Planner to optimise these opportunities.

Google reaches 79% of the Europe population in the display network. There are typically 501 ad exposures per user per month. Average CTR is 0.07% on display whereas GDN text receives is closer to 0.37% when contextually targeted. Contextual targeting of text ads achieves good CTR across most verticals. CPCs are typically very low. … Continue Reading