AdWords ads appearing above search results on Google.com now have a new look, according to the Inside AdWords blog. The sponsored links that appear above organic search results will now have a yellow background, instead of the previous blue background. To lessen unintentional clicks on ads, Google has also changed the way it processes clicks on those ads, from allowing a click anywhere in the box to count as a click to requiring the user to clic
The Google AdWords Blog just announced that they have made two changes on how the top sponsored listings in the Google search results are handled. (1) A color change from a blue background to a yellow background was pushed through today after much testing. (2) Now you have to click on the title of the ad for it to take you to the advertiser’s page. In the past, you can click anywhere on the blue background and Google would count it as a click.
Vinny Lingham reports finding a new metric on his Google AdWords console named Impression Share. Impression Share is a statistic available at both the campaign and account level, which shows the share of all impressions an ad earned against others that are competing for those. From the help pages:
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Are Google’s moves to expand its footprint into new areas a precursor to launching a behavioral targeting network? That’s the prediction of blogger Anil Batra, a Web analytics consultant and former account manager at BT technology provider Revenue Science. Batra points out that Google’s networks of publishers and advertisers could provide a vast amount of visitor behavior data which could be used to target ads across its network. While Google do
In some cases, less is more. Google is finding that out in respect to the number of ads it shows on certain search results pages. Last week, Robert Scoble shared his cocktail party conversation with an anonymous Googler in a post titled “Did Google turn down the revenue knob?” While fewer ads mean less short-term revenue, the increased relevance leads users to click on ads more, according to the source. That kind of thinking is not new to search
We descend now into Beavis and Butthead territory, but a reader sent this in, and it gave me a chuckle for the same reason it did him. When signing up for AdWords, he was presented with a CAPTCHA code — an image of letters that you enter to prove you’re not some automated system hitting Google: Click to continue reading…
Google AdWords has begun to roll out the quality score column in advertiser accounts in AdWords. Advertisers who are having trouble with quality score issues - as well as those who want to ensure they are not having their accounts impacted with poor quality scores - can now enable the a special quality score column that will reveal the status of their quality score for keywords.
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After several emails from readers and spotting Jeremy Mayes post I have learned of a bug with Google’s new AdWords quality score algorithm. Google AdWords Adds Quality Score Column & To Improved Quality Algorithm from Wednesday warned us of the new changes coming but apparently there is a bug that makes good performing ads prices spike through the roof
Google announced that you can now pause individual ads or keywords in your AdWords accounts. Brad Geddes has screen captures showing how to do this visually.
But Jeremy Mayes reports that some paused campaigns were not completely paused and advertisers were getting billed for clicks and impressions. Maybe the launch of the new AdWords feature caused a small bug with some paused campaigns?
For more information on pausing your campaign read How do I pause a keyword, ad or site within my Ad Group?
Google announced today that it will be updating its ad ranking algorithm for AdWords, and making that process a bit more transparent for advertisers.
Before the end of the month, Google plans to implement an improved quality-based bidding system, updating the current AdRank algorithm that first launched in August 2005, and has been updated consistently since then.
The last major updates came in December 2005, and again in July 2006, in the form of landing page quality scoring additions that left many advertisers upset with Google’s lack of information regarding how that quality score was reached
Google will be adding a quality score column within your AdWords accounts by weeks end. In addition, within the next couple of weeks, Google will be rolling out a significant change to the AdWords quality score algorithm. I had a conversation with Nick Fox, the head of Google’s ad quality team, to review some of these changes.
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Google announced plans to begin a test of CPC-based ads using the site targeting feature. Site targeting allows advertisers to choose individual sites in the content network where they want their ads to appear. Since it launched nearly two years ago, the program has used bids placed on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) basis
Since Google Checkout was
launched last June, merchants in the program who also advertise on Google
through Google AdWords have
had little Google Checkout shopping cart icons in their ads. Today, Google
Checkout
announced the icon will be updated to a badge format similar to the
Google
Checkout buttons used by merchants since the program started.
The image above shows the
before-and-after look. I’m still seeing "before" icons, but I imagine they’ll
roll over into the new ones shortly.
Google has just started a “send us your smile” campaign. They are moving one of their offices and want to wall paper the new office walls with pictures of Google advertisers.
A nice sentiment but after a while staring at those smiling faces on the walls has to get a little much… I want to visit that office after 6 months and would wager a few of the pics have been graffittied… true smiling can be contagious but in your face smiles can be annoying after a while.
Give us any thoughts here.
The Google AdWords Blog wrote a blog entry introducing us to the Google click fraud team, with a blog post describing some of the most common questions and concerns on click fraud. Here are some of the highlights from the post.
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At the Inside AdWords blog, Google invites Click Quality team member Julian to put a kinder, gentler face on the team that many have complained is inaccessible by mortal advertisers. He shares a bit about what his job entails, and points out some of the more common concerns that usually turn out not to be click fraud, and steps to take to investigate suspicious clicks.
The Google AdWords blog announced that they have removed the cap on the number of sites you can exclude in the Site Exclusion Tool. Many advertisers that opt in to Google’s Content network (AdSense) often may run out of sites they want their ads to specifically not show up on. Google has listened and removed the cap, allowing an unlimited number of sites and URLs (sub sections of sites) to be added to your Site Exclusion list.
A new patent application from Google gives hints about its plans to include relevancy factors in its contextual ad algorithms. According to Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea, the filing describes a process of scoring ads by price, relevancy, and performance, using a technique that has popped up in several recent patent applications, “probabilistic hierarchical inferential learned cluster.”
Google has been applying relevancy to ad algorithms since the fall, and causing problems for advertisers that are not factoring in Google’s Quality Score when planning campaigns.
We had a problem with our PPC campaign recently. Even though we had unoptimised the ad delivery we noticed one ad getting more traffic than the other. Now this did not seem like what should happen so we contacted Google thinking maybe we had found a bug in the delivery system.
In actuality we had found an impacting variable that is not generally known. Quality scoring impacts the delivery of your ads - one can get a better score and that will influence delivery even when asking for even flighting.
I saw
Should Google Give Brand Owners A Cut? from InsideGoogle earlier, about
the idea of Google paying brand owners a share of revenues of those advertising
on their names. Then a reader just emailed me asking what I think about the
idea. OK, I’ll bite. In short — probably not. More on that below, along with a
review of Google’s existing policies and how they came to be. Plus, give me your
thoughts by commenting!
Most Google AdWords advertisers have been facing the problem of rising pay per click prices. But while in the past many advertisers have gone with the increased prices as the cost of doing business on AdWords, recently more advertisers have decided to significantly cut their AdWords spending because many of the keyword prices have resulted in advertisers being priced out of profitability.
Marketwatch recently spoke with six advertisers who all spent between $4 million and $10 million in 2006 who plan to spend less in 2007.
One of the most challenging aspects of local search is small business (SMB) advertiser acquisition. Everyone is aware, especially Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, that the US SMB market is where the advertiser volume is: almost 99% of US businesses qualify as small businesses (here defined as < 100 employees).
According to the US Small Business Administration (SBA), more than 20 million firms qualify under the definition above, with almost 19 million of those having no employees at all!
AdWeek reports that Google is testing video ads at Beet.tv for AllState. The reports indicate that about a week ago, Beet.tv has 15 second Google ads for AllState in their videos. The ads linked to www.allstate.com/google with a special landing page for those users. The ads “were sold at $15 per thousand views, with the money split between Beet.tv and Google.” This is not the first time Google tested out video ads, they did before with MTV around mid-August of 2006.
Barry Schwartz over at SERoundtable has capture the first sighting of the Google Quality score in an AdWords campaign.He has a screenshot of the new update that I have not been upgraded to yet in our many accounts.
It appears as if Google has replaced the edit listing column with a listing of the Quality Score for each keyword.
This morning I posted a screen shot of the quality score in AdWords, showing a rating of Great, OK and Poor. The quality score does not show all that much, but it does show more than before. Plus, Google has set up some more documentation on what the quality score column means. The help page says that this is a “customizable column that is disabled by default for new accounts,” but I do not see a way to activate it for my account - so I suspect it is still a limited user test. You can see a screen capture over here.
Nathan Weinberg reports that searches on Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa bring up a special holiday divider between the organic results and the AdWords results on the right. Google did the same thing last year, but last years candy cane has been replaced by Christmas trees. Also make sure to track Google’s holiday logo doodles.
In a two part post at the AdWords blog, Google has added more detail to their trademark policies. In part one, Google explains how trademark owners can prevent use of their trademarks in AdWords and how they can exclude some advertisers from the trademark policy. In part two, Google explains how advertisers can request to use certain restricted trademarks in AdWords.
Google has been listening, I guess, to advertisers recent complaints over the new AdWords Quality Score and Landing Page update. The Google AdWords blog informed us that Google has added several pages of content to the help section better documenting the changes. Those pages include, and I quote:
The Inside AdWords Blog announced a new feature that allows businesses without web sites to build a “hosted business page” for their business on Google’s servers and then use AdWords to send traffic there. The page is basically an informational page that tells people how to contact you and what you do. It is currently only open for new US advertisers, at no cost. More details on how it works at AdWords help. I believe Yahoo also offers a similar service.
The Inside AdWords Blog announced a new feature that allows businesses without web sites to build a “hosted business page” for their business on Google’s servers and then use AdWords to send traffic there. The page is basically an informational page that tells people how to contact you and what you do. It is currently only open for new US advertisers, at no cost. More details on how it works at AdWords help. I believe Yahoo also offers a similar service.
PPC Discussions confirms via Traffick’s interview that Google is really testing displaying some of the quality score values to AdWords advertisers. Rumors started back when PPC Discussions found a DigitalPoint Forums discussion thread mentioning that a particular advertiser was told Google will be testing this. It appears that based on Andrew Goodman’s interview with Nick Fox, that this is indeed going to be tested. FYI - Yahoo already shows quality score factors in Panama to the advertiser. The question all PPC engines live with, is just how much to show to the advertiser.
Google’s AdWords Editor program, which makes it easy to perform account management of your campaigns directly from your desktop, may come with one large pitfall. Simon Heseltine reports that while performing campaign maintenance on his account, he noticed that impressions and clicks data was much higher than normal
Andrew Goodman interviewed Nick Fox, Google’s Senior Product Manager for Ads Quality, about the most recent AdWords algorithm change. Some highlights from Andrew’s interview include that Google seems to have two quality scores algorithms for (1) setting the minimum bids and (2) for ad rankings. He also gets into some of the internal debates Google is going through when it comes to using how much of which algorithms at what points. This was a very good and insightful interview, definitely worth a read or two.
I reported this morning at SERoundtable that AdWordsAdvisor Denies Google Uses Conversion Tracking & Analytics To Determine Minimum Bids. Yes, Google has come out on the Internet to make it clear to everyone that Google is not using data from their conversion tracking scripts of Google Analytics to determine the minimum price of keywords. This was a recent rumor that began with the new AdWords algorithm coming into play.
