You know when you allow ads to be placed on your website using Adwords? When you’re seduced by the promise of making millions from clicks and conversions and you decide to sell space on your site to nameless companies? If you do, then you’ll know all about Google’s apocalyptic warning about click-fraud that you’re required to read before signing up.
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It’s not nice when something like this happens, is it? Two icons of the British high street locked in a legal battle, but what could it possibly be about? Why are two such resoundingly ‘nice’ brands instructing their lawyers to rip each other to pieces?
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Most people involved with online marketing either regularly use, or are at least familiar with Adwords. The application, which allows webmasters to attract not only traffic to their website, but highly specific, targeted traffic, would appear to have won the online marketing race, becoming the presumptive medium to market anything online. However, Adwords is not perfect, in fact there’s a pretty major flaw that’s annoying more and more of us.
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On a preliminary testing basis, AdWords has begun implementing ads with optional product images and additional descriptions. A main example is ‘diamonds,’ searches for that keyword have recently begun displaying results for a company called Blue Nile that can, if the searcher chooses, include product photos and descriptions.
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Google has just launched a very exciting new tool for Google Adwords users. It’s called display Ad Builder and it allows you to customize and create your own adverts, be they image, animation or flash based. The tool allows even small businesses to get creative with their advertising, instead of simply displaying the traditional text ad.
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This article follows on from last weeks post on ‘Getting the best ROI from Adwords using Google Analytics’.

Keyword Popularity
Impressions show you the number of times your advert has been displayed.
Clicks show you the amount of clicks the advert has received (and you paid for)
Click Through Rate(CTR) is the percentage of times a searcher clicked on your advert.
By looking at these, you can get a good idea of how often people search for a particular keyword, and when being supplied with your advert, how likely they are to click it. (more…)

We at Top Click Media love Google Conversion Tracking. It is an invaluable tool for anyone trying to make money out of websites. However, one thing has always annoyed us about it – Google’s insistence that you display the Site Stats Badge which lets your customers know that you are tracking conversions. So, imagine our delight when Goggle announced that it will no longer be requiring this little interference with site design.
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As you are probably already aware, your quality score is one of the major factors to consider when attempting to plan an effective AdWords campaign. The trouble is that traditionally the criteria for deciding the quality score has been, to all intents and purposes, a mystery; just another Google policy that has been annoying people like us for quite some time.
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There is now some added functionality and transparency from Google to break out the search traffic between Google search and the Search Partners. In the dark old days you were only able to separte the figures between Search (Google Search & Search Partners) and Google Content Network.

With the new filters, we can now get clear data on the performance of the Search Partners: (more…)

This article follows on from last weeks post on ‘How to achieve a better ROI’.

Keywords that lose money.

To identifying the keywords that will lose you money, first click on the ROI Column header to bring the lowest ROI keywords to the top of the table. (more…)

Mirroring a recent decision by MSN and Yahoo, Goggle has decided to resume advertising online casinos in the UK through Adwords. However, the move is strictly limited to casinos with licenses from the British Gambling Commission, or who have an advertising license somewhere else in the European Economic Community.
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This week I’m going to show you how to achieve a better ROI by using Google analytics. We will look at using Analytics to drive the highest quality traffic to your site, and hopefully increase your ROI.

There are many reports to be looked at in Google Analytics some being more important than others.
One report in particular, can show you the ROI for each keyword your bidding on, letting you keep the ones that work and dropping those that don’t.

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Over the last 12months I have seen my CPC’s and CPA’s for my clients rise and I’m finding it so very hard to keep control on it – Is anyone out there feeling the pressure like me in delivering good ROI?
I can so appreciate there are so many external factors why but it seems to me the competition in each industry is on the up – I have also just found out today via a colleague here at Top Click Media that there is now a minimum bid to be on page 1 – WOW this is surely going to hurt my CPC’s and CPA’s even more? (more…)