A very interesting adwords development that’s been trialled across the US recently has finally made it to these shores. Essentially what’s happening is that Google are allowing some accounts, initially just ones with particularly high quality scores, to show more than just text in their ads, this can take some surprisingly diverse forms with everything from links and maps, to pictures of products and even videos.

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For ages the advertising of hard liquor using Adwords was flatly forbidden. Adwords had a no nonsense approach, no mention or implication of the good stuff was to be used on their platform, whatsoever. Recently however, the credit-crunch amongst other things has forced Google to reappraise its values and perhaps look a little less harshly on the multi-billion dollar alcahol industry.

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Google Images is one of the best and most popular image search facilities on the internet, so it’s surprising that Google have up to now resisted putting ads on it. They did however speculate recently that they could be losing up to $200 million dollars a year by not doing so. After that statement, it came as a surprise to absolutely no one when they began experimenting with banners on Google images and then last month with text ads.

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Adwords is beta testing a new budgeting option called ‘Timeframe’. If Timeframe is rolled out properly it will allow users to budget for their campaigns by the day or by the month, depending on their preference.

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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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Adwords has greatly expanded the number of accounts trialling its ‘automatic matching,’ feature, allowing them to earn more money during the tough economic times ahead. The feature works by identifying keywords, in addition to those that the client user has stipulated, which could be useful for a particular account by making use of Google’s extensive language processing ability. The ads will then be shown in response to these keywords as well as the ones the advertiser has actually stipulated. These clicks are billed at a rate that is around that of the ad group’s average CPC.

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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.

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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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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.

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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?

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