This article is about Google Product extensions which are putting an end to the 70-character ad text which is incredibly restricting, the ‘one landing page per keyword’ rule and the fact that image ads are not available on the search network.

Amazing! Unfortunately, this product is only available in the U.S. for the time being but I am sure Google will roll it out world wide once all the bugs have been dealt with.

So, what exactly are Google Extensions? Simple! Instead of simply one ad being displayed for a company/product, the ad appears with a + sign inside of a box underneath it which can be expanded and displays a list of other products featured by this same company. Brilliant!

Where does this extra information come from? The company needs to enter information into Google’s Merchant Center and the information is pulled from there. If a customer then clicks on one of the products listed in the expanded product extension, they are taken to the appropriate page (specified in the Google Merchant Center).

The article goes into great detail about the strategies, costs involved, tracking and whether there will be an impact on SEO (since once all of the extensions are expanded, the first organic listing falls well below the fold) but for sake of simplicity, I have just covered the basics.

Check out the full article here (with a subscription), on Google or contact us at Anduro for more information on this. Remember though, this is only available in the U.S. for the time being.

The gist is, this man knowing that people do vanity searches on themselves in Google, created an ad asking them for a job. Genius!

There are many reports available to the AdWords advertiser – some helpful, some just a lot of data on a page with no real value. One of the helpful ones is called the Search Query report. This report spits back, essentially, a list of keywords users have used and have seen your ads. The reason this is helpful is if you are using different match types (which I hope you are!) there are a lot of variations of keywords that you may or may not have included making this list incredibly helpful. You can also see which words your ads showed up for that you may not want to show for and you can then add these words as negative keywords.

A big one I have been seeing a lot is a local company selling their product only in that particular city, with the geo target set to that city. So for example, if I have a jewelry store in Calgary and I am only interested in local customers, I can set the target to Calgary only. But if someone in Calgary searches for ‘jewelry store in vancouver’ my ad will show up if one of my keywords is phrase match ‘jewelry store’. This will show up in the report and I can add vancouver as a negative keyword.

On the flip side of that, maybe someone typed in ‘calgary jewelry store’ and my ad would have shown. If I have broad match terms, I could add calgary jewelry store as a phrase match term and slowly eliminate the need for broad match terms which often have high impressions and show the ads for some pretty interesting combinations of words! They are also very good at using up your budget quickly.

When you run the search query report, you can specify which campaign or adgroups you want to run the report on.

With this new feature, you can log in to your account and while you are looking at each adgroups keywords, click the “See Search Terms” link and it will show you all of the keywords used for that particular adgroup. This is so much easier than running the report every time and then having to sort by adgroup etc.

The real time saver though, is the fact that you can add keywords right there. With a click of the mouse! You can also add negative keywords just as easily.



You can either select specific keywords and see what variations users have used or you can simply click on See search terms… and then select All. This will give you a complete list.

Fantastic tool that has already saved me a ton of time! Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Here is a link for more details: Internet Marketing Conference – Calgary 2010.

Great line-up of speakers. So far 60 people have registered. Ends on St Patrick’s Day – March 17th.

Topics include Social Media, Gaming, Videos, SEO, Pay-Per-Click and Industry related news.

Anduro is offering a discount. Call our office and we will give you the promo code.

1. The importance of the tail varies tremendously
2. People search differently for different types of services/products.
3. The importance of the tail does not depend on the size of the search spend.
4. The tail is most important for SKU-based commodity retailers.
5. The tail is critically important for some advertisers.

I love the way Damon James in our company summarized the article. His conclusion is, “For bigger websites (lots of pages) and companies with lots of discretionary funds, the long-tail is a good thing. For smaller websites (limited real estate) and companies with limited dollars, (unless they want to do it themselves), not so much.”

One of our strategies is to use SEO techniques to go after keywords that are in the middle of the tail and pay-per-click campaigns to catch keywords on the long tail.

The bottom line is that most companies have to look at the value of keywords in the long tail and determine the value. More often than not setting up a pay-per-click campaign is the best way to go.

Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.

Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.

Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:

• Enter the search term “gps”
• Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada /  All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
• Click on News headlines to see related news
• Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)

If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.

For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”.  But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.

By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.

At this stage we have a few options:

1. Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
2. Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
3. Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page

We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.

Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Jeff Nelson

In online marketing the key is to gently coax website visitors through an evolution into website participants.  Whether we are talking about Pay Per Click platforms or ecommerce sites, visitors need to be participating – clicking – in order to increase the conversion rate and, hence, the ROI.  As evidenced by the 2 million Google Search results, this process is not a hard science with tried and tested methods – it is an art.  There are a lot of web users who are more than happy to simply be visitors – just hoping to pass GO and collect their proverbial $200.  After reviewing a few of the Google Search results and thinking of my own online experiences I have identified two key concepts that website owners should keep in mind when trying to entice visitors to take that first step toward earning the highly esteemed blue Participant ribbon.

• The need to participate:
  • In today’s fast paced world, people do not take the time to do things they do not need or want to do.   The end goal of the conversion must be valuable and secure for the visitor as well as for the website owner.  Nurture the desire to participate by clearly communicating the value of the conversion to the website visitor.  Encourage return business by adding an additional thank you page after the conversion step is completed.
• The ability to participate:
  • Expand on the concept of the Big Orange Button (BOB).  Keep the visitor on task by ensuring that the information, design and feel of the website are consistent from the landing page through to the actual conversion step.  Limit distractions, make the next step(s) obvious and encourage and enable the visitor to act quickly.

It is well recognized that higher conversion rates can translate into higher ROI and a few well executed website adjustments can help to increase conversion rates.  So, welcome to all visitors.  Now, ready… set…participate!!

- Jenn -

Guest post done by Jenn. It just so happens that Anduro Marketing offers what we call an “Increasing Conversions Session”. To find out more, contact us.

1. Relevant Content
The first factor is to have a tight connection between the ad and the landing page. We aim for similar content between the ad, the keywords and the content of the landing page. This is important not only for maintaining high Google quality scores and keeping the price per click as low as possible but also to improve conversion rates. Costs can skyrocket when we set up ads that are directed to landing pages with content that is loosely related or irrelevant and conversions can plummet when a connection is not made between the ad and the landing page.

2. Conversion Rates
The second aspect is generating conversions from the landing page which is ultimately measured by ROI. Some tricks of the trade to increase conversions include:

• Adding a big orange button (BOB) – the button doesn’t have to be “orange”.
• Having relevant buttons above the fold
• Minimizing distractions on the page
• Linking to a page with a form on it
• Listing the benefits and value
• Add micro conversion features

Solution
Every company and the products they offer are different. The solution to both problems is to design and develop landing pages that are relevant and encourage a positive  response.

Essentially, if you are looking to make changes to your account, you can click on this tab and it will give you suggestions on how you could improve the account. The tool is new so right now there are only Budget and Keyword changes ideas but there is a promise that there is more to come.

I tried this tool out on a client of ours and found that, of course, Google wants me to increase the budget and add keywords. What was surprising though, is that the increase was only $0.60/day! This really won’t make them a ton of extra money but according to the tool, will increase the traffic by an estimated 121 clicks/month.

I am always a bit skeptical of new Google tools because I am never sure if the tools are meant to help the advertiser or Google but this one seems to be not so terrible – if you always keep in mind that Google is a business and they need to make money!

Here is a link to some more information about the Opportunities tab which I have actually used a few times. There are good keyword suggestions which you may have missed. For the most part though, it is just a way to check you are on the right track.

There is also another blog post about this that I received a while ago and would like to share.

The title is, “When to Restructure Your PPC Campaign or Completely Start Over” by Amanda Chaney.

She points out 5 scenarios which may lead you to have to make a decision to either restructure or start over:

1. Change of Direction – company is going in a new direction, with a new site

2. Client Evolution – long standing account may not be working anymore since the internet and search behaviors change.

3. Site Redesign – if the site is undergoing a redesign, so should the PPC account.

4. Reporting Reasons – companies may want to see data grouped differently, focus on certain aspects of their site etc.

5. Poor History – if the account has poor history such as poorly written ads or poorly organized structure.

I would like to give my input here.

If at all possible, I don’t think it is a good idea to start over unless you have to. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Account history is a big deal – especially with Google Adwords. Google bases a lot of decisions on the account history and how the account has been managed in the past. Having a good account history will help and if you just go a restart from scratch, you will lose all the history. This is not only not great from Google’s perspective but just think about all the useful data you are losing. What can you use to compare the new data to? The account will have changed too much to compare it to the old campaigns so you have no real way of determining if the campaign is successful.

2. Making drastic changes when a client is making drastic changes to their website spells out trouble. We did this with a client of ours recently and here are the issues: they were getting a lot of conversions before they launched their new site and we redid their PPC campaign. All these changes were made and conversions dropped like a rock. We obviously had no way of knowing for sure if the problem was the PPC Campaign or the website. After about 3 months, we figured out that it was actually the site and not the campaign (CTR was much higher and more people were getting to the site but not covnerting). So be cautious when making drastic changes – either to your site or the campaign.

Small changes are better to make than big ones. The results may not be as obvious but in the end you know what changes made the difference.

So to recap, unless you really have to, I would always try to redesign rather than start fresh. What do you think?