Get Ready for Google’s New Adwords Interface

For those of you who haven’t tried it out yet, Google’s new Adwords interface is rolling out very soon!

Many advertisers, including us here at Getupdated, received an email a couple weeks ago saying that within 30 days we would automatically be switched to the new interface. This was sent out as Google’s attempt to warn us to be prepared for the switch.

If you are an active Pay Per Click advertiser, get ready for switch and familiarize yourself with the new interface. The feel is very different, so it might take some time to get used to.

Google Adwords Trademark Policy Changes

Google is now allowing advertisers to use trademark terms in their PPC ad text in the United States. Previously, advertisers were only allowed to bid on trademark keywords and not use them in their ad text. This made it very difficult for advertisers looking to sell a specific product and weren’t able to write the brand name of the product in the ad text.

Google has outlined the following guidelines describing the ways in which the trademark terms can now be used:

-Ads which use the term in a descriptive or generic way, and not in reference to the trademark owner or the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term.

-Ads which use the trademark in a nominative manner to refer to the trademark or its owner, specifically:

• Resale of the trademarked goods or services: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the goods or services corresponding to a trademark term. The landing page of the ad must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the goods or services corresponding to a trademark from the advertiser.

• Sale of components, replacement parts or compatible products corresponding to a trademark: The advertiser’s site must sell (or clearly facilitate the sale of) the components, replacement parts or compatible products relating to the goods or services of the trademark. The advertiser’s landing page must clearly demonstrate that a user is able to purchase the components, parts or compatible products corresponding to the trademark term from the advertiser.

• Informational sites: The primary purpose of the advertiser’s site must be to provide non-competitive and informative details about the goods or services corresponding to the trademark term. Additionally, the advertiser may not sell or facilitate the sale of the goods or services of a competitor of the trademark owner.

If you adjust your ads based on this new policy, the ads will not show until June 15th. For more information, visit Google Adwords Support.

Google AdWords Now Allows Ad Titles Longer Than the Usual 25 Character Limit

As recently as March you may have noticed that some Google AdWords ads have longer titles than you’re used to seeing. Google has confirmed that in limited instances, the AdWords title can exceed the 25 character limit. There is a thread over at WebmasterWorld about this.

Exceeding the character limit in your ad title is possible by using dynamic keyword insertion in your ad copy; the ad title may show more than 25 characters.

A Googler has stated that there is no guarantee that your ad title will display characters beyond the limit of 25, but that Google may choose to show a keyword with 26 or 27 characters automatically.

So with this in mind, if your ads are looked after by a PPC management company you should notify them about this and play around with your ad title copy but realize that if your ad title exceeds 25 characters the ad simply might not work all of the time, and the ad title might not always match the ad description text too. It is worth noting though that you should test this to find out if it results in any improvements to your click through rate and your quality score.

New Adwords Interface

Google Adwords has revamped their user interface. Now when you login to your Adwords account you will see a link to the New Interface (Beta) at the top right corner. Some cool features of the new interface are graphs of your performance data and faster editing of your campaigns.

Check out Google’s video on the new interface:

Negative Keywords are a Must!

For many companies, creating a successful Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign is of the utmost importance.  One very important PPC tactic that is often overlooked is developing a negative keyword list. As defined by Google, “Adding a negative keyword to your ad group or campaign means that your ads won’t show for search queries containing that term.” For example, if you are running a campaign for Used Cars and you do not sell Nissan’s, you would want to add Nissan as a negative keyword to your campaign. (You can add the keyword with a negative sign in front of it to your keyword list. For example, -Nissan.) The reason why this is so important is because this makes your traffic more targeted. Negative keywords will also decrease your impressions, which as a result will increase your CTR, and increase your Quality Score. Plus, there is no reason for you to generate traffic for Nissan’s if you don’t even offer them!

So before you set your PPC campaigns live, be sure to develop a negative keyword list! A great tool to find negative keywords is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Review of MSN’s adCenter PPC Program

MSN’s adCenter is a search advertising engine which states that they can bring your online marketing to a whole new level. With state of the art tools and customized audience research capabilities, it is threatening to be the new AdWords altogether. This is because not only do you have the classic pay per click advertising model made famous by Google, but MSN goes another step further: they offer analytical tools that help an advertiser target potential customers, track ad performance, and much more.

So far, according to a study done earlier this year, adCenter ads converts clicks to customers at a rate that is 57% higher than Google and 48% higher than Yahoo! Search Marketing. Further, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, MSN supports 94 million visitors a month, which is a highly qualified audience, with 81% making online purchases in the past six months.

One of the major complaints advertisers have with pay-per-click programs is the inability to choose to whom they are advertising, resulting in unqualified traffic. This will make all the difference in being able to make the sale or not. With tools available like demographic predictions, MSN hopes to be able to bring more targeted ads overall than either of the other competing engines can. Can they succeed?

MSN’s adCenter information page states, “For instance, if you sell running shoes, you want an audience who is interested in running shoes to see your ad and take action, which may result in the audience clicking on your search ad, visiting your web site, and buying a pair of running shoes. Conversely, you would not want someone who is interested in buying horseshoes to see your ad and take a similar course of action because that likely not result in a sale, but the click on your ad by this person would still cost you.”

There have been multiple complaints however; some have said that the MSN’s adCenter bids on keywords can reach much higher levels than Google’s, without seeing much improvement upon ranking in the sponsored listings. Further, MSN utilizes about 5 results per search engine results page (SERP) on the right hand side, with one or two results at the top, compared to Google’s 8 ads on the side, and up to 3 ads at the top. Customers are complaining that it is too difficult to reach a top position for their ad, which doesn’t do them much good if they cannot save money over Google’s program.

Others have abandoned the program due to lack of relevant contextual advertising that MSN’s press releases claimed was far superior to AdWords. There have been many updates and upgrades since the beta program went live after MSN’s contractual obligations with Overture/Yahoo! Search Marketing ended in June, and results have improved much more overall. But there may still be many more bugs.

When doing a search in MSN for “discount apple desktop pcs” there is an ad for Alienware and one for plasma TVs, which hold little relevance for me in regards to my search. Another search with keywords “natural herbal supplements” show two almost identical ads, one for dealtime.com and one for shopping.com, that are titled “Save Time and Money”. The sad part is that so far, I had only done searches on four keyword phrases, and two out of the four searches provided multiple irrelevant results in advertising. That doesn’t look so great for MSN so far.

What about click fraud? According to several reports, click fraud was absolutely no better for adCenter than for either Google or Yahoo, even with the rumored addition of DeepMetrix, which is a web analytics firm that competes with WebTrends and other firms.

Still, the program is fairly new, and there are bound to be glitches. You may just want to sign up and see what happens for yourself. Currently, MSN is offering a $30 American Express brand rewards gift card when you spend $30 in the adCenter program, and it only takes five bucks to activate an account, then it is very similar to what Google’s AdWords program has to offer. Fortunately, the analytics part of the MSN program is extremely simple to use, and in my opinion, far easier to track with conversion tools than Google’s. This month I will be running multiple tests with adCenter, and I’ll let you in on all of the results.

SEO Skills That Translate To Paid Search

Sometimes it may seem that natural search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search marketing are two entirely different animals. There is a technical aspect of SEO that does not translate to paid search and a “media” aspect to paid search that doesn’t often sit well with SEOs.

So where do the two meet?

It may be surprising to some, but SEOs possess some key skills that translate very well in the paid search arena. Whether the focus is technical SEO (e.g., coding, automated feeds, dynamic URL solutions, etc.) or nontechnical SEO (e.g., wordsmithing), it’s generally not a huge leap to move from SEO to paid search (and back again).

Here are a few skills that both paid and organic search marketers can leverage.

Keyword list development: Nearly every search marketing campaign (regardless of whether its PPC or SEO) starts off with a keyword list. We all have our various tools and tecniques for developing this list, but the bottom line is we know how to pull a list together - whether we’re paying for ads or optimizing someone’s web site for their most desirable keywords.

Optimized titles and descriptions: A core component of natural search engine optimization is optimizing page titles and description tags. In fact, SEOs may have an advantage over traditional copywriters when it comes to developing paid search ads because we are accustomed to building the title and description around the relevancy of the keyword in question. Google and Yahoo both evaluate paid search ads for relevancy (e.g., to encourage advertisers to bid on terms that are actually relevant to their product, rather than bid on terms simply because they get a lot of search queries.)

Competitive analysis: Part of an SEO’s job is to analyze the positioning of their clients’ competitors in the search results of the top engines for a given keyword. Putting a competitive positioning report together for paid search results is not that different from putting the same type of report together for organic listings. SEOs may even have a head start over more traditional marketers in that they are accustomed to running queries in various ways based on search popularity, plus they likely have some tools or tricks up their sleeve to help with an overall competitive review.

A thorough understanding of search: SEOs inherently understand what is important to search engines and (at least most of us) possess a deep empathy for the search engines’ desire to provide relevant results even for paid search results. Traditional media buyers may be baffled when ads are rejected by editorial teams due to lack of relevance (after all, they are PAYING for the ad), but SEOs understand how important it is to keep relevancy consistent from the keyword to the ad copy to the landing page.