This past week, Google has introduced a new “Analyze Competition” feature in the Adwords interface.   It can be found under the “opportunities” tab.

The feature examines the account’s activity over two weeks, and lists categories that represent the products/services you’re advertising. These are based on search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with the account, users will see a bar graph highlighting individual performance compared to the performance of other advertisers in the category.  For questions on how to use this to increase your CPA or Click Thru Rate, please contact us.

-Ryan Walker

In this recession internet and mobile advertising is big business. Everybody knows that Google Adwords is the leader in internet and mobile advertising. Apple is attempting to muscle its way in by creating iAd. But the main question has been “how does iAd it differ from Google AdWords”?

Steve Job stated that mobile advertising is just not the same as a desktop. With limited screen space on mobile devices the ads from Google and Yahoo clog up screen space.  He believes that people tend to use mobile devices for specific applications such as reading a book, playing a game or for business use. Mr. Jobs wants to change all of that. His first step was the iPad. It has sold over 450,000 units and still going.

With Apples new iAd platform, instead of try to compete with Google AdWords, Apple has taken a different approach. Their advertising platform will be for Apps, which Jobs believes is even bigger and more profitable than search. Apple will soon have over 100 million mobile devices out in the market.  Their thinking is this… The  bulk of peoples  mobile activities are performed on applications and they spend an average of 30 minutes per day on them. If 10 ads were to appear on each device per day, that would make up 1 billion ad impressions daily.  The ad revenue will be shared at a 60:40 ratio, with the developers getting the bigger share.

In this global economic climate affordability is the name of the game. Google AdWords strives on affordability and its self-serving user-friendly interface. Apple feels that iAd could revolutionize the mobile advertising game through Apps . But the problem is that Apps are not easy to build and could be costly. Jobs train of thought probably is “build them and they will come”. Just like everything else Apple does.

Mobile advertising was a 400-600 million dollar business at the end of fiscal 2009 and forecasters are predicting it to quadruple  that by 2013.  And Apple wants their piece.  Sure…  Apple may be the leader in the mobile hardware/software business but Google is the leader in internet and mobile advertising. When Bing announced their search engine Google didn’t even flinch. Will Apple make Google flinch? As long as people are using PC based systems, Google will always be the leader. They are just that good.

Paris Vardakas

pari@gazelleinteractive.com

Google recently introduced its new Remarketing feature.  Through this behavioral  targeting technology, advertisers can reach a target audience with display ads that are highly relevant to the way users search.

The first thing you do is build a web advertising campaign to attract visitors to your site.  Some of those visitors take your desired action once they are on your site the first time around. Unfortunately many will visit your site once, not take any action, leave your site and may never come back.  Remarketing provides a second chance for advertisers to reach someone who clicked on an ad and didn’t convert. During the first visit, they failed to convince a prospect to buy, but remarketing ads will be shown on sites from Google’s content network that they subsequently visit, allowing the advertiser to reinforce a message.

What retargeting does is it helps build brand awareness.  As visitors are presented with multiple advertisements from your business, they begin to recognize your brand. Brand recognition earns trust and leads to higher conversion rates. It also means more relevant and useful ads for users, and more opportunities for your customers to receive special offers and discounts that may be of interest to them. While doing all of this in real time.

Here is how it works. A user visits your site and a cookie gets dropped into the users computer. The cookie then tracks where the user left your site.  It knows whether it left after the home page, info page or the shopping cart for e-commerce sites. It then follows them to the next website they land on and proceeds to serve them with another ad from your company, thus reminding them of where they have just been and hopefully giving them more reason to return to your website and convert.

The major benefit of using the remarketing tool through Google is that Google is the worlds number one ad network and most utilised search engine on the web.  The Google content network reaches 80% of global internet users. Google Remarketing enables you to reach the maximum amount of potential customers by serving them with only relevant ads and content.

Paris Vardakas

paris@gazelleinteractive.com

Imagine if you could somehow discover if anyone that saw your display ad, but did not click on it, actually converted later, somewhere down line. That additional knowledge would provide valuable information as to the value of your ad placements and enable better evaluation of ROI.

Well, now you can, thanks to a new feature on the Google dashboard called “view-through conversions”.

How does view-through conversion reporting work? The Inside AdWords blog has an example. “Let’s say you’re selling pet food online and you’re measuring conversions on your site’s email newsletter sign-up and your shopping cart “Thank You” pages. If a user sees your display ad, does not click on it but then visits your site within the next 30 days to sign-up to receive your email newsletter and to purchase a couple dozen cans of organic cat food, you’ll see two View-through conversions reported on your Campaigns tab in AdWords.”

It should be noted, however, that view-through conversions are only available for display ad campaigns and you must have AdWords Conversion Tracking installed for it to work. Plus, if a user deletes a cookie after viewing a display ad but before they convert, that conversion won’t be captured.

Google released the updated version AdWords Keyword and Placement tools in beta:

* Keyword Tool combines the functionality of Keyword & Search-based Keyword Tool to get you keyword ideas based on keywords you enter, your website content, and user searches. Also let you search by any combination of a keyword, website/URL, or category – instead of having to perform each of these searches separately. Additionally, you’ll be able to see all match types for a keyword at the same time to help you compare statistics for each match type.
* Placement Tool now search for placements by any combination of keyword, website/URL, or category. For e.g., you can search for placements that’re only on youtube.com, in video placements, in automotive category. Under Advanced Options, you can also further filter placements by Country or Language, Impressions Per Day, Included Ad Sizes (those sizes offered by the content publisher for their offered placements), and demographic options.

Where is everyone? We still have $100 of free advertising on Google Adwords. Please contact us here and we will get you set up today.  Free Credit

-Gazelle Interactive

A Google AdWords representative posted a thread at the Google AdWords Help forum. In that thread, Bindu, the Google rep, said that the recent marketing blitz from VistaPrint had the wrong coupon codes on them.

If you received a VistaPrint AdWords offer code, the code was misprinted. Specifically, the code was “accidentally abridged” so the code won’t work. To get them to work, you will need to contact AdWords support – according to Bindu. Bindu said:

Recent VistaPrint Coupon Codes seem to be invalid because they were accidentally abridged. If you have received a VistaPrint code and it does not seem to work, you will have to write in to AdWords support and request the correct version of the code.
For Adwords Support help click here.

Gazelle Interactive

Google expanded the AdWords “Opportunities tab” beta to additional U.S. advertisers, and also started including U.K. and Australian advertisers in the test. You can think of the Opportunities tab as your homepage for account optimization. You can use the tab to get a quick overview of Google’s customized keyword and budget ideas for your campaigns and ad groups. Google’ll expand the Opportunities tab beta to all global advertisers over the coming weeks, announced. To find out more contact Gazelle Interactive.

Today, we’d like to tell you about a new way to run your local ads – location extensions. Location extensions allow you to “extend” your AdWords campaigns by dynamically attaching your business address to your ads. This new feature will be fully available in the coming weeks, with some advertisers having access to the feature starting today.

If you’re a business owner, you can set up extensions by linking an AdWords campaign to your Local Business Center (LBC) account. If you’re not the primary business owner of the locations you’re advertising, you can manually enter addresses directly into AdWords. For example, a clothing brand that distributes to a number of different stores might want to associate their ads with various store locations through extensions, even though their official business address doesn’t correspond to those addresses.

Once extensions are set up, we’ll dynamically match your business locations to a user’s location or search terms and show the address with your text ads. If we’re unable to determine a user’s location or if there are no relevant addresses to show, we’ll simply show your ad without an address. If you prefer not to dynamically match addresses to your ads and would rather show a specific address in one particular ad, you can do so by setting up specific location extensions for individual ads. Your ads can show with their relevant extensions on Google and Google Maps and as regular text ads without the extensions on partner sites in the Search and Content Networks.

With the introduction of location extensions, local business ads will no longer be a separate ad format. Instead, you can simply create new local ads with extensions from scratch or add extensions to your existing text ads. For those of you who have existing local business ads, your ads will continue running as long as you don’t edit them. If you edit a local business ad, it will be converted to a text ad with the ad’s address attached as a location extension. The new converted ad will look identical to the local business ad and will appear in the same places as your local business ads. AdWords Editor will continue to support the creation and management of local business ads, and we plan to launch Editor support for location extensions in a future release.

The Bid Simulator will allow advertisers to simulate what could have happened had they bid differently on the previous campaign week. Take note of the word “previous” for this feature can’t predict scenarios but it can re-calculate the number of impressions an ad could have shown. This is all based on the previous weeks’ data, if a different maximum CPC had been chosen.

According to Google AdWords’ Dan Friedman, “The feature provides increased transparency into the AdWords auction and gives you the insight to make more informed bidding decisions to meet your advertising objectives.”

With this feature the advertisers can make better judgments concerning which keywords to alter spending on. This gives a much better look of the trade-off between the cost and click-through volume.

According to Google, the Bid Simulator doesn’t work for all keywords. “The Bid Simulator requires historical information in order to provide click and cost data for different bids. If a keyword didn’t receive many clicks in the last seven days, it isn’t possible to simulate clicks and cost.”

Googles recently made a small tweak to their search results page by shifting sponsored links on the right hand side closer to the organic (free) results. Theres no official word from Google on the change which has experts speculating it may be a sneaky way to increase AdWords revenue.

Search Engine Roundtable has created a great video to illustrate the changes Google has made:

As you can see in the first example, AdWords listings on the right hand side dont expand with the browser like they used to. It looks like Google has set a fixed spacing width between organic and sponsored links which remains constant as the browser expands.

This will be especially noticeable for widescreen users as AdWords listings will now sit much closer to the organic results.

As I mentioned earlier, many experts are speculating this might be an attempt from Google to increase the click-thru rate for ads on the right hand side. More ad clicks results in greater revenue for Google ” so it wouldnt surprise me if this was the case.

What do you think, have you noticed the change?

Google now sees the huge revenue potential in the local advertising market, as it continues to enhance the AdWords to make it more attractive for businesses.

This week, they’ve unveiled their latest Local enhancement ” Local Extensions.

Location extensions allow you to extend your AdWords campaigns by dynamically attaching your business address to your ads.

If youre a business owner, you can set up extensions by linking an AdWords campaign to your Local Business Center (LBC) account. If youre not the primary business owner of the locations youre advertising, you can manually enter addresses directly into AdWords.

It has on numerous occasions annoyed me to find advertisers pretending to be local on explicitly local searches. The local extension should make it easier to identify the real local businesses on such searches ” levelling the advertising playing field.

From a searchers point of view, the Location Extensions should improve trust in ads, and accordingly increase click through rates (CTRs). Hopefully this will also help local advertisers get better quality scores and more affordable click prices.

Googles Local Extensions are the latest in an ongoing effort to improve Googles value to local businesses.

www.gazelleinteractive.com

Google has lowered the requirements for using Adwords Conversion Optimizer, a CPA-based bidding feature, again. Now any campaign that has generated at least 15 conversions (rather than 50 conversions) in the past 30 days is eligible to run on Adwords Conversion Optimizer.

Google recently made it possible to import your Google Analytics goals to your Adwords account. This allows you to select optimizing based on the conversion data from either Adwords Conversion Tracking or Google Analytics goals, when running your campaigns on Adwords Conversion Optimizer.

www.GazelleInteractive.com

If you have just put up a website, you probably all ready have heard words like: keywords, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, SEO. Adwords, Adsense, SEO have one thing in common – Keywords. How important are keywords? Very Important.

Google Adwords

Adwords, be it through Google, Miva, or any pay-per-click search engines, you need keywords. With Adwords, you create a three-line ad – 25 word title, with two 35 word lines of ad copy – then you create your keywords. To get the hits, you have to brainstorm for different keywords, that are different but relevant to your target audience. Sound easy? It’s not. It takes time, patience, constant tweaking, and hoping that the product you are selling is not already saturated — to much competition, makes it a little more difficult for the novice to make a profit.  http://gazelleinteractive.com/ppc.html
Google Adsense

Google Adsense is an advertising program created by Google, and which is beginning to be explored by other search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN – that allows you to put targeted ads on your website. If someone clicks on the ad, you earn a small amount of money. These ads are keyword driven and are relevant to your webpage or website.

Sounds simple? Well, not really. There is more too it than just putting an ad on your website and expecting someone to click on it. What’s involved? Let’s see – color, position, style, to name just a few.

SEO

Search engine optimization – this for some has been a time-consuming process.  SEO is keyword driven – the search engines pull the keywords from your web copy – not, to my surprise,
from the meta keywords tag. Granted, I still use the meta keywords tag, but maybe in the near future, I will slowly eliminate the tag from my webpages…

The search engines do, however, pull information from Meta Description, Meta Title, and the content of your webpages. Thus, content does reign supreme.

To conclude, keywords is one of the main ingredients that leads people to your website, product, service and/or ad. …AND, keywords based around your quality content will help with your positioning on your website.

Gazelle Interactive

Google released their results for the past quarter, 2nd quarter results show a staggering $5.5bn which was 3% growth from Q2 2008.

The revenues from the business are split as follows:

Google Owned Sites- Businesses which Google has purchased, such as Youtube, generated $3.65bn, up 3%.

Revenues From Google Network
So Called partner sites using Google Adsense programs generated $1.68bn 31% of all revenues.

Non Domestic- All non-US revenues were at $2.91bn up 1%. UK generated $715m, down 1%.

More concerning is that PPC revenues are down by 15% mirroring the trend throughout the industry.

Google employed 19,786 full-time employees as of June 30, 2009, down from 20,164 full-time employees as of March 31, 2009

Comscore’s just released their June search engine numbers, and Microsoft’s Bing has moved the needle only slightly.

The totals:

* Google: 65% (unchanged)
* Yahoo: 19.6% (down from 20.1%)
* Bing: 8.4% (up from 8.0% for Live Search in May; Bing went live June 3)

Is that enough, with an initial blitz of free press and an expensive ad campaign — especially if your goal isn’t just to knock off Yahoo as a distant second-place runner to Google?

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney says in a research note we’ll need “three to four months” of data to see if we are witnessing a trend. But even if this is trend at this rate Bing won’t eclipse even Yahoo until August 2010 — another 14 months — assuming Google holds steady.

That’ll be a headline-grabbing story. Unless … coincidentally, the second half of 2010 is just about the time Google’s Chrome OS is supposed to come out.

www.gazelleinteractive.com

Quality score is a somewhat mysterious anomaly for Google Adwords campaigns that have a real effect on the cost of your advertising. The price of your ppc ads is determined by a combination of your bid and your quality score, which means that a good quality score can get you a higher ranking for less than the other guy is paying. So how do I get a good quality score? Well, that’s where Google is a little vague, but there are some strategies.

You can use the keyword report to discover which keywords have a low Quality Score. Once you find those weak keywords, you can use the keyword analysis tool to find out what factors are affecting your score.
keyword_analysis_tool

The analysis really only gives you three categories and a thumbs up or down. It may not be very useful if you are trying to bump your score up from an 8 to a 10, but it will let you know when you are way off base. The three areas that affect your quality score are: keyword relevance, landing page or landing page load time. Basically you want to make sure your keyword is relevant to the page your ad is linking to, this means including your keyword on the page, and maybe even creating specific landing pages for certain keywords. Also if the link is broken or takes a long time to load, your quality score will go down.

Quality score may not be your number one concern when designing an Adwords campaign, but it’s a good indicator of which ads aren’t working at all, and anything that makes your campaign more cost effective is worth the time.

www.gazelleinteractive.com

French website owners who don’t currently advertise on Google AdWords might notice a message waiting for them when logged into Google Webmaster Tools.

The message prompts webmasters to give Google AdWords a try, as an alternative means for sending traffic to their website and even offers 100 € free AdWords credit to get them started.

Like all Google promotions, this one is cleverly interwoven into a helpful email. They start by pointing users to the Webmaster Support / Help page and their search engine optimisation starter guide. Only after that do they add that the AdWords programme is just another effective way to drive traffic to a site.

The message ends with a quick run-down of the advantages of advertising via AdWords.

Google has remained unaffected by the economic downturn. This promotion is just one more example of the various new means they are trying to drive advertisers expenditure. The search giant is continuously testing ways to broaden its advertising platform’s reach, prompt more users to click on ads and convincing more advertisers to spend a greater portion of their media budget on AdWords.