Google Adwords Blog Posts

Google Quality Score Update

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

Google, PPC, Quality Score

Google have announced that they are changing the way they calculate the Adwords Quality Score. Going forwards, they are going to place a higher weighting on the user experience – specifically, the keyword relevance and landing page quality.

Their announcement in full reads as follows:

When searching on Google, users appreciate results that are relevant and deliver a great experience after they click. In August, we announced trials in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal1 that increased the weight given to relevance and landing page quality in determining Quality Score and how ads are ranked on Google. The goal was to improve the user experience with search ads. Based on the results we’ve been seeing, we’re now rolling these changes out globally over the coming weeks. (more…)

New Metric in AdWords: Top of Page Bid Estimates

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Conversion Rate, Google Adwords

There is a new metric in AdWords now that shows you the estimated bid which will place your advert in the results above the organic listings rather than on the right hand side; this will give advertisers a clearer idea of the sort of bid they need to have to get higher up the page. This can be used with the Top versus Side feature also recently added to Adwords. (more…)

Are You Writing Off Your Display Campaigns Prematurely?

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Google Adwords, PPC

Let’s say you have a PPC campaign running on Adwords. This is a search campaign you’ve been running and optimised for a number of months and you’re more than hitting the CPA targets you’re looking for.

The campaign is maturing, and you’re looking for new avenues in which to bring in greater traffic and conversion volumes – Display advertising looks like a very logical step to take.

Your search orientated campaigns bring in high volumes of traffic, and conversions at around a £1 CPA. (more…)

Google Now Puts Display URL Domain in Headline of Some PPC Adverts

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

Featured, Google Adwords, Industry News, PPC

Last month, Google started putting the Display URL domain in the headline of PPC adverts for some advertisers. This only shows in “select top placement ads on Google,” according to the official Adwords blog.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/05/showing-display-url-domain-in-headline.html

This is an attempt to make the brand more prominent. It will not show if the domain is already in the headline, but it will show even when the first description line has been moved up to the headline (unless the whole headline is more than 68 characters). (more…)

Intention Analysis or Just Funny Search Query Reports!

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Google Adwords, PPC

One of the things I love most about search marketing is access to Search Query Reports. While they are just keywords that people enter into a search engine, you occasionally come across the odd one that just jumps out of the page at you.

I’m guilty of it myself but it’s amazing how much trust people display when using a search engine – almost giving no consideration to how this data is being used (and stored). It’s almost like people are talking to a friend… although sometimes it’s like they’re talking to themselves. People share information on their interests and lifestyle like never before and give little regard to what’s actually happening behind the white background and multi-coloured logo. (more…)