Even experienced users of Adwords, such as agencies, make mistakes, and can cost their clients money and ultimately cost themselves accounts. It’s very rare that I’ve accessed an account, whether managed by an agency or by an individual, where mistakes aren’t being made.

But fear not! Help is at hand. Perhaps the most easy-to-understand, but powerful guide ever written on how to advertise on Adwords is now being serialised on the Epiphany Solutions Blog for the first time.

This is the first part of that serialisation. It gives an overview of what Adwords is, where it is and isn’t useful, and the advantages and disadvantages of PPC against SEO. Future parts will look at each aspect of an Adwords account, and show what you should do in order to deliver amazing results, and perhaps more importantly, why the account should be set up and managed in this way.

Why Advertise Using Paid Search?

It’s a fair question. The days of PPC being a goldmine, with undiscovered pots of gold (also known as searches with few or no adverts) have gone. It’s one of the competitive – if not the most competitive – forms of advertising that there are, and you are going head to head with your rivals.

It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted. Your advert is likely to be in the middle of a bunch of competing adverts, all vying for the searcher’s attention. Even if you get the searcher to your website, they probably won’t do what you want – many sites see only one in every hundred actually making a purchase. Is it worth paying for the 99 that don’t?

It’s interesting, then, that a properly managed account is virtually guaranteed to make money.

No seriously, I mean it. Do the sums. Assuming that the visitors to your site have a value (i.e. you make money from at least some of them), then as long as you bid less than the visitor is worth, you can’t lose money.

For example, suppose 2.5% of your visitors buy something, the average order value is £100, and 25% of the order value contributes to profit. Each sale is worth £25 to you, and so each click is worth £0.625 to you (since every 40 clicks generate one sale, which is worth £25 to you).

So if you only pay £0.50, you will make money. Of course, if 30 other advertisers are all making £5 from each click, they are all going to outbid you, pushing your advert down into the nether regions, and you’ll get very few clicks – so you won’t make much money.

Optimising Your PPC Account

This simple example highlights two of the themes that will keep repeating throughout this whole guide.

Firstly, you should be basing the amount that you bid for a keyword on the amount that the click is worth to you. This is pretty obvious if you look at the example above. But there are still many advertisers out there that view success as achieving the highest positions that they can for their budget!

Secondly, since the amount that you bid is limited by the value of the click, you should be doing everything you can to maximise this. The simplest way to do this is to maximise your conversion rate. Every click that doesn’t convert is wasted money, every click that does convert is very profitable.

There is one more critical aspect to successful account management. Adwords is an auction – if you bid more, you appear higher. However, it is not a fair auction. Google multiply your bid by your Quality Score in order to determine your advert’s position, and the amount that you actually pay per click for your keyword.

Quality Score is Google’s measure of how relevant your advert is. Google want to make sure that their adverts are as relevant to users as possible for two reasons. Firstly, if their search results aren’t high quality, users will use another search engine. Secondly, if their search results aren’t high quality, nobody clicks on them, and Google don’t make any money. And Google likes making money.

Quality Score is covered in a lot of detail later on, as it is really quite important. But for now, suffice to say that every change that you make to your account should serve one or more of the following purposes:

• Increase the volume of clicks that you are generating
• Increase the profitability of a click, either by
  • Increasing the value of the click, or
  • Reducing the cost of the click

Often these two objectives directly conflict. For example, bidding more increases your clicks, but results in each click being less profitable. A new advert may improve your click through rate, but by driving less qualified traffic. New keywords may cause a similar trade-off.

Each individual section will look at this trade-off, and how to make the right decisions, and every recommendation made will be based on improving one or both of these objectives.

Isn’t It Cheaper And Easier To Stick To SEO?

Well – it can be, and you should probably do this regardless of whether or not you do PPC, but optimising your website to appear high in the natural, ‘free’ results takes a lot of time, work and money. In the long run, SEO generally pays off, but you’ll be spending a lot of money for a long time before you get results on popular search terms. And if your competitors are also doing SEO, then you may never catch up.

Pay Per Click gives you immediate results, and unlike other forms of online (and offline) advertising, you know for certain that you’ll get results. Instead of paying for an advert that people see, who then may not even visit your site/store, with PPC you pay only when somebody walks through the door. As long as there’s a good chance of that person buying something, then there’s a clear link between what you’re paying and how much you sell.

Also, you have total control over how much you pay for your visitors, and who visits your site. If something isn’t working, you can stop it immediately, and if something’s very successful, you can do more of it.

PPC can also support your SEO strategy, showing you which keywords convert, which landing pages you should be trying to drive visitors to, and which messages appeal to the searchers. And many studies have shown that websites with both natural and paid search listings get more traffic than they would expect to achieve from the two individually – the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Hope you enjoyed Part One of Google AdWords Expert — keep your eyes peeled each Friday when I’ll post the next part.

In the meantime, please feel free to comment or leave questions.

That said; don’t think that just because people like you, you don’t have to put any real effort in – the honeymoon period will quickly run out if that is the case! If you want to improve, please take on board my (and no doubt many other advertiser’s) views and feedback:

• Transparency of click data: In numerous campaigns that I’ve run now, I’ve ensured that all adverts are tagged up in such a way that we can track their exact performance in Google Analytics. The difference in click numbers that Facebook reports compared to Google Analytics can be quite startling – sometimes as much as a 50% discrepancy between the two. When Facebook tells you your campaign has generated 400 clicks on a given day, and you can only see 200 of these have actually been recorded as traffic through to your site, you can’t help but be a bit concerned about what you’re being charged for on Facebook.
• Greater communication regarding acceptable/unacceptable adverts: Now this is an area that Facebook needs to become a lot more transparent in, in terms of exactly what is allowed and what isn’t. At the very least, we advertisers would like to see some consistency! It’s all very well one day disallowing an advert on the basis of the image used infringing their advertising guidelines and quoting those to us. Fine, you think, I won’t use that image again. However, when I submitted the identical advert the day after with the only difference being that it was targeted it towards a different demographic, this was approved no problem. Time and time again this is happening. What am I supposed to do as an advertiser? You’d be forgiven for thinking that your success depends on the ‘sensitivity’ levels of the Facebook employee vetting the adverts on that given day.Increasingly, we are also seeing more and more adverts banned for this reason:
• 
  This is a sight I dread to see when I login to Facebook each day. Your advert could have been running successfully for weeks with a nice healthy click-through and conversion rate, but then, from nowhere… gone, just like that due to negative feedback. How much negative feedback needs to be accumulated before an advert gets pulled is unclear. Would I be surprised if only a handful of reports, despite thousands of clicks, could stop an advert? No. And what’s to stop a rival competitor deliberately reporting all of your adverts, knowing this will happen? Again, greater transparency is needed here from you Facebook.
• Improved advert testing: Now this is one of the most frustrating elements of all on Facebook. Anybody that regularly conducts PPC activities will tell you how vital advert testing is to a successful paid search campaign. On Google, for each ad group we create, we are used to creating at least two adverts. These are then used to split test traffic to effectively assess which advert is the better performer. The poorer performer is removed, and a new test advert is put in its place. Thus, the process of advert testing is established. On Facebook, the importance of advert testing is even more vital, as, other than different demographics, the adverts will have the greatest impact on how well the campaign will perform. You would therefore expect to be able to create numerous adverts, set them all live, allowing Facebook to split the impressions equally (as much as possible, depending on different demographic settings), between all adverts. Not the case unfortunately. Instead, on any given day, Facebook seems to just decide for you, which advert it would like be shown the most, and the majority of impressions register against that version. The next day, it may remain the same, or the system may suddenly decide to show an alternative advert instead. This process makes advert testing incredibly difficult. The only way around this for now, is to pause all adverts except one version, and on that day, this will force Facebook to show that one advert. The next day, pause that advert, and un-pause another. Overtime, you’ll be able to assess the results and decide on the better performing versions.
• A desktop tool a bit like Adwords Editor: Being able to create and upload bulk batches adverts from a desktop-based program instead of creating them one by one via Facebook’s website? That’s the stuff of fantasies surely? I hope not. It certainly would save me a lot of valuable time in my day-to-day job!
• Create a separate interface to login to, moving away from the existing Facebook login: After time, it does become a little tiresome having to login via the normal Facebook login screen, scroll to the bottom of the page to find the ‘Advertising’ link and then take things from there. Could a separate interface not be created just for the sole purpose of managing Facebook ads that doesn’t require them to either use their own personal Facebook account? Or the creation of a corporate Facebook login just for the sole purpose of advertising and nothing else?!
• Improving general communication: That word ‘transparency’ seems to be cropping up a lot already in this blog. But it’s so true – to improve, you need to engage with your users more effectively and take on board the feedback they’re providing you. There is a general ‘Ad Campaign Inquiry’ form on the site as a way of raising any questions you may have regarding a campaign. However, I’ve used this form a number of times to ask questions regarding billing and advert issues and so on. To date, not one reply has been received to any of my questions from the Facebook Ads Team – not good.

  

  If you’re reading this Facebook, there are companies and agencies out there like ours that are willing to spend a lot of money advertising on Facebook because despite a lot of these flaws, we have seen a lot of potential. To do so, we expect a lot more help and support from you in return. Perhaps even an assigned account manager for larger accounts wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world?

  If you really are serious about competing with the big boys in search, then you need to up your game. Do that, and the world could well be your oyster.

  Do you have additional suggestions about how Facebook ads could be improved? Please feel free to comment below.

What happened? Where did it all go wrong? What do you tell your line manager/client?

Adverts don’t exist in a vacuum. Whenever your advert is displayed, it’s being placed amongst a number of other adverts, generally for the same product or service. It’s easy to think that the clickthrough rate of your advert is simply a function of its position, and the advert text. But unless you look at it in the context of the adverts around it, you’ll have no way to tell whether it’s good or not.

Here’s an example. You’re selling the new Apple IWidget for £249, and your advert says:

Advert 1:

Is this a good advert? Or would you be better saying:

Advert 2:

You run an A:B test, and both have a similar conversion rate, but advert A has a clickthrough rate of 5%, compared to just 3% for advert B. This is fine and dandy, until one of your competitors realises that their clickthrough rate has dropped, and spots your advert. They write one saying:

Competitor:

Suddenly, your USP isn’t so compelling – you are more expensive, and are telling the world. Your clickthrough rate drops sharply, and your advert goes from amazing to pants overnight.

Of course, the opposite is also true. You may have tested the two adverts and found that the second one works better, because your price wasn’t competitive. But the moment your competitors stop advertising their price, they open the door for you to do so.

Writing good PPC adverts isn’t just about identifying the right USP, and pushing that. The USP that works best may change, and actively tracking what your competitors are saying (or aren’t saying) can be the difference between having to react when your adverts crash, and dominating the PPC results.

The price-sensitivity above is an obvious example, but there is a small danger. You need to ensure that large changes to your adverts don’t negatively impact the quality of visitor to your website. I said earlier that the conversion rate was the same, but what happens to the average order value? It may make no difference, but it may be very significant. Here’s another example. This time, you’re selling Digital Cameras.

Advert 1:

Advert2:

Suppose that Advert 1 has a better clickthrough rate, and the conversion rate is the same. It’s a no-brainer, right? Clearly, the people that click on the second advert and likely to buy more expensive cameras, so the better advert may well be the second one.

This all sounds fairly unremarkable, but something happened to one of my campaigns a couple of weeks back, and I became interested in this whole question in a hurry.

We were advertising a good price-point, and were mopping up in the market that we were advertising in. A competitor came along, with a lower price-point, and undercut us, taking half of our conversions. But the conversion rate didn’t change, and the value of the conversion went up sharply, since our competitor was taking all the low-value traffic.

To cut a long story short, the campaign became a lot more profitable overnight, because our competitor was taking all the unprofitable traffic. This led to a secondary impact, as the improved average conversion value meant that we could increase our bids, and move up the search results.

We are now getting almost as many conversions as before, but our competitor has made our campaign a lot more profitable, by qualifying our traffic in a way that we could never do ourselves.

A short time ago in a city not so far away (from Leeds anyway) i came up with what i felt was the Killer App for AdWords. This was a long time before i’d come across the long tail concept, chris anderson’s blog and my favourite keyword research tool of 2007, Hittail. Basically, the Killer App was a log file analyser that primarily focussed on the search terms that delivered traffic to your website. This tool would look at exactly what query delivered traffic to your website and tell you how unique it was.

Why would i build a tool solely to do that? Simply becuase with the help of other pay-per-click bid management tools you can report on the ROI per keyword. Google, and now Yahoo and MSN, allow you to choose exactly what keywords and search term combinations you are bidding on and the ROI that each one, individually, is delivering.

Looking for answers in the wrong places

What i frequently found, managing some very high spending campaigns, was that it was nigh on impossible to generate more traffic for a keyword without raising the bid price. Yet inevitably when a campaign was delivering a strong ROI, my client would always ask me if I could deliver more converting traffic to them, “Why don’t you just bid a bit higher?” In theory i could by raising the bid price, but in reality that strategy could be potentially disastrous, as not only would i be raising the ad position, to get more clicks, I was paying more for each click, so suddenly I might be in the position of kissing goodbye to that great ROI I’d helped deliver. Clients found my answer, that it was simply impossible to deliver better results simply by messing around with bids (after i’d found the sweet spot), difficult to stomach.

Which left me with something to chew over. How could i squeeze a better ROI, whilst engaged in a bidding war with my competitors, without blowing my spend? I felt like i had to develop the art of zen non-competing.

The Preamble

The idea of non-doing in Zen buddhism centers around a double denial of existence. Essentially it is the logic, “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless”. Basically the logic posits that the statement itself is neither true nor untrue becuase the statement is a component part of reality that only holds a mirror up to what is actually going on. Put another way, the statement itself is only a reflection of what is going on, a description, not actually what is happening.

Pure PPC strategies are just speculative at best

Believe it or not, Pay-per-click bidding is exactly like that. Pure speculation. Most SEMs will push the idea of never before seen levels of campaign control and targeting, yet they are wilfully overlooking that fact that they are overseeing what is essentially a blind auction. When you choose to bid on the term, say ‘jobs in charities’ you can select that to be a broad, a phrase or an exact match, and your bid management engine will deliver an ROI value for each permutation. It’s great becuase it gives the feeling of confidence (especially when you see your exact match is delivering a great ROI), but it’s not necessarily true that the term jobs in charities is the best converter. This is especially clear when you notice your broad match is consistently delivering strong ROI too. A more savvy PPC manager should find cause for concern regarding the long term health of their campaign, simply becuase they cannot say with the same level of certainty what terms are driving conversion. And therein lies the opportunity.

Finding answers in the right places

Typically, although this does vary from market to market, you’ll find that your exact matched term delivers the best ROI but fairly quickly you’ll start to see that drain away as your competitors start competing aggresively and driving your bid prices up. A typical response by most agencies i’ve worked with is to add more keywords and variations to fill out the bottom end of the market with search terms that have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs). Frequently this strategy works, but it does not solve the problem of what to do about rapidly diminishing ROI from your super-converting term. Furthermore, in most cases, these ads deploy ineffectively because the click-thru rate on your broad match, out performs your new untested and unserved keywords. So you we’re back to square one, becuase the broad matched ad was served in their place and we have no new data.

So how do you solve this problem?

Firstly, optimise your clickthrough rate (CTR) rather than your bidding strategy by blocking certain terms.
Find all the irrelevant matches that are coming in and delete, delete, delete! Set up negative matches on your campaigns so that your ads don’t serve for any irrelevant phrase or broad matches. This should reduce the number of impressions you get on irrelevant terms, pushing your CTR up and furthermore, becuase you are not getting clicks from terms that are unlikely to convert (hey, you know what useful content is and is not on your site), you are optimising your ROI.

Secondly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by adding new terms.
Discover what relevant variations are still coming in. Log all of the long tail combinations and variations that are coming and see what juicy stuff you can learn about your market and where you are failing to serve them effectively. You will honestly be amazed at the granularity of search terms clicking through to your website in the hope of finding something relevant. For instance, in the broad matched example of ‘jobs in charities’, I was amazed to find how much volume there was to the term ‘jobs working in animal charities’ and variations to that effect. Yet, if you think about it for a second, with a global database and the ability to search it at 0.11 seconds, it stands to reason that the more inquisitive user knows exactly what they want and is going to set about finding it!

Thirdly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by restructuring your campaign.
Re-structure your entire campaign to accomodate new learnings, in such a way that you can learn from the new initiatives you are taking. PPC data should be seen as source of response data about your audience. Aside from having some assurances as to what search terms deliver business, clickthru rate metrics give you some pretty good assurances as to what your audience really reponds to. A lot of AdWords accounts that i’ve taken under my wing to optimise basically fail to deliver more becuase of the way they are structured. High traffic terms are under the same budget control as low traffic terms and in many many cases one generic ad is serving a multitude of different search requests. This is really problematic because you are unable to get a clear overview of what keywords and ads your audience responds to. Restructuring your campaign really allows you to know at a glance how relevant your ads and website your website is in general to the market your targeting. People find themselves in different terms. for instance I principally think of myself as an SEO and PPC expert, rather than an SEM expert. Yeah, i may be quibbling over definitions, but frankly if I am, then your audience probably are too.

Even if you don’t bother with steps 1 and 2, a campaign restructuring will deliver more impressions, have a much less volatile cost-per-click (CPC) and higher CTRs. A solid account structure will give you far more control over your budget on a long term basis to engage in or opt out of particular bidding wars. On a daily basis you can switch on and switch off campaigns and adgroups whilst your competitors bid aggressively, until they burn out and you can slide back in.

Fourthly, optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by writing more specific ads.
Serve your audience better by serving better ads that meet their specific requirements. Until you re-structure your campaign to accomodate the new keywords, you’re going to be under the impression that your broad matched campaign delivers you a fairly standard number of impressions at a fairly standard 3% CTR at whatever CPC. When you restructure your campaign, and serve a relevant ad (and please don’t forget a relavant destination webpage) to that query, you’ll discover that in fact that particular term, say ‘jobs in animal charities’, drives over 500 impressions a month and delivers a 25% clickthru rate when targeted with relevant ad text and landing page. Sit back and watch your ad sail above your competition without you ever adjusting your bid price.

Fifthly (is that a word?), optimise your CTR rather than your bidding strategy by continuously improving your account.
Repeat the whole process on your new campaigns and adgroups. Each new campaign and adgroup you target will deliver more opportunities to discover how you can compete in the marketplace with your current budget and where to best position your spend.

Search terms ARE NOT markets in their own right, only reflections and sources of insights

So where is this killer APP now? Well the long and the short was i was too young and inexperienced in the SEM business at that time to really win the funding i needed to develop it beyond it’s neo-natal stages. In the end the business died (archived site here) because i still needed to support myself – but hey, it’s totally OK to fail at setting up your first company! (Seriously, the UK needs to realise this and learn from our bigger brothers across the pond). Anyway, the most important thing is, as the dalai lama is alleged to have said, “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson”. And I can safely say that i didn’t. Instead i put a similar tool, Hittail, into action with some splendid results. So when you think you are losing the bidding wars (and the ROI), remember not to lose the lesson – ask yourselves or your agency how far you are going to improve clickthrough rates.

And btw, Hittail have just upgraded their service. Isn’t that nice!

So are marketing managers missing a trick? With an advert on Google and an indented listing in natural listings it is possible to have 3 links to your company on the first page of Google! This power would drive lots of interested traffic to your site, so why do some marketing managers phase out ad words spend when they reach the top of Google? Surely running a search engine optimisation campaign and Google adwords campaign simultaneously would ensure you have double or treble the coverage on a targeted advertising medium. People searching for your products and services have a real interest and maximum exposure to this audience should be your main marketing goal.

Epiphany solutions can help you reach those people. As a business we operate in 2 key areas: search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising, we do this day in day out. To find out about how we can enhance your marketing strategy visit our main site or call us on 0870 199 6382.

The Google adwords blog also addresses this issue, to read about it click here.

Essentially, the control of consumed media is being given back the consumer: Sky+ has got us skipping through adverts, and iPods are drawing listeners away from commercial radio stations. This is also reflected online. Banner ads are losing popularity to pay per click advertising, which takes into account what the customer is interested in. There is also a move towards Web 2.0 endeavours such as MySpace and YouTube, although search engines are still playing an important part in developing the web space. Lucinda asks what the future for advertising is, now that it seems everyone is developing their own content.

Her solution is that advertisers should endeavour to become content, rather than piggyback off content. She cites Mastercard as an example. Their ‘Priceless’ commercials have been hijacked, providing the punchline for everything from World Cup defeat to Michael Jackson’s trial. Whilst they don’t publicly condone these films, it’s hard to deny that they’ve helped the campaign, delivering it straight to people’s inboxes.

So, is this the advertising of the future? And how far away is the future? And is Google concerned?

Interested in getting your business noticed? More importantly, are you wanting to drive people to your company website? Contact
Epiphany Solutions for Search Engine Optimisation and Pay per Click / Google Ad words Services.

Negative keywords are words or phrases that trigger your adverts without you wanting them to. Let me give you an example, if you were a shoe retailer and you had an AdWords campaign advertising under the term shoes, your adverts would get triggered by people searching for shoes, mens shoes, womens shoes, kids shoes, etc. and this is all fine, assuming you sell a wide range of shoes.

The problem occurs when people searching for horse shoes and brake shoes also trigger your advert. This has two dramatic effects upon your account. Firstly, it means your adverts are being shown to people who have no intention of buying a pair of shoes and therefore if they click your advert are wasting your budget. Secondly, if these people never click your advert, you won’t have wasted any money but your adverts click through rates will drop dramatically and you will end up having to bid more and more to keep your adverts on page one.

Our advice is to use keyword suggestion tools mentioned in the previous tip to build a negative keyword list and also check your web stats to see which search phrases visitors are using that are irrelevant to your product or service and then add all of these into your negative keyword list.

For help in doing this or to talk about this topic further, call one of our specialists on 0870 199 6382.

2. Competitor Identification.
Once
we know which phrases your customers use to search we can identify who you are going to be competing against. It is commonplace for your online competitors to differ from your traditional competitors. There will be some overlap but you will find there are new rivals eating your market share every day you don’t have an aggressive campaign online.

3. Competitor Analysis and Tracking.
Once identified we will spend a good period of time tracking these competitors and understanding which ones are just dabbling in the market, which are just wasting money and which are running refined campaigns 24/7 and making all the profits. In a short space of time we will be able to see how they are achieving this and where their campaigns can be improved.

4. Cost and Return Projections.
At this point we can start to gain an understanding of just how much it will cost to get maximum market penetration and what kind of traffic/return this could yield. Of course, the beauty of PPC advertising is that you can set a daily budget limit and ease into the
market place at a rate you feel comfortable with.

5. Campaign Creation.
Armed with this research we will begin creating the campaign and structuring different ad groups and categories, isolating the campaign to certain regions if necessary.

6. Ad Writing.
This is one of the most overlooked areas of PPC advertising. The text used in ads can dramatically effect your campaigns success. We have vast experience writing ad text that gets results, as you can see in the case study above.

7. Landing Page Creation.
The pages of your website that these new visitors will land on is one of the most important areas of any campaign. It can be the difference between a sale and waste of your marketing budget. We advise upon changes to your landing pages in order to maximise possible conversions and in some cases build custom pages to increase performance.

8. Recommendation of Opt-in Mechanisms.
Most clients have their eyes fixed on the sale and miss other opportunities available to them from this traffic. Not everybody is ready to enquire or buy when they visit your site but they obviously have an interest. If 2% of your traffic turns into sales then you can probably get a 10% sign up to a newsletter if you offer something to them. This way you can stay in touch with these potential clients and convert them at a later date, minimising wastage from your campaign budget.

9. Conversion Tracking.
Detailed conversion tracking is of vital importance. Without detailed statistics pertaining to your campaign then you are flying in the dark. This important information can help us continually refine your campaign and dramatically increase our understanding of your customers ultimately contributing to the success of the campaign. We will recommend how to proceed in this area and produce detailed reports of the campaigns status in all areas.

10. Optimisation and Split Testing.
Stages 6 to 9 are repeated each month a split testing of certain elements occurs to ensure we are constantly improving the campaigns performance. Split testing refers to the process of testing two ads, or landing pages against each other that are identical apart from one change in detail. The loser is then deleted and a new competitor is created from the winner.

As usual adverts will only be triggered by users accessing sites that contain content directly related to that advert. For example, if you were browsing a site talking about mothers day gift ideas, a video advert for a florists may appear.

Adverts will be charged on a cost per click basis or by per 1000 impressions.

To find out more read this!

Until now it has not been possible within Google AdWords to choose over what time period your ads are shown. This has all changed!

Within the AdWords management system it is now possible to choose which days your ad is shown, which time frames and how your budget is distributed during this time.

For instance, a company may know they sell most of their products during the week and weekend visitors are just browsers that effectively just cost them money. They may have also realised that 90% of their sales are made between 8am and 8pm each weekday. Therefore, within the new system they can now schedule their ads to be shown only during these times.

Google, as always, have taken this technology one step further by adding budget percentage spend into the equation. This comes in useful if a company wanted to be highly visible in the morning and just have a moderate presence in the evenings. With the new Ad scheduling system, they could assign 80% of their budget to mornings and 20% to evenings, ensuring they are most visible when it matters to them!

If you would like to know how this could help your business, get in touch!

The system, much like Googles AdWords, takes three main factors into account when deciding where to place adverts.

1. Bid price
2. Click through rates
3. Relevance of advert text to the search

This marks a significant step forwards in the paid search market place with Yahoo (formerly Overture) set to launch their new ranking system for ads towards the end of the year. Yahoo generates 30 to 50 percent less from its advertising system because advertisers can hog ad positions purely on what they are willing to spend but if nobody clicks on the ad because it is not relevant to their search, Yahoo lose out on valuable revenue.

All these advancements are attempts to close the gap with Google who continue to dominate natural and paid search, with advanced advert ranking systems.

To learn more about MSN adCenter click here.