Google & Trademarks & UK: A Good Thing For Clients

What is all the complaining about? I am thrilled we will be able to bid on competitor's brand words in the UK and Ireland starting in May 2008. That has always been a successful tactic - for years and years. People seem concerned that the bid price will go up. Yes, the price will probably go up but it has been cheap for a long time and I am sure that smart marketers can find a way to control their Affiliates and Partners. We had to put those controls in in the US/Canada a long time ago. I am not saying it isn't still a battle and that it doesn't take constant policing, it does.

NetImperative- Google Sparks Controversy with New Trademark Policy
BigMouthMedia - Google to Introduce Open Keyword bidding on all terms in UK and Ireland
WebProNews -Google Gives UK Adwords Trademark Bidding
BlogStorm - Big Changes to Google's Adwords Trademark Policy and its follow up reactions

Note - I am constantly surprised by people who think Google shouldn't do this to 'line their pockets'. Of course they should. They are a public company who is accountable for their bottom line to stockholders. It isn't about good and evil - it is about growth and making Wall Street happy.

Search Marketing Agency Mistakes on Google Adwords - Shocking!
Once again my team and I were totally shocked by a bad, bad implementation of an advertiser's search marketing strategy by their search marketing agency. Search is about keywords and creatives, yes, but ultimately it is about landing page conversions and optimization of the spend based on the ROI goals. To bid a high ($10) CPC on a keyword that has no relevancy and, not surprisingly, no conversions - but lots and lots of traffic - is really unconscionable. I don't hold the agency 100% responsible. The client should be watching the bottom line, and the media vendor should be paying more attention to their big spending clients.

The following items should be reviewed/considered when taking on a new client with an existing Adwords campaign. Note: All of these subjects can be discussed without knowing much about the client strategy or target audience; they are just common sense in the search marketing business.

1. Tracking - are they tracking? What tools are they using? Can you 'see' all the way through to sales? If B2B, can you at least see through to completion of a lead form? If not tracking, how do they measure ROI? Asking these questions will help the client either realize the campaigns are half-baked because no one was looking at ROI or give you the chance to review the value of the campaigns based on ROI.

2. Keyword Buckets/Groups - are all keywords in each bucket closely related to each, or are they too general? Keywords should be grouped so that the creatives and landing pages are directly related and relevant. This leads to better testing, thus better knowledge about how to optimize the campaigns.

3. Creative Testing - how many creatives are they testing per bucket? If there is only one text-based creative per bucket, you know that there is a ton of room for optimization and it wasn't being done in the past.

4. Broad Match - are there words that are being broad match that have nothing to do with the product/service represented by the advertiser. Classic example: your company name is Flower and Associates so you bid on the word Flower. Ok, really stupid example but I have seen it happen.

5. Budgets - what is the distribution of media money? If it is a B2B company a significant amount of money should be being spent on Google Adwords. Have the other engines been tested (the should be)? Is 'owning' the category important (ie: IBM may want to own the keyword computers whether it converts or not), then they should be buying on at least the top three vendors and not just Google. Is the daily spend being hit before the end of the day? What keywords are eating up the budget?

6. [And my favorite] Negative Keywords - are they using negates in their campaigns for words/phrases that may result in inappropriate search results to be associated with the advertiser? If you have a keyword like video or conferencing, the advertiser should be smart/mature/whatever enough to negate out words like xxx (fill in your favorite x).

So many more. Feel free to comment and add your own thoughts.

Google Quality Score Post by Amy Konefal (a WebMama.com Team Member)

Google Quality Score: What’s the True Measure of "Quality" Anyway?

In this blog Amy talks about the return of the click-through rate being an important (man it hurts to say that) measure in order to stay at a reasonable price and good position in Google Adwords. A few words from Amy's Google Blogoscoped posting:

"However, those keywords that are getting lower click-through rates due to the use of strategic, pre-qualifying ad descriptions that are written for conversion, could end up being deemed ‘poor quality’ by Google. The result often is that the advertiser is forced to pay much more per click to compete in the listings (I’ve seen minimum bid requirements up to $20 per click!). Even when that very same set of keywords combined with the pre-qualifying ad description happens to be the winning combination that produces the most conversions and highest ROI for your company!"

and

"But what I’d suggest to Google and Yahoo is that they look at this from a longer-term perspective. Who is going to bring you more money over time? The advertiser who is successful because they’ve adjusted their campaign to maximize conversions... therefore seen that PPC can be one of their top ROI-producing marketing channels... therefore moved more of their dollars from traditional marketing to PPC ... and are sustaining and increasing this budget more and more over time? Or the marketer who may very well be producing a large volume of clicks, impressions and a high click-through rate for their company... but quite possibly may not be impacting their company’s bottom line?"

Thank you Amy for your perspective.

Different Search Marketing Tactics Require Different Success Metrics

The art of search engine marketing requires at least one spreadsheet addict. That addict creates reams & reams of data showing cost-per-click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) and other minutia too numerous to mention here. We have spoiled the upper class of management by providing them with edible data that blows all other marketing campaign numbers out of the water.

But..there is only so much pure search inventory available. In order to expand lead generation campaigns we need to move into the next set of search engines' advertising offerings - contextual or content-based ads - specifically by Yahoo and Google (and MSN has just launched). It is still based on keyword groups, it is still CPC, and it is still text-based BUT it doesn't convert at the same rate as pure search. We have addicted our clients to the high returns of the 'real' search visitors and, after all, they say, it is all coming from the same agency and the same budget and the numbers are telling a different story. Oops!

So, education must ensue. Clients need to be trained that not all traffic from Google advertising #2 (ie AdSense) will convert to bottom line sales as Google advertising #1 (ie AdWords) does. A different success metric needs to be put in place. Best of luck to other agencies to get this one across. I haven't been able to retrain many of my clients.