Google have announced they are to reverse their policy regarding the use of the AdWords by companies promoting gambling sites as of 17 October. Prior to the change advertisers were not allowed to bid on keywords or show ads relating to the gambling industry.
The policy change is currently just for the google.co.uk search engine not the Content Network and the ads will only display to searchers who have disabled the Safe Search filter, via the search options page.
UK companies who wish to make use of this new policy change will need to be registered with the Gambling Commission, those companies who are based outside the UK and within the EEA must be licensed to advertise in their respective countries.
To find out more about this policy change please contact our team on +44 (0)161 427 9304
October 16th, 2008 - No Comments »
Posted in Search Engine Marketing | Tags: content network, gambling industry, google, search network
Ever since the implementation of Google’s ‘Quality Score’ it has changed the way listings have been displayed in the Sponsored links. Not only was your ad important but it also was important to change your landing pages to ensure that the score was not lowered.
In actual fact any landing page should have been relevant to the key phrase already if a SEO strategy was in place, but for those obscure phrases and new landing pages it was emphases even more.
The new Dynamic Quality score works on a number of the same principles as before but it can utilise your landing page much more, with the ultimate goal of helping shoppers find the correct information, which in the long run should hopefully dynamically lower the over CPC and bounce rate for a PPC Campaign.
The Quality score now takes every phrase searched for and looks to the landing page to ensure that it is relevant to the searched phrase. It t hen will dynamically change the quality score, which in turn will adjust the position of the ad to ensure the end user is seeing the most relevant ads for their search. Because exact searches do not differ this will be most widely used on the broad match phrases.
Therefore to ensure that your quality score is at its best take advantage of the dynamic quality score by ensuring that all your landing pages are targeted to a not only your exact match phrase but to those phrase which might come along side your broad match phrases.
October 14th, 2008 - No Comments »
Posted in PPC Management | Tags: adwords, google, ppc, quality score, search network, seo
Bid Management Software is a tool used by many PPC Managers to automatically manage a campaign for a number of important aspects of campaigns including Cost Per Click and ad positioning. Bid Management Software general combines the information from the analytics of a website and the data from a PPC campaign. It takes this information and looks at each key phrase and the performance on it when using a certain ad, when positioned in a certain level in the sponsored links and sometimes when people land on different pages within the site. The software then makes a decision on what position and ad should be displayed at and the cost per click for key phrases which had a high success rate. This allows for the budget of particular key phrases which are under performing to be pushed into phrases which are bring better ROI.
In general managing a Pay Per Click Campaign is to better ROI and on a manual basis it is also possible to reduce the cost per click based on performance although it requires many more man hours but in many cases this way is much more accurate and allows for a better long term understanding on the campaign and the direction for better ROI.
Here are some advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages
• Decrease the time required to manage a campaign on as it does not require as much intense monitor to a key phrase level
• Make better use of budgets for certain key phrases
• Advanced positioning for improved Click Through rates
• Reduced management time for large campaigns
• Possible increase in ROI
Disadvantages
• No way to manage landing pages correctly
• Use of brand building key phrases will have reduced Costs and lower Click throughs as the conversion rates are no usually as high
• No way to deal with first visitors
• No way to deal with seasonal changes
• Still requires intense management
How could they be improved?
Using a Automated Bid Management tool in many ways can benefit a Pay Per click campaign but still requires intense monitoring. As the tools further advance to allow for times of day tracking and landing page analysis with the process become even more advanced. Google’s huge collection of tools such as the conversion Optimizer and Web Optimizer working together may be able to help with this and both are free, but it is almost impossible to deal with important human edited areas such as first time visitors key phrases, branding key phrases and the intelligent behind landing pages and website usability at a key phrase level.
Overall the use of automated bid management tools can help on large low cost per click campaigns but campaigns which require intense monitoring to improve conversions it well always be better to use automated systems as a backup to intense human management.
October 3rd, 2008 - No Comments »
Posted in PPC Management | Tags: adwords, bid management, ppc, roi
If you set up a blog, forum or customer review area on your website you are most probably looking to engage your users and looking for input back from them. Unfortunately it is pretty much guaranteed that you’ll end up with spam comments of absolute gibberish such as Iufosda fkoasdkfj sadkl;f;l or just random web links.
Spam affects both webmasters and web users in different ways. As a webmaster spam can become the bane of your online life taking up more and more time checking and deleting comments. This is necessary so that your website and brand do not get associated with the products, scams or views that spam articles often contain. As a website user you are forced to be more selective about which comments you read and this can also make following a thread or series of comments much harder if it is interspersed with spam. Users have different tolerance levels to the amount and kind of spam that they are willing to accept. This can also be different if the user is viewing a blog regularly or has come to the blog from a search engine looking for a specific solution to their query, as users looking for a solution are more likely to scan content and identify and ignore spam content quicker than a user that is reading all the comments since they last visited.
Ok so it is pretty much common sense that SPAM IS BAD, it eats away at administration time for the site and can negatively affect the sites brand. Users experience of the site is worse when there is spam so how can you cut it out. There a many ways on the web for cutting out spam comments the most effective way is to verify each post before allowing it to be published, but this can be very time consuming and can stop real time debates and discussions from users. You can implement a CAPTCHA ((C)ompletely (A)utomated (P)ublic (T)uring test to tell (C)omputers and (H)umans (A)part) where a word or phrase is converted to an image and distorted so that automated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs cannot solve them whilst humans can still read them. This approach cuts a lot of spam out but also makes the submission process more time consuming and incontinent to the most valuable users to the site, the ones are generating content for your site. Finding the best method for your site requires research and testing of the different methods that can be found on the web, but hopefully it will not be long before a solution is found that is less intrusive into the user’s experience. Our main strategies on this blog are a mathematical sum and comments are moderated by humans before they are published. What methods have you found to be most successful?
October 1st, 2008 - No Comments »
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: content strategy, online presence, seo, spam
