The spat between Google and Louis Vuitton continues, and at the moment it looks to be going in Vuitton’s favour. Despite a ruling back in march that Google had not infringed trademark rights by allowing Adwords users to bid on the Vuitton brand name, the French Supreme Court has decided that Google are liable. Next stop: the Paris Court of Appeals.
What are the potential repercussions of Louis Vuitton’s campaign to have exclusive rights to “Louis Vuitton” as keywords? Google said this back in March:
“We believe that user interest is best served by maximizing the choice of keywords, ensuring relevant and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts,”
They’re clearly of the opinion that limiting certain keywords to the use of those who’ve trademarked them could compromise AdWords as a whole:
“Some companies want to limit choice for users by extending trademark law to encompass the use of keywords in online advertising. Ultimately they want to be able to exercise greater control over the information available to users by preventing other companies from advertising”
And they’re confident that their AdWords anti-counterfeit-goods policies are enough to deal with the problem of knock-off goods being advertised as genuine on Google. At the moment, trademark owners can report individual sites for infringing trademarks, and it seems that as far as Google are concerned, that’s enough. This is bolstered by a mid-July update to AdWords policy, extending the prohibition of implying affiliation through deceptive business names.
Since the French Supreme Court’s decision, however, it seems that the argument is going to continue for a while yet.
Louis Vuitton claims the judgement will “ensure greater legal certainty to the benefit of both businesses and consumers operating online”.
August 4th, 2010 - No Comments »
Posted in PPC Management | Tags: adwords, google, google adwords, louis vuitton, trademarks
Google have launched a further sophistication to adwords targeting; Broad Match Modifier. By adding a “+” before keywords, you can ensure that your ad is only triggered by users whose search contains that keyword. Google will also trigger your ad for searches containing plurals, misspells / common alternative spellings, and abbreviations. It’ll avoid synonyms and related searches, offering greater accuracy in your ad exposure.
Broad Match Modified keywords fit snugly between Broad and Phrase searches, and should offer a combination of Broad search volume with Phrase search control and manageability. Google are pushing it at PPC users who normally focus on exact and phrase match keywords, as it offers greater possible exposure. The reverse is also true, with Google advising that PPC users who tend to concentrate on broad search results may see a preliminary reduction in click-through and conversion rates. Ideally, of course, the increased relevance of ads with the broad match modifier should help to bring these back up.
Google have, as usual, published some excellent supporting literature for this new feature. Two very important practical points for those of you who want to implement the Broad match modifier:
- Don’t put a space between the “+” and the keyword.
- Do put a space between the keywords.
May 12th, 2010 - No Comments »
Posted in PPC Management | Tags: adwords, adwords match types, google adwords, modified broad match, PPC Management
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
