Short Introduction to Google Adwords Quality Score

 

What is Google's quality score ?

At a very basic level: Google's quality score is a Paid Search / Adwords algorithm (rule) which provides an estimate of how relevant the keywords are to the ads, adgroup, campaign and the landing page.  1 is the lowest score and 10 the highest.

Improving your quality score

We work with our clients to improve their 'quality score', by reviewing integration between the below:

• Keywords
• Ad text
• Destination URL
• Landing page 

Understanding quality score

There is some debate as to how much the landing page affects Google's quality score, with many (who have run tests) saying it is a small % of the score.   Researchers have found that rarely will you see a Quality Score of above 3 if your landing page is not relevant.

Useful link to Adwords help to help you check and understand quality score.
What we are certain of is:

• If the most appropriate landing page (relevant to keyword searched) is served then set conversions will increase
• CTR and Keyword relevancy and Adgroups are closely related
• Adverts need to relate to the keywords
• Quality Scores are determined at the keywords, ad text and campaign levels

Benefits of achieving a high quality score

Having a high Quality Score within your Adwords account can lead to:

• Lower costs (CPC)
• Better ad positions
• You can also outrank competitors that have relative CTR and a higher CPC than you

How is your score working right now?

We work with our clients to improve their Google Adwords Quality Score and increase their return on advert spend (ROAS).   If you believe your Google Adwords account could benefit from a third party review, please feel free to get in touch with our sales team.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Introduction to Adwords Enhanced Campaigns

Early in February this year, Search Engine Land shared their thoughts on the news of the latest Google Adwords update, titled: 'The Big Adwords Update: Enhanced Campaigns Puts the Focus on Mobile'.

The February 2013 Adwords update has been designed to simplify PPC campaign management across many devices, and seeks to increase the use of mobile advertising. Paid search managers are able to set different bids and show different ads based on a user's device type, location and time of day, all within one campaign.

Google have remained progressive with their Enhanced campaigns and on April 22nd Google let their advertisers know that all enhanced campaigns will now include social annotations when they can improve ad performance, (without additional edits to the campaign).  In order to receive this feature your Google+ page must have a significant number of followers and be linked to the website that matches the URL of your search ads. You can learn more about this particular feature here and the launch of a way for advertisers to reach app users; with 'ads in apps'.

Following the recent advancements, Google reported that since launch of the enhanced campaigns:

"advertisers have already upgraded over 1.5 million campaigns and have shared many success stories"

As enhanced campaigns reduce the overall number of campaigns you need to create (as you no longer need to create separate campaigns for each target devise type or location), this will save time and generate a better return on ad spend (ROAS).

We are welcoming the increased ROAS, the time saving, the more comprehensive reporting, the simplified budgeting and dynamic delivery to show the right ads to the right person at the right time. A great move by Google product teams and a very useful feature. Naturally, some transitional concerns may arise from sites, for example, some e-commerce sites, where mobile doesn't traditionally convert as well as desktop.

Some of the main features of enhanced campaigns include:

• Powerful advertising tools for the multi-devise world: Ability to manage your bids across devises, locations and time. 

• Smarter ads optimised for varying user contexts: Ability to show the right creative, sitelink, app, social annotations (where suitable) or extension based on the context of your prospective customers and the devise they are using.

• Advanced reports to track and measure new conversion types: such as Phone Calls over 60 Seconds Counted as Conversions, digital downloads, and conversions across devises.

Benefits to Businesses

To help explain further about how your business can benefit from Google AdWords enhanced campaigns, the Adwords blog post on the February 2013 update, gave the below three examples:

"A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for "coffee" or "breakfast" on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign"

"A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign"

"You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads"

Learn more about enhanced campaigns

To understand more about how you can reach customers, at the moments that matter, across devises with more relevant ads, please visit the Google Enhanced Campaign landing page or watch the above video.

Google plans to update all Adwords PPC campaigns to enhanced by June, this year.

Should you have any further queries on launching paid search campaigns, please do get in touch and contact our sales team to discuss your requirements further.

Author: Fiona Anderson and Sarah Griffiths

Google Shopping Changes in UK from February 13th 2013

Google Shopping paid for service 

What is happening to Google Shopping / Google Merchant Centre?
Google Merchant Centre, one of Google’s free products for eCommerce, is due to become monetised and linked to AdWords, here in UK (also in Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Brazil, Australia and Switzerland) as of tomorrow. There will no longer be a free service.

Google is planning to roll out a new commercial model for Google Shopping, built on Product Listing Ads (PLA). To keep Product Search listings active on Google, businesses will need to set up a Product Listing Ads campaign in Google AdWords.

Product Listing Ads are ‘AdWords search ads’ that include rich product information, such as product image, price and merchant name. Whenever a user enters a search query on Google.co.uk relevant to an item a business is selling, Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name.

When is Google Shopping / Google Merchant Centre changing?
In order to give merchants time to make this transition and optimise their campaigns, Google plans to roll out the new model gradually, via several steps. The first major change will take place on February 13, 2013, when visually cleaner results for shopping queries, including some new commercial formats on Google.com that will display products in a single unit, will replace current search results. These new commercial formats will be labelled as "Sponsored" and appear in the space currently occupied by AdWords ads.

Google Shopping sponsored  ads

The full changeover is expected to have been implemented sometime in June 2013.

Why is to Google Shopping / Google Merchant Centre changing?
Google is quoted as saying these improvements will create a better shopping experience that will benefit both shoppers and merchants. Shoppers will find products in one convenient place and quickly be able to compare features, find the best prices, read reviews, and identify great merchants -- while advertisers will be given more granular control over product listings and traffic.

Impact of Google Shopping / changes:
Many of our eCommerce clients who are performing well in organic search and have benefited from Google Shopping need now to decide whether they should in fact also consider a paid search campaign, as part of an Integrated Digital Marketing Strategy. Google Product Search allows consumers to easily find product listings and compare products by relevance and price in a Google search. Until now the registered Merchants streamed products via an XML feed with price, image, attributes etc, directly into the Merchant Centre, which then automatically showed up in the Google Shopping and Search Results.

Regular updates of the XML feed ensured that the prices, product description and stock levels were kept current.

Google Shopping free XML feed

To some extent, this move to a paid inclusion model, or ‘paid for service’ of the shopping results may help create a more level market by allowing smaller and larger businesses to equally bid for top positions. However, businesses with tighter profit margins and smaller budgets will find this new market may also be restrictive when it comes to assigning budget.

It will be interesting to see if Google Shopping will overtake eBay as the world's leading global commerce platform. Google is already pushing down the natural search results of Amazon in USA where Google Shopping is already being used and accounts for 11% of overall paid search spend.

It is doubtless that Google offers some of the most amazing free products from Google Analytics to Webmaster Tools, from regular products most of us already use like Gmail, YouTube, Picasa, Translate, G+, Blogger to some of the more niche and useful products like Creative Sandbox Gallery and Research Library in ‘thinkinsights’

Google offers many useful free products

How much will Google Shopping cost?
Paying for a product which was traditionally free is always a hard sell-in but with Google Shopping it really is still a great product for busy eCommerce businesses. What other online location is there that has 90% of all UK search traffic potentially looking for products to purchase.

Google is offering a short discount to merchants who create a Product Listing Ad campaign before 12 April 2013. The offer is a £75 credit for new account set ups in AdWords and a 10% monthly credit until the end of June, if the account is set up and launches PLAs before 12 April. The Merchant can pay in to the account and use it as a credit to pay for the ads that are driving customer traffic to their business website.
Google has uploaded a video to YouTube to help explain the Google Shopping changes, implications, cost to retailers and the growing importance of Mobile in Product Search.

Prices will depend on a few factors:

Cost-per-click (CPC)
The advertiser will pay each time a searcher clicks on their advert. No more than the maximum CPC will be charge by Google each time the advert is clicked.

Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) Percentage.
The advertiser sets a maximum percentage of the final sale value they are willing to pay. Once a customer clicks on a product listing advert, any purchase they make within 30 days of the click that can be directly attributed to the click will be charged a percentage by Google of the final sale value that was set.

Shopping product advert positions are determined by the Advert Rank.
Advert Rank of a product each time a relevant search is entered in to Google.
The Advert Rank is a score based on maximum CPC or the CPA percentage of how much a business is willing to pay Google and the quality score. The quality score is a measure of how relevant the search query is to the most relevant product in your entire Merchant Center product feed.

Product Listing Ads are visually much more appealing to searchers compared to traditional sponsored links on the search results page and businesses have reported that running PLA’s have experienced an above average click through rate.

Much of the Google search position results have to be paid for nowadays yet 46% of searchers click on the website in the first position on first page in the organic search results. It is more important than ever now that product optimisation be factored into an eCommerce website marketing budget. E-commerce is experiencing double digit growth globally and is forecasted to be a $1T industry by 2017 and Google has publicly acknowledged that 40% of their revenue is in the retail / e-commerce vertical.

Now is a good time to really build a strong eCommerce strategy to combat the competition and Google Shopping’s price comparison Internet marketplace and Google Enhanced Campaigns, also launched this week, will help businesses wanting to be relevant on paid search and for searchers to have a consistent online experience across a multiple number of devices when they are buying a product. Two years ago, Rocktime designed a Product Description Optimiser Tool. I think we get plenty more use out of it this year!

There are a number of blogs Rocktime has written over the last few years relating to previous updates to Google Products Feed in 2011,  Global eCommerce Opportunities in November 2012, and an ongoing update on the development in Social Commerce, What is Social Commerce and Social Media meets Commerce. We hope you find these useful!

If these sort of eCommerce search result questions are something you want to know more about and how to determine where your marketing budget can best be spent for a good return on investment then you are welcome to call our Sales Team on 01202 678 777 or email your queries for a chat.  



Author: Fiona Anderson

Adwords Location Targeted Improved

This time last year we were letting our clients know that local search engine optimisation was destined to be a hot topic in the natural search engine result pages. We advised our clients of the numerous ways in which our clients can increase their local traffic via natural search (i.e. not paid for search adverts) this included geo tagging, local business adverts, local mentions, local social network tribes. Paid for options have included local directory listings and local targeted paid search adverts.

Over the last year we have been working on our local targeted proposition and in the new year will be sharing with you a selection of success stories.
A recent development with location targeting is: at the end of October 2011, Google Adwords team announced that the local targeted features within Google Adwords are getting a makeover.

Google has noted that several businesses have been using Google location targeting features to drive more qualified customers through to their websites. With tighter targeting, Google report that one of their customers (digital agency) was able “to lower their cost per click (CPC) by 36%, driving in higher quality leads at a lower cost”.

We are pretty excited about the new location features, as it will make it easier to discover and obtain more detail for our clients, on potential target locations. Google is providing more information on ‘reach numbers by location’ to help estimate the potential audience/ leads available. These numbers relate to number of users seen on Google products in a given location and should be viewed as trends rather than accurate figures.

To find out more about the improved Adwords Location Targeted development, talk to the Flashlight “Local Targeting Ambassador” Fiona Anderson, or visit the Google Adwords Insider Blog here.

The above image shows current location targeting feature “Polygon targeting”. This feature is being migrated by the end of 2011. Google recommend using the ‘Target a radius’ feature which allows you to selectively add locations within the radius target. To help determine which to target, we suggest you should run a geographic performance report to get an idea of which locations received traffic within the custom shapes and then target those individual locations.

You can engage with Fiona on Twitter @GeekChicSocial; let her know you read this blog, as she loves Maps, Local, Google and Geo chats.


Author: Sarah Griffiths

Google Adwords Location Extensions

As it is “Operation Local Search Marketing” month, this month here at Rocktime, thought to share with you how much we love, Google AdWords' move to add location extensions to the PPC account adverts. Great example of Fitness First using this service above (see image or Google search Fitness First).

Basic summary is, you link your Google Places Adverts to your AdWords campaign. This is another reason why we have been raving recently/couple of years to our clients to get everything in one Google account.

Google AdWords location extensions are a local ad format designed to help local customers find your local business. Watch this video to find out how to transition your local business ads to location extensions in five steps. Alternatively contact the Flashlight Search Marketing Team to arrange this for you.




If your Google AdWords campaign is focused on local business and you have more than one place of operation (Pizza Hut is an example given on above video), then you really may want to consider using local ads, enriched with additional information, such as address and phone number. A big bonus is that with this feature you will be able to target multiple locations within the same campaign.

Google will show a local extension in the ad as default – this will be based on the users query ie: Pizza Delivery London and the users IP.

We believe that this is a perfect strategy for local targeting within AdWords and are implementing this for a number of clients with more than one local location. Let us know what you think and send us a comment below!

Read more about setting up your Google AdWords over at the Local Extensions Best Practice Guide from Google.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

AdWords Trademark UK policy

We were recently contacted by a client with regards to bidding on a competitor's brand name.
Sharing the information supplied here, as may be of use to you, our readers.

In May 2008, Google stated that keywords that were disabled as a result of a trademark complaint and investigation will no longer be restricted in the UK and Ireland. Google stated that they will no longer review a term corresponding to the trademarked term as a keyword trigger. However, they stated that they will continue to perform a limited courtesy investigation of complaints regarding ad text purported to be in violation of a trademark.

The official post from Google is here: see regions where Google investigate ad text only – UK is on the list.

What this means:

The New policy launched in 2008 suggests that competitors can now ‘hijack’ your brand term keywords and collect a proportion of your brand traffic. Advertisers can also bid on their own brand term and because they will have a higher “quality score” (their page is more related to term) then it is likely that the advertiser will generally be at the top (paid) spot. (Feel free to talk to Rocktime more about Quality scoring – it basically equates to making your page relevant to a key term).

There is some dispute that even though Google permit this activity (as do Yahoo & MSN Adcentre) you may still be breaking the trademark law and this will lay with the person purchasing the adword, not the person selling it (i.e. Google).

Months after the update, Hitwise ran a report on the impact on search traffic and found that the “New Policy” increased brand bidding on brand terms by 22% amongst the UKs top brands but this was essentially just to defend the threat. They found that brand hijacking was limited.

Google will allow brands to bid on a competitors name as long as they do not mention the key term / brand term in their advert, (which would be misleading for the customer).

We noted a few affiliate comparison sites using brand names and using the term in their ads (this may or may not be with agreement with the brand). Should it not be in agreement with the brand then the brand seeing their trademark name displayed in an advert can put in a complaint about using the trademarked term, however they can’t complain about bidding on the keyword term (As mentioned above Google permit this).

Should you feel that you have grounds for complaint then you may contact Google here: https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint. Once Google has put on notice of the infringing listing, then they (Google) will be legally obligated to remove this listing (in a timely manner).

As “brand key phrase” bidding is allowed, the brand using the term may invite the other to bid on their “own key-phrase”. In theory the hijacked brand could contact a lawyer and progress this, however before this stage you could remove the keyword as an out of court “Gentleman’s agreement”.

Conclusion

In summary, as long as you don’t mention a trademark name in an adwords advert, then you can bid on the term. We would advice that you fairly use the trademark (if the term is trademarked!) with your search marketing and imagine impact it would have on your business if your competitor placed a bid on your trademark !! The Flashlight SEM team at Rocktime help a number of brands with management of their Paid Search Accounts across a number of search engines. Should you require assistance in Pay Per Click Management feel free to get in touch.

Author: Sarah Griffiths