Alex Moss, our Head of SEO writes:
“Yesterday I visited the new BBC Salford Quays buildings (which are fantastic by the way) to hear Matt Brittin, UK CEO of Google speak. He has worked for Google since 2007 and has been instrumental in their operations here in the UK and Ireland. He has also been acknowledged for his influence in New Media Age, The Financial Times and Wired; the latter voting him No. 1 of 100 people who shaped the wired world in 2010.
Matt mainly spoke about what Google had done to help users’ experiences over the years. And how Google had improved the way in which results were displayed to people in order to ensure that all users are provided with the most relevant results, whilst fulfilling two words Matt considered most important – “fast” and “happy”.
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Today Interflora, the self-professed ‘flower experts’ are delighted with a European court ruling that agreed their trade mark has indeed been infringed by Marks and Spencer, via a Pay Per Click advertisement on Google’s Adwords platform.
It is only Half Time though as a judgement is still outstanding on M&S liability, which the Interflora blog suggests is due sometime next year. But this judgement raises an interesting debate and one that has ebbed and flowed throughout the relatively short lifetime of Search Engine Advertising.
In the UK, Google and Yahoo historically did not ‘protect the trade mark’ of their advertisers through the Paid Search channel but capitulated under brand pressure and eventually offered a manual opt in option. The value of this protection was great as the cost of a click could be reduced from an average of say £0.20 to £0.03 or even less, across tens or even hundreds of thousands of clicks that large brands can attract in a month. So big savings were made when Google particularly offered this type of protection in 2004.
So when Google reversed its stance on May 5th 2008 to allow ‘free bidding’ on all keyword terms in the U.K. (it had already relaxed the ruling in the U.S.), there was an uproar from well-known brands as a plethora of companies seized on the opportunity to ‘steal’ customers from their larger competitors by buying keyword position on Google’s Paid Network alongside the more familiar brands.
There was much debate… Read More…
The Google Display Network places your ad against contextually relevant content on other people’s sites. To ensure your ad appears against the most relevant pages you need to ensure the structure follows best practice guidelines.
However, many content campaigns are set up poorly (some people don’t even realise they are targeting it!) and are often left to ‘run themselves’. When managed correctly, this network can be a great way of reaching users as well as generating sales.
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Only 2 weeks ago we were talking excitedly about the success our clients are having with our managed advertising campaigns on social media sites like Facebook.
Over the last few days though we have been reading about Google themselves getting ready to launch what could be a Facebook rival; Google Circles. Google are keeping their cards close to their chest at this stage, which of course means people making wild assumptions.!
We have seen blogs speculating that this might not be an attempt to take some of the social media market from Facebook but simply a way of making other Google products more social. Something that Google themselves has hinted at.
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A PPC manager’s work is never done, with a constant cycle of keyword expansion, bidding, analysis & testing across thousands of keywords and hundreds of ad texts. This is why there are a few features in Adwords which may get overlooked.
I’ve identified 3 features which can improve your PPC results while not taking up huge amounts of your time…
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