May 22, 2009
Google Adwords
2 Comments
Although Google have relaxed the rules on Adwords advertisers being able (or not) to use trademarked phrases in Adwords adverts, there is still an unlevel playing field in some situations.
For those that don’t know, it used to be possible to register a company trademark with Google and although that wouldn’t stop people having adverts appear when that trademark phrase was typed, it would at least stop the advertiser from using that trademark phrase in the Google search results. For example, if you type a phrase such as ‘Toyota Hilux’ you may see adverts appear in the Sponsored Listings but it would be rare to see the word ‘Toyota’ in those adverts because it’s been registered as a trademark with Google.
Where it becomes more complicated is when phrases are deemed (by Google) to be linked to medical issues and Google are pretty hot on stopping advertisers from using such phrases in their adverts. Here’s a story about Botox …
A couple of years ago, as an advertiser, if someone typed a phrase such as ‘botox courses’ you could have an advert appear in Google Sponsored Listings that had the word ‘Botox’ in it as much as you wanted it to be. Then (I suspect through a combination of the Botox trademark owner and Google also seeing Botox as being a medical-related word), Google stopped advertisers from doing this. If you type a phrase such as ‘botox training’ into Google (UK) you’ll see adverts appearing for advertisers that aren’t allowed to use the word ‘Botox’ in their adverts, but have found creative ways around the problem. For example, look at the screenshot below to see how two advertisers have used ‘BTX’ instead of ‘Botox’ to get round the challenge:
It’s not ideal, but using BTX does at least give those advertisers some options.
However, there’s an unlevel playing field because one of the other companies that displays in the Sponsored Links is displaying with the word ‘Botox’ very much prominent in their adverts, as you can see below:
So it begs the question of why it’s possible for one company, offering the same type of service as the other advertisers that appear when the phrase ‘botox training’ is typed, to be allowed to use the word ‘Botox’ in their advert text?
On behalf of our client who also offers Botox training courses we contacted Google by email and phone. Four times in total over a period of months. Each time we were told that Google couldn’t comment on the adverts of other advertisers but that yes, Botox was a phrase that shouldn’t be allowed in adverts and that they’d get it rectified. As can clearly be seen here, it hasn’t been rectified and, understandably, the other advertisers are losing out because of the unlevel playing field that penalises them as follows …
- Someone types the phrase ‘botox training’ (or variations of).
- They see several adverts appear but only one has the actual word ‘Botox’ in it.
- They click on that advert as a preference because it’s clearly what they were looking for, whereas the ‘BTX’ type variations don’t have that same ‘feel good’ factor.
- By clicking on that advert more than the other adverts, that advertiser gets not only more clicks to their website, but their click-through-rate (CTR) becomes stronger, which means that the competitors end up spending more budget to try and keep their advert positioning high.
Yes, we’re looking at yet another example of Google failing advertisers and in this case it’s all about them having poor processes to deal with advertiser concerns. The situation is simple:
- One advertiser is being given priority treatment over other advertisers.
- Complaints have been raised and supposedly the situation is being reviewed.
- Several months later, nothing has changed.
And Google wonder why their advertising revenues are down! Yes, it’s got something to do with recession but much of it is down to the fact that they are clueless about understanding what their advertisers concerns are, and then acting upon them. This leads advertisers to look at alternative ways in which to promote their businesses, which leads to decreased revenues for Google.
This is just one example of advertiser disatisfaction, solely related to the unlevel playing field in the Sponsored Results, but add this to the issues that many advertisers have and the fact that those advertisers will find other ways to promote their businesses, and you will see the gradual decline of Google due to the fact that it just doesn’t understand that its real future success comes not from the big boy advertisers but from the millions of small companies worldwide.
And if Google don’t listen to those ’small’ advertisers now then by the time the Google heads are out of the sand, those small advertisers won’t be interested in what Google are offering because they’ll have found other ways to generate business growth.
April 6, 2009
Google Adwords
1 Comment
I had an email today asking me to provide Adwords Feedback to Google. I could win a Google beach ball.
Wow!
I filled in the survey as an excuse to rant at Google and repeat my “you guys don’t really understand what your advertisers want” message, and at the end of the survey it became clear how unfocused they can be.
First of all, there’s the page that comes up near the end of the survey which says:
Would you like to provide your name and address so that we can enter you into the prize drawing and send you the special Google gym bag as a gift?
To which my answer is: “lovely, but the gym bag was last time and you’re supposedly offering me a beach ball – perhaps it would be a good idea to update the survey page”.
Then the next page says:
Please provide us with an address for your gift. Your Google beach ball should arrive in 6-8 weeks.
To be sure that the XXX is delivered, be sure to give us your whole address (including office number, if necessary).
Well, that’s progress I suppose – they’ve now decided it WILL be a beach ball after all. Sadly, in the next sentence they decide they’re going to send an ‘XXX’ instead, whatever that is!
Throughout the survey there’s a copyright 2008 message at the bottom of each page. Last I checked we were a quarter of the way through 2009.
OK, these are all relatively small points but they do add more fuel to the fire that Google aren’t customer focused when they don’t even have the ability to accurately create a survey.
March 14, 2009
Google Adwords
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They’re familiar words to hear.
Working within this industry it’s not uncommon to hear that companies have tried to use Google PPC advertising but it “hasn’t worked” for them.
And they’d be right … in a way.
For starters, the fact that Google defaults to advertisers being opted in to the content network practically guarantees a stream of very poor quality clicks to the website. That alone must be responsible for numerous advertisers to think “I’ve had all these clicks but they’ve converted to nothing”. It’s constantly amazing that Google haven’t yet realised that they’re destroying their own business by having the content network set up as default. Perhaps the short-term money made from advertisers who don’t know better seems worth it to Google.
Apart from that though, there are many other reasons to have the perception that “Google PPC doesn’t work”. For the purposes of this posting we’ll completely discount the fact that most companies have websites that are poor and so the clicks would have a hard job to convert to enquiries anyway.
Looking specifically at the way advertisers set up their PPC campaigns it’s not at all uncommon to see horrendous mistakes made. Even those people who go on Adwords courses, read a book, get a DVD, or find out about Adwords in other ways, still make mistakes that will result in click budgets being spent for little return on that investment.
Recently we had this discussion with a company that had created their own PPC campaign. We looked at their website and found that the website itself was great and so were confused why the company wasn’t getting good results. We discussed PPC and they said they’d tried it but it didn’t work. They let us look at the campaign and we explained some of the reasons why it was going wrong for them. But the damage had been done – in their eyes their fingers had been burnt and nothing was going to detract from their view that “Google PPC doesn’t work”.
So we came to the end of that conversation knowing that there was a strong website within a sector that was perfect for cheap clicks to be gained, and that would undoubtedly have converted to good levels of business.
This is becoming a problem in this industry because companies try to “do it ourselves”, fall into all the traps there are, or even buy in ‘expertise’ that isn’t as good as it needs to be (after all, EVERYONE is an online marketing expert nowadays aren’t they?), and the end result is money spent on Google clicks and a poor return on that investment.
It’s a real shame because, with a few exceptions (e.g. highly competitive industry sectors), Google PPC DOES work. But like any other form of marketing or skill, it does need expertise and knowledge to get the best results out of it. Unfortunately, we seem to live in a society where “do it yourself” often seems like the cheapest and best option and when it goes wrong the perception is that the method of marketing hasn’t worked.
And there lies the reason why so many companies are going to die a slow death in the current economic environment.
February 13, 2009
Google Adwords
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14th February is the day that men all over either get a few brownie points or are in the dog house for forgetting or buying the wrong thing.
The big decision is whether to spend £30, £40, £50, more, on that bunch of flowers that looks like it cost the florist just a few quid to put together and make a hefty profit. But it’s worth looking at what that investment brings and comparing that to the world of business …
£30-£50 on a Valentines bunch of flowers would normally result in a happy person who is going to be in a good mood all day and possibly into the next couple of days. Certainly money well spent and getting a better result than if you’ve spent it on the latest PS3 or XBox game and sat there playing it all Valentines Day.
But let’s look at what £30-£50 could buy your business as a Valentines present. Depending on your business sector and how competitive keyword phrases are in Google, you could be looking at anything between 30 and 50 visitors (if costing £1 per click) or 150 – 250 visitors (if costing 20p per click) for that £30-£50 investment in PPC advertising.
Of course, you have to get the PPC setup right and your website totally effective (so that visitors are highly qualified and have a good potential to convert to enquiries) but the result from that present to your business could last far longer than the investment in flowers. If even only one person out of all those visitors became a client, who goes on to generate ongoing revenues then that £30-£50 investment has been more than worthwhile. If you get several enquiries leading to several clients then the return on that investment rises even further.
Of course, the advice here isn’t to spend that money on PPC as a present to your business INSTEAD of buying flowers. That would be poor advice because your business can’t perform as effectively if you’re dead or seriously maimed by making the wrong investment decision on Valentines Day. But to feel that buzz of PPC investment converting into enquiries and business will leave you with a positive feeling long after those Valentines flowers have died and been dumped.
October 24, 2008
Google Adwords
3 Comments
Any company that has niche product names, under which they want to appear within Google has a couple of options:
1. Get good positioning in the natural search rankings
2. Use PPC
Although it’s often the case that niche phrases do result in companies getting good natural rankings for their products, that positioning isn’t always as strong as it could be, and sometimes doesn’t happen at all. Therefore, the company wants to use PPC to ensure that whenever people type their niche phrases, people will see a link to their website.
You’d think this is easy to achieve in PPC but it’s not, as the following example shows …
A client has a range of makeup products, each of which has unique names. One of those products is called i-smoulder. We set up a PPC campaign focusing on variations of that phrase, assumed that we could gain cheap clicks and strong positioning (because no-one else would be optimising for that phrase) and we then found that the Google system refused to make the advert visible when that phrase was typed.
There was a strong link between the phrase, the PPC advert text, and the website landing page itself. All boxes ticked as far as Google should be concerned. Upon asking Google why the advert wasn’t being allowed to show the answer was that the quality score for the phrase was low because the traffic was low, which basically means that not enough people were searching for the product.
In a way that’s understandable but the reality is that the product wouldn’t be searched on huge numbers of times. However, as other forms of PR kick in, it’ll become searched for more and so people should be able to see the advert. Even then, why, as an advertiser, shouldn’t an advert appear when people DO type ‘i-smoulder’? It’s not as if the appearance of the advert in the Sponsored Links is taking up advert space.
Then Google said that it would be possible to use phrases such as ‘i-smoulder eye pencil’ but have them set up as broad match. This is another way of saying “use that phrase and your advert will display when people type ‘eye pencil’ along with other phrases that aren’t necessarily i-smoulder but the Google system deems that there’s a relevance between the search phrase used and your product”.
From many years of experience, broad match in Google is a generator of poor quality traffic and therefore wasted clicks. What Google are doing, therefore, is stopping companies using niche phrases because “the system doesn’t think people will type those phrases so we don’t think they should be allowed”, but at the same time are saying “you can adapt the phrase and use broad match to make it visible”.
So, ‘i-smoulder’ on its own isn’t allowed but ‘i-smoulder eye pencil’, as an even more specific, but broad-matched phrase, is allowed. People often comment to me that I’m very negative about Google – this is just one example of why that is – forcing advertisers down certain paths that won’t benefit them as much as the original path they wanted to take.
September 29, 2008
Google Adwords
2 Comments
Following on from my last post about the restrictions on using niche phrases in Google Adwords, I’ve had an interesting discussion with a Google rep. In a nutshell, the problem is that Adwords won’t allow adverts to be visible when people type what it considers to be particularly niche phrases. So, if I wanted ‘red widgets with blue spots’ as a phrase to trigger an advert in Google Sponsored Link results, then the Google system would likely tell me that:
The keyword phrase that you have entered has a low search volume and is not showing any of your ads.
In an ideal world it should really be my choice as an advertiser whether I have an advert appear when a certain phrase is typed, but Google is, apparently, God and so I have to do as I’m told. Back to the Google rep …
One of the reasons that the Adwords system won’t allow numerous types of (what it considers to be) niche phrases to trigger adverts is that it would be open to abuse by organisations that have the money/resources to abuse the system. Using widgets as the example, a company could set up numerous weird variations of phrases such as:
- widgets for midgets
- red widgets for churches
- blue widgets with green stripes
- etc.
…. with the sole purpose of attracting clicks from anyone who happened to type those phrases. Those clicks, because the phrases would be so niche, would be really cheap, and the company would become a regular fixture in the Sponsored Links regardless of what variations people typed on a theme. This would basically mean that the searcher could be pulled into clicking on an advert that may not actually deliver what they were looking for, which would be a negative experience for the searcher and so make them less likely to click on Sponsored Links in the future (which is a negative for Google).
While I fully understand that Google doesn’t want people to take advantage of the system by creating thousands of niche phrases that don’t result in a positive customer experience, is the answer really to penalise advertisers to the level they currently are? To take an example, if an IT support company wants to advertise under phrases such as:
- Maidstone PC experts
- Computer support companies Maidstone
- Maidstone PC consultants
… because they can help people with IT problems in the Maidstone area, then surely they should be able to do so? But no, because the Google system considers such phrases are ‘too niche’ then they’re penalised and instead are faced with advertising using more generic phrases that end up costing a lot more.
The big issue here is that surely the Google system can tell the difference between a major abuser of the system trying to capitalise on cheap clicks, and an advertiser with a limited budget and what is quite obviously a sensible campaign setup?
The answer, unfortunately, is that it’s a lot easier, and more profitable, for Google to stop companies from using niche keyword phrases, than to apply more thinking to the issue and start to understand that smaller companies won’t be able to afford the ever-increasing click costs for certain types of phrases and so will go elsewhere. When that happens, the Sponsored Links will become purely a directory of those companies that have the deepest pockets and the smaller advertisers (which make up a huge number when their buying power is combined) will have found other ways to advertise their products and services.
September 18, 2008
Google Adwords
1 Comment
Going back in time, if a Google Adwords advertiser wanted to have a certain phrase within their PPC campaign and to trigger adverts, that was easily possible.
If you wanted to have “purple widgets with red spots” as a phrase then that was fine – as long as the CTR was considered to be good enough. This, in my view, was a fair system.
Fast forward a few years and the ability to use niche keyword phrases is rapidly disappearing and advertisers often find that, having set up a keyword phrase, that the Google system won’t allow their adverts to enter the auction. Let’s look at why that may be, starting with Google’s explanation …
According to Google sources I’ve spoken to, if I wanted to have a particular phrase in a campaign and the Google system considered that low numbers of people would type that phrase, then the advert wouldn’t be allowed to appear. The reason given for this was that if the Google system allowed people to have numerous niche phrases in their campaigns, that it would clog up servers and reduce the response time when people search within Google.
That, to say the least, is laughable. Let’s look at it another way …
If people were allowed to use niche keyword phrases in PPC then they wouldn’t need to compete aggressively against other advertisers who are using more generic phrases. So, if I wanted “purple widgets with red spots” but there were advertisers promoting themselves under just “purple widgets” then if the playing field was level I’d be able to have an advert that differentiated my purple widgets with red spots from the other adverts that just promote plain old purple widgets.
However, if Google allowed my advert to be visible when people typed “purple widgets with red spots” then I’d be highly likely to get cheaper clicks than the other advertisers because my advert would be so specific, my CTR strong, and my website landing page would also have relevant content. This would mean that I’d get the click whereas the advertiser prepared to pay more for ‘purple widgets’ clicks wouldn’t do. That would appear to be perfectly fair and fits in with both what an advertiser and a searcher would want.
But it would appear that Google don’t see this as good business. After all, if you could stop people from having adverts visible only when niche phrases are typed then that would create more people having to compete for the more generic phrases. So, if there were 10 companies wanting to promote their purple widgets of various specifications then they could all be limited to just using the phrase ‘purple widgets’ if Google doesn’t allow them to be more specific. This then means that, as companies do, they start to compete against each other for dominance in the search results when ‘purple widgets’ is typed, which of course means that they play a constant game of click cost raising leapfrog. Ultimately, the only winner is Google.
In my view, the path that Google is taking is fundamentally flawed. Yes, it may make short-term financial sense to force advertisers down a path that means they have to compete against each other for a smaller range of phrases that are allowed to trigger advert. But the end result will be small businesses who can’t afford to pay those levels of click costs and so they’ll take their advertising budgets elsewhere.
Above all else, what it should also come down to is advertiser choice. If, for example, I want to have an advert display when people type “purple widgets with red spots” then surely that’s my right as an advertiser? I fully accept that I wouldn’t get many clicks and I also accept that I’d still have to offer higher click cost allowances because the generic ‘purple widgets’ advertisers would still appear if people type my phrase. However, if if I’ve got a reasonable advert positioning (i.e. I’m offering a good budget and good cost per click) then whenever someone types “purple widgets with red spots” then I’m much more likely to gain the click than the other adverts around me. The clicks may be really low in numbers but what I’m after is quality of clicks and I’d apply this to other parts of the PPC campaign (e.g. “brown widgets with yellow spots”) so that I end up with lots of clicks of relatively small numbers for numerous different phrases.
Unfortunately, as things stand though, the Google system appears to be blocking those advertisers who innovate and do exactly what they should be doing, which is to create keyword phrases that link in tightly to the advert text and also the website. Longer-term, Google will find that the small business market (who, after all, got it where it is today) will desert them because of the increasing costs per click and the inability to innovate through niche keyword phrases.
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