Time travelling back to the Verona opera

As part of client work we keep an eye on adverts that appear in the Google Ads and, nearly 4 months through 2011 we saw the following advert appear when we did a search on Verona Opera holidays:

Checking the calendar to make sure that it was in fact 2011 and we hadn’t travelled back in time, two thoughts sprung to mind:

1. The advertiser has outsourced their Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and the (lack of) service provider hasn’t updated the advert to 2011 from 2010.
2. The advertiser runs their own PPC campaign and doesn’t have their eye on the ball.

If it was the former then the advertiser would have good reason to shoot their service provider because not only will an out-of-date PPC advert significantly reduce the ability to gain clicks, the click-through-rate (CTR) will decrease, which will cost the advertiser more if they want to then get a decent position (as Google will penalise if the CTR is too low).

If it was the latter (advertiser running the PPC campaign themselves) then it would imply that their attention to detail was poor.  Would YOU book a holiday with a company that didn’t pay attention to detail?   You think you’re going to Verona and end up in Bognor.

There are more signs of a poor awareness of what’s needed to win online, when you go to the landing page itself …

• Poorly scanned image of seating, not even translated.
• Page meta title crammed with all sorts of keyword phrases in a scatter gun approach that will fail spectacularly.
• Poor meta description showing no awareness of how it should be used.
• 2006 copyright in the footer.
• Focus on ABTA as a supposed sign of credibility (when people are becoming increasingly aware that ABTA gives them little protection).

Will that website owner be sitting there, wondering why they’re not getting many bookings?   Possibly.

Will they finally work out that their PPC advert is letting them down?  Possibly.

Will they maybe then go on to realise that their website landing page and organic SEO is poor?  Possibly.

‘Possibly’ is the common word here.   All sorts of companies may ‘possibly’ work out that certain things are wrong with their websites and online promotion.  But they lose a lot of time and potential business while in the meantime, their competitors just snap up the opportunities through a stronger online focus.

Google Adwords Position Preference – goodbye to bad rubbish

Although they’ve not admitted that their system was flawed, Google are getting rid of the rubbish Position Preference feature that people have been using in Adwords for ages.

The non-techie explanation of Position Preference is as follows …

The advertiser decides what position (in the paid search results) that they ideally want their adverts to appear in.   They say what they’re prepared to pay as a maximum per click to make that positioning happen and the system does the rest.  So, if you wanted to be visible in position 1 for the phrase ‘red widgets’ then you may offer a maximum of £1 per click and Google would try it’s best to position you  in top position whenever it could.

I’m really proud to say that at Custwin we have never allowed any client campaigns to use such a daft system.   It’s like saying to Google “we want to be in a certain position of the paid search results and we’re willing to pay up to £X  per click for that to happen so go ahead and make the adverts visible when YOU think that’s going to be achievable”.   So what happens is that the system makes adverts visible at all sorts of different times, that aren’t necessarily useful to the advertiser.

The biggest downside to Position Preference is that it encourages laziness in the advertiser, who thinks that they’ll get a certain advert positioning, which will benefit them.  If their website is strong enough then yes, it’ll benefit them but if the website is weak then all they’ve achieved is being highly visible, which gains costlier clicks, but those clicks don’t convert to business due to the website weaknesses.

For so long now there have been advertisers who are obsessed with being top of the PPC positions – to the point that it’s probably not profitable to do so (when comparing click costs to enquiry/sale acquisitions).  In the case of bigger companies, that’s been going on for years.   It didn’t matter to them that no-one was analysing what results were being gained from such high positioning and costly clicks – it was just important to be seen to be top and if the Adwords Position Preference system let them do that without much effort then so be it.

There have also been PPC service providers who have charged clients to set up campaigns, allowed those clients to dictate that they always want to be in a certain advert position, and have allowed the client to do so.  This happens even in cases where it makes no sense because the actual website (from the clicked advert) is not strong enough to convert clicks to enquiries at a sufficient rate.

What should the PPC service providers do in such a case?   Tell the potential client that it’s not worth the money to pay for a certain position dominance in the paid search results.

What happens in practice?  The PPC service provider just wants to earn a crust, lets the client make that mistake, and ultimately, down the line, loses that client because someone (e.g. Custwin!) tells them that they’re generating expensive traffic to a website that won’t convert at a sufficient rate.

So it’s great to see Position Preference disappear (although there is another tool available which does similar) because it should shake up the working practices of some PPC service providers.

Here at Custwin we’ll keep going with the same methods that we have always used:

1. If a client website isn’t strong enough to convert, tell them and discourage use of PPC advertising until it’s been fixed.
2. When it’s fixed, invest in PPC that doesn’t go for top position but still attracts enough visibility to gain clicks that would be cheaper than top position.
3. Measure results from those clicks and if the website is proving strong enough then further increase the PPC advert positioning.

Using competitor names in Google Adwords

A recent court case involving Marks & Spencer (M&S) and Interflora has brought to the fore the question about whether you can use competitor names as keyword phrases when advertising with Google Adwords.

As the article on the ebizlaw website explains, M&S had used the word ‘Interflora’ in their Google Adwords campaign so that when people typed ‘Interflora’, an advert for M&S came up in the search results.  The article goes on to explain that because Interflora have a trademark on their name, then M&S may have been in breach of that trademark.  However, there is yet to be a full European Court of Justice ruling so nothing is yet binding.

Google takes the viewpoint that it’s not there to police which trademarks can and can’t be capitalised on.   It does take a dim view of advertisers who actively use the trademark in the actual adverts, but doesn’t have such a strong view on whether the keyword phrases are linked to adverts.   So, Google wouldn’t be so impressed if someone typed ‘Interflora’ and saw the following advert:

Looking for Interflora?
M&S Flowers Online – Order by
6pm for Next Day Delivery.

But it wouldn’t have a problem with:

M&S Flowers Online
Beautiful Fresh Flowers & Plants.
Order by 6pm for Next Day Delivery.

With the recent court case not being binding, M&S are currently still able to advertise using the advert above when people search for ‘Interflora’, as you can see below:

The likely outcome, over time, is that Google Adwords advertisers will not be able to use competitors trademarked names to make adverts appear for themselves.  So, when typing phrases such as ‘Interflora’ in the future, you won’t see any paid adverts appear for Interflora, other than companies they may allow to capitalise on their trademark.

The key point here is that it’s all about a company name/product/service being trademarked.  Google doesn’t care too much about your trademark – it just wants to pull in advertising revenue and so it’s convenient that it just effectively says “get your lawyers to sort it out, we just provide a platform to advertise on”.  If you, or your competitors have got a name/product/service that’s not trademarked then your competitors can freely have adverts appear in the Google paid listings, whether you like it or not.

This is where it becomes important to choose your name/product/service carefully because you need something that can actually be trademarked.  If, for example, you’ve called your company ‘Jet Hire’ then that’s not going to be something that you’ll be able to trademark.

Depending on the outcome of the Interflora/M&S case we’ll likely see further developments in this area – starting with the major brands stopping others from using their names/products/services in their Google Adwords campaigns and then filtering down to smaller brands.   I believe that within 3-4 years we’ll see an increase in legal services providers and trademark professionals targeting companies who will be experiencing their competitors advertising under their names within Google Adwords.  There will be many telephone/email conversations along the lines of:

“Did you know that many of your competitors are capitalising on advertising under your company name of Big Red Widgets?   We can help you trademark your name and stop that happening”

In the meantime, any company that’s not actively taking advantage of the slack rules on using competitor names/products/services, should perhaps be making hay while the sun shines.  As long as you don’t use the competitor name/product/service in the actual advert text, and ensure that the Google system thinks there’s a relevant link between that name and what’s going to be found on your website, then great results can be gained.

What PPC enquiries may tell us about the economy

Anyone can set up a Google Adwords account.   But the system allows most people to ‘get it wrong’ and the end result is wasted budget.

We’ve been noticing an interesting pattern – we’ve been seeing a gradual increase in ‘from cold’ enquiries from companies needing help with their PPC campaigns.   We have a Google Adwords account but it’s not something we make a lot of use of.  It’s been the same campaign for a long time now (years) and, being as busy as we are, we’ve not found it necessary to boost it up in any way.    But things started changing over recent months …

It started with the odd enquiry each week coming in via the PPC campaign, then starting to increase to be more frequent.  It’s now at the point where 5 enquiries have been gained in the past week.  From speaking to those enquirers the message is the same every time:

“We’ve got an Adwords campaign but it’s costing a lot of money for results that aren’t good”.

Putting aside the fact that many of the enquirers websites weren’t strong enough, there will be issues with the actual PPC campaigns.  Nine times out of ten there are the same old mistakes being made.   Where it becomes interesting though is when people say that they’ve had their PPC campaigns running for long periods of time but it’s only now that they want to do something about it.   I call this the ‘economy effect’, which is worth explaining more …

People in business use a range of marketing methods and while business is good or trickling in, they’re reasonably happy because they’re surviving.  However, when other external factors kick in, they become more aware.   The economy is suffering and people have less money to spend.  They may click on PPC adverts but in more cases they’re not in a position to buy at that stage.  They may also be searching in lower numbers and so the PPC adverts don’t get as many clicks as in the past.  The end result is that the company who is suffering from lower levels of business, starts to look at their marketing and so PPC, being a particular cost, is usually high on the list to focus on.

In short, their perception is that their PPC campaign isn’t working.   In most cases that’s true, and things can be fixed to make those campaigns much more effective, but the reality is that their PPC campaign has been underperforming for some time but it just wasn’t so noticeable until the impacts of the economic woes started to have a knock-on effect.

It’ll be interesting to see if we continue to get these enquiries from companies that aren’t getting the results they need from their PPC because it would appear, based on recent weeks and months, that the tougher the economy gets, the more companies are looking at what they’re gaining from their marketing investment.

Google Ads – when money means more than accuracy

If you type a phrase into Google you generally expect to get back search results that are useful to you.  When considering the paid adverts, you expect even more accuracy.   Unfortunately, Google thinks it’s more important for it to make money than to give the searcher the right experience.  Let’s look at what appears when you type ‘spa deals Canterbury’ into Google …

While many people will ignore the ads in the shaded area, and those on the right-hand-side, they wouldn’t ignore them so much if the adverts appeared to be particularly relevant.  If you scan over those adverts (shaded area plus right hand-side) you’ll see that only one refers to Kent and none refer to Canterbury.

If you click on the top advert it takes you to this page within the Groupon site.  That page doesn’t refer to Canterbury but does give you a ‘Your city’ pull-down to select from, as you can see in the screenshot below.  However, Canterbury isn’t in that list …

Feeling cheated, you go back to the search results and you see the next link down that goes to livingsocial.   It doesn’t actually refer to Canterbury but you think it may be worth trying as you think “surely Google wouldn’t allow an irrelevant advert to be displayed?”  When you click through you see no reference to Canterbury, even when you navigate to the UK options, as shown in the screenshot below …

And so it goes on – you could click through various other paid ads displayed and not find what you wanted (a spa deal in the Canterbury area).

This is where Google’s greed and lack of customer focus becomes very apparent.

IF you were a spa in the Canterbury area, and wanted to be visible (in the paid ads) under the phrase ‘spa deals Canterbury’ then you would be expected (by Google) to offer a high cost per click in order to be displayed amongst the top adverts.   From an advertisers point of view you’d hope that the Google system would connect the following three factors together and so it would display your advert higher than those that are not delivering the best experience to the searchers:

1.       Your keyword phrase is ‘spa deals Canterbury’.

2.       Your advert includes the words ‘spa’ and ‘Canterbury’.

3.       The landing page of your website is clearly relevant to the search phrase.

But Google doesn’t think like that.  Instead it thinks “All these other advertisers want to be highly visible under various phrases related to spa deals or Canterbury, and they’re prepared to pay high costs per click to be made visible.  They are worth more money to Google than a small advertiser with a highly relevant advert/website, so we’ll make that small advertiser offer high costs per click if they want to appear amongst the other adverts”.

One day Google will wonder why their paid advertising results are decreasing.  They will maybe realise that one reason is that they’ve made two horrendous mistakes over the years:

1. They’ve displayed adverts that aren’t closely enough aligned to the phrases that people searched for (so people don’t click on the adverts).
2. They’ve not made it easier for smaller advertisers to have their more focused adverts displayed higher than less relevant adverts.  Therefore, the smaller advertisers will find other ways to promote their businesses.

When the day comes that Google announce decreases in paid advertising revenues, it’ll be a great day indeed.  It will demonstrate that they have little concept of what advertisers and searchers are looking for, by which time so many advertisers will have gone down the social media route, including, in many cases, migrating across to getting better results via the Bing/Facebook alliance.

Google Boost – another blank cheque for Google?

Google Boost is currently under trial in parts of the USA and if it goes well, will likely migrate worldwide.  We’ve been looking at Google Boost and can see many benefits for certain types of businesses, but also some pitfalls.

Google Boost appears to be perfect for small businesses, located in one or more geographical locations (e.g. a single restaurant or chain of restaurants) – purely because it’s so simple to use.  The steps a business needs to follow are:

1.   Claim (or create anew) their Google Places profile.

2.   Opt in to Google Boost, selecting a few tick boxes (e.g. Chinese restaurant), and how much budget they’re prepared to pay per month.

That’s it – nice and simple.  They don’t need to create an Adwords campaign, set up any geographical targeting, or anything complicated at all.

Taking the example of a restaurant (as shown on http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/10/advertise-your-local-business-with.html), when people search for that type of restaurant in that geographical location, an advert appears where you see the other pay per click results.  The restaurant gets clicks and Google makes money.

The benefits for the business owner is that they don’t have to pay external resources (e.g. people like Custwin) to create Adwords campaigns – that will be an immediate saving for them as they’ll only be paying Google.  No-one can dispute that this would be a major plus.

What remains to be seen though is how effective such Google Boost advertising actually is.  Taking round figures, suppose a restaurant allows £100 per month for their Google Boost clicks, which generates them, say, 100 clicks – if they gain business that exceeds that investment (in terms of profits) then that’s clearly a winner.  But what if their website isn’t strong enough?  A lack of testimonials, no menus to view, and a lot more besides, all contribute to people not bothering to make contact with the restaurant.  Google won’t tell them that their website isn’t good – it’ll just take their clicks budget.  What also, if Google are actually conning the Google Boost advertiser?  Here’s how that could happen:

Currently, Google Adwords accounts can be set up so that you allocate a budget and let Google position your adverts as they see fit. You generally get higher positioning of adverts but pay a lot more for the clicks.  Google Boost appears to work in the same way – you pay a monthly budget and Google will do its best to give you good advert positioning – that means you’d pay higher costs per click.   Let’s look then at an alternative scenario, looking at two restaurant owners competing for business in the same location …

Restaurant A is using Google Boost and has allocated £100 per month for clicks.  It spends that budget and gets 100 clicks.

Restaurant B is using an Adwords expert, who they’ve had to pay to create the campaign, but for their £100 clicks budget they get 200 clicks.

If Restaurant A has had no professional input on the strength of the website then their 100 clicks may not amount to great levels of enquiries.  If Restaurant B has had input on their website strength, even before spending money on clicks, then they can make their website stronger.  Their Adwords expert has also created a campaign that’s so much more in-depth than the Google Boost system will create, and so they get more clicks for their budget, and for a wider range of search phrases.

Personally, if Google Boost comes to the UK I’d relish the opportunity to take a restaurant and beat their competitor (who has been convinced that they need to use Google Boost).  Within a period of time it would probably be possible to make the restaurant so successful (via website changes and a good Adwords campaign) that it significantly damages the competitor who has relied on Google Boost.  It would be a fantastic experiment to do and a poke in the eye for Google, who continue to search for ways in which they can raise the costs per click for advertisers.

There’s more to consider on this subject though.  It’s not been that long since Google made the Google Places listings much more prominent in the main search results.  At the time, many people thought it was a nice gesture to help small businesses get a higher profile.  Our view was that it was a method to push downwards the other organic search engine results and force more companies into considering Adwords advertising.   Now it’s clear that this was part of a bigger plan – make the Places more prominent but then add in an upsell so that instead of being amongst the list of Places listings, a company can be in the paid search results more prominently.  This stimulates more companies in the Places listings to consider using Google Boost.

There are still many unanswered questions about Google Boost and so it’ll be great to have the opportunity to get our hands on it when it hits the UK because it’ll probably not take long to demonstrate how it’s detrimental to the potential success of those who use it.  For some businesses though it’ll seem great – a restaurant who pays £100/month to bring in, say, 100 visitors to their website, is going to be on a winner if, say, 10% of those become diners.  Those diners only have to be worth £10 profit each to cover costs and anything else is profit and also the opportunity to impress those diners enough so that they return, as well as spread the ‘good restaurant’ news to their friends and family.   Where it’ll get interesting though is when a Google Boost advertiser then gets competition from another restaurant who has used outside help to gain a lot more from their website traffic, and the cost per acquisition per diner becomes lower.

It’ll be a way off before we see Google Boost in the UK but watch this space because we’ll have a lot more to say on this subject, backed up by hard evidence instead of theory.

How to avoid dumb PPC advertising

I typed ‘white truffles’ into Google today and look at one of the adverts that appeared …

Other adverts appearing referred to either white truffles or truffles in general but this one appears reasonably high up and seems to boast “you want white truffles, but we sell black truffles”.

There’s two things that could have happened here …

1. They’re advertising just under the word ‘truffles’ and so will appear under various search phrases.

2. They actually want to be visible when people are looking for white truffles, as if those people are going to be tempted to click and then buy black truffles.

If it’s number 2 then they’re going to create themselves problems because the majority of people searching for ‘white truffles’ only want white truffles.  This means that the advertiser will get a low click-through-rate, which will have a negative knock-on effect to their campaign, including paying higher costs per click to stay high up.

It may be that they don’t even realise they’re visible under all sorts of search phrases but chances are that they’d get some clicks from people who searched for ‘white truffles’ and as soon as those clicks are gained, they’ll show up in their Google Analytics, which should be enough for them to then put negatives into their PPC campaign, which would stop them being visible under phrases such as ‘white truffles’.

There’s something that Google don’t shout from the rooftops to PPC advertisers: you need to be looking at not just the clicks  you get, but at the actual keyword phrases that the searcher had typed before clicking on your advert.   Simple systems like Google Analytics will provide such information or there are other webstats analysis systems that will provide better insights (ask us if you need help here).

Let’s say that the truffles advertiser had 100 clicks in a day but very few, if any, sales.  Their PPC campaign would tell them that they got clicks for certain keyword phrases but the reality could be that the actual phrases typed by the searchers were quite different.  By using webstats analytics software they would have the answers, could make refinements to the PPC campaign, and so attract more relevant clicks.

I’ve used the phrase ‘dumb PPC advertising’ but that’s not really fair.  Many advertisers aren’t dumb – they just don’t realise how much the Google system will allow them to make costly mistakes.   Google will let you make plenty of mistakes because ultimately it benefits them financially (short-term anyway, until the advertiser feels that PPC doesn’t work for them).  Thankfully, for every mistake, there’s an answer.    This is just one answer to one issue and quite simply advises:  don’t view the PPC clicks in isolation – use a webstats analysis tool to identify which actual phrases people searched for, which brought up the PPC adverts.  Then make changes accordingly.

Season’s Greetings from Google – what an insult!

Today Google emailed out their PPC advertisers to thank them for using PPC, which has enabled Google to contribute $20 million to charitable organisations around the world.   They also give a link to a YouTube video that explains how the money will help.

Aaaaaaahhhhhh, that’s nice.

Or is it?

While no-one can say that $20 million is not a good gesture, it’s worth putting those figures into a bigger perspective. 

In 2009, Google’s revenues were $23.6 billion.  Based on current figures, 2010 looks like hitting about $28 billion.  Doing quick sums shows us that the $20 million charitable donation works out at about 0.07% of total revenues.  Not exactly a huge percentage is it?  If Custwin was to make that same percentage donation it would come to under £100.  Hang on, if we multiplied it up by, say, 7 times, we’d be donating 0.5% of our revenues – that would make us (proportionally) so much more generous than Google!

I’m being flippant of course but the first point is that $20 million is a microscopic amount of money compared to what Google bring in.

The second point is about the flip side of the coin.  The organisations benefiting from the Google donation will, I’m sure, be grateful.  But perhaps charity should begin at home, with the advertisers who buy Adwords clicks.   It’s becoming increasingly the case that PPC clicks are getting costlier – there are many reasons for this but one big reason is that the Google system actively stops advertisers from using the system in a way that would be fully beneficial for them.  Here are just two examples ..

Broad match

If people set up PPC in the way that the system will allow them to do (by default) then they will lose money hand over fist – guaranteed.  It is so easy to prove that broad match PPC advertising is wasteful on advertisers budget and yet Google don’t go out of their way to encourage advertisers to use the system more effectively.  It’s much easier (and profitable) to let advertisers make costly mistakes.   Contact us if you need any examples to show you why broad match in PPC is a disaster zone.

Niche phrases

If you’re an advertiser who wants to be visible under a phrase such as ‘red widgets with blue stripes’ the Google system won’t allow that because it’s considered ‘too niche’.  As an advertiser, you may not care that relatively few people type that phrase, but you still want the option to be highly visible when people do type it.  Instead, you would be allowed to advertise under the phrase ‘red widgets’ and to do that, would have to offer higher click costs because of the levels of competition for that phrase.  

The fundamental flaw in the Google system is that it forces people down a path of having to use more generic keyword phrases, which gets expensive as there’ll be more competition bidding on those phrases.  What it should do is recognise that there’s a strong link between what the person searches for and what an advertiser has as a keyword phrase.  Taking the red widgets example …

If someone types ‘red widgets with blue stripes’ then they have a need for that type of widget.  They would much rather see an advert appear that refers to what they need, rather than a load of adverts for red widgets or other widgets.  In theory, Google should allow such keyword phrases and if someone types them it matches up with the most specific advertiser, not the advertiser who is prepared to offer the most cost per click.  The searcher gets what they were looking for and so are more likely to click on future PPC adverts.  The company gets a click to their site that hasn’t cost them a fortune.

Google give many (pathetic) reasons why they won’t allow advertisers to use niche phrases – none of them have any real credibility.  The only real reason is that they realise they can make more money from getting advertisers to compete against each other (for more generic keyword phrases) to have higher positioning.  But it’s very short-sighted and dumb for Google to look at their revenue stream in that way.   Small companies dominate the world but they don’t have huge budgets for clicks.  Thousands (probably millions) of small companies won’t use PPC (or have tried it and it’s not worked for them) because of the costs.   If Google allowed advertisers to use more niche phrases, and as long as those adverts got a reasonable level of clicks compared to searches, then everyone should be happy.  Google would be especially happy because revenues would increase massively as smaller businesses suddenly found that the system works for them.

The end result of all this?  Searchers find the PPC results to be so much more useful (by getting niche results appear for their niche search phrases).  Advertisers gain better quality traffic and enquiries/business as a result.  Google make a lot more money because small businesses feel there’s good reason to advertise and it’s going to be cost-effective.

What would Google do with that increase in revenues?  Hey, they could increase their percentage of charitable donation.  But I doubt that would happen.  Think more of what impact the smaller businesses could have if the PPC system was friendlier to them – increases in business leads to increases in revenues and the positive knock-on effects from that would be huge.   There’s constant talk about recession and companies not doing well – show me a PPC campaign and I’ll show you where the wastage is and my finger will be pointing at Google for allowing companies to waste money and make mistakes through their PPC advertising.

$20 million donation from Google?   Pah, what an insult!  They make more money than that in a single day of wasted clicks from advertisers being led down a path of advertising inefficiently.

Adwords Qualified Company – A Potential Money Pit?

For years I’ve resisted ranting about this subject but now it’s time to focus on the joke that is the badge provided by Google to those who apparently come up to scratch.

The reason for the rant is because companies are losing money through making poor online advertising decisions.

To become an Adwords Qualified Company, an organisation has to go through certain hoops to demonstrate to Google that their people will create and manage PPC campaigns in a way that’s ‘right’.    That then allows the company to display a seal of approval.  But it’s a seal that has limited value in some cases.

If you take some industry sectors there are seals of approval that have more teeth (for example, Gas Safe) and there are certain checks put in place to ensure the welfare of people.  But what checks are there in place to ensure that a Google Adwords Qualified Company is providing what’s best for its clients?

I should say here that there will be many Adwords Qualified Companies (and individuals) that do a great job, which means that their clients gain good levels of business not purely from the setup and management of PPC campaigns, but by those companies thinking outside the box of purely driving traffic to websites.

However, take an offering such as that shown on the page http://www.thomsondirectories.com/keywordsearch.aspx - an Adwords Qualified Company offering a service that, for different fees, creates and manages PPC campaigns.   Thomson is just an example that comes to mind today, and this isn’t aimed purely at them, but that page serves as a good example of where PPC could potentially be a money pit.

So let’s say you’re a company and you’ve bought into a PPC campaign via an Adwords Qualified Company, because the presence of that ‘badge’ looks good to you.  What you’ve bought into is a PPC campaign that may well be properly created and managed but ultimately it’s doing just one thing – sending traffic to your website.   What if your website is weak at best, or rubbish at worst?    You could be attracting hundreds of clicks at expense to you and your return on investment could be relatively low.   That will make you think that PPC doesn’t work or that the provider of the service didn’t do a good job.  If it was someone like Thomson Directories, would it be their fault?  Not at all – they’re purely creating and managing PPC campaigns and within their pricing structure they wouldn’t be able to include much in the way of recommendations that would strengthen your website.

The fault actually lies with Google themselves because they have a brand that is relatively trusted and so when they’re dishing out badges such as ‘Adwords Qualified Company’ many people will trust that because they use Google regularly and think they’re buying into something good.

When you buy products from the financial services industry there is usually some form of disclaimer (e.g. ‘the value of investments can go down as well as up’ or ‘your house will be at risk if you are no longer able to afford your mortgage repayments’).    Maybe the same is needed within the PPC industry and perhaps those who are Adwords Qualified Companies should have some sort of disclaimer like ‘The service provided is purely to attract relevant and quality clicks to your website.  We cannot guarantee that these clicks will convert to business and you are advised to have a professional website review before using PPC advertising.”

But Google won’t enforce such things – it just wants to gain revenues.  Maybe one day they’ll introduce such a disclaimer requirement.  Even better would be if they introduced a higher level ‘badge’ that included knowledge of PPC but also the vitally important skills needed to ensure a website is strong enough to convert clicks to enquiries -  a badge that isn’t awarded just once but is retained only through ongoing results gained for clients, who are contacted by Google themselves to ensure they’re happy with results.

I suspect that Google wouldn’t contemplate such a move (until perhaps a big competitor such as Bing does something similar) and in the meantime, Custwin is proud to say that our clients keeping benefiting and we continue to be NOT an Adwords Qualified Company because we currently see no value in having that badge.

Google map change to force up PPC costs?

This week Google took another step forwards (or backwards) that’s either an intentional attempt to gain more revenue for themselves, or a silly mistake.

Everyone knows that Google make the vast majority of their money out of PPC (Sponsored Links) advertising.   It’s also fairly common knowledge that Google will do anything in their power to push companies towards PPC advertising and push up the costs per click.

The screenshot below shows a search on the phrase ‘jaguar dealers kent’.  In the pink area are 3 x Sponsored Links and below them are text entries that would have previously been smaller and next to the map of the area.  You’ll notice that the map has jumped to the right-hand column above the other Sponsored Links.   It’s worth exploring this more after looking at the screenshot …

On the surface you’d think that Google was being kind to those Jaguar dealers in Kent, who have Google Maps (Places) listings – nice size map on the right, showing their location, and a decent sized description/link from within the results on the left.  And you’d be right – they are.   But it hides what I believe is the true motivation – to increase revenues from PPC. 

Let’s look at the flip side of the coin …

1. If there are bigger descriptions of the companies that appear in the maps then it pushes down the organic search results that were appearing.  This means that those in the organic results get less visibility.  In the screenshot above you can just about see the first organic result appear within the screen without the need to scroll.   So, those who would previously have found it easier to get clicks from searchers now find themselves forced down the page and the only other things on view are either the ‘pink’ Sponsored Links or those on the right-hand-side.   In my view, this has clearly been engineered by Google so that those with previously reasonable organic results are forced into considering PPC advertising when they see their levels of clicks decrease.
2. Those who were already advertising in PPC but who weren’t appearing in the ‘pink’ area will find themselves pushed down below the map that now appears where they were.  This makes it harder for them to get noticed and so many of those advertisers will think that the answer is to offer higher costs per click in an effort to get ‘into the pink’ (not realising that they’ll get themselves into a fruitless bidding war in which the only real winner is Google).

Taking that point 2 above it becomes more interesting when you scroll down the page because (certainly in Firefox), the map graphic moves with you and actually sits on top of the PPC adverts that were there.  That means that those PPC advertisers on the right-hand-side are at a further disadvantage and so may be incentivised to increase their budgets in order to try and ‘get into the pink’.

It makes no sense why Google would think people actually want to see that map move down the page.  After all, if you’ve typed ‘jaguar dealers kent’ and have seen the map and the details on the left then if they weren’t of interest, or you’ve already clicked on them, then you want to look at the remainder of the page as it stands and not have it obscured by a map that’s no longer of interest to you.

Things get more interesting when you type a more competitive phrase that has a geographical reference.  For example, if you type ‘plumbers London’ you’ll see 7 of the map descriptions where the previous search results were, the map on the right, and the only real ‘organic’ search results are the 3 at the bottom of the page (that would previously have enjoyed much better positioning).  For many, demoted from page 1 organic results to page 2 in one sweep – thanks to this change from Google.

So what’s the answer here?

Presuming that Google don’t find they’ve made a huge mistake (them assuming that the change will cause a big boost in PPC income) and Google then have to change things back again, then companies with a geographical focus need to roll with these changes.  On one hand it’s pleasing (for example I have a client who cleans drains in Kent who now has a much better profile via their Google Places listing) but it means even more work for companies who target geographical areas (most who don’t have the knowledge to properly capitalise on the opportunities for them and so will have to call in those of us who can help).

If there’s an upside (and perhaps part of Google’s motivation) it’s in demoting the plethora of directories that previously dominated many of the organic search results.  Those directories do well at SEO but the quality of them is often dubious so it’s good to see them demoted.

Overall though, this looks like a familar tale – Google apparently giving something of benefit but that actually gains them more than they give away.  Here’s my view of how the thinking within Google heads has gone …

“If we give those who list in Google Places (Maps) more priority on the page then that’ll please those companies who target their business geographically and we’ll look really good.  At the same time we can give higher dominance to the ‘pink’ Sponsored Links, obscure those in the right-hand-side when people scroll, and push the organic listings off the page – end result: people having to spend more on PPC to gain the coveted top positioning”.

Oh dear Google – you really must think advertisers are stupid and you’ll soon realise that you’re going to damage your PPC revenues.