SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing

The big talking point over the last week has been about Google’s decision to allow trademark bidding in the UK.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether allowing trademark bidding is a good or bad idea, I understand why Google would want to keep a good relationship with advertisers by preventing competitors bidding for their brand, like they did with Marks and Spencers in February. But from the perspective of an online retailer like Argos who previously had to sell products without being able to use trademarked terms such as iPod or Sony in their ad copy the new rule does make sense. Just imagine how difficult it would be to avoid using these terms in offline print advertising!

But despite what anyone else thinks it is Google’s policy, so whether advertisers and brands agree with this or not they will need consider the implications this has upon themselves or risk losing sales and traffic. The decision now lies with advertisers as to whether they choose to bid upon their competitors, but what can you do to protect your own brand?

SEO
You obviously should be ranking #1 organically for your brand name, but if in addition you can build the strength of your site so that it displays Google Sitelinks this is going to take up more valuable on-page real estate and distract users from clicking competitor ads.

Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management is possibly even more important now, if you can the control the top 10 natural listings with interesting content about your brand you can potentially reduce the clickthrough rates to competitors ads.

Bid for your own brand
If you didn’t previously bid on your own brand you probably should be now. As soon as you notice competitor ads appearing it’s important users find the brand they are looking for, clearly labelling the ad text as “Official Website” should also help to increase the CTR of your ad.

Set your own affiliate brand bidding rules
Affiliate websites generally don’t pay out on brand search referrals, this is because the likelihood of this leading to a sale is much higher. They now face the dilemma about how to deal with brand bidding on Google AdWords themselves, for example gadget website iwoot have taken an early step to announce they won’t payout on brand traffic.

Bid on your competitors
Many brands will take the stance “if their bidding on us, we’re going to bid on them!”. With the new rules there’s no reason you can’t do this, but perhaps if no-one is bidding on your brand you should be careful about who you annoy before bidding on popular brands as it may backfire.

So are you planning ahead for the trademark policy update? Are there any other strategies I’ve missed which can help a brand protect themselves or take advantage of the rule change?

I missed the official launch of Google demographic bidding last week, but noticed the option in my accounts campaign settings this morning.

This feature is available for UK advertisers and I’ve actually been able to set this up for a UK geo-targeted campaign, although as far as I was aware it’s only US data which is available for demographic bidding on US geo-targeted campaigns, maybe not?

Here’s a screenshot of the demographic campaign I setup (click for full-size image):

There’s also screen captures on Search Engine Roundtable to show the demographic targeting campaign setup for a US geo-targeted campaign.

I’ve only just set this up but I’ll run off a report and update this post in a couple of days to show any data and see if this is actually working in the UK too.

The Guardian newspaper have today written an article titled Is Google a Grinch or a good guy?, which asks many UK SEO’s (myself included) for their views on the recent Google paid link debate.

In my opinion the Google AdWords landing page quality score and PageRank paid link updates were definitely necessary and will only help to improve the relevancy and quality of both organic and sponsored Google listings. But perhaps the timing of the updates are questionable, the Google AdWords change in particular caused many advertisers a major loss in profits just before the Christmas period with many campaigns unable to stay cost-effective due to large increases in minimum bids.

The major issue I feel is that while Google have the right to prevent MFA (Made For AdSense) websites and paid listing directories from clearly profiting through their algorithm and PageRank indicator, they also catch some of the people who are not intentionally doing so. The roll-out of these changes takes time to perfect and in many cases the more selective paid “review” directories will be penalised initially, as could AdWords advertisers using Google AdSense as a secondary source of income, and with Christmas around the corner it’s probably not the best time of the year to be facing these sort of problems.

I’d be interested in hearing comments from anyone else regarding these issues, should Google consider it’s timing of updates more carefully? Can the short-term issues affecting websites within Google’s guidelines be prevented in the first place? If they delay necessary improvements will this harm the algorithm? Is there actually a good time to apply these updates anyway?

Google AdWords have today released a new feature which allows My Client Centre account managers to create campaign templates and share them with managed accounts.

The Google help centre has some information about the campaign templates, I’ve only created a very basic template but this does look like a very useful feature to speed up the setup process for new client accounts or similar campaigns.

I’ve created a quick guide to show how you can create and share campaign templates. The template setup follows the same process as creating a new campaign, it’s just created though the MCC account instead of the individual account. Each template can then be applied to quickly create a new campaign for a selected client account.

1) Create Campaign in Google AdWords Template Center
Please click all images for full-size versions:

2) Publish Campaign
Once you have created a campaign template you need to publish this by clicking into the campaign and selecting the publish button, changing the status from draft to published:

3) Select client and click “Template Library”
And once the campaign is published this will be available to apply to managed client accounts as part of their new template library:

4) Create Campaign from Template
All you need to do is set the campaign name, geo-targeting, URL, budget and start/end dates:

5) Save Campaign
Once the setup is saved, the new campaign will be added to the account and you’re ready to go!

Google AdWords seems to be rolling out some useful features recently, last week it was the snapshot date range comparison and today’s is the option to change number, date and time formatting.

This is a great addition for UK users to avoid any confusion between US and UK date formats.

Here’s the Google AdWords account alert (click for full-size/readable image):

Until now if you’ve heard about the Google AdWords dynamic keyword insertion it’s likely that it’s through a blog or forum, but last week the Google Help Centre added information to answer seven common questions about keyword insertion.

Personally I’ve found keyword insertion can be a great method of improving an adverts clickthrough rate by dynamically inserting the exact query string into the ads title, description or URL. The keywords searched for are also highlighted in bold which helps to draw further attention to your ad, potentially boosting it’s CTR.

The new information from Google is great as this clears up any misconceptions which people may of previously had about keyword insertion, making sure that advertisers have all the details they need to use this method effectively. One concern I had was how keyword insertion affects your ads quality score, for example if an ads quality score is calculated using the default text rather than the dynamically created version, but Google explains that “each keyword’s Quality Score is determined after the keyword is triggered and inserted into the ad seen by the user”.

There’s plenty more information in the Help Centre which is well worth a read even for people who have been using this tactic for a while.

I found this quite funny; doing some keyword research for cleaner searches on Google AdWords one of the suggestions was “crap cleaner”, at least it’s honest I suppose:

Maybe I should setup a test as the competition is unsurprisingly very low. The broad match suggestion for scrubber (sorted by relevance?) might also throw up a few unwanted clicks too!

We were tagged by Kelvin yesterday in his If there was an SEO Genie my one wish would be… post and as I seem to be using Google AdWords Editor more and more these days I thought I’d request a couple of new features.

While I find AdWords Editor great to speed up many tasks such as copying and moving keywords or ad groups, there’s still a couple of things stopping me being completely lazy and having to log into the web based version too.

So if I was an SEO PPC Genie, here are the new Google AdWords Editor features which I’d wish for:

• Quality Score Columns
  The quality score column shows some very useful information, so it makes sense to also have this available using the AdWords Editor software.
• Today’s Figures
  When viewing stats you cannot select the current days figures, sending me back off to my web browser again.
• Account Alerts/New Features
  Another reason to log back into your account is to find out if your funds are running low or to be alerted of the new features.
• Reporting
  It would be nice if you could setup and email or export reports directly from the software.
• Client Manager Area
  Not sure if this one would work so well but it might be useful to have a client overview screen and MCC options.
• Capitalisation of Names
  I’ve had this problem before where the renaming of ad groups or campaigns is not processed if you’re only changing the capitalisation of these names.

I’m sure there are a few more features which I’ve missed that the Google team are probably working on already for the next version, let me know if you think anything should be added to this. And as this is a blog meme I’ve tagged the following UK bloggers to join in with their own wishes; Lyndon, Joe, Gabs, Patrick, David and the mystery PPC Blogger.

Google AdWords have today launched Conversion Optimiser in beta, this is currently only available for campaigns which have received 300 conversions during the last 30 days.

Here’s the new feature alert from my Google AdWords account:

Use the Conversion Optimiser to save time and minimise conversion costs
The Conversion Optimiser lets you specify a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid for each ad group. Then, this feature continually adjusts your CPC bids to keep your conversion costs under your maximum CPA bid, showing your ads only when you are likely to get conversions. By using the Conversion Optimiser, you can save time while minimising your conversion costs.

This sounds like it could be a very useful tool to predict future conversion rates, which are calculated using the conversion rates of keywords, the users location and also individual websites on the content network.

For example, here are some of the factors that affect the conversion rate on Kim’s custom shirt website:
- The search query. Kim’s conversion rate is higher when users search for custom shirts than when they search for shirts.
- The location of the user. Her conversion rate is highest when her ad shows in New York.
- The conversion history of particular sites. When her ad shows on certain types of content sites in the Google Network, Kim is more likely to get conversions.

Kim does not have access to these details, but they directly affect her conversion rate and costs. By considering these factors every time her ads are eligible to appear, the Conversion Optimiser can show her ads when she is more likely to get conversions, meanwhile working to keep her average cost per conversion below her CPA bid. Using real time performance data allows the Conversion Optimiser to adjust Kim’s bids for better performance than she would get with manual bidding alone.

Update: Google have now announced the new CPA bidding product on their Inside AdWords blog with an introduction to how this works.

Hitwise posted an interesting case study yesterday about the popularity of cheap vs free searches in the UK.

I find that many people regularly set “cheap” and “free” as negative pay per click keywords without testing it’s performance first. In my opinion this is a mistake, firstly because cheap/free searches are very popular so by doing this you’re missing out on a large amount of extra clicks and also people searching for cheap flights might actually be willing to pay for averagely priced flights instead!

This might not always be successful, especially for luxury goods, but there’s certainly no harm in setting up a low-budget campaign containing some exact match cheap/free keyword phrases to test how well this converts into sales.