Clix Marketing PPC Blog

 OK, it’s just a tiny link to our blog from an article on the WSJ web site, but it’s a start…

Normally I wouldn’t simply reprint a posting from the AdWords blog, but this time I thought it particularly important that everyone see this one – especially if you have clients who frequently perform Google searches to check their own ads:

“One of the most common questions our support teams receive from advertisers is “why can’t I see my ad on Google?” While it may seem like a good idea to monitor your ad by searching for it, here’s a list (in no particular order) of possible account issues that are difficult, if not impossible, to troubleshoot by simply looking for your ad on Google.com:

1. Your ad has been disapproved.
2. The keyword you used to search for your ad is not performing well and has become inactive for search.
3. Your ad rank is not high enough to allow your ad to show on the first page of search results.
4. Your ad is showing, but in a lower position possibly due to a shift in the competitive landscape.
5. Your regionally targeted ad doesn’t include the region (e.g. city, state, or country) associated with your computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address.
6. Your ad is targeting a language that’s different from the language you’ve selected for your Google.com preferences.
7. Your daily budget has been exhausted and your ads are no longer showing for the day.
8. Your daily budget is lower than the recommended amount and Google is spacing the delivery of your ads to ensure you receive traffic throughout the day.
9. You’re using ad scheduling and your ads are currently not scheduled to run.
10. Your account hasn’t been activated.

AdWords is all about results and we understand that you want to monitor your ads. However, searching for your ads on Google can lead to a diluted clickthrough rate (CTR) as well as account changes based on results that may not represent what the average user sees (more on both points later). For these reasons, we strongly recommend against monitoring your ads solely based on a Google.com search. Below, we’ve highlighted three great tools to help you monitor your ads quickly, accurately, and without negatively impacting your performance:

1. “Search” using the Ad Preview page rather than Google.com

For those of you who search for your ads simply to monitor their positions on Google.com, the Ad Preview page is a perfect alternative. The Ad Preview page enables you to view ads (and search results) as they would appear on a regular Google.com search results page to most users, without accruing extra impressions for your ad. Remember, anytime you or your colleagues search for your ad on Google.com, the keyword associated with your ad accrues an impression. Over time, this may decrease your CTR (as the number of impressions increases but the clicks do not) and, in turn, may lead to a lower Quality Score.

In addition, if you search for your ad multiple times on Google.com (not using the Ad Preview page), our system may adapt the results you see. This means you may begin to see your ad in a lower position than before.

You can access the Ad Preview page by adding “/adpreview” to the end of the usual Google URL – http://www.google.com/adpreview. Here’s an example of a search using the Ad Preview page:

(Click the screenshot to view the full-size image.)
2. Use the Ads Diagnostic Tool

For ads that don’t seem to be showing at all, the Ads Diagnostic Tool is a good place to start. Located within your AdWords account, the tool can tell you if your ads are not showing due to approval status, cost-per-click (CPC) and budget price settings, ad and keyword performance, ranking status, geo-targeting settings, etc.

You can access the Ads Diagnostic Tool information two different ways – for a quick diagnosis, point your mouse at the magnifying glass icon next to any keyword in your account. A help bubble will appear with information about that keyword. For a more thorough analysis, go to the tool itself by clicking Tools on the Campaign Management tab.

3. Account statistics and reporting

Your best bet when monitoring or troubleshooting your ad activity is reviewing the statistics in your account. Unlike searching for your ad, your account statistics provide a comprehensive overview of how your ads are performing overall. These statistics can provide you with the average position of a keyword that’s calculated, not estimated, across all the geographic locations, languages, network sites, etc. that you’re targeting.

In addition, your account offers numerous reports that you can run as needed, or schedule to run and have emailed to you on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis – this means you get all the data without even having to log in to your account!

We understand that it’s natural to search Google.com when curious about how your ads are performing; however, we hope you’ll keep in mind that how your ad appears, or in some cases doesn’t appear, for you, may not reflect how it appears to the vast majority of people who are searching for your product or service each day.”

IDC published a press release recently that turns out to be a rather bad advertisement for their pricy white paper on internet advertising – read the press release here.

In the press release they predict that search advertising”market share” will decline due to the increase in prevalence of video advertising.

The author obviously doesn’t “get” the distinction between search and contextual advertising. I think it’s likely that contextual video advertising will enjoy an increase in market share, but it won’t do so at the expense of search – it will do so at the expense of other forms of display and contextual advertising, like banner ads and print ads.

I think search advertising will continue to gain market share compared to all other kinds of advertising. Especially when you envision a world where search is embedded into more user experiences. Think on-screen search during TV and movie viewing; search while traveling by car; search while using ad-supported Microsoft software applications.

(Edited version appeared on Search Engine Land today)

One month ago I mused about possible impact of Google’s DoubleClick acquisition on SEM agencies and bid management tool vendors. This week’s Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive sheds an interesting new light on the situation.

As I reported, DoubleClick (and now Google) sells a powerful PPC bid management system called DART Search. Features include one-screen management of ad campaigns on Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter and other services. It also allows automated bid price management according to rules set by the advertiser. So, for example, bid prices can rise or fall depending on position or ROI goals.

aQuantive is owner/operator of Atlas, a provider of digital marketing technologies, which sells, among many other things, the venerable Atlas Search (formerly Atlas OnePoint), one of the best-regarded bid management tools available. Its feature set is similar to DART Search.

I hope that Google and Microsoft enter into a healthy competition to provide these powerful cross-service bid management tools to agencies and advertisers – preferably at no cost, the way Google now provides Google Analytics. Why would either offer a tool that makes it easy to manage ad campaigns on their competitors’ platforms? Same reason that Google AdWords and Analytics allow conversion tracking of non-Google advertising now: to cement brand/product loyalty.

So that’s the good news; now the bad news. The acquisitions have placed Google and Microsoft squarely and imperiously in competition with SEO/SEM agencies. Microsoft’s aQuantive owns Avenue A | Razorfish, which bills itself as “the largest independent interactive agency.” And Google’s DoubleClick owns Performics, one of the largest SEO/SEM firms worldwide.

Will the acquisitors hold on to their agencies despite the fact that doing so might alienate some of their biggest customers? (Microsoft may be more vulnerable than PPC-leader Google – who’s gonna stop advertising on AdWords?) Or will each spin off their agency property to avoid conflict? Microsoft and Google: bribe me with a free bid management system, and I’ll begrudgingly accept your competing with my relatively smaller agency.

(Originally published in Search Engine Land)

Last Month’s announcement of Google’s new AdWords Preferred Cost Bidding may have been a whimper compared to the bang of its DoubleClick acquisition news. But the two events may be related in a way that could spell trouble ahead for the paid search bid management companies like Atlas, Omniture, KeyWordMax, etc.

Preferred Cost Bidding allows advertisers to set an average price they would like to pay per click (or per thousand impressions)—and then AdWords works automatically to ensure the click price hovers around the preferred bid price. It’s an alternative to arbitrarily setting bid prices high—the Maximum Bid we’re used to—and rewards savvy advertisers who have figured out their acceptable ROI and conversion rate, such that they know exactly what a click is worth to them.

In so doing Google has added another bid management alternative that was formerly the domain of pricey bid management/automation software. Google now offers Ad Scheduling (dayparting, or the ability to vary ad delivery by day of week and/or time of day), position preference (automatic adjustment of the bid price to attain a specified ad rank), cost-per-action bidding (where the advertiser pays only if/when a desired action, like a sale, is achieved) and a handful of other “bid automation” capabilities.

Little wonder that bid management companies at SES NY last month were downplaying the value of their bid automation features and instead trumpeting campaign management features that make it easy for advertisers and agencies to manage campaigns across multiple PPC services—mainly Google’s, Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s.

But does this put them on safe ground? The answer may be a big “No,” based on an aspect of the DoubleClick acquisition that didn’t make the headlines: DoubleClick sells a slick PPC bid/campaign management package called DART Search. It boasts features that put it squarely head-to-head with other products in the category like Atlas Search and Omniture SearchCenter—which currently charge fees in the hundreds to thousands of dollars monthly.

A free bid/campaign Manager from Google makes perfect sense given their strategy to provide best-of-breed tools to PPC advertisers—think Google Analytics and the Website Optimizer, two acquisitions that Google now provides at no cost. But it’s likely to force the Atlases and Omnitures of the world to scramble to provide new features that set them apart from DART Search.