Google AdWords Advertisers can now Analyze their Competition

Available only in beta to a small number of advertisers using the English AdWords interface for now, Google has introduced a new “Analyze Competition” feature located on the “opportunities” tab.

By reviewing the account’s activity over two weeks, AdWords will  list categories that represent products and services you’re advertising, based on search terms which are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page. For each category associated with the account, AdWords advertisers will see a bar graph highlighting individual performance compared to the performance of other advertisers and competitors in the same  category.

“When you hover over the data in the ‘Competitive Range’ column, you’ll be able to see more details such as the exact size of your competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers,” explains Emily Williams of Google’s Inside AdWords crew.

“It’s important to remember that data in ‘Analyze competition’ is anonymous, and as part of our commitment to protect your privacy, we don’t reveal information about any advertiser’s identity,” says Williams.

My Company is XYZ, my domain name URL is XYZ. All my paid search campaign ads reference XYZ both in the display URL, the destination URL, the ads themselves and there are at least 6 – 12 instances of my company name on the landing pages I drive traffic too. There is one brand ad group in a separate brand campaign XYZ.

And yet I have a quality score of 7 or less for all variations of my company name keywords.

How can that be you ask?

Good Quality Score PPC question and an issue Google needs to address.

Added as of a couple of weeks ago, Google Search now returns ‘brand links’ on organic results as a new organic update  several weeks ago May 2010.

So with all the fuss around promoting brands, how is it paid search is still so far behind and a companies name keywords and phrases are not garnering a Quality Score of 10 to reflect the Brand value?

One of the more interesting features of AdWords that advanced PPC marketers have been using is Google Dynamic Keywords. This allows you to insert the search query that the user typed in directly into your ad. How to Use AdWords Dynamic Keywords In your title or description lines, you can enter a little bit of code that will insert the users query into your ad. The text should be formatted as follows:

{KeyWord:Alternate Text}

The KeyWord: is the query that the user typed in. The Alternate Text is what the ad will display if for some reason the query cannot be shown (such as if the query string is too long, etc.).

For example, let’s say we have “Larry’s Lamps”. Larry is bidding on the keywords “brass lamps”, “brass lamp”, “quality brass lamp”, and “brass lamps sale”. The ad is set up in AdWords as follows:

If the visitor searches for “Brass Lamps”, they will see:

If the visitor searches for “Quality Brass Lamp”, they will see:

This is brilliant, because whatever the user types in will appear exactly in the ad. The ad will be properly bolded, and will appear more relevent to the visitor.

You can even control the case of the ad:

Buy {keyword:Car parts}  Buy car parts
Buy {Keyword:Car parts}  Buy Car parts
Buy {KeyWord:Car parts}  Buy Car Parts
Buy {KEYWord:Car Parts}  Buy CAR Parts
Buy {KeyWORD:Car parts}  Buy Car PARTS
Buy {KEYWORD:Car Parts}  Buy Car Parts

Photo by Pipe What is “social media”? The phrase, which appears in Wikipedia is the umbrella term that defines activities integrating technology, social interaction and the construction of words,  images and other rich media.

Although I believe this definition is somewhat fair, “Social Media” uses consensus swarming to generate content and link information in a collaborative manner as collective intelligence.

What we understand as Social Media, we are shown in different ways as Forums, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Online Communities, Social Networks, Photos, Videos, etc..

The point is, that the rise of the term emerges from naturally derived concepts such as Social Media Optimization (SMO) which is the process of optimizing individuals or companies to distribute content quickly and successfully through the sites for social participation. The acceptance or otherwise of such content, with the content generated by users themselves form Online Reputation.

The other concept is derived from Social Media Marketing (SMM) that must be understood as a form of marketing that seeks its objectives through participation in social participation sites through unique content, attractive and useful, but not necessarily shocking. Such content items may be from a blog, even a simple video on youtube. We must not confuse it with viral marketing campaigns, but both come very close and look at very similar goals.

The issue is that the term Social Media, we use every day and is now in full effect as we see in the chart Google Trends does not yet have a definitive translation into ROI until recently.

There are lots of proposals for Social Media Campaigns, Media Collaborative Marketing, Online Media and Social Participation, but little is heard which clearly defines what the customer wants to see for return on investment and can be measured until now.

Overdrive Interactive has created a social media dashboard, tracking SEO, PPC and Social Media using a proprietary process clearly defining actions and reactions down to the lead level. On the dashboard clients are able to learn what programs and initiatives work and costs per customer acquisition associated with those processes. Download the social media map.

Lead development and online lead generation are no longer a guessing game, fraught with false promises and expectations. Using Overdrive Interactive’s tools and services customers both B2C and B2B are now able to track online marketing programs ROI successfully.

2009 Best Use of Social Media
Project: Harley-Davidson 2010 Motorcycles Mosaic
Agency/Creator: Overdrive Interactive for Harley-Davidson

What is the “Google Slap”?

Photo by Dr.S.Ali WasifOther titles I thought would be good for this article:

Google knows better than you and your customers

Google Knows Best

Google decides your business model

What is the “Google Slap”?

The slap is an act of  “punishment” by Google to websites, consisting of

A degradation of the Quality Score on the keyword level for your Adwords campaigns

Organic Positioning degradation (drop in positions not links)

A degradation of Page Rank (loss of authority in the network)

which adversely affects your SEM, your SEO, and perhaps also your relations with strategic business alliances and the general public.

Normally this  “slap” applies to websites using bad marketing practices, “Black Hat SEO” (optimizing pages via forced illegal techniques such as link farms), in Adword’s, use of outside niche keywords, irrelevant, overly broad and inconsistent with each other, and so on. And many campaigns were hit with the “Google Slap” because the squeeze pages contained content full of sales hype rather than useful information.

So, what’s changed?

Google obviously has a right to determine which pages represent the greatest quality and best match to keywords used, but in 2008, a round of Google Slap actions on small vendors took considerable toll, driving many companies out of business quickly. Many argued that their pages conformed to Google’s AdWords’ recommendations for pages, and yet they still received very low PR rankings.

That’s the theory, but Google is no longer pretending to be neutral as claimed.

Google has returned and shown partisanship when it comes to businesses based on affiliate marketing because, without apparent cause, thousands of net workers and business Internet marketers with affiliate relations have suffered a massive  Google slap.

Stunningly, Google has decided to ban businesses that send a user through a flow of offers or what is also known in the industry as coreg or co-registration. The goal in co-registration is to present a user relevant offers and have them sign up for multiple deals. The company makes money by charging advertisers in the path a Cost Per Acquisition [CPA] or Cost Per Lead [CPL] basis.

With Co-registration, the process of generating sales leads starts the second a consumer decides to join, and clicks on an offer, and opts-in to receive more information. Co-registration offers the opportunity to take advantage of additional deals after the main value proposition has already been delivered. Some consumers may be annoyed seeing additional offers, but the consumer has a choice to take the offer or to say, “Skip”.

Co-registration can be a respectful service offered to potential subscribers. The company I had setup the PPC campaigns for is best in class with regards to protecting the users confidentiality, never reselling their data to third parties, as many other marketers in their space do to pad their income.

Where I think Google is flawed, rests not in the poor user experience as described and claimed by them. But a business decision made by Google regarding a business model, not the actual results generated from the campaigns, offers presented, efforts in optimizing landing pages,  behavioral targeting and segmentation, resulting in the true user experience as represented by conversion rates.

My personal “Google Slap”

I was the one that set up the PPC campaigns and optimized the program so this client had the benefit of a PPC ninja working their account to garner incredible conversion rates, but the numbers [and screen shots] speak for themselves.

With a 25% conversion rate for the products [content network in this case], services and deals that were being shown in the co-reg format,  this cannot be described as a bad user experience.

There are plenty of business out there that would literally kill for anything over a 5% conversion rate.

These conversion rates are based on the last page, the “Thank you” page where the conversion pixel fires.

I spent 6 months working feverishly taking a business unit from $100k’s of thousands of dollars to a mutli-million dollar Google high performance PPC account. Thousands of ads and 10′s of thousands of keywords were added to this Adword’s account both in the search and content network. As you can see from the screen shot below the business was going gang busters till Friday August 1st, 2009 where the bottom literally fell out.

On Friday evening the entire account saw it’s Quality Score’s drop from 8,9′s and 10′s to 1. Nothing like killing an account with no customer service over the weekend.  No notification was sent, no reasoning and no communication for 2 days because Google took action, but does not provide customer service on the weekend. To add insult to injury, the phone message on their system tells you their hours are 9-6 but neglect to mention those hours are Pacific time.

Talk about flipping out. I had to wait till Monday before I could speak to anyone and even then, they couldn’t tell me what happened to the account.  Even better, I was looking at the AdWords editor data which did not update correctly, indicating quality score as the issue.  I  went through several conversations, 3 service specialists and tons of emails until almost 30 days later a senior account representative got to the heart of the matter.  Google hates Co-Registration as a business model.

Unjust banning

So my question to Google, was this an algorithmic implementation or a business decision based on user feedback? Googles automatic site ban for coreg is not intuitive. Many of those businesses were in fact not violating Google’s guidelines and do not deserve an outright ban: The algorithm could apply a variable penalty based on the conversion rates, page views, time on site or any combination therein.

I submit a 25% conversion rate is not a bad user experience and that Google is way off base on their assumptions of business and business practices.

Additionally, through the use of behavioral ad targeting and segmentation we reduced the bounce rate of the campaigns from 70% to 40%, again confirming the consumer appreciated our efforts in presenting a good user experience.

Pay per click (PPC) marketing isn’t the easiest thing to get right.  I should know, having spent a small fortune on Google Adwords, before I learned how to get good placement that generated reasonable click through rates (CTR) and conversions.

Google quality score, you either work well with it or go broke because of it.  Google quality score is a variable used by Google to reward good quality ads that link through to valuable and relevant websites. What does that mean? Google’s reputation is based on its ability to match their users with the best and most relevant content that matches what the user is looking for.

So how does Google, a company so focused on metrics totally miss the boat on this and decide a bounce rate of 40% and a conversion rate of 25% results in the equivalent of a non relevant and poor consumer experience?  What’s your thoughts regarding Google’s ability to decide whether your business model is right or wrong.

Web statistics, Web metrics, web analytics, web stats and site stats.

What are all these site metrics, and why measure them?

Web metrics refers to measurement, the science of measuring websites. Specifically, measuring website events, defining goals and extracting trends.

Analytics is the act of distinguishing categories within recorded stats, and analyzing for any patterns and trends. The process of analytics means, literally, taking apart the whole of something in order to study its component parts.

Statistics are a scientific application. The goal is to form actions and initiatives based on the data recorded.

What should your website stats tell you? The number of (returning) visitors to your site, how visitors interact with your pages. Information about the content of your site and how visitors use it. Your traffic statistics are an indicator of website performance.

There are many different web analytics solutions available, there are both free analytic tools such as Analog, AWStats, Webalizer and Google analytics and more advanced and in-depth paid / subscription tools like Omnitu re.

Google analytics (previously Urchin) provides a high quality free service, with a quick, clean user interface and clearly displayed default and customized reporting.

Free Website Stat Packages

• Hitslink A very effective web tracking solution and easy to implement, simply paste a small tracking script on your site’s pages and start viewing reports within seconds. There are two versions available, HitsLink Enterprise and Professional.
• Statcounter – Free web tracker. Detailed stats are provided for the last 100 pageloads only.
• Addfreestats – provide free website statistics
• GoStats: Provides real-time web statistics and analytics which can give you immediate insights into your website’s performance. Started in 1999, GoStats provides a wealth of data which most free stats systems cannot provide.
• Google Analytics: Google rolled out this analytics platform out in 2005. Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free web stat tools currently available and definitely worth a look.
• ClickTracks: Known as one of the higher end web analytics solutions, great for search marketers and search engine optimizers alike. Click tracks gives the user a deep insight in to campaigns, site navigation patterns, PPC, SEO and ROI stats instantly.
• HiStats – Free, real time updated web stats service
• WebTrends: The high end corporate web site statistics / web analytics package. WebTrends have been around for some time now and demand a great deal of respect in the analytics market. A very powerful solution demanding a high price.
• Webalizer: Webalizer needs to be installed on a host that is able to access the server logs. When it processes these logs, you get a view of the types of visitors that have come to the site and what they were specifically seeking.

Server and Site Data
Ping Test – Check the presence of an active connection
Reverse IP/Look-up – Resolve a host to an IP address
Server Status – Check if your website is online or offline
Website Speed Test – Find out how fast your website loads
What Is My IP Address – shows your ip address
IP to City – determine the Country, City, Latitude and Longitude of an IP Address
Website to Country – determine the Country in which the specified website is Hosted

Photo by Storm CryptI have hundred of websites and domain names in just about every vertical you could imagine, literally. The websites function as a test bed for my SEO and PPC experiments, a source of income in most instances and best of all, insight to many of the sensors search engines use as Ranking Factors for the  search engine result pages (SERP’s).

The key to my insight is running some form of website analytics on every site.  No one site really tells me what is brewing with any given engine, instead the birds eye view helps me see potential changes to the ever shifting ranking landscape.

After spending considerable time sifting through several dozen reports I noticed a change on or around the 8th of October. Albeit some of the changes were minor and insignificant but I have a bunch of steady Eddy sites that perform very consistently for traffic in some very niche keywords and search engine performance.  I have guidelines and flags set to alert me when something goes wonky and sure enough some of the indicators were off, both positive and negative.

On October 28th I posted to my twitter account the following message to see if anyone else saw something change.

Fully two days later the Google update hit across the board. From SEORoundtable.com  October 30, 2009 Google October 2009 Toolbar PageRank Update

“There seems to be a Google Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. We have threads on the topic at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums and HighRankings Forum. The update seemed to have started sometime yesterday afternoon and many SEOs and webmasters are chatting about it now.

The last PageRank update prior to this one was in June 2009, which may have just been a technical quirk because the one prior to that was just a month before in May.

In any event, like I say every time:
Yes, a Toolbar PageRank update means nothing in terms of your ranking changing anytime soon. The PageRank scores shown in the toolbar are outdated and have zero direct impact on your Google rankings. That doesn’t mean that PageRank has no influence, but the toolbar score does not have any influence. Google shows us one thing, but yet uses another thing.”

Photo by catatronicI have been working with a company on their website redesign and mentioned that as long as they were going for a complete overhaul of the site would they consider a new domain name.

The old name was truly terrible on so many levels. The domain they had been using for over 6 years only took into account some of what the company was about, the name was too long and had only 1 keyword in the name but worse, the domain name was not a .com.

I use several  research tools to find domain names and hit upon several nice potential names including SEO factors, branding and other forms of measurement.  The domain I really liked was already taken but parked, so I new right away there was a good chance the owner would be willing and ready to sell.  This particular domain name was an “exact match” to their most important keyword phrase The domain name was originally registered in the early 2000′s and  had a clear history.

All they needed to do was pay $17,800 for the domain name. I wasn’t surprised when they got back to me, “we can’t afford $17,800 for a domain name”. “Are you sure?” I asked.

What is the domain name really worth to them

I explained that this particular exact match name generated approximately 1,780,000 searches per month according to a Google search. And upon further investigation into the PPC ads on this exact phrase we knew that a number one organic search engine ranking could get them up to 45% of all of the clicks.  Even if we only had a number two or three ranking we could expect at least a 10 percent click through ratio.

Do the Math

$2.50 CPC times 18,000 clicks a 1 percent click through rate from 1.8 million searches equals $45,000.

In under 180 days the domain would virtually pay for itself!

Having a domain name with the keywords in it does not guarantee you a top search engine ranking. Nothing does, but Google does favor exact match domain names.

In this case, using a 301 permanent redirect, we would be able to redirect a domain name with great history and a great number of quality links to this new domain name.  This new domain also has age, relevant, existing content and pages and links.

The value of acquiring a domain name that has a very popular keyword phrase in it (and a “.com” top-level domain) is that you may also see “type in” traffic. Some people, rather than search for a keyword, type a URL into their browser’s address bar. There are many domain name owners (called “domainers”) who base the value of a domain name off of this metric (type-in traffic), alone.

Domain Value Tips

Is there a keyword in it?
How many people search for that keyword on a regular basis?
Is it memorable?
What is the history of the domain name (number of on-topic links, level of traffic, TLD of the domain name)?
Does it have a hyphen or number in it? Domain names with hyphens and or numbers are less valuable, but may be a good option for SEO purposes because the main keyword may be in the domain name.

Congratulations on your purchase of a domain name through an accredited registrar via the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) accredited registrar’s offices located in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. [And your 20 cent ICANN fee] ICANN, the non-profit group that regulates domain names.

Now what do you do when there is no current plan to build a website, email service or resell this new asset you have acquired through dropcatching, pure insperation, trade or auction?  Will this domain make  or cost you money?

Domain parking refers to an internet domain name whose DNS [and sometimes the A record] is pointed to a service which provides a landing page or pages served with ads, links and or search results, without that domain being associated with any services such as e-mail or a website.

Revenue sharing from a parked domain works by traffic being directed to a search page or pay per click page where any visitors to your parked domain may click on the ads and you receive a percentage of the revenue from this.

This is also referred to as parked domain monetization. Revenue is earned as potential customers view pay per click (PPC) ads or the Internet traffic [type in or search related] may be redirected to another website. The domain name itself is the revenue generating asset providing information and more than just acting as a regular internet address.

There are “DOMAIN FOR SALE” parked pages to let others know that your domain name is for sale. When potential buyers type in your domain name to see if it’s available, the “DOMAIN FOR SALE” parked page displays with your email address so they can contact you.

Parking pages can be presented in two forms, a ‘one-click’ process, where a click on a keyword is not necessary to generate ads. The ads are targeted based on the domain name or keywords presented in the admin panel of the parking companies dashboard. Domains with ‘two-click’ implementations require a click on a keyword or a keyword search to generate ads.

Domain owners may use parking services to reserve the domain name for future development, and to protect against potential cybersquatting. Many companies provide parking, domain resale, auction and appraisal services. There are many turnkey Internet advertising firms that let you earn money on your domain names, providing advertiser links, landing pages and track traffic statistics for you. I have used Sedo, Domain Sponsor, Parked and so on with varying results but diminishing returns over the past several years.

Often to be most effective as an monetization tool, the domain names and their landing pages must be designed and optimized to generate maximum revenue.

Considerable skill and expert knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) practices, behavioral psychology and an understanding of the target market audience, including demographics play significantly into the amount of money a domain name can generate.