A short time ago, one of our live coaching clients found himself wasting a lot of budget without even realising it. In a fiercely competitive market, where clicks are £1.50 or more, together we established that he was wasting around £50 PER DAY on irrelevant clicks that had absolutely no chance of becoming sales. Why? [...]

Many of our clients and coaching students have asked us about their obligations surrounding their use of competitors’ brand names in Google ads and as keywords to generate traffic and sales. We interviewed top commercial technology lawyer, Frank Jennings to field those common questions. Mark Tillison: Although Google disapproves some Google ads because they include [...]

For many of our clients new to Google AdWords, the most confusing element is how to achieve top positions on Google AdWords – the ranking system can be confusing. We spotted this neat video which demonstrates the value of CTR and explains in simple terms how Google ranks your ads amongst competitors’ ads. Learn more [...]

…ask what you can do for Google. To effectively lower your cost-per-click (CPC), and therefore your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or cost per sale, you need to first appreciate Google’s perspective. If you understand what motivates Google, you’ll understand better how to manipulate the system to your advantage: 1. Obvious, perhaps, but Google is a SEARCH engine. [...]

There are many things to love about Google; measurability, tightly focused targeting and all that traffic. But there’s a little-known element that’s really beginning to annoy me and a lot of the other search community: the Search Network. You’ll be familiar with the two primary networks; Google Search – essentially, the Google you know and [...]

One of our clients just asked about this suspicious email from Google: From: Google AdWords [mailto:reactivation@google.com] Sent: 25 March 2008 02:58 To: [removed] Subject: Please Update Your Billing Information This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message. ——————————————————————————– Dear Google AdWords [...]

By default, Google will display your ads on the content network. If you haven’t switched it off, you’re advertising to an audience you know little about, and you’ll find it difficult to measure and manage the results that you’re getting from your whole account. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the content network is [...]

Google announced today that it is to commence testing on Demographic Bidding. You can already target specific geographic locations for your ads to be shown, and pretty soon you’ll be able to target particular demographics too. Even if you don’t want to target specific demographics, there could be an incredible amount of value in the [...]

Recently, a number of AdWords campaigns I’m working have been sailing very close to the limits of what Google will permit in a single AdWords account. Anyone who is a subscriber to the ‘long tail‘ principal will know that generating variations and combinations of keywords is good practice to find lots of niche little terms [...]

Google AdWords includes a wonderful, often unused feature for negative keywords. This allows you to filter out the unwanted irrelevant traffic that would still cost you money in clicks, but not gain you anything in sales. Using the example of a campaign selling hubcaps, if you don’t sell Renault hubcaps, make sure you use “-Renault” [...]