…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. Its job […]

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 love, and […]

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” in […]

Initially, I was a little sceptical about this change, and I still am. As Google suggests in its post, we’ll have to monitor campaigns over the next few days or weeks (depending on the number of clicks you usually achieve) to see what difference this makes.
Actually, I have established a circumstance where this is beneficial. […]

There’s a change coming to the way that Google currently chooses the position of your ad in the pecking order. The whole post makes confusing reading and I’d recommend reading it a couple of times.
It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out. Right now, the placement of your ad is not just based […]

Google has this clever way of presenting results that are most relevant to the searcher. I completely agree with this policy - a searcher wants to find the most relevant results. This helps you to build campaigns that acquire clients for the lowest cost.
However, there’s a downside: what if you’re searching for a product or […]

So, how useful is it?
Not least the whole Harry Potter thing, but we appear to be in a wizard-driven society, or at least much of the online experience is. That’s all well and good and many times, like this, it can work well. What it doesn’t do, is give as much flexibility - it’s a […]

Why does search marketing work? Seth Godin describes in his post, Permission, Junk and Spam, how marketing has changed since 1999:
The result of Google and the prevalence of search means that people are far more forgiving of things that need to be sought out, and less patient than ever with selfish marketers that insist on […]

I finally completed my ‘brain-dump’ of my experiences with Google AdWords.
This is only part of the story, of course. If done well, AdWords will get you visitors. Without putting as much effort in to the rest of the strategy, you’ll end up just paying for visitors to land on your site, and disappear without engaging […]