Understanding how your customers behave, not just that clicks sometimes convert to sales and sometimes don’t, is critical knowledge in the battle to constantly increase the ROI from a paid advertising campaign. Google’s recent addition of Search Funnels to AdWords accounts attempt to do just that. If you don’t already have conversion tracking implemented correctly, [...]

Mobile Internet usage is fast becoming a significant audience worth exploiting. The headlines: 43% of iPhone owners earn salaries in excess of £65,000 200 million Internet enabled phones shipped in 2009 with 22% growth projected for 2010. 38% of mobile phones worldwide will be smartphones by 2013 UK mobile searches increased by 260% for commercial [...]

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 [...]

The AdWords Success Guide explains the practice and benefits of using negative keywords to your advantage, excluding irrelevant searchers from seeing your ad, let alone you paying for an irrelevant click. If you really want to be able to measure performance and optimise your campaign effectively, there’s a little more to it. Example Dennis and [...]

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 [...]

A colleague posted me this article about the online marketing economy. Big Bubble? Maybe. Big Trouble? Definitely. There’s nothing like a bit of Google-bashing, huh? Bill Gates must love it! It certainly takes some of the usual negative attention away from Microsoft. If Google is squeezing the AdSense partners, and I don’t especially advertise on [...]

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 [...]

Google has just added a new report to the range available on the AdWords platform, the Search Query Performance report. I know that many people struggle with the choice of keywords to get the performance that they want from their campaign. In my experience, this is typically where many businesses form the opinion that Google [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]