Ok so the 5th of May lift on Google keyword trademarking date is nearly here.

Are you prepared? Are your clients?

Are you going all out aggressively to bid against competitors trademarks?.

Are you going to start bidding against your own brand as protection?.

Perhaps a mixture?. Or are you going to wait and see what your competitors do?

Looks like Tesco have taken the ‘moral high ground’ issuing a statement that they will not be bidding against anyone elses branded terms.

Will this moral high ground mean that they get less competition against their own brand?.

Lets see.

The key thing to remember here is ROI. You can go and bid wildy against any brand you like if you are willing to pay through the nose for it, but with a lack of relevance and ultimate conversion its expenditure you can do without.

Lets not forget, Google has quality based minimum bids, so although you may think your brand is relevant, if your click through rate is not high enough your minimum bids will get very high. Trademarks are still in place for adtext and this is a massive factor in click through rates.

Against core branded keywords advertisers will find CTR will not be high enough to allow bidding against brand unless you are willing to pay extortionate CPC’s. This is because core branded keywords contain a high number of navigational queries with lazy searchers who would rather search for the brand than type the url directly into the browser. These searchers can be blind to anything other than the brand they searched for.

I recently set up a competitors adgroup for a client with these types of competitor terms. The competition was directly related selling the same product and all keywords were on phrase match. However, as expected CTR was simply not high enough to keep them active. Unless Google lower CTR thresholds you will see this -

The Hitwise blog highlights the gap in brand traffic lost between the US and UK (where the US have always been able to bid openly against keywords), so there is brand volume to be had from competitors. It just needs to be taken from longer tail queries and more inteligently than simply bidding against core terms.

Another key thing to remember is the relative nature of Googles bidding platform.

If you are bidding against your competitors brand as the only advertiser against the brand owner, then your CTR will be poor in comparison. Google takes into account all advertisers against that keyword. So if you bid in a pack with 8 other advertisers who will also have relatively poor click through rates then the quality threshold might be a lowered a little allowing for lower minimum bids.

So will the threshold naturally decline over time?

After Yahoos blog was hacked I spotted today that Amnesty seem to have a similar problem.

Monitoring the SERPs for ‘buy viagra‘ (ahem) I noticed an Amnesty blog post appearing in 8th. If you click on the link you get redirected via some onpage script to a pharmacy site…

The cached text of the page shows the viagra content. If you go direct to the page (rather than visiting via Google) you won’t be redirected either and can view the text.

What’s most alarming is the scale of the problem over at Amnesty.

A quick site lookup shows blog and news articles full of hidden text and links to .edu domains and ‘pharmacy’ sites… not cool.

Coincidentally the listing above Amnesty for ‘buy viagra’ is from Prospect Magazine. You see as a user you get redirected to the homepage but visit as Googlebot and you see a whole different page. A quick lookup shows they have similar issues to Amnesty.

Looks like Matts 2008 predictions are coming true.

Good news for naughty affiliates. Nightmare for real brands.

Google are moving inline with their policies in the US/Canada.

We’re writing to inform you that we’re changing our trademark complaint procedure in the UK and Ireland. This change may affect how we handle the trademark complaint you currently have on file with Google.

If you’ve submitted a complaint letter requesting that we prevent advertisers from using certain trademark terms anywhere in their ad text, we will continue our efforts to support your request. However, from May 5, 2008, our trademark complaint investigations will no longer result in Google monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This will bring our procedure in line with the approach taken in the US and Canada. Complaints received on or after today will be processed under our revised procedure.

You do not need to file your trademark complaint with us again unless you would like to amend it based on the new guidelines. For more detailed information regarding our trademark complaint procedure, we invite you to review our revised complaint procedure, posted online at http://www.google.co.uk/tm_complaint.html.

To learn more about this trademark policy revision, please visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

Advertising Legal Support Team

More details on the upcoming policy change here.

The new policy will have a big impact on advertisers brand bidding, providing opportunities to bid against competitors brands while of course making it more difficult to protect your own.

Read more about understanding when to bid on your own brand here.

Quite an amusing spot by Jeremy over at PPC Discussions. Looks like the YSMBlog (“nofollow” for you I don’t want to be linking to bad neighbourhoods) has been hacked (another WP exploit example) and currently has a ‘buy viagra’ link hidden in a noscript tag.

Actually what I found interesting is that it took this long for anyone to realise. Check out Archive.org from back in August ’07.

Looks like they were promoting a few things ;)

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(I cut the number of links in half, it made the post massive!). Timely considering SEL article about the display:none feature of CSS.

Interesting article over at Conversation Marketing about bidding on your own brand name. The post throws up some good arguments, but like all things in life one rule simple does not fit all. Aswell as reasons to bid on your own brand there are equally very good arguments against bidding on brand and it really depends on the business circumstances as to whether it makes sense for you.

When bidding on brand one thing you should always do is track brand performance separately from your non brand campaigns.

There are some agencies who will encourage you to bid against your brand and then proceed to lump it all into one to make the overall figures of your campaign appear far more successful than they actually are; effectively hiding the poorer performance of non brand campaigns.

Things to consider when bidding against your own brand -

1) Other Advertisers
2) Organic Placement
3) Brand Volume
4) Affiliates

1. Other Advertisers – Are there any other adverts displaying against your brand? If there are other advertisers appearing against your brand then I would advise to bid against your brand no matter where you are placed organically. This increases your exposure or shelf space so to speak. If you have a trademark, submit an application to Google to stop other advertisers appearing against your brand in the UK. For US advertisers this works a little differently, you can’t trademark protect keywords, only the use of your trademark within adtext. So those targetting the US will have to maintain a degree of vigilance in monitoring the SERPS if at the time of checking their were no other advertisers.

2. Organic Placement – Where are you placed organically? You should be in the very top position for your brand unless you have an extremely generic or competitive brand name (or a new site!). If you are not top then you should bid against your brand to avoid losing any visitors. If you are top organically and there are no advertisers bidding against your brand then it makes sense to save your money and not bid against your brand. You should however take into consideration point number 4.

3. Brand Volume – How much volume do you get to your brand?. If your brand volume is quite low then cost will be equally small. However, if you are a large brand, bare in mind that you could get a serious amount of your volume going through the PPC advert obviously at a cost. In theory the larger brands should be able to afford this, but it still might be better spent elsewhere.

4. Affiliates – You should have terms and conditions in place to limit affiliates from bidding against brand anyway, whether that’s paid or organically. Obviously if you don’t have affiliates this will not be a problem, but those that do need to consider affiliates because bidding against your own brand can act as protection, especially in the US where you cannot trademark the use of keywords.

Conclusion

In general if you have no other advertisers displaying adverts against your brand name and you are placed at the top organically, then you should not bid against brand. There is no need to pay extra when the difference in clicks from a top organic placement against aggregate clicks via an organic top placement with a PPC advert are generally fairly small. I have seen the research which shows increases, but I have also seen many instances where you are simply paying a cost with no extra benefit.

Although average CPC’s on branded keywords in these circumstances are also very small, if you are a large brand then actually this can equate to a significant amount of volume. Some brands can incurr costs into the thousands each month as an example.

Would this spend not be better funelled back into the paid or organic search campaign?. That said, you will need to monitor your brand within the SERPS, in terms of other advertisers and affiliates especially if you do not have a trademark or are based in the US.

A Happy Medium

There are mediums to be had when bidding on brand. If you are concerned that you are losing out on some misspellings of brand or long tail brand related queries then you can use embedded match to show for the queries you want to.

This allows you to bid broad on your core brand keyword(s) and negatively match out exact (or phrase) match keywords where you are sure you rank organically in top positions. So you can run search query reports (and use log data) to negatively match out further queries you identify where you rank in the top position and believe you would be incurring cost for no reason. Alternatively you could just bid using exact match where you believe you need to show your ad. The Adwords example from the help centre explains embedded match -

“Example: An advertiser selling Toy Story merchandise might use the embedded match option of a negative and exact match on -[Toy Story]. This way, the advertiser’s ads appear for Toy Story dolls and Toy Story products, but not for the exact match Toy Story.”

Still Not Sure?

Like I said at the start, one rule does not fit all. The best thing to do is test and see what works best for you.

Looks like there has been a site links update, thanks big G. ;)

Interesting to see which pages Google chose. The Amy Alexandra post was just a little testing I did for fun and was certainly not one of my most linked to pages, but traffic wise its been pretty big…

Am I being to cynical but page load time as another factor in quality score?. Why?
According to Google it’s all in the name of ‘user experience’ and hence it’s going to be added into the quality score algo in Adwords sometime soon.

I don’t get it. Why bother?

Surely if site load time is long and delayed meaning the user experience for a visitor is that awful then they will simply go elsewhere, meaning the advertiser will lose out on conversion. Ultimately if it was that much of a problem it would be detrimental to the advertisers business and they would naturally drop out of the bidding or just fix their problem.

So what’s the point? Isn’t this basically just organic and self fixing anyway?

Do we really need a load time algo to dictate how fast a site should be…it raises more questions and worries about what happens if the site has a small or temporary issue etc. Apparently Google will be clarifying the new factor but still…

If user experience was really the key then develop a system where campaigns automatically pause when there is a certain server or site response over a given time instead of just making advertisers pay extra. Or something.

I have finally found some time to make some changes to the blog. So lets get rid of those sitewide blogroll / links that seem to come with a lot of the ‘out of the box’ WP themes available.

Before -

<h3>Links</h3>
<ul class=”list”>
<?php get_links(-1, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, ‘ – ‘); ?>
</ul>

After -

< ?php
if ( is_home() )
{
?>
<h3>Links</h3>
<ul class=”list”>
<?php
get_links(-1,’<li>’, ‘</li>’, ‘ – ‘);
?>
</ul>
<?php
}
?>

Job done.

Wow, there seems to be a lot of talk about some rule changes for Adwords display urls that is kicking up a bit of a stir. The original article was from over at PPC Hero blog – Google updates adwords display url policy.

“As of April 1, Google will be making significant changes to their enforcement of display URL policies. The “Policy Team” has taken a stricter stance on the relationship between display URLs and destination URLs — and they will be allowing few exceptions to their rules. In short, if your destination URL is www.example.com, your display URL must be www.example.com. Just to alleviate any confusion: display URLs are what is displayed in your ad text – destination URLs are where your ad text leads post-click.“

To me there has been no change. The ad level destination url has always had to of directed traffic to the same TLD as the display url to pass manual approval. Googles ad policies can be seen here.

So for example -

Display url – www.ppcblog.co.uk
Destination url – www.ppcblog.com

Would never pass manual ad approval. Or at least if your not working from an agency account/MCC.

So, I cannot see the fuss with the “rule changes” or envisage them really impacting many people. There are still plenty of ways around them -

• Taking advantage of companies multiple TLD’s (that do not redirect) to display two ads per SERP
• Redirects (after manual approval) or cloaking
• I-framed landing pages

I wrote about some of these blackhat PPC methods.

In theory, you should NEVER have been able to use ppcbloggy.com as your display url in an effort to display for ppcblog.co.uk even with a redirect. Bridge pages and redirects have never been allowed and I have had adverts banned quite a few times due to this (testing obviously).

Although obviously they do work if you implement them after manual approval with the correct technique.

So Shoemoneys posts about dominating the entire SERPS still may or may not be caught depending on the method used. It worked because they had different domains as the display url and were either simply taking advantage of the period between manual and auto ad approval using multiple Adwords accounts… (which will get caught in the end)

OR

They complied with the rules (display and destination urls match) and then added a redirect after the manual approval (without amending the advert) which will still not be picked up until someone points it out. Google need to pick up redirects after manual approval to spot these things…

So there is no confusion here, this is only for TLD’s. You can still play with the / of display urls even if the page does not exist.

Example -

www.ppcblog.co.uk/Whatever etc

Discussion over at Sphinn.

I am suprised by how often I still see how budget caps are used in PPC campaigns. Such a basic thing can make a real difference to performance and return.

Budget caps are there to prevent you from overspending as a safety precaution and are not a primary method that should be used to control spend. They are great as a fail safe measure but they are not a performance effective method of controlling spend and are often a sign of a lazy marketeer or someone who does not know what they are doing.

Budget caps are great for those new to PPC but experts should know better and be able to control spend by cost per click (CPC) using caps merely as a back up precaution.

Simply put, if your campaigns are hitting their budgets daily you are not getting the most out of your paid search campaign.

Why?

Not only will your ads go offline meaning you will miss out on conversion when you reach your caps but by not reducing average CPC you are missing out on receiving more clicks for your spend, heightening the chance of additional conversion. If conversion rate (and avg basket value) remain equal you will get more clicks, more sales, a reduction in CPA and an increase in ROI. Nice.

There is a valid argument in some industries that very high rank is key to conversion and that lowering average CPC and hence ad rank, conversion rate will fall aswell. This is more in those industries or products that are heavy on the trust factor, like finance, loans, insurance and sometimes travel. So test conversion against your rank & evaluate whats best for you. If you are convinced you cannot reduce rank on key terms (or increase your caps), reduce costs elsewhere and increase ad delivery by optimising account structure, keyword lists and ads.

More often that not you will find that you will get less window shoppers and higher conversion in lower positions than the top 3 and a lower average CPC to boot all equating to a better return on ad spend.

So go check your caps…