Back in the day, it was the Overture keyword tool that ruled the roost. There was nothing else out there to match it for keyword variations and volumes.

For the last 4 years or so, Google have taken over. Third party keyword tools can give you more variations, but it’s the Google tool that gives you best insight on the overall shape and depth of searches.

In the last year Google launched an updated beta keyword tool, which helped identify new keywords and search queries to add to your AdWords account.

The good news is that the tool is out of beta, and it has been enhanced to include many of the features of the old tool.

Here’s the good stuff it does:

*You can search by keyword, URL or category and get just 1 set of results
*You can filter by word or match type
*You can drill into stats for local, mobile and even get a view on ad share
*If you use the tool from within an ad group, the keywords that are already in the ad group are marked as such – saves on duplication.

*You can add negatives from right there in the tool, straight into the ad group.

Although available externally, the new tool is best accessed from the opportunities tab of your AdWords account, so that the results it pulls up for you are most relevant for that account.

Take a look and let us know what you find.

Google Analytics has just added a new feature that makes tracking clicks from mobile ads a whole lot easier.

If enabled, Google analytics can automatically tag all AdWords clicks with a unique URL the helps it identify that traffic source. However, in some cases it’s not possible to link an AdWords account with an Analytics account. And in other cases, you might want to track clicks from mobile ads on other networks.

So how do you go about identifying and segmenting mobile clicks?

The answer lies in a new tracking parameter called Mobile ValueTrack. This automatically ads a tag to the destination URL, allowing Google Analytics to identify it as a mobile click. To use the feature, just add the Mobile ValueTrack parameter: {ifmobile:NewTagName} into the “Destination URL” field  when you’re putting together your mobile text ad.

Redirecting traffic to a mobile optimised site

The first, huge benefit of the mobile ValueTrack parameter, is that it allows you to identify clicks from mobiles, and to redirect them to a mobile optimised version of your website.

Let’s say you wanted all clicks from mobile devices for your website www.travelingdog.net to be redirected to www.travelingdog,net/mobile. All you’d need to do is add the mobile ValueTrack parameter {ifmobile:mobile}.

Here’s what it would look like in AdWords:

Tracking using third party tags

If – like Euston Digital – you’re often using third party tracking tags, you can still use Mobile ValueTrack to track your mobile clicks. All you need to do is insert the tag into the destination URL.

In the example of travellingdog.net above, you just need to add the Mobile ValueTrack parameter into the landing page URL so it looks like this:

www.travelingdog.net?type={ifmobile:mobclick}

In this example, the tag “mobclick” gets inserted into the URL, which lets you identify those clicks from mobiles.

If you need help tacking clicks from mobile devices for your PPC or Mobile campaign, get in touch.

In the last couple of years, Google have added a few ‘extensions’ to AdWords campaign settings that allow the savvy advertiser to make their ads stand out from the crowd.

Aside from making your ad appear larger on the page, they also let searchers grab more detail about your service, and navigate deeper into your site.

We’ve already talked about Sitelinks, an effective way to take more space on the SERPs and let users reach new pages. And just a few days ago we discussed phone extensions which can display your phone number to some searchers.

Now it’s time to talk about location extensions. Launched last year, these let you attached relevant business address to your ads. This is what it looks like in the SERPs:

And this is what it looks like when expanded:

Location extensions can be added to campaigns from the ‘extensions’ or ’settings’ tab of your AdWords account. You can either link your AdWords account to your local places account, and thus display your location listed there; or add an address manually.

Location extensions have also just been upgraded, to allow the display of multiple addresses. In this example, someone is searching for their local Toys R Us store:

Clearly it’s useful to allow customers to see the location that’s nearest to them, or the easiest to get to. And if they move the map, the relevant locations appear for the new area shown. For offline businesses this is clearly going to provide a boost to in-store footfall.

To make sure you have multiple addresses displayed for your location, you need to link your AdWords account to your Google Places account, and make sure all your locations have been listed there. If you’ve got loads of addresses don’t worry, these can be uploaded in bulk.

If you need Euston Digital to help adding location extensions to your PPC campaigns, please get in touch.

As any marketer knows, search engines can bring your website traffic from two separate areas of the search engine results page (SERPs).

The red section is the paid-for listings (PPC). The green is for the organic listings (SEO). Euston Digital can help with both your PPC and SEO.

The question is: which side brings the most valuable traffic?

The short answer is: it depends. It varies from site to site, and the only way to really work it out is by analysing your conversion rate and ROI using your web analytics.

And the long answer? What about ‘on average’? Well according to an economic study published recently by Google, it’s the paid for – or sponsored listings – that bring the most valuable traffic. Google go as far to say that organic clicks are worth just 70% of their paid-for counterparts.

Why are paid-for listings worth more?

Google don’t say why they make that call, so here are a few ideas of our own.

1. People who click on the adverts have a specific intent. They know what they want, and are prepared to cost a business money in order to get it. They consider that a fair exchange, and are prepared to enter a transactional relationship.

2. There’s fewer paid-for listings that organic listings. For each search term there are probably just a few thousand competing advertisers, but 100s of thousands of websites competing for the organic listings. So a click on the paid for listing is takes a great share of the overall opportunity.

3. The only advertising that sticks around is the stuff that’s working. By and large, business won’t poor money into advertising that doesn’t work, and would sooner turn it off. By contrast, a website might continue to rank highly in the organic listings even though it no longer sells a product. Therefore the paid clicks are more likely to be accurate and result in good value for both users and website owner.

4.Adverts are human edited and controlled more closely. Not only are they written, and placed on a keyword by keyword basis, they also pass a ‘quality score’ judgement by the AdWords system. Therefore they are more likely to represent the best place for that user to arrive. By contrast, the organic listings are Google’s best guess at the user’s intention.

5. Adverts are deep linked to the most appropriate page on the website. By contrast, organic listings often send traffic to the home or category page, or make poor judgement due bad signals as to the best landing page.

Which side of the page brings you the most traffic? How does it vary in quality? Leave us a comment below.

I arrived back from holiday last week to be greeted by over 1,000 emails. That doesn’t mean that I’ve got 1,000 things to do – my work has been well covered whilst I was away.

Most of these emails are newsletters, Google alerts and updates from the Advertising industry in general, and the specific markets I focus on.

Aside from this, I’ve got about a g’zillion tweets to read, Google reader updates, and all the essential stuff I feed to my iGoogle page.

It’s a tough task to keep on top of it all, but it’s also part of what you need to do to keep abreast of the latest developments in Advertising generally, and online, search and social media specifically. The problem is that most of that stuff isn’t completely new: there are a few innovations here and there, but most is just repetitious regurgitation of a few unique items.

So I’m interested to see that Google have now added a Google Ad News site, powered by Google News. You can subscribe to the specific area you’re interested in, be that search, display or mobile. You can even get news specific to your news or brand.

This makes it easy to identify what is genuinely new, and what can be ignored.

I’m going to be using it to cut some chaff but retain the wheat… something that feels sorely needed right now. Take a look and let me know what you think.

In the last couple of weeks, Google has quietly slipped out a couple of modifications to their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). One of these is ‘Brand Suggestions’.

Brand suggestions

For some product searches, Google has started introducing suggestions about which brand of the product you might like to search for next, in a single line above the rest of the results

For example, if you’re looking for a digital camera, Google gives you these suggestions at the top of the results page:

Google say that these suggestions are designed to help those who are researching which product to buy. They are based on brand searches that other people have moved on to.

What does this mean for your SEO and SEM strategy?

To start with, its going to boost the number of secondary searches for big brands.   Big brands by their very nature will be better known, and therefore more frequently searched for. This will push even more people to search for them.

If you run a PPC campaign for a big brand, then you need to make sure you are appearing in top position for all your brand + generic searches, since theses are the ones that are going to be boosted.

If you’re a retailer then your SEO strategy should include building brand pages on your site. These will give you a better chance to grab some of that brand + generic traffic. Be sure to build targeted links to these pages within your site that include the brand name

If you’re a smaller brand, then it might be a good time to start bidding on competitor brand names + generic keywords; and building product comparison tables on your website. This will give you a chance of getting other brand’s traffic onto your website, and then converting it once there.

This is a serious blog. On an important subject. Search Marketing. PPC. SEO. CRO. AdWords.

Serious. Honest.

Yesterday Google announced their Product Reviews Program. They’re going to start to include ratings and users reviews in their shopping results, search results and in AdWords too.

The whole point – they say – is to make consumers better informed about purchasing decisions.

Later on that day some keen eye PPC afficionados on Search Engine Land spotted user reviews and ratings appear on AdWords ads. Here’s what they saw.

We’ve spotted nothing yet, but this could well  be a game changer for any Pay Per Click campaign. Users will naturally gravitate to those with the best ratings, and even a modest rise in CTR for these advertisers will transform their campaigns.

So whilst its important to keep an eye on your quality score, all website owners should be working hard to manage their online reputation and foster positive reviews.

This ties together the marketing channels of PPC of Social media ever closer. To find out how Euston Digital can help you with that, get in touch.

Here at Euston Digital we have found that an effective and efficient return on on investment can be achieved by running a Pay Per Click AdWords campaign in conjunction with a TV ad campaign.

The mediums work in tandem – TV advertising drives people to search online, and online adverts can raise receptiveness to TV advertising. And if you get it right, then 1+1 can often come to more than 2.

But there are a few things that you need to do to make sure your PPC campaign is capitalising on your TV Ad spend.

Budget
A basic one this, but TV ads can hugely boost both your brand searches, and general searches in the market advertised. You need to make sure your daily caps are set way in excess of any theoretical limit. It would be the worst possible situation for your TV spend to drive people to Google, only to find that the user couldn’t find your site

Use all search engines
PPC specialists tend to put all their effort into Google and give Yahoo, Bing and others require token attention. But the difference with TV adverts is that they tend to make less experienced users search online. And less experienced users are more likely to use search engines other than Google.

Position
It goes without saying that you need to make sure that you are in position 1 across all your brand terms. Many companies survive by picking up the search tidbits left by big spending competitors. A large advertising campaign will drive brand searches: others will try to capitalise on the users’ lack of experience by grabbing their attention high up in the SERPs.

Bidding strategy
Now is the time to be more flexible with your CPA targets and to get more aggressive on generic search terms. Your television ad spend will drive general searches in your market; its reassuring for searchers to find your ads at the top of the SERPs as well as on television. It makes them more likely to buy from you. Its worth raising your CPA targets in the short term to grab as much market share as possible.

Message: Be Official
To start with you need to make your brand name really stands out in the ad copy, so that users are sure that the company they saw on the TV is the same one that they’ve found on Google. Put the brand name in the headline of your ad, and make sure that you use official ‘TM’ signs to add a stamp of authority.

Message: Use your strapline
If your TV campaign has a strapline, then repeat that in the final sentence of your ad. It makes sure that users get the a consistent take-away from all your advertising. Again this adds reassurance.

Message: Try to be tailored
Continue to test tailored headlines. It might be that your TV advert does not have strong brand recollection; you need to continue to make sure your adverts reflect the terms that users are searching for.

Create a ‘product + TV’ ad group
If they can’t remember your company name, users will often search for you product + TV, in the hope that Google can find the people who have advertising on TV. For these keywords, it makes sense to create a dedicated ad group and to include a ‘As seen on TV’ message in your advert.

Use keywords from your Strapline
Some users will not be able to remember your company name, but may well search using your strapline. Make sure that you’re bidding on these keywords and consider them as ‘brand’ traffic.

Summary
TV advertising in conjunction with a PPC campaign can deliver strong ROI. But to make sure that you get the most from both, your PPC campaign needs to cover a lot more bases. For help on how Euston Digital can boost the returns from your Pay Per Click Internet marketing, get in touch.

Any comments, please leave them below.

Some research by Comscore, an online traffic measurement company, came out last week. It was covered in some depth over on Techcrunch.

The research is based on US traffic, but it applies here too.

Comscore have basically found that whilst the number of searches rose last year by 68%, the number of clicks on search advertisements went up by just 18%.

Here’s a graph that shows it all:

Comscore are attributing the relative decline in clicks compared to searches to the increasing length of search queries. They say that as the number of 3, 4 or 5 word searches increases, adverts are less likely to appear because advertisers are less like to have those word combinations in their AdWords account.

Comscore say: “And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”

Techcrunch think that this doesn’t explain it enough. They reckon that clicks on adverts have declined because many US advertisers have reduced or stopped their AdWords campaigns.

They say: “Sharper Image, Wickes Furniture, Levitz, Foot Locker, Wilson’s Leather, Ann Taylor, Zales, Mervyn’s, Macy’s, Circuit City and a ton of other retailers are either shutting down entirely or closing lots of stores… All of these companies used to spend tons of money on paid search ads. Those budgets don’t exist any more.”

Another idea is that as Google gets better at displaying more relevant results pages (SERPs), maybe users are less drawn to the sponsored AdWords ads because they find what they want in the organic listings. I haven’t got any evidence for that, it just seems like logical conclusion.

Whatever the reason, once again its a good opportunity for your to get your website to the top of the SERPs. Make sure you are ranking highly for the specific search phrases that people will use that are relevant to your website.

Do you find yourself clicking less on ads these days? Or have you never done so? Leave us a comment below.