Until yesterday, Internet marketers or website owners that were using the AdWords platform to promote their product/services could not distinguish between a low page quality score or a violation of Google AdWords policy. However, guys at Google recently released an interesting change that will help advertisers make the difference between poor quality score and guidelines violation.

Before we dig into this change, let’s see what a “landing page policy” really means. Basically, this translates a website into being “safe, trustworthy and legal”; once a website like that is encountered, ads are being automatically disabled by Google. Page quality equals to experience users landing on your page might have.

Going to this latest change, Lisa Shieh from the AdWords team explained:
“Previously, if a destination URL wasn’t compliant with our landing page and site policy guidelines, the associated keywords would show a Quality Score of 1/10, a notice that ads were rarely showing, and an indication of poor landing page quality.”

But what does this mean, in simple terms? Whether you were violating Google policy or you just had a very poor landing page, for both instances the score would have been 1/10, without any further details. The major change is that once your landing page violates policies you will be notified through the AdWords interface, in status column, with 2 words: Site Suspended.

This “Site Suspended” will appear for all things related to landing page policy violations. However, going further in terms of offenses will only lead to immediately account suspending. A good improvement, indeed.

Google keeps testing and rolling out new changes, whether they are related to local results, general search engine results or, lately, AdWords ads. For the last one, until this month paid links were labeled by Google in SERPs as “sponsored links”, now it seems they will remain for the time being as labeled “ads”.

This change is available for both the top 3 “above organic search” paid results as well as for the right handed one. However, a recent study from Benjamin Edelman and Duncan S. Gilchrist from Harvard Business School called ”Sponsored Links” or “Advertisements”?: Measuring Labeling Alternatives in Internet Search Engines” have revealed some interesting results related to click-through rate on paid advertising.

Basically, the two folks started an online experiment for measuring users’ interactions with the search engines in their standard configuration and in a modified version related to advertisement. They have changed the “sponsored link” with “paid advertisement” and the results were quite interesting: 25-33% fewer clicks on “paid advertisement” than on “sponsored link” ads.

The questions asked to users were  related to commercial research and health information. The first one asked the users to search for websites that sell mattresses and while the second one asked them to search for cancer treatments. Both searches and clicked were monitored and the results were as mentioned above: a significant ads clicks reduction for “paid advertisement”.

However the last voice that counts is the final user’s one so we should wait and see whether this change will impact or not the CTR on paid results. In the end, is the conversion that counts rather than the CTR, right?

The web designers at WebCreationUK will keep an eye on this subject as well.

As we all know, the cheapest method for driving customers to a business is, of course, search engine optimisation. However another great way for getting loads of targeted traffic is by PPC, in particular by Google’s Adwords.

The problem with Adwords is that you can end up spending a lot of money and not getting the results you’re looking for. But there is a brighter side as well: creating relevant and quality ads will increase the CTR,  lower the costs for a click and can definitely increase the conversion rates. Increased conversion rates can mean only more business for your company.

Here are some brilliant tips to use in an Adwords campaign:

1.      Headline – the most important part of an ad

It’s a sure thing that a great headline can have a major impact on people, in particular when creating articles, press releases or submitting posts to social bookmarking sites. The most important aspects of a good headline are keywords  and making it a catchy one, that will drive visitors to check what the ad is about. You can use questions, claim almost impossible stuff, divulge secrets etc.

2.      Use more keywords in more places

Let’s say you have 2 keywords you are running for. Always test different keywords placement in the ad, let’s say keyword A in the headline, B in ad, A and B in ad and B in headline and so on. Try to make different ads with different keywords order and see which ad performs better.

3.      Capitalisation or not?

Again, testing is the best way of seeing whether you should use capitalised letters or not. Best practices say that CTR can increase whether you capitalise every keyword, capitalise each first letter from all words or capitalise each word except “and”, “in” etc. Without doing some serious testing you will never know what works better for your product/service.

4.      Always check other advertisers

When you are doing SEO, one of the most important things to do for getting higher rankings is to check your competition. What are they doing, where they are getting links, are they into social networking and so on. This is exactly what you must do when setting up an Adwords campaign . Search each keyword you are promoting, see what ads are appearing, see who is in the top. Do this for a number of days and when you’re starting to notice a pattern (the same ads appearing more frequently) it means those are the best ads for conversion competitors use. See how they are created, what headline and body are they using and create your new ads based on the ones that you researched.

Google has a new tool. This time it’s an “Analyze Competition” feature for AdWords advertisers. The feature is currently available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but Google is planning to expand availability.

One of the most useful tools in this feature is the “Competitive Range” column, where businesses can see info such as the exact size of their competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers.

To find this Google feature you’ll need to look in the “opportunities” tab. 
Businesses can use this tool generally to look at the account’s products/services activity over two weeks.

Remember though that data in the “Analyze competition” section is anonymous, so businesses can’t find out the name of better performing competitors but it does offer a general insight into how you might be able to improve your own ad performance.

Managing Google Adwords is one of the many things that i find myself playing with on a daily basis and over the years, I have learnt of interesting tips on how to affect your all important enquiries.

The 2 main aspects of Google Adwords are the Conversion Rates which show how many of your sites visitors via Adwords have made an enquiry on your site and the CTR (Click Through Rate) which shows how many visitors have accessed your site via your Google Adwords add.

Both of these are important and ultimately affect the cost you will pay to have your site listed via the Google Adwords advertising medium. Over the coming months I will go in to more detail about the various ways to manage a Google Adwords campaign. Today, i will keep things simple and start with the useful basics.

To start with, you need to consider your budget. This is the amount you are willing to spend on Google per month. If you set this to a realistic amount, you know that this is the maximum you are willing to pay to list your site. There are a few factors which determine your position but mostly this comes down to your budget. If you pay more, you pretty much appear higher up. However, being No 1 on Google Adwords or being No 50 is pretty irrelevant providing you are getting enough visitors to your site to warrant the budget you have specified. To many Adwords users worry about being No 1 when it is your budget and click expectations that should be your main considerations.

Once your add is being displayed you can monitor on a daily basis the performance of your add. If you are receiving lots of visitors then you may decide you can lower your daily budget and or monthly budget. If you are not receiving enough you may decide to use different keywords or increase your budgets. Again, these are all aspects of Adwords which i explain in a later post.

To make things even more interesting there are the Conversion Rates to consider and if anything, these are the most important statistics you should be looking at. You may very well be receiving hundreds of visitors to your site but if these are not turning in to actual business or enquiries, something is wrong.

Google Adwords has a clever system whereby you can at least monitor your websites conversion performance with regard to online enquiries. This can be setup with some simple code which any website design company can assist with including of course, WebCreation UK. Once the code has been added you can monitor which of your visitors actually turn in to enquiries and even which keywords they used to find you and make their enquiry.

I hope the above has helped explain the difference between Conversion Rates and CTR’s. Later on i will explain further about the Google Adwords system and ways to utilise this fantastic marketing tool.

If you wish to discuss Google Adwords in further detail, by all means contact our team.

Cheers!