Today we noticed across our accounts that our spend for the day isn’t showing correctly. For example an account that’s normally spent a few thousand dollars today is showing a $2.47 spend. Talked to our Google rep and they said engineering is working on it. So if your seeing odd numbers for the day don’t fear, your not alone.

Yesterday there was some talks in the forums about how sites that load slowly and are using google adwords to promote them, can see their quality score lowered. Google uses a number of factors in determining quality score but this appears to be a new one. This is from the Google AdWords FAQ:

Beginning in February 2008, you’ll be able to see a grade for your website’s load time in your AdWords account. ‘Load time’ refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad.

Several weeks after your load time grade becomes visible, it will begin to impact your landing page quality and, therefore, your Quality Score. We recommend working to improve your load time during this interim if it’s received a low score.

Google offers a few tips in terms of bettering your load times

- Using fewer redirects
- Using smaller, more highly-compressed images
- Limiting use of iframes

Other factors like use of external stylesheets and javascript calls (limiting javascript as much as possible), global headers & footers, and fewer http requests also can help.

Google Adwords is testing a feature called “Automatic Matching.” In essense it will automatically spend your budget for you by extending your reach to keywords that you aren’t already bidding on if Google deems it appropriate.

This makes me incredibly nervous. As one of my colleagues said ‘It’s bad enough they have your health information now their spending your money too’.

When I build out campaigns here I spend a solid amount of time on keyword research as well as various combinations of keywords and phrases so I feel confident that I’m hitting all the valuable searches. With an implementation of something like this, whats the point of taking the time to do broad, phrase and exact match. Doesn’t this sound like an iteration of broad match which is beyond our control?

Here’s the example from Google:

I’m excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new Automatic Matching feature which will be starting on February 28th.

Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget. If you’re already meeting your daily budgets, automatic matching will have a minimal effect on your account.

Shoes vs. Slippers? Yikes!

How am I applying that principle personally? Well we have a real estate site which currently doesn’t offer rentals, only real estate for sale. Basically is Google saying because my keyword list doesn’t offer rentals that they will bid on that for me? Houses for Sale and Houses for Rent may be similar but certainly those two keywords are not targeting the same searcher. It sounds kind of like Google’s keyword tool that searches for synonyms and suggests adding those to your keyword lists only done in an automatic fashion now.

I like Google, their products, and the people that we work with there, but I really don’t see the value in this.

I just hope that Google is careful when testing this, or the perceived value of PPC ads and the amount of people clicking on them might decline faster than the amount of people who are still buying cd’s.

A colleague of mine recently has had some problems with a new Google Adwords account that he setup for an Auto Dealership. First I’ll give you a brief overview. This company sells used autos and has their full inventory online. Basically the goal of this account was to bring in traffic not necessarily some sort of conversion.

This is how the account setup looked:

• National Targeting & Geo-Targeting
• Use of Broad, Phrase and Exact Match Keywords
• Keywords that were bid on also matched on page copy
• Tested variety of landing pages including homepage and results pages

After launch it was noticed that the quality score for landing page relevancy was awful for all campaigns. One phrase that was bid on was 5 words total and also had the matching phrase on the homepage itself assuming that the quality score would be good; this didn’t help at all.

What was concluded to be the problem?

It wasn’t our landing page quality which was “good” so that could be scratched. Instead after working with Google on this, there were 2 problems:

• Poor Overall Quality History
• Visible URL Performed Poorly

How could this have been avoided?

Many times as search marketers we like to copy similar campaigns that might be running well to another account and make small tweaks. When this is done, keyword and creative history is retained so you will still have the same quality score.

When this account was setup there could have been more optimization such as watching the campaign closely and weeding out low performing keywords or ad copy so that the quality history could have been reversed before things got to this point. It’s still possible to do this once the campaign is has run but it certainly would be easier if caught early on. A second approach is to start this campaign over with a new account even though the “visible url” history will still be influenced.

The main takeaway from this experience is to take the extra time in prepping your account as opposed to tweaking a campaign after its run for an extended period of time and facing high CPC rates as well as poor quality overall and a negative visible url history.

Google just released their retail industry newsletter for September 2007. This newsletter in particular is talking about Halloween and offers suggestions for businesses running seasonal campaigns. Some of the main points are:

Being Creative

If you sell a variety of items you might want to think outside the box in terms of what you offer. Besides your typical items like costumes think about other money making products that are in your inventory. I would suggest you setup your campaigns based on product and price range within those products. Read more »