Posts by Philip Pollock

On 14^th September, Google will be relaxing its trademark policy in the UK and Ireland. It will now allow advertisers to use trademarked keywords within their Ad Text, as long as they are not trying to pass themselves off as the trademark owner. As an example, “iPod” is a trademark owned by Apple, and currently you are not allowed to include “iPod” in any Ad text, but with the new ruling, Google will allow advertises to create adverts around such products as long as they are not trying to pass themselves off as Apple.

Yes – Google is right to relax the policy

There is a very cynical view out on the internet that Google have done this purely to increase revenue. Although this is quite easy to believe, I do not believe this to be the reason, or even a main fact in the reasoning. If you are a reseller of a product that is trademarked, you would want to advertise that you sell a particular product. But due to the current trademark rules, Google will block you unless you get authority from the trademark owner to use it. So, the only way around this is to create similar words to the trademark, such as i-pod or i p o d instead of iPod.

Relaxing the rule will allow resellers to advertise more freely; they are not wanting to trick visitors into thinking that they are the trademark owners, just that they sell a particular product. This is also in the best interests of the trademark owner as a sale is a sale.

No – Google should not change the policy

The current policy helps protect brands that may have spent millions of pounds and many years in building up a reputation and recognisable brand. Under the current policy, if a client wants to use the trademark to resell they can always apply, giving full control to the legal owners.

Google is the provider of advertising space, so just like TV, newspapers and traditional forms of advertising they have a duty to help protect trademarks.

It will now be up to the trademark owner to stop any misuse of the trademark, whilst Google still profits.

Philip Pollock
PPC Account Manager

What is the most important aspect of PPC and PPC management? Now this is a very vague question and is dependent on a lot of other things such as, your goals and targets, budget and the market place.

Let me phrase the question slightly differently: what is the most important aspect of PPC in achieving a great ROI? Is it your keyword list, or the structure of your account? Maybe your Ad Text or the amount of negative keywords you have in the campaign?

Now all of the above points are crucial to a well performing PPC account, but to simplify things, you are advertising in a space with potentially 10 other direct competitors, with the user having the ability to click on and compare all 10 competitors within a matter of minutes. If this was the classified section of a newspaper, it could take ten’s of minutes to find the companies that you are looking for, and then hours to call and visit each one to see which has the best offering. So the most important aspect of PPC is your site itself and the product/service you are offering.

If you have a poor looking site with rubbish functionality then the user might not be engaged in to the site as much as with your competitors; if your price isn’t the cheapest then your conversion rate is going to be less. If you have poor reviews then you are not going to gain customer trust or loyalty. What I am trying to highlight is that you can have the best PPC campaign ever; delivering highly targeted, cheap traffic to your site, but this is worthless unless they convert. A good analogy would be to have a suit shop on Savile Row, but the front window was smashed and the suits displayed in random places around the shop, making it difficult to browse. You would find that people would turn away within seconds, the equivalent to having a high bounce rate, yet your rent will still be very high.

Look at your campaign, bottom up. What is the last place your visit will land on if they were to convert? Most likely the check-out, so make sure the functionality is clear and concise. This is the stage where the visitor is going to be most sensitive because they are giving away their personal details and hard earned cash. So they need to feel secure and trust who they are giving money to. Then you need to make sure the product or service page is descriptive and includes all relevant information, with the correct amount of imagery. The visitor cannot physically pick up items; they cannot judge sizes or feel the weight of objects, so make sure this is replaced by a suitable amount of pictures and literature.

Is the initial landing page relevant to what you are advertising? It may be you are selling t-shirts, but the landing page is predominately about jeans, then the user is going to wonder if this is the correct site to visit, or that its it going to be too much hard work to navigate in order to find what they want.

As long as the paid traffic which you are supplying is relevant, you have thought about CPCs and quality scores and you also have a well laid out, easy to navigate, fresh, modern-looking site with competitive pricing, it should be easy to achieve your desired ROI.

Philip Pollock
PPC Account Manager