You might even choose to advertise your product range. For example, if you are advertising hard drives from Seagate, you might want to add other Sitelinks such as Maxell, Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung or any other brands you are selling. Here, by using the Sitelinks feature, you are giving visitors an opportunity to choose from other brands in case they do not want to buy a Seagate hard drive.

Sitelink Extensions generally get good clicks and this increases your CTR overall. However, you should be careful when implementing Sitelinks. For example, if you want to advertise only one hard drive model, say the WD1000, then you do not need to give additional links to deviate users from their path. If someone already knows what they want and typed the exact keyword (model) to get it, just take them to the product page.

Although it’s true that Ad Sitelinks acts as a good resource to increase CTR, but you should still be careful while implementing it as you might end up getting irrelevant clicks.

Adil Jain
PPC Account Executive

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

What has Google changed from a PPC point of view?

Google have now combined the natural lists with the Google local places lists, and inserted the map within the sponsored listing section.

Google seem to be testing whether they are going to include the top 3 results as sponsored, or remove them and only run ads down the right hand side. I do not think this is the end product however and believe it will take many weeks for us to see the final page.

I think that we will then start to see a reduction in CTR from the PPC ads as the natural lists are more relevant to the search term, and the ad also appears on the map. More information is now available to the user on the natural listings to the paid listings.

All this means from a paid search perspective is that we’ll have to be more creative with the small amount of characters we currently get given.

Please note that this style of search isn’t applicable to every keyword appended with a location.

Philip Pollock
Paid Search Manager

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

I am limited to the amount of data I can get hold of, but here are the results:

What strikes me about these results is that the UK, France and Sweden are all relatively developed and saturated markets for Pay Per Click, whereas Ireland is pretty untouched. The higher CTR could be because of the lack of competition and poor campaigns within sponsored listings, or that Irish users are more likely to click on sponsored listings rather than organic.

The next stage would be to analyse Irish clients who are achieving position 1 rankings organically and take the average CTR compared to the UK.

Philip Pollock
Paid Search Manager

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

But is Broad Match Modifier (BMM) the saviour of the broad match type?

I am currently conducting an experiment which will revolutionise the way I structure my accounts. Depending on the size of the account and the goals the client wants to achieve, I tend to split down my account very heavily at campaign level, trying to maximise budgets to top performing keywords. This allows me to change the level of investment on keywords which have a very low risk, and a high conversion rate, leading to a nice stable account which converts high. The downside, as there tends to always be one, is that it make optimising, especially the addition of negative keywords, labour intensive and difficult.

The main problem I have is at ad group level. As an example, I am going to take an imaginary client who sells branded clothing. I have broken the campaigns down by brand, then by clothing type. I’ve used all three match types as I want to achieve a broad coverage.

This structure is for demonstration purposes only and I realise it may not be the preferred structure. However, I am trying to achieve a good quality score for all keywords. The problem of the broad match type is that if I typed in PJP Clothes UK, it may not be the clothes ad group which gets triggered. It could be the hats ad group, which would display the incorrect ad and wrong landing page. The way around this is to add negative keywords. But the amount of negative keywords to ensure 100% success is almost infinite.

I think we now need to look at the broad match type in a different view and take it purely to get new keyword ideas and nothing more, so reducing the amount of broad match keywords massively. The new structure would be as follows:

I’ve created a new campaign which only includes the keyword PJP Clothes on broad modifier match type and removed all broad matching from the PJP Clothing campaign. The idea is that there is only one keyword which I need to have to control the related themed search terms. The downside to this is that the CPC will be higher, the quality score will be lower and not all search term will be triggered by this keyword. The positives are a more controlled account, with better controls on budget and you don’t need to worry about incorrect ads being displayed. We are now looking at the term +PJP Clothes purely as a testing area for new keywords, so the benefits of this structure will take time to show.

I’m unsure whether to increase the number of ad groups to the PJP Clothing (b) campaign, but my belief is that it could defeat the whole purpose of having the one related themed keyword.

Philip Pollock
Paid Search Manager

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

• If you make X% changes in your bids, how will it affect your CPC and cost per conversion?
• If you want to test a landing page for selected keywords
• If you wish to add new keywords but aren’t sure how will it affects overall campaign conversion, costs and clicks
• If you wish to test Google Display Network campaign performance by adjusting keywords and adding placement specific bids but are concerned that you might end up with fewer conversions with no improvement in cost per conversion.

ACE runs the experiment side by side with the existing setup. You can set up an experiment to measure the impact with any percent of your traffic. This feature is on a rolling launch and will be available within just a few weeks.

In order to set up ACE for a campaign, select the campaign on which you wish to perform the experiment and click on ‘Settings’. Then scroll down the screen and find ‘Experiment’. Click on this and specify the experiment settings.

Adil Jain
PPC Account Executive

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Every time an advert appears for a search query, Enhanced CPC predicts the likelihood of conversion and automatically lowers or raises the ad’s maximum cost per click bid. The thing to note here is that Enhanced CPC can bid 30% above the set max CPC bid if a conversion is likely to happen.

We feel that this new feature will certainly help in boosting conversions, unlike Conversion Optimizer which needs 15 conversions within 30 days to be enabled. This feature comes in very handy and you can apply it to your campaign at any time. In order to set Enhanced CPC for your campaigns, log in to your AdWords account, and select the campaign you wish to test. Then, click settings and look for ‘Bidding and Budget ‘. Click edit next to the ‘Bidding’ option and select ‘Enhanced CPC’. Once enabled, wait for couple of weeks to see how it has impacted upon your conversions.

We hope that Google will keep on adding new features to AdWords, helping advertisers achieve their desired ROI.

Adil Jain
PPC Account Executive

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

• Always run SQR reports on a weekly or fortnightly basis. This report will give you an insight into the queries being searched for on your campaigns. Analyse the keyword match type and select the best match type for your keywords. The report will also help you find out irrelevant keywords for your adverts. Analyse these irrelevant keywords and add them as negative.
• If you have more than 15 conversions in a campaign within the space of 30 days, then try using a conversion optimiser. With this, you can select a CPA for your campaign.
• Target iPhone and other mobile users by adding ‘phone extensions’ for your campaigns.
• Add sitelinks relevant to your business or campaigns. You can add up to 10 sitelinks and if your adverts are good, Google will reward you by adding sitelinks to it. You will usually get four sitelinks added to your advertisements. So, for best practice, always advertise your first four top pages / products / services on the first four sitelinks spaces.
• Add local extensions for your business. This will give you more visibility.
• Make sure that your adverts are pointing out on correct landing pages as that will improve your ad rank.

In short, always test and refine your campaigns. Doing this will not only improve your CTR but you should also get a better ROI for all your campaigns.

Adil Jain
PPC Account Executive

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

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

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

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

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Advertising on AdWords will boost your natural rankings

Google natural search results and AdWords are two different platforms. If you cancel your account and decide not to advertise on AdWords, it won’t affect your natural rankings but neither it will boost your natural rankings if you do advertise on AdWords.

AdWords declined my credit card payment

Google doesn’t decline a credit card. If something happens like this, then it’s better to check with your bank as the reasons may be:

• An invalid credit card or wrong security code
• An invalid address
• Missing or invalid expiration date

Your quality score will improve with an increase in conversion rates

The conversion rate of your ads will never affect the quality score as both of these are separate metrics and independent of one another.

AdWords keywords are case sensitive

AdWords doesn’t distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters. For example, ‘BASINS’ is same as ‘basins’.

Keyword tool suggests keywords to be added in your campaign

The keyword tool doesn’t make any recommendations about which keywords you should add in your campaign. It is a tool that just analyses related search queries and then it’s up to you to decide which keywords you wish to include in your campaigns.

Adil Jain
PPC Account Executive

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC