Cameron Gibbs

Google AdWords allows you to dynacially match a searcher’s query.  Aaron Wall explains it in this post.  It’s definitely helpful but it’s got a couple of drawbacks to consider before implementing.

First, if you’re bidding on broad keywords like ‘dvd player’ and you sell cases for dvd players, if you use keyword insertion for the ad, searches are going to click on your ad thinking you sell dvd players… not the kind of traffic you want to be paying for.  This is probably a bad example since you shouldn’t be bidding on that keyword anyway but it clearly gets the point across. 

Also, regular google users can tell which ads are dynamically generated and which ones aren’t.  Why does that matter? You probably already know… usually those advertisers don’t have what you’re looking for (thanks ebay, amazon, and other lazy advertisers).  If you do keyword insertion, I highly recommend capitalizing the W in keyword so that all of the words in the title of the ad are capitalized — it makes it looks a little less dynamicically generated.

One good reason to use keyword insertion is to get around use of trademarks (or inability to use them).  For example, if you sell iPod cases, you can’t put the word iPod in your ad but you can do the insertion code.  Yet, I have seen some sites place the word iPod in their ad without using insertion.  I’m not sure what it is they’re doing.  Do you know?

A little over a week ago, I was shoked to log into our our AdWords account to discover that our brand keywords, terms we have registered the trademark for, were inactive because they were deemed “irrelevent” and to activate them, we had to increase the minimum CPC to $1.00.  What the… ?  Our site is the most relevent for those keywords!!!  Needless to say, I was not impressed.

I contacted Google in an outrage.  They got back saying that the ads (which showed the store name) didn’t include the keywords in them.  The rep recommened creating an ad group for the store name keywords and one for the brand name keywords.  In the meantime, after our ppc management company (which I’m anxious to write about and will soon) had uped the bid to $1.00 afterwhich Google imposed a minimum CPC of $5.00!!!  Something’s not right here Google.

Our ppc manager called me the following day to tell me he had been on the phone with Google for about an hour.  Turns out they had recently done an update to AdWords which put significant weight on the ad text and, I believe, the landing page.

Fortunately, Google credited us for the pricey keywords fessing up to the mistake.

Well, I just did some searches on the issue and it sounds like this problem has been going on for weeks.  I’m surprised it took so long for us to be affected.

Hello, its me again.  I’m back. 

You know, its kind of hard to write a post when you’ve let so much time go by without writing.  I feel like the constantly drunk, wife-beating husband going back, pleading for forgiveness, promising to be a better man…”I will be a better blogger, I promise.”

Well, I think I’m back for good this time.  Just tired of being a consumer and not much of a producer.  Stay tuned…