Cameron Gibbs

So I just logged into my adwords account and got a notification that Google will be changing the way the CPC formula works for ad placements for ads that display above the organic results. Straight from Google:

In the current top ad placement formula, we consider your Quality Score and your actual CPC, which is determined in part by the bids of advertisers below you. Even if you have a high quality ad, if advertisers below you are not bidding very much, your actual CPC may not be high enough to qualify your ad to appear in a top position.

With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you. Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC.

Your actual CPC will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price for top spots. The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results. As always, the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay. And you will never be charged more than your maximum CPC bid.

So, even if you’re ranking number one on a keyword, if your bid isn’t high enough, your ad will only show up to the right. I like how I can now have control for it showing up above the organic listings but I don’t like how I have to bid more, even if my ad is the most relevant. I wonder how Google will determine the minimum bid to be placed at the top of the results.

By the way, Google says it will be going into affect in the coming weeks. I wonder how this news will be received and how it will affect my campaigns. This will be interesting.

So YSM called me a couple of weeks ago and offered to suggest new keywords and ads for a client’s YSM account. I’m all for expanding keywords or doing whatever to increase search engine traffic to client’s sites (as long as it has a positive ROI, of course) so I didn’t have a problem with trying it out. The rep assured me that I could view the keywords and ads before they went live so there was nothing to worry about. I was all for them doing free work for me.

So last Friday I got a call and the rep asked me if I had looked at the keywords and ads and if I approved of them. They weren’t showing up in the account so the rep told me she would look into it and call me back. OK, no big deal.

Later that night I noticed that YSM charged the credit card on file to replenish the balance. Again, no big deal… or so I thought. Saturday morning at 2:12 AM I get another email from YSM saying they’ve charged the credit card again, just hours after the previous notification. I had noticed previously that sales weren’t up so I logged into our YSM account and sure enough, those keywords that I was supposed to approve of were live and had generated over a thousand clicks costing nearly a thousand dollars resulting in one conversion. Not cool Yahoo. “Broad” isn’t even the word I would use to describe the type of keywords they were bidding on… more like “irrelevant” and “high-volume.” Needless to say, I immediately paused the campaign.

So today I got a call from the same rep asking if I had a chance to look over the keywords. I related to her what happened and she wasn’t completely understanding. She started to confirm what it was that I had “requested” and she said she was going to look into it. Excuse me? What I requested? You called me and offered me this deal to me!

Stay tuned for an update. If a refund isn’t issued, they better be prepared for the consequences.

So I recently upgraded wordpress (again) and despite all the experience (upgrading and creating new blogs), it still takes me A LOT longer than what it should.

Both times I upgraded, I followed the instructions wordpress gives but I’ve found most of the tips a waste of time. I think it’s best (at least in the circumstances I’ve been in) to just completely deletd all of the files on the server (but not your databse, of course) and then upload the new wordpress files and then your plugins. After spending an hour or two trying to “upgrade” wordpress, I did this and the blog worked flawlessly. Oh yeah, and it took an enitre 3 minutes.

So today we got an invitation to try out Google’s Pay-per-action (read affiliate program) and it’s got an obvious problem: the cost structure — you have to set a fixed dollar cost for an action (in most cases, a sale).  This is a problem because if you have a product line with a wide range of prices, the justifiable cost per action (CPA) will vary based on the price of each product.  The cost should be a percentage of the sale — just like affiliate networks do it. 

With a fixed cost, I can’t figure out a justifible CPA that would attract affiliates.  The only option we’re left with is to put a reasonable CPA for the majority of our products and watch it carefully.  To be honest though, I don’t see this being any more effective than AdSense so if AdSense doesn’t work for you, CPA probably won’t either… hopefully I’m wrong.

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…

Well, I’m back.  After posting daily for an entire month, I took a longer break than I anticipated.

Today was my first day of work at ShieldZone corp, makers of the InvisibleShield (a protective shield for your handheld devices).  The company has an incredible history despite the fact that it hasn’t even been in business for two full years yet and the future is very bright.  To read about how the company started, check out this article from connect, a Utah business magazine.

I’ve actually been surprised at how well-known the product already is.  Of everyone I’ve told about my new job, almost half of them have either heard of the InvisibileShield or have one.  Now I’ve just got to educate the other half.

Just two days after I was venting my frustration with the Overture keyword selector, SearchEngineWatch posted about Wordtracker’s new free keyword suggestion tool.  Though the tool provides hard numbers on keyword search volume, the calculation is somewhat crude (I don’t think the searches done on dogpile and metacrawler are a very good representation of searches done on more popular search engines).   

That being said, I think this was a smart move by Wordtracker.  Thousands like me used overture’s (Yahoo’s) tool and miss it.  Wordtracker’s tool will now be the go-to tool for keyword volume and many of those users will signup for a paying account.

Want to find out how much you know about SEO?  Try taking seomoz’s SEO quiz.  It’s not easy, so you may want to warm up by taking webconfs’s 10 question SEO quiz first.  After getting bored of the quizzes, webconfs’ crossword puzzle is a nice relaxer.