The Inside AdWords blog has details on an update to the UK, Ireland & Canadian Trademark policy.  In summary, you can now bid on trademarks if you have a valid business reason to do so. Read more here.

The changes are due to go live on September 14th so what should you do to prepare?
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With real-time ppc information at your disposal you can see exactly which search terms have triggered your ads. No more waiting 24 hours for adwords keyword reports, act immediately on the search terms your visitors are using.

Figure 1. Expanding a search keyword in Contextured AdTime

If you decide a search term is relevant you can quickly expand your ad group or even write a new more specific ad for the term.

Have you ever had a great PPC ad that generated outstanding results? If so I’m guessing you modified your other ad-text variations to mirror it’s style but, did you ever consider using it as your page meta description? This is a great way to make your organic listing stand out from the crowd. A high CTR (Click Through Rate), is proof that the text in your ad is highly relevant and compelling, so why wouldn’t you use it as your meta page description if the wording is suitable.

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If you add words to AdWords (frequently adding new keywords from any source such as your server logs or the search query reports is good to find new opportunities) and re-word your ad words (always be testing new ad variations) then AdWords rewards (improved return on investment) will be yours!

Normal service will resume tomorrow.

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Links

Realtime PPC |  AdWords Help |  Product Search Listings

Originally published on the Contextured PPC Management Blog

SES – Adwords Tips – if it’s not helping it’s hurting

Introduction by:

• Judith Lewis, Search Director, i-level

Speaker:

• Erica Schmidt, SES Advisory Board & Global Search Director, iProspect

The two AdWords campaign settings ‘accelerated’ and ‘standard’ – Generally research shows accelerated is better

Good ad-texts requires – Good imperative verb, call to action, benefit one or more

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Save yourself one keystroke every time you need to type Google in an address bar by dropping the second “o”. Try it – type gogle.com, gogle.com/adwords or gogle.com/reader they all work.

It won’t save you as much time as having your PPC Ad Variations written for you (signup today if that’s what you need), but its a start.

Links:

AdWords Help Product Search Listings Ad Writer

If you’ve ever worried that the money you spend on pay per click is being wasted then don’t feel alone. When you see the clicks coming in but the sales needle doesn’t move, it’s easy to start worrying about your return on investment. The truth is that it is all too easy to waste money with online advertising.

Everything you do is a potential minefield from the ads you write, the keywords you select, right down to the way you structure your account. Any little mistake or deviation from the “perfect” setup can end up wasting your budget.

So if you are about to create an advertising campaign what should you do to minimize wastage? Try following these simple steps:

1. Always separate search and content campaigns
2. Always have multiple ads per ad group
3. Never have too many keywords per ad group
4. Always set negative keywords
5. Start small and grow

If you already have campaigns running that break all of the above rules, it’s probably worth starting again with fresh campaigns. Click through rate has a massive impact on Quality Score and if you’ve already got a really bad long-term CTR on a campaign or ad group it may be irredeemable.

If you find you need a bit of AdWords Help you may want to consider registering for Contextured.  — Currently available on a Free Trial for new users!— Contextured will help you get the most out of your online advertising budget.

Creative Landing Page Ads – Ensuring Your Ad Creative is Relevant to the Landing Page

Focus on your landing page when building new ad groups to keep them relevant

If your website has landing pages that you want customers to visit, then Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a great way to deliver results. PPC advertising is an excellent way to build up the number of incoming customers, drawing in a targeted audience of potential buyers. To ensure you are attracting qualified buyers to your website, it is essential to ensure there is a strong link between the content on your landing page and the content of the ads. This is relevancy and it is greatly rewarded by Search Engines and Advertising Networks.

Relevancy is vital when carrying out both search engine optimisation (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM) activitiy. The reason it is so important, is because all listings in search engines are placed by computerised algorithms. That includes PPC ads that will appear beside search engine results. If you’re conducting a PPC campaign, then the relevancy of the advertisements will dictate their placement in search engine results and cost.

If you keep in mind the most relevant keywords and key phrases used on the landing page whilst writing your ads, then you can be confident the advertisements you write will attract an audience of eager buyers. If you’re struggling to get started, then you might like to use a tool that will help you to generate quality ads based upon the content of your landing page. The Contextured ad generation tool works well and can save you a lot of time and effort when writing creative ads that tie in closely to the content on your landing page.

The same principles that you implement when structuring the landing page can be carried over and adopted when it comes to creating your PPC ads. Your goal is to drive highly targeted traffic to your website so that you get a steady number of sales at the lowest cost. Using PPC ads can be expensive, therefore you want to ensure you get a steady stream of eager buyers reaching your site, not a bunch of ‘tyre kickers’ who will bounce from your site to another without purchasing anything.

To maximise your PPC success write relevant advertisements that clearly target the audience and match the landing pages they lead to.

It is with great pride and delight that I can announce the debut of the new Contextured user interface! This version sees a return to our core values of relevance and simplicity.  We found (indeed you told us) that the interface had become somewhat complex as we had continued to add features over the last three months. Well we have simplified from 15 menus(!) down to six without losing any functionality in the process.

The key to both SEO and SEM is relevancy and so the new user interface starts with your site; your webpages and lets you work from there. Working with ads and keywords in the context of the page they will be delivering traffic is important from a quality score perspective.

We have always ranked your pages across all of the major search engines to track your oragnic keyword performance. The new user interface lets you quickly see how each of your pages ranks and the SEO tips are there to help you improve each and every page. Another new feature is the social media tracker to help you monitor which of your pages are generating buzz!

Over the next week or two we will update all of the help pages to reflect the changes. If you find any bugs or would like to add any comments, please use the new feedback system that we have integrated. Its the small blue tab in the left hand-corner. Clicking it will open a feedback area where you can vote on the suggestions of others and also contribute your own.

We think with this release we are clearly demonstrating our commitment to providing business owners with answers, not questions with our simple and profitable web marketing platform.

Join today from as little as $149 per month.