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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There are several features in development that paid subscribers have early access to, that are not yet available in the demo account. I wanted to briefly explain the purpose of these new features so that beta users could understand them clearly.

Figure 1. Beta features available in Contextured AdTime

Firstly, the name menu title “Pages” is not the intended name we plan to launch with.  At the moment it’s a place holder, but we hoped you would understand that it relates to your website pages.

The functionality here is designed for online merchants, e-commerce stores and people selling products.  It is designed to let you see all of your products that Contextured has identified from your website.

In this section you should see all of your products from your existing website.  Currently there are no category pages shown, just individual product pages.  The point of us extracting your products is so that we have structured information such as name, description and price.

This structured information is very useful for search engines  to understand your page and help shoppers find your products. It is also very useful to Contextured AdTime so that we can give the search engines a helping hand, in bringing visitors to your shop.

Bringing visitors into product pages is often termed “deep-linking” and can play part in a cost effective pay per click strategy.  Please give these beta features a try and let us know what you think.

It’s very easy to create a new campaign with Contextured AdTime.

Figure 1. Creating a new PPC advertising campaign

So whats special about this? Well Contextured will automatically expand your ads and keywords into the optimal ad grouping and keyword match types. So if you write two ads and two keywords, this could result in two ad groups, each containing three keywords (broad, exact and phrase match) and two ads – so four ads and six keywords in total.

Good search marketers with a lot of time know how to best structure a ppc account like this. But we assume you’ve got better things to do with your time so the Contextured algorithm will do it for you. You can of course override these settings should you wish to.

Contextured AdTime is available now.

During the beta testing a lot of customers told us they wanted to try realtime on some but not all of their AdWords Campaigns.  So now in settings you can control at the ad group level, how real-time should be applied.

Figure 1. Control which ad groups have realtime enabled

This granular level of control allows you to easily test the value of Contextured AdTime during your trial period. You can increase the realtime coverage to all of your campaigns over time or immediately.

If you have any feedback or suggestions please email info at contextured dot com as your opinions are important to us.

Keynote speak: Optimizing your digital marketing mix

Dave Chaffery – Insight director, Smart insight

BBC documentary on Internet 2010 is one to watch

Web marketing overview:
-90% searches done in the UK are done using Google

-Reaching out to bloggers could prove very effective for your business

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Successful Information Architecture

Moderator:

• Heather Lloyd-Martin, CEO, SuccessWorks

Speakers:

• Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive
  Alan Perkins, Head of Search Marketing, SilverDisc Limited
  
  Click to close

  Speaker Profile

Landing Page Critique Tip

• Remove any ‘product features’ and ‘about/ contact us’ options from top right of page

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SEO: Where to Next? and Web PR

Moderator:

• Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD

Speakers:

• Lisa Myers, CEO, Verve Search
  Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google
  Dan Cohen, Global SEO Lead MSN, Microsoft
  Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, Telegraph

Website critique tip

Add a couple of latest blog snippets on homepage to satisfy customer fear and show we know what where talking about.
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European regulators (no great friends of Microsoft) have now approved the Search Alliance deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft.  What does that mean for Contextured customers who want to advertise on all three major search engines?

From the Microsoft email sent to AdCenter users:

Reach more potential customers: Search ad inventory from both the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks will be joined in a new, unified search marketplace powered by Bing™ , with a combined audience of nearly 577 million searchers worldwide.

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There are many, many ways to kill a pay per click campaign. It can be a minefield and the slightest mis-step can see you lose an arm and a leg financially. Thankfully there are ever increasing safeguards in place as the PPC networks such as Google AdWords take steps to protect you.

If you accidentally add a nought to your budget thus multiplying it by ten, Google now checks if you really wanted to do that. Nice of them. But what about the other ways to kill your campaign?

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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.