Sometimes you might find that the ads don’t display usually because your budget isn’t high enough to get full search coverage.

For example

• Your ads are scheduled to display from 6am – 12 midnight, 7 days per week.
• Your budget is set at $20 per day

Scenario

Your ads are clicked a number of times from 6am – 12 midday and half of your budget is now used up so you only have $10 left of your daily budget. Your campaign still needs to run for 12 more hours so your ads will display intermittently throughout the rest of the day to give you the greatest coverage for the remainder of your scheduled ad time.

I’m assuming that Google does this so that you get an even level of enquiries throughout the day instead of lots of enquires all at once plus to minimise the same people looking for services from clicking your ads multiple times.

Dave Davis of Red Fly Marketing wrote an excellent article on how they improved a clients Adwords quality score in their campaign using both on and off page techniques and pretty much shows that it was essential that their client has SEO done on their landing pages at a minimum.

Many Adwords users simply get into the Adwords keyword tool and start adding all sorts of related keywords to their campaign trying to drive traffic and conversions to their site often overlooking the fact that in many cases their web site doesn’t support their keyword list.

Google is predominatly about relevancy and just adding keywords to your Adwords campaign is only part of creating an effective campaign.  Create adgroups that target similar keywords and then push those targeted keywords to most relevant page on your site.  If your landing pages don’t contain information related to keywords in your adgroup keyword list then you can bet that your keywords will become inactive or you’ll have to bid alot more to target those keywords.

Need help with an Adwords campaign?

One of my sites is ranked in the Top 5 in MSN & Yahoo but still only get a small fraction of overall traffic. Even a page 2 Google ranking can be better than a top spot on the other big two. So what good are the other two search engines for? Well I like to use them as Google ranking indicators as I usually find that MSN & Yahoo will give you early indications of rankings before Google will so if you were ranking in 9th position for a search term in Yahoo then it shouldn’t be too long before you see these same results manifest in Google too.

Another use for them is to use them to help you find trends with problems on your site. If you see your site dropping rapidly across all the search engines then you better start investigating as there is a fundamental problem with the site that needs to be fixed.

You might even want to include them on client web site ranking reports because the rankings look good on paper too! I don’t want to bag the other two too much but I have a good feeling that Yahoo is slowing moving in the right direction and might yet put up a challenge to Google’s domination in the future with their involvment in many social aspects of the web. Only time will tell.

Well Yahoo search sponsored search is about to change with a new improved interface and a bidding model that matches Google’s Ad Score and Relevancy algorithm. No more highest bidder wins on Yahoo anymore with relevancy becoming the key to low cost and higher rankings in sponsored search results.

Although I haven’t been able to take a sneek peek inside, early indications show categories changing to campaigns so managing Yahoo and Adwords may become more similar that we can imagine.

Other new features are

• Geo Targeting capability
• Campaign Budgeting
• Ad split testing
• Campaign Scheduling
• Bulk Ad Management
• Ads Up and Running in Minutes

I’m really looking forward to seeing the new improved interface as having alternative advertising opportunities outside of the Google umbrella is a welcome change.

Yahoo is doing some very innovative changes lately which leverage from social interactivity with hit sites like Flickr, and their comprehensive Developer Centre supporting developers of many languages to integrate Yahoo web services into client sites. Yahoo is also the default search engine for the Flock web browser which I really like.

The only thing left for Yahoo to do here in Australia is get more market share as the majority of traffic here is predominately Google search referrals.

Yahoo is just about to roll this out in the US in a few days time so I called Yahoo Australia and asked about the Australian rollout and they told me that the new Sponsored search upgrade is expected to be rolled out in Australia in about two months time.

You can find out more at the Yahoo Sponsored Search Upgrade Centre.

I personally feel that this is a negative aspect to Google Adwords which unfortunately due to legal issues I’m sure Google is required to comply to some degree but I’m not a lawyer so I wouldn’t know so don’t sue me!

Why I find this a frustrating issue is that many online business selling products are in fact being penalised by the companies that supply them. For example manufacturing company Widgets Inc (not a real company that I know of) makes widget chairs and an online shop owner Wadgets Online shop (another fictional shop) sells these widget chairs using Adwords as part of their campaign but when they want to use the keyword ‘widget chairs’ in their campaign keywords or ad text, they get a big no no from Adwords because this keyword has been restricted by the trademark owner, forcing them to use a less relevant keyword to try to sell these chairs.

Umm sorry but I don’t think that benefits the end user, online shop owner or the manufacturing company who applied the trademark restriction in the first place. So the user can’t find the product they want, the online shop owner loses a sale and the manufacturer sells one less widget. So you tell me, who wins now?

For legitimate reasons Google does allow you to request an exception which will be reviewed by the Adwords team however you’ll have to cross your fingers and wait for the outcome.

My recommendation is to take a look at Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Aaron has to be one of the best know SEO guru’s in the search engine community and has the best ebook ever teaching many of the tips and tricks of search engine optimisation.

The best part of Aaron’s book is that you get lifetime free updates so you’ll always be up to date with the latest information about how search engines are evolving and excellent strategies on how to improve your sites rankings.

Also in Aaron’s ebook you get a lot of information on how to understand and improve your Google Adwords campaigns which is easy to understand and easily transferable into practical use for your Adwords campaign.

You might be asking how do I know it’s such a great book and that it works? Easy.. I bought it myself and find it an invaluable tool in my own SEO strategic direction. So if really serious about getting your website on track, they Buy The SEO Book Today.

As time goes on it is going to be more and more difficult to rank your site as thousands of websites are entering the market everyday making every market more competitive. Give yourself the advantage and start today.

+PLUS – Aaron has just released the latest version of his Ebook.

Admittedly I was somewhat surprised to see how quickly this relatively new site could rise to the top 10 of the selected keyword phrases. I modified some onsite content, worked on creating some back links but didn’t do a lot in this area due to the client budget, and focused on getting alot of their pages out of Google’s supplemental results.
Then it happened… I complete my monthly report for clients web site rankings and to my surprise the site had lost the majority of search term rankings except for their domain name related keywords as it closely related to their business.

So I do a bit of investigation only to find that all the good work I had done on the site had dissappeared. I start comparing my last site changes to the live versions and sure enough all my onsite changes had dissappeared. It just happened that the web site owner had his web developer make some changes to the site and overwrote any SEO work done on the site which had big implications in their sites rankings.

I advised the client that the SEO work had been undone and needed to be done again unfortunately at extra cost as I now had to create a combined version of SEO and developer changes to their site.

If you have multiple teams accessing your site at various times you should either move to a version control system or advise all parties of any website upgrades to ensure that you maintain the latest versions of the site. If your going to spend your businesses hard earned dollars on optimisation, make sure it sticks.
I have a few thoughts about the web developer who made the changes but that’s another story….

For example, you have a landing page selling your product on your website and using adwords you may have a conversion rate of 5%. Without testing, you don’t know what changes are needed to make this conversion rate higher and more appealing to your target audience so this is where Google’s website optimizer comes into play.

You design three variations of the landing page using heading, image and content variations and add this to your Website Optimizer account. The Website Optimizer will then measure and monitor how each variation performs giving you information on which landing page variation provides the best conversion rate. You can then make this new improved version the current version and start the process all over again trying to improve your conversion rate again and getting the most bang for your buck from your Adwords campaign.

Google’s Website Optimizer isn’t yet available to everybody however you can apply to beta test for them which I am currently in the process of doing. Check out Google’s video overview of the Website Optimizer and let me know your thoughts.

So how do get those extra sales without costing an arm and a leg? Well firstly you need to look at your business model and determine if selling online is an option for your business. If you can integrate an online shop into your business then I would definately investigate if this is a worthwhile exercise for you. Sure you’ll need to have someone develop an online ecommerce system but it’s really not too difficult and providing there is some demand for you products then you should easily make your money back plus more in a reasonable amount of time. Talk to you web development team about how to add ecommerce functionality to you existing web site if you have one.

The best part of an online business is limited overheads because you don’t have to have that prime real estate position and the online space works pretty well particularly if you already have really good branding of your business and people are looking for your business name online. Prime real estate online is a combination of improving your pay per click campaign and natural search rankings and you get a global market to boot.
So do people really buy stuff online? Yes, Yes, and Yes, however it depends on what your business sells but I think in a majority of cases you can sell your products that you have and use the leverage of Pay Per Click with Google to sell these products online as well. All you need to do is to setup some tracking so you have some visibility of what’s happening on your site, track conversions, and monitor and adjust.

Of course you will need some knowledge of Google’s Adwords Pay Per Click program, need to be a little tech savvy to edit the shopping cart information and have some determination to perservere when starting off. I’ve been involved with promoting one particular shop selling online and have seen sales over this past year for their online shop tipping in just over $250K in gross sales for under 10K in online advertising. Not bad for not a lot of extra effort.