Google Rolls Out Google+ ShareButton in Search Results

Google this week introduced an experimental "Share" button that appears in place of the +1 button in English-language search results, allowing Google+ users to share and comment on website links directly with their Google+ friends.

Two Google+ SEO Guides You Should Read

The conventional wisdom where Google+ and online marketing goes is this: Even if your audience isn’t active there, it’s almost mandatory to have a profile and be active there because of the way Google is showing more Google+ content in its regular search results.

It’s still early days for Google+ and the potential search/SEO benefits of being active there, but there are two recently published guides that go a long way to helping explain what Google is doing and how search marketers (and their clients) can take advantage.

5 Ways To Give Your PPC Account A Kick In The Butt

So you’ve set up your PPC account, have been monitoring it for a while, and things are going swimmingly. But now what? You feel you’ve done everything you think you can do to the PPC account. Not so!

SEO Service process overview

SEO Ranking Factors

Keyword Strategy

Choosing the appropriate keywords is a crucial part of search engine optimization. Optimizing various elements of your site for major keywords can have a positive impact on your site's rankings. Be aware of density in search engine optimization when incorporating keywords into your site, and be careful to avoid keyword stuffing.

Google Expands Flight Search Outside US To 500 Cities

Google Flight Search is taking off to international destinations. Starting today users can search for flights to 500 airports outside the US. Google hasn’t provided a comprehensive list of destinations, but most European and Asian cities I searched for were available.

How Serious Is Facebook About Search?

An article in BusinessWeek suggests that Facebook is planning a deeper push into search. Will that be limited to improving search for the site — or will it be something more comprehensive?

It’s clear that Facebook needs better internal search. Right now the search function at the top of the page is not very useful. Improving Facebook site search seems to be the first objective of an internal team, led by former Googler Lars Rasmussen, according to BusinessWeek;

AdWords To Automatically Match For Misspellings, Other Variants

Most experienced AdWords advertisers have developed keyword lists that include things like misspellings, plurals, and other variations on a keyword or phrase. Now, Google will do all this automatically — as it does with organic results — with exact and phrase matching, though advertisers will be able to opt out.

A new way to access quality content online

Whether we’re getting the latest election news, making sense of the day’s stock market activity or looking for an update on our favorite celebrities, we rely on publishers to inform and entertain us. Online publishers often fund the creation of this content through ads; sometimes they ask you to pay for content directly, by buying a subscription or purchasing a particular article.

Now, you may see a new option: the ability to access some of this content by responding to microsurveys, without having to pull out your wallet or sign in. When a site has implemented this option, you’ll see a prompt that offers you a choice between answering a market research question or completing another action specified by the publisher (such as signing up for an account or purchasing access). All responses are completely anonymous -- they aren’t tied to your identity or later used to target ads. The prompts look like this:

Google Expands AdWords Bid Simulator To The Campaign Level

Advertisers have long been able to simulate the results of bid changes at the keyword and ad group level, and, now, they can do so at the campaign level, as well, Google has announced.

The change will allow advertisers to model changes even when there’s not enough data to do so at the keyword or ad group level. They can also see what would happen if they raised or lowered all of their bids within the campaign by a certain percentage — say, 5%. Advertisers can see what would result if you changed all campaign bids to the same fixed value.

If a change looks promising, the system will be able to say whether an advertiser would need to increase the campaign budget to avoid being limited at the new bid value.

There’s also the opportunity to download the bid simulation data at the account or campaign level, and users can also download an AdWords Editor-compatible file with bid amounts at the simulated level, along with the ad groups and keywords to which they should be applied.

Campaign bid simulator can be found in the Opportunities tab within the left navigation tree.

Source:  Pamela Parker/ Searchengineland

8 Features Advertisers Really Need From Google AdWords

Google AdWords has seen a flurry of releases recently. Some have been good (Display Campaign Optimizer) and others bad (rotate changes) for advertisers. Many of these features are items Google wants to see as they help increase their bottom line or make it very easy to advertise.

However, these new features are not necessarily what advertisers really need to pull additional revenue from their campaigns.

In today’s column, I’m going to talk about my wish list and why Google should be implementing these features instead of adding yet another ad extension.

Cross Campaign ACE

AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) was a blessing when it launched. Suddenly, you had the ability to test ads, match types, ad groups, and much more while controlling your overall risk.

The beauty of ACE is the simplicity of testing. However, there are two main problems with ACE:

Some advertisers see their overall impressions drop significantly when using ACE (uncommon, but really bad bug)

You can’t test campaign settings

Some campaign features such as CPA bidding are very useful when they work; but they do not always work. An experiments feature that allows you to test campaign level settings or just one campaign against another one will let you get to a level of testing that will increase your overall efficiency.

True Ad Rotate

Google recently announced that the rotate setting would be changed. This lead to a lot of controversy from the community, so I went and chatted with some people in-the-know about this; and the most common theme was, “rotate has always been broken, so why does this change really matter?”.

Rotate has always been broken because of quality score and other reasons, but at least it was directionally correct. In my opinion, if something is broken you don’t change the idea behind the feature – you fix the problem.

With the new setting, it will be impossible to conduct a lot of tests within AdWords without working around the system. Testing is so important that Google should fix the problem and just launch a true ad rotate feature.

Search Partner Control

There was much rejoicing when Google finally allowed advertisers to control the display networkby targeting placements and by blocking publishers. Those control settings were launched several years ago, so Google obviously knows how to control and block ad serving by site.

Why do these settings not appear for search partners?

I have some accounts where search partners outperform Google, and I’d love to spend more on them. I have other accounts where search partners are doing very poor. Now, I’m sure that what’s really happening is that some partners are performing well and others are performing poorly.

The problem is, I have to turn on or off all partners. If Google gave me more control over what partners my ads appear on; then overall, my search partner spend would increase.

Accurate Local Search Estimates

In local search, I don’t mean country – I mean a city, region, state, etc. The local search numbers are terrible. You can use the traffic estimator tool and estimate traffic at a metro level; however, I find that the numbers can be between 100%-1000% off. Yes, more than 1000% off is possible.

I was recently working with a company and the local estimates were showing about 0.1 clicks per day; in reality, the keyword receives more than 100 clicks/day. The difference of 3 clicks vs 3000 clicks a month is quite significant.

Normally the estimator is not this far off; but seeing the estimator 300-500% off is fairly common.

If Google really wants to support local businesses, they need to fix the estimates of how much traffic a local business can really receive through AdWords. These estimates just compound the problems that sales reps have in selling and support local businesses.

Detailed Relative Quality Score Numbers

Google recently started showing more information for the quality score; however, in many cases it makes no sense. You can have a keyword that is below average have a 10; you can have a keyword that is all average be a 4; or you could have a keyword that is slightly above average be a 4.

Part of the problem is that the ranges are: average, below average, above average. If average is 1, is 0.99999 below average? If so, then 0.99999 and 0.00001 have both the same message: below average. Showing a more detailed level of relativity would be useful.

Google doesn’t like to show numbers for quality score factors often, so even if the range were: Excellent, good, average, poor, terrible; and each of those was a defined range; then the relative quality score numbers would be useful.

Account Budget

I have many accounts where there are tens or hundreds of campaigns. For each campaign, I have to control the budget. In reality, I set the campaign budget to the most I want to spend on a campaign, but I often don’t care if one campaign goes over or under by 10%. What I do care about is the entire account budget.

This has been on my wishlist since 2002 when AdWords launched. For a while, I was using invoicing as an account level budget control as Google wouldn’t spend over the defined spend. It wasn’t ideal; but it was a workaround that worked. What advertisers really need is both a campaign and an account budget.

Ad Group Level Extensions

The idea behind extensions is a great one: append more information to a plain text ad and give consumers additional details or options about a business. Of course, extensions also help CTR so Google is reaping the benefits of more ad clicks.

However, extensions are only at the campaign level. This means that if you really want to control sitelinks, or you are advertising for several business locations, you end up with more campaigns than you want. And because there’s no an account budget, you end up in a budgeting mess trying to control overall budgets.

If Google just allowed ad group level extensions, this would all be fixed. They could even take some inspiration from adCenter and use the cascading rules. Allow an extension to be at the campaign level. If ad group also has extension, use the ad group extension. If the ad group does not have an extension, then use the campaign level one.

Google has been very innovative with their extensions; however, if they go a step further it would transfer a lot more control; and therefore better ads, to the advertisers.

Fix Google Analytics Integration

When I first tried to see AdWords data inside of Google Analytics, I was really excited. Finally, I could see interactive data that would help make decisions about keywords and placements. I was examining how I could trigger CPA bidding off of events. The list of possibilities was endless.

Until I realize the integration is often broken.

If the integration works (and it doesn’t always work); then you can usually only set AdWords conversion information off of the first goal in a group. While you can work around this by moving your goals around; the more concerning issue is the data.

Sometimes the analytics data matches the AdWords data closely. Other times, the data is completely different. When the data is different, then you lose faith in the system. The possibilities of being able to set bid rules based upon analytics data is endless. I’ve always thought the best bid managers would be part of your analytics data. However, that has not proven true over the years – and much of it is due to data integration.

Google, you own both AdWords and Google Analytics. Your ability to provide consistent data between the two sources should be something you could accomplish better than any 3rd party provider. Why are you not better at it?

Conclusion

I don’t want this to seem like Google bashing. Google has been fantastic over the past few years about launching features. The additions of extensions, display campaign optimizer, ACE, modified broad match, and more, have often lead to more advertiser control and options.

In some cases, such as modified broad match, they were fixing something they broke when broad match became expanded broad match.

In other cases, such as extensions, these were brand new features that helped advertisers accomplish marketing goals.

Google cannot stop innovating, but they do have a difficult balancing act between giving advertisers control versus maintaining an ecosystem where small advertisers can still do well.

However, if they would just launch (or fix) these features; advertisers would be happier with the inventory. Happy advertisers spend more money. So Google, are you ready to help us spend more money by launching some of these features?

Source: searchengineland