I just wrote about Personalized Search and specifically SearchWiki a few days ago and alas, Google surprises us with another twist to the tale. They are testing SearchWiki on Google Adwords, allowing searchers who are logged in to remove (delete) Paid Ads from the SERP’s.
Even though we live in a fast paced and virtual world we are still very limited in our way of thinking in order to retrieve and obtain information. I just had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Stafford Masie from Google South Africa at the Lowe Bull Group office in Johannesburg. I was not the only one, but all of us were equally blown away by what Google actually has to offers its users, Advertisers and individuals in the Media world.
I have to mention that longtail previously invited Stafford to speak on Google’s involvement in South Africa at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange which I was not able to attend, so the following are my impressions taken from his latest presentation. This is in the particular order of randomness.
Google has officially announced that the load time of your PPC Ad landing page affects keywords’ Quality Scores.
As of 18 June, Google is incorporating the page load time factor into your keywords’ Quality Scores.
“Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.”
Google is doing this for two reasons:
The inclusion of the load time factor by Google will most certainly help you improve conversion rates on your active Ads, but more important, it provides you with the opportunity to offer consumers the best possible experience when interacting with your brand or product.
How do you improve your page load time?
Google Adwords is able to re-evaluate your page load time on a regular basis and should you make significant improvements to your landing page’s load time, you should see a better Quality Score and lower minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids.
To find out more, go to the AdWords Help Center to learn more about load time and landing page quality.
In a move to provide better solutions, Google recently updated the AdWords Site Exclusion tool to allow Adwords advertisers more control over where ads appear on the content network campaigns.
Now called the Site and Category Exclusion tool, and it allows you to exclude certain categories of webpages from your content network campaigns in addition to excluding individual sites.
This change should make it easier for advertisers to keep their ads out of sites where conversions remain low. You don’t have to repeatedly exclude sites from the same category any longer.
Head on over to the Inside AdWords blog, for the latest on Category exclusion.
In this extra session I attended the team from Google Univarsity ran through the advantages of using Google Adwords and how to set it up.
To keep it short, here is the basic gist of the session:
Why advertise online? (UK stats)
60% of UK households have internet
10% growth in Internet households in last 3 years
