Now you can check in quickly, from anywhere, and monitor what is happening in your Adwords account. Google just rolled out AdWords for Mobile with a new interface for Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices.

AdWords for Mobile provides mobile access to your account, key alerts and statistics as well as a facility to make quick changes to your AdWords settings even while on the move.

You have to customize your experience for your mobile device. To do this you should first log in from your desktop computer and choose the parts of your account that you want to monitor closely. You are able to set up custom alerts for key account events such as when your campaing reaches a certain threshold of your daily budget or to monitor when traffic drops significantly.  You can also set “saved filters” to flag your most important keywords and campaigns.

The interface was designed to access the essentials in your account by viewing and making basic edits to campaigns and keywords. If you need access any other areas of your account then you can switch to the desktop version of AdWords through a link at the bottom of the screen.

AdWords for Mobile is now the default mobile interface for a small percentage of English language advertisers, and Google will be enabling the feature for additional advertisers and languages in the coming weeks.

To try out AdWords for Mobile immediately, simply direct your Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre to http://adwords.google.com/dashboard/Dashboard

Congratulations to two of our team members, Kerry-Leigh Stevens and Mangosuthu Malinga, who succesfully passed the Google Adwords Professionals (GAP) exam.

As specialists in online strategy and e-marketing, Virtuosa recognises the need to provide credibility and we are proud to say that Virtuosa is now an Accredited Adwords Company – this means that we are officially qualified by Google to advertise online.

What this means for Virtuosa clients:

• Clients are assured of receiving expert PPC services from qualified Google Adwords Professionals;
• With more than one Adwords Professional in the Virtuosa team, clients are guaranteed of even better creative ideas for online business strategy;
• Virtuosa receives insights into future Google developments which allow us to understand and timeously implement trends effectively;
• Virtuosa will have access to Google beta testing of new tools to understand and participate in the development;
• Virtuosa has direct communications with the Google International team as well as exclusive previews of new product launches;
• Virtuosa has access to Google Market Intelligence on best practice within various industries that we operate within

Find out more about Virtuosa’s Paid Search Marketing services.

We are looking for a PPC Specialist/Search Marketer to join our team permanently in Fourways Johannesburg.

The primary focus of this position is to set up, implement, maintain, analyse and report on Pay Per Click services.

Duties, requirements and further details can be found here, PPC Specialist/Search Marketer.

Many small business owners and even large corporates fall into the trap of only investing into a short term online marketing strategy. Some think that they only need to promote their website once by sending a once-off email campaign, or running a PPC campaign for a couple of months to promote a special of some kind or even just optimize their websites to get a better ranking or get indexed in the Search Engines.

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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.

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In the latest press release distributed on BizCommunity, longtail eMarketing eluded to the fact that as a result of website owners wanting faster results and quicker return on their investments, they are looking at PPC and Banner Advertising rather than SEO when they want to market their website on the Web. Let’s look at some excerpts from the article with extra commentary on these.

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In a recent blog How the Internet is affecting (y)our world?, I made mention of how the “Interent has shaken up the US Elections”. Another article on this topic caught my eye this morning which made for further interesting reading.

The article, written by Greg Jarboe, asks the question whether the more seasoned Hillary Clinton was out-Googled by the more search savvy Barack Obama for the 2008 US Presidential Campaign.

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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:

1. First, they want consumers to have the best experience when clicking on a Ad (they don’t want consumers to wait a long time for landing pages to load) and;
2. Second, they want to help you improve your conversion rate (slow loading pages are more likely to abandoned and will hurt your conversion rate)

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

• users spend +- 2 hours to shop online

• changing face of advertising: from outdoor > press > radio > tv > online display > seach ads > blogs
• from generic push to personalised pull
• 25 million Google search customers
• Google advertising network is the biggest advertising network in the UK – 1 million daily ad exposures
• you have full control over your ads
• you can target geographic locations
• relevant ads gain higher rankings
• key principle
  quality score = relevance
  higher ranked ads get more clicks
  Ranking = Max CPC x Quality score
• Good quality score leads to a low Minimum CPC
• the stronger the quality score, the more clicks for less
• when clicks count as most relevant, quality score goes up – the more relevant the ads, the more users will click and continue to click
• include strong call to action – book now fro instance.