Our thoughts and knowledge on all things Internet

Evolution Internet Becomes Google AdWords Qualified Company

Friday, September 15, 2006

'Team Evolution' are proud to announce that we have been officially appointed a Google AdWords Qualified Company.

This makes us only one of a handful of pay per click agencies in the Kent area to be officially qualified, and means several of our team members have scored 75% or more in Google's AdWords Professionals exams, and we have successfully managed a significant value of client's PPC budgets.

All this gives an official endorsement of our pay per click management services for new or established PPC users.

So it's a small pat on the back to all of us at Team Evolution... and then back to work!!

Google Adwords Tip - When not to change your AdGroups

Thursday, August 10, 2006

I had a very interesting conversation with Google the other day about Adgroups disappearing from view or dropping from rankings like a stone. After eliminating all the obvious causes like maximum CPC, campaign budget, and landing page quality, it seems the problem is caused by ads waiting to be manually reviewed by Google.

The nice people at Google told me that every time you change your bid, advert wording, link, keywords, or anything else in an AdGroup, it enters a queue to be manually reviewed by a Google reviewer. Until it's been reviewed your ad can stop running or drop in rank.

Now, even though Google told me EVERY ad is manually reviewed, I don't think this can be the case because a) they just couldn't have enough staff and b) this problem only seems to occur for selected clients or campaigns, so I suspect manual reviews are triggered by the use of particular keywords or ad text.

The other bombshell is that the Google reviewers don't work on a weekend, so in other words don't tamper with your ads on a Friday afternoon because they could be dropped all weekend, or change them on a Monday morning when there's likely to be a reviewing backlog.

This revelation also explains the frustration many of our clients have previously reported, of making a change to an ad, then it disappearing, so they make another change to try and get it back. What they don't realise is each time they make a change, they go straight to the back of the review queue again. Best to make a change and wait for it to go live before making further changes. This should also better help you identify the outcome of your ad amendments anyway.

Of course for Google Adwords accounts we manage on behalf of clients, we can chase up getting ads off review or even warn Google in advance of major changes that are due to be made to campaigns to save time later on - just a small plug for our Adwords account management services!

Don’t overlook the potential of Google Adwords Site-Targeted Campaigns

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Have you been guilty of overlooking site-targeted campaigns in Google Adwords? I know I’ve always rushed past the link in my haste to create a keywords-targeted campaign instead. But recently I’ve been exploring this aspect of Adwords in more detail and have found some interesting possibilities.

Whilst we’re not the greatest advocates of PPC advertising on Google’s content network, preferring to confine our client’s campaigns to the search network only, the site-targeted campaign function enables a far greater level of control over your content based advertising. You can choose to have your ads delivered on specific content sites (as we suggested in our recent MySpace post). Or you can browse sites suggested by a keyword search or Google’s lists of recommended sites for specific categories.

The concept of site-targeted also seems to be far more in line with traditional marketing thinking. Deciding which sites reminds us all that an online marketing campaign should really be led by the target market segments and their habits, and not just by the available advertising media or channels.

A few words of advice - I’ve found the recommended sites need some careful editing if you are just targeting the UK as many are US led. You’ll also need to create a whole new campaign for each set of content sites you want to target, as you can't target different sites for different AdGroups in the same campaign.