I will be heading out to SMX Social Media and SMX Advanced this year, and would love to catch up. I will not be liveblogging, rather will be hoping to gather ideas from those of you in the business.

I will not be waring my hat. But come shake my hand - meeting folks is the best part of the event.

If you’re going, fire over a Tweet [scottclark] or comment and be sure to say hi at the show.

Photo (me, Bruce and Cristine) from last year’s shows.

Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) is the process by which you can carry the search phrase into your ads on Google. You’ve probably seen the silly ads by companies like Ebay who end up with ridiculous ads such as “Buy Nuclear Waste on Ebay” for a search about Nuclear Waste. It’s no wonder eBay pulled these ads from Google last year… they were probably wasting huge money.

Sloppy PPC

Broad match PPC ads with DKI are sloppy. Such automated ads rarely improve the search experience.  A few more advanced PPC managers create morphing landing pages that account for this…but most advertisers are winging it.

Luckily for searchers - the syntax is hard for newbies and scares away many amateur advertisers. But there are plenty of fire-and-forget adwords buyers who are using it.

The only way I can see DKI being useful for those who care about the performance of their campaigns is through their use with exact match and highly researched keyphrases on the search network only. Here, you can insert text into the ad and guide the user into a relevant, thematic adgroup that funnels people into a landing page for the purpose. If the phrase doesn’t appear in the list you’ve defined, your ad does not display.

Will Quality Score Take Care of the Problem?

Will Quality Score slaps get rid of this problem on their own?  I’m not sure.  My tests have not shown any impact on costs of ‘poor’ ads using DKI that I’ve seen from clients.  The silly ads just keep running.  Google has said before that they use only exact matches to do the calculation, and they will disable poor quality keywords… but it still gets confusing about exactly what happens in the broad match + DKI situation.  I guess it depends on the landing pages.

Trademark Troubles

The trouble starts when people begin to enter trademarked terms. Now, the ad-buying company is posting ads generated by the search activity that might include trademarked phrases. This negligence appears to be gaining some legal footing as a justifiable lawsuit, where earlier it was a bit fuzzy and things were happening on both sides. Only if you post negative keyphrases of all trademarked terms in your industry can you prevent it.

Exact match DKI - What would this do?

Exact match DKI prevents the problem, improves the ads, and puts the responsibility for legal keyword use in ads squarely on the advertiser. If the ad showed the keyword in ad copy, there is no question the phrase is in the advertisers’ keyword list somewhere.  Google can disable poor quality keywords straightaway from the keyword list rather than through some mysterious invisible system.

What are your thoughts? Should Google block DKI on broad match? What are some good uses of this you’ve found? Does quality score, which is determined through exact match vesion of keyphrase only

They say playing the lottery is a “special tax” for the “math challenged.” I think that’s true. In the search world Google’s new Automatic Matching setup is a special tax on the uninformed advertiser.

What I’m hearing about the new Google Automatic Matching beta is that they will look at unspent funds in your account, and “spend it for you” on terms its algorithms deem appropriate. I blew this off at first thinking it sounded like a rumor, but am now hearing more buzz about it. (more…)

I am always leveraging a company’s PPC brand (and yes, 1+1=3 when it comes to having organic and PPC presence for brand-related searches) there are roadblocks brought on by PPC networks. In the past few months we’ve been dealing with an interloper who has used broad-match on Google Adwords to get around their trademark blocking policy… Note, none of these links are to the interloper in question, I’m just linking to informative posts related to it)
According to Google’s documentation, Google Adwords will not allow competitors to actually use the trademarked keyword phrases in the text of its ads – but does not prohibit purchasing the keyword itself and presenting an ad. This seems to work most of the time, as illustrated by Shoemoney (where it kinda worked.)

For example, I do marketing for a national franchise, let’s call it “Cheeseworks” (fictional) - and I have a high quality score placement on PPC and organic rank. But competitors are able to bid AND DISPLAY “Cheesework Pizza” on Google Adwords (singular, no ’s’.)

Cheeseworks Pizza
Open a Franchise in Your Town
Excellent Opportunity - Low Cost
http://www.fabuliospizza.com

And then somebody else runs this one:

Cheesework Pizza
Are You Ready to Be Your
Own Boss? Learn More!
http://www.franchise-pizza-leads.com

(this company sells leads to franchises - again this is a fictional representation of a real case)

Yes, we filed trademark complaint about them using the singular version of this mark, but since they do character-by-character checks (apparently) - and rejected the complaint. If someone does broad-match triggering on “Cheeseworks Pizza” the ad with the singular version will show. This is wrong. Trademark/Brands are protected from confusingly similar derivatives. I don’t expect Google to become an arbiter of trademarks - they need a scalable system that does much of this - but this case (it is a real case, just as absurd) they should consider the spirit of trademark law considering “use in commerce” and how their match types work.

The interloper had private domain registration and doesn’t answer emails - we couldn’t prove it but there was evidence they were selling leads to others. We had to spend a lot of effort with attorneys to send a C&D and a real substantial threat. The ad is off now, but it required huge work. We’d not expect them to get involved in the McDowell’s vs. McDonald’s case that was in the Coming to America movie. But this was simply a singular versus plural issue that anyone could see was illegal.

Upon removal of the ad (via our legal work) our brand-specific click through rate jumped 4%. This, over the course of several months, adds up to over $6000 in traffic not to mention possible loss of business to a competitor. There is real talk about suing the other advertiser for the harm done. I know Google wants things to be handled “outside” but this is one case where it shouldn’t be.

At the very least Google needs to block by match type when infringement occurs. They should have disallowed broad match at least.

Note: I’m not an attorney - none of this is legal advice. If someone would like to chime in and clarify these issues I will be happy to hear it.

postscript:  I received an email from Google who has approved the singular version of the trademark block.  It took me three tries, and lots of damage done to my client, but at least it’s gone now.  I want to be grateful but still I’m just mad.  

Image from “Coming to America” a terrific Paramount Pictures film. Highly recommended.

One of the most difficult challenges is tracking paid search performance via telephone calls for the small business. While a few will spring for a new 800 number or IVR system to get some of that information and train phone staff in its use, many cannot due to the workaday reality. Often the busy office environment means metrics go out the window in favor of just getting the order out, so the company continues to guess.

This is especially true for companies who are struggling to find their sweet spot in the paid search world. During the day-to-day chaos, few are thinking about the cost of each call - they just want to answer it and do their best to change the caller into a customer. If the staff is so busy, do you really think they’ll drill down and get the “how you found us” information accurately recorded. It doesn’t happen. Pay-per-call and click-to-call offer “embedded” tracking, but are plagued with inventory and adoption challenges. My friend Christine (CC: Nice to see you at SMX!) created a great post on Offline Conversion Tracking, which covers some of the same ground, and this issue has often come up in conference sessions.

As Greg Sterling points out, the vast majority of purchases are made offline, yet the tracking solutions are only just maturing, and others have a very healthy skepticism about some of the new solutions.

The real result of this is the “leaking” of marketing budgets that happens with a lack of tracking. The dynamics of the purchase cycle are mysterious, making strategic and tactical solutions little better than guesses.

I see basically four flavors of off-line conversion tracking from pay-per-click ads, and would like to introduce a hybrid.

anecdotal
customer question at point of sale, catalog IDs, coupons, offers
poor man’s IVR (multiple phone numbers)
cookied IVR
…and a hybrid…
cookied part number modification

CLICK MORE to see the rest of this article.

(more…)

Microsoft has put together a set of keywords by Industry.

Currently listed are Retail, Technology, and Financial Services groupings.

For example, you can download pre-fab lists of financial services terms around “Banks, Loans and Refinancing”. Retail can look into Apparel, Toys, Transformers, Video Games, and Mobile Phones.

….Tis the season for advertising online—particularly if you’re in one of our featured holiday consumer industries: Retail, Technology, and Financial Services. It’s time to prime the holiday search advertising campaigns, to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable holiday sales. Below we’ve compiled lists of industry search keywords designed to give you an even better shot at ringing up more holiday sales in these hot industries….

These may be good for the newbies to learn more about what a keyword list looks like. The lists are in a near-ready-to-import Excel spreadsheet set up for Microsoft Adcenter.

On my pay per click campaign summary I see this:

I’m not sure but this seems like the first time they’ve made specific traffic increase predictions. Here, they point out

Daily budget of $100.00 met on 13 of the last 15 days. Increasing your budget to the recommended amount would allow your ads to show 118% more often and get approximately 784 more clicks per month.

Yeah, more traffic. But is it the right kind of traffic? Only a watchful eye can tell that. Sadly, many amateur PPC marketers will just go with the recommendation without thinking.