Effective Ads

In search is doesn't matter how simple your ads are as long as they are effective. I happened to chance upon this ad today. At first I felt it was strange and the advertiser was wasting his money but on thinking about it for a few seconds I realized that the ad said everything it needed to. It was very simple, very short but was effective. The target audience for this ad would have no reason not to click it.

Ad in Blogger

I am not surprised seeing this. Google used this space for great cross promotion of their (relevant) products / features. But there is a limit of how many such messages you can give users.

Blogging on the go

Well not such new news but still interesting stuff - Blogger makes it easier to now post from a Mobile or via Email.

Will write more once I check the features out.

Keyword Basics

Was going through the Keywords Insights Webinar and founds a few interesting slides that I am attaching here. While the Webinar is quite basic (if you already know details about keywords) but a good refresher sort of watch and I would recommend it if you have about 25 mins or so to spare.

[You can find past AdWords Webinars at - http://www.google.com/adwords/webinars]



Interesting slide but the smaller things that can be confusing - cafe and café are treated different. All punctuation except "&" "_" are treated as spaces. Apostrophes are treated as apostrophies when added correctly. And keywords are not case-sensitive.




The two 'Did you know...' points below are important to remember.





Few new things I learned about broad match - like each expansion is measured in effectiveness for each advertiser and that impressions of the expanded broad match are not used for quality score evaluation.





Negative Keywords can be used in all match types (this is 1 fact that I think few people know). What is important to note in negative keywords is that broad match negative keywords never replicate the way broad match keywords work. Which means that a broad match negative will not not show your ad for synonmys, plurals etc. So if you are sure you don't want certain types of keywords to show your ads you should add pluarals and synonmys too.





While the example on Long Tail here is only related to misspellings, Long Tail keywords are any keywords that are low volume and low competition keywords leading to lowered CPCs. But I believe no matter how much you want to expand the long tail, the words you choose should directly be related to your product /service. Also your bid to have cheaper keywords should not lead to your overall quality score dropping. Having high CTRs and high relevancy also help lower CPCs

Video on Google Ad Auction

Nice (basic) video explaining ad ranking and actual CPC
[The only important thing missing in the video is that you are charged 1 cent more than the advertiser below you. So basically the formula for avg CPC becomes - {AdRank of Competitor(of advertiser below you)/Your Quality Score} + $0.01]

Expandable Ads on Google Content Network

So it does seem that Google is very serious about 'branding' budgets too. They are looking to get more advertisers to use the content network for branding purpose and this is a step in the right direction. (Gadget ads are a great way to have very interactive ads via the Google Content Network).

The only issue with these expandable ads is that a user has to click on the ad for it to expand and contract (they will expand to wherever there is free space on the page). The only problem with this is that the creator of the ad will have to put in a line that says 'Click here to know more' or something which is a waste of space because a lot of ads expand the ads on a mouse over. Of course that does give a negative user experience but I think people are used to it.

Full article - http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/03/announcing-expandable-ads-beta-engage.html

Image taken from the Inside AdWords Blog.

Sulekha to charge for Classified service

Source AlooTechie. Full article at - http://www.alootechie.com/content/sulekhacom-plans-switch-its-classifieds-services-paid-model

In case you don't want to read the article, the service won't moved to paid right away. The service will move to a full paid model after 6 months to 1 year.

Of course there is apparently a clarification in the comments section -

Sulekha.com Classifieds will continue to be free. We are implementing, however, multiple options where users can *choose* to pay either before they post an ad (for additional premium ad features) or after they have fulfilled their need (if they are satisfied with our services). We remain committed to serving the widest range of transactional needs for users across multiple cities for free…while providing ways for them to pay if they choose to.

I have to say that I don't like this news (full paid for all users). Maybe they should do some kind of split where corporate etc pay for the classified but individuals don't have to. Or maybe they can even charge by category. For instance if they know that lots of people search for travel agents but few search for language classes, then they should charge those listings which are created by travel agents. Or as stated there should be a paid service for 'premium ad features'. Well we will see what happens in 6-12 months time.